Time and the Future

I’m currently taking three courses at my university:

One of them is the Japanese language class I’m taking in preparation for going abroad in January. I have spent some time during the last weeks preparing for the kanji test I have tomorrow. Among the kanji ideograms I have to write is the sign 年, toshi or nen, meaning “year”.

One of them is called Future Studies and Forecasts. I have spent most of the weekend trying to analyze future scenarios, the idea of futures, utopias etc. Today I finally got started on the paper we’ll be handing in next week.

One of them is called Theory of Science and Research Methods. I should probably get started on the final examination part of this, but I haven’t yet.

Today two videos that I have looked forward to were released. One is called 1000年、ずっとそばにいて・・・:

One is called Humanoids, but the lyrics are about the future:

What song will I get for when I start writing the final part for the methods course?

(Also, here I am writing on a blog called The Future is Idol!)

Honestly, I’m a little creeped out by these coincidences.

/Mis

Getting Shipped

The other night, I had a dream about YunJae (they were taking care of a troubled child). I’m not really an active YunJae shipper – I definitely recognize them as a pairing, and I think that they were, in some way, “real”, but I have never spent days and nights reading fanfiction about them. And tonight, tumblr was flooded with HunHan stuff, making me start wondering at what point Sehun and Luhan became aware of themselves as a ship (or a “couple”) and started acting with that in mind. I don’t really believe that entertainment companies make ships up and force them on their idols. Everyone who has ever watched a TV show or a drama where the main actors have zero chemistry would know that to be something you can’t really fake extensively. But I do believe that idols are sometimes asked to play it up a bit extra, or to “remember” to be affectionate even when they aren’t relaxed, which at least I need to be to act affectionate towards others.

This sort of subtle fanservice is interesting in other ways than the one sometimes displayed on stage. I personally have never really dreamed about standing on a stage, but for those who love it I imagine it to sometime be almost intoxicating: doing what you love in front of a crowd, having everyone look at you, want you in some way or another, admire you and scream your name from the top of their lungs. I find it stranger when that kind of raw energy and charisma boost don’t spill over onto fellow group members on stage.But, for the sake of fans, being very obvious with having some sort of special bond with or warm feelings for someone? I bet it can sometimes be strange, like selling something intimate, but sometimes perhaps sort of fun or maybe even liberating, allowing expressions of friendship of love to a further extent than normal. If it later results in smut, well… That’s another problem. If it is a problem.

(I sometimes wonder whom I would be shipped with, were I and everyone around me idols.)

/Mis

Best Fanservice Ever

Pictures are surfacing of Changmin and Kyuhyun reenacting their duet from SMTown LA, but with Taemin in drag instead of some white girl. YES. BEST FANSERVICE EVER!!!!!!!!

/Mis

Shim Changmin

I obviously think a lot about fangirlism, being a fan of a real, living person, and being a fan of the persona a real, living person adopts as an idol. I think about life choices, secrets and admiration. I think about reality, day dreaming and what desire or attraction means. I think about what it would be for me to actually face an idol.

One of my favourite idols all time is Shim Changmin of DBSK. I watched this video yesterday, and thought about how Changmin’s also one of the most beautiful people I know of. But I have always had problems with that. One reason for that is that he is so much of a guy; there isn’t really any (to me) visible ambiguosity or blurred lines when it comes to that. Another is that though he – almost ten years after debuting – is almost perfectly trained at being an idol, I don’t think he’s very comfortable with it. He seems, in many ways, to actually wish for something else than his idol life. I have, at a couple of times, tried to explain the unease I feel at the thought of meeting him as a fan meets an idol as something that comes of him being to real to me for that. But tonight, when I rode my bike home after having spent an hour or so with two people who have actually seen him in person and could definitely tell me that it really was like meeting a star, I realized that it’s not about him being real to me. No. That’s not the problem. The problem is that I actually wished he were, and there is something in that, that makes me very vulnerable or maybe even slightly pathetic, and something I’m very, very uncomfortable with.

/Mis

One Among Others

I was never a boyband fan. I didn’t really get the deal with Backstreet Boys – maybe I was just a tad too young, though I should have been a kind of appropriate age for N’Sync or 5ive, or at least for Spice Girls. But though I could understand the catchiness of the songs, my feeling of otherness was too strong for me to participate in pretty much anything that my classmates liked. I tried, a couple of times. But the Spice Girls era never really drew my in as much as my books did, and when I got into my tween years, I got online for real and continued shaping the alternative identity I had already gotten started on years before. I liked other stuff than my classmates. I also liked that stuff because my classmates didn’t like it. It was either finding a pride in that or giving blending in another try, which I was simply convinced I would fail at.

My obsession with Morrissey was partly dependent on his outsider mentality, though clearly expressed with a lot of self-irony. I would, half seriously, halv as a joke say: “Only Morrissey understands me”, knowing that this was a common chant around the world. But I was always looking for music where I could recognize a self I thought unique, both to accentuate the uniqueness and blur the loneliness.

Today, I took a walk and listened to both old and new Swedish indie music as well as some of my favourite mainstream ballads from both West and East, and realized how much my view on this has changed just during the last year. When I used to seek in others for what I found in myself, I now seek in myself for what I find in others. When I got into kpop, I still could mainly listen to the happy, upbeat songs, the clean and peppy dance tracks. I liked the thought of millions of people dancing the same dance, singing along all over the world, though especially in Asia. But for “serious purposes”, I still needed music in languages I could understand, preferrably of fairly arcane kinds. If I recognized myself in the music, I identified with the singer or musician who had written it, but not with all the other people who had listened to it. If others liked it, I saw that as a sign that I might have something in common with those particular people, but not with people in general. Now I find comfort in listening to the mainstream ballads too, especially when knowing that millions of people all over the world have listened to the same music and maybe not danced the same dance to it, but definitely – oh, the wonderful banality of life! – hurt and longed the same way I hurt and long.

When DBSK had five members, they made this wonderful japanese ballad called どうして君を好きになってしまったんだろう (“Why Did I Fall In Love With You”). Some awesome stranger had put it up as a help for remembering the japanese word どうして (doushite/why) on Memrise and I’ve had it stuck in my brain ever since. Here you go (also, here is one of my favourite fan parodies ever. I mean ever.)

/Mis