Took me until about halfway through college before I realized “study” means “play with the material in a variety of ways until you understand it” and not just “read the assigned chapters and do the homework” and I think that probably should have been discussed at some point prior to that.
Most annoying thing to remember is that you're litterally just a homosapien. You're just a very smart animal. If you feel like shit, imagine you're an exotic pet for some alien species and do what they'd do to keep you healthy. You gotta be well cared for. Animal abuse is a crime for a reason
"My pet human, Greg, hasn't left his bed in a long time. He's just scrolling his phone all day" Greg needs enrichment. Add enrichment in his enclosure and take him on walks
"Greg has been super lethargic and sad recently for seemingly no reason" Greg need vitamins, take him outside for some vitamin D and fresh air. Perhaps a picnic
"Greg won't sleep even though he's been super lethargic" Greg needs a schedule, especially for the lights in his enclosure.
"Greg has been super distant recently and keeps crying to sad music" Humans are pack animals, he needs to hug another human and hang out. Perhaps pack bond with a rock together
"Greg has been flailing around and panicking, his breathing is way faster than it should be" Greg is overwhelmed. Take Greg out of the situation and give him time to calm down. Perhaps somewhere cozy with tea and a movie
"Greg won't do what he needs to do" Train him. Humans do great with positive reinforcement, give him little treats when he's doing good
"Greg he's been super anxious and tired, he can't seem to enjoy his days" Humans needs to move around. Give Greg something to exercise with. Things like stretching, weight lifting, walking, or even dancing will help
"Even though I've taken really good care of Greg, he still has been having issues" Greg is ill, take him to the doctor. You might need a specialist (therapist, optometrist, oncologist, etc)
I know it feels patronizing, and I know it feels embarrassing or that you're "just giving into the clichés", but you are literally just a creature. You need to sleep/eat on time, you need enrichment, and you need to take care of your social needs. Humans are complicated animals, but they are also beautiful and all deserve proper care. This obviously isn't a perfect analogy, nothing is, but if you saw your friend taking care of their pet the way you take care of yourself, would you be concerned?
the transition from people needing each other to wanting each other is literally one of my greatest weaknesses that shit makes me want to walk into the sea and sit on the ocean floor for a thousand years
like. characters whose entire self worth is based on how useful they can be to others, who think that they're going to be abandoned as soon as they're no longer necessary, being told by someone that they want them to stay and realizing that they have value to people in and of themselves and not just for what they can do for them will never fail to completely unmake me. like on a molecular level.
The closest experience I've ever had to discovering "the vitamin" was buying a 100% wool outfit and wearing it in the winter.
Not only was I not freezing anymore, I was not sweating and overheating either. The horrible sensory nightmare of winter clothes disappeared.
In particular, I bought a pair of wool pants. They were a thrifted pair of fancy dress pants like you would wear at an important office job, and they were easily the most comfortable pair of winter-appropriate pants i'd ever worn. I wore them Every Single Day.
From that point on I realized a lot of my clothes were making me feel bad, and the common thread was polyester. Especially polyester blends.
It's a trap because the polyester clothes are the ones that always feel sooooo silky soft when they are in the store, whereas cotton, linen and wool can feel comparatively rough and scratchy. But when actually wearing them for hours throughout the day, it's the natural fibers that feel more comfortable.
Maybe the secret to sensory comfort is not about the presence of softness, but the absence of overloading sensations. Or maybe the sensory stress and agony is not triggered by texture of the fabric, but by how it breathes and regulates temperature.
Then there's the problem of clothing life span: polyester blends, no matter how soft they seem at first, become rough and scratchy and covered in hard, itchy pills after wearing them 10 or 20 times, whether or not they have been tumble-dried or even washed at all. (I tested it!) Linen and cotton become softer and more comfy the more you wear them, polyester but ESPECIALLY polyester blends become a constant stressor. Polyester blend t-shirts I used to love for their softness now feel bristly and irritating.
So now I'm trying to change my wardrobe to as many natural fibers as possible, and the more natural fiber clothes i have the more I realize that the plastic fibers stress me out. It's so easy to overheat or freeze in them and they're always degrading and becoming less comfortable and it sucks.
A lot of wool items are scratchy but some of them are not. There's a whole spectrum of scratchiness and I haven't figured out what the commonality is. I bought one wool sweater that is 100% too scratchy to wear without an under-layer (and haven't worn it yet), and a different wool sweater that is soooo cozy and comfy and not scratchy at all.
Why is wool so unpopular? My professor was talking about how the school used to keep a herd of sheep for educational purposes but wound up selling them because the wool was so worthless they ended up using it to mulch greenhouse plants. Wool is a miracle. I love you wool thank you sheep
like sure I also hate polyester for the environmental impacts (its a huge part of microplastics) but isn't it infuriating that this environmentally harmful material we are using everywhere also just...sucks way worse than the natural alternatives
everytime I remember that lesbian couple that have a marble statue of the two of them embracing and sleeping on a bed together over where their graves will be because the artists didn’t believe they would be able to be married before they died, so what they couldn’t have in life they could have in death, I fucking breakdown
“on july 24th, 2011- the first day that same sex marriage was legal in new york state, particia cronin and deborah kass got married. that same year the marble ‘memorial to a marriage’ was replaced with a bronze version. rainwater pools in the space between their two sculpted bodies, and falling leaves catch on the metal in the autumn. the two women sleep peacefully through snow and ice, and the scorching days of summer. over time the hands of cemetery visitors will wear down the bronze, burnishing it into a smooth shine. one day this will mark the final resting place of the two women. and someday people will have to remember that there was a time, long ago, when this was a memorial to a marriage that two women never thought they’d have.”
- Caitlin Doughty, on the Death in the Afternoon podcast
This is my take on the Escape mv borrowing heavily from the big-brained @boom-boom-back.
Full disclaimer: I am talking out of my arse. If you disagree, please be respectful and if you can't be please just block me. It does get a bit sad at the end but that's just my headcanon, still, fair warning.
However, if you agree, hey bestieee tell me what you think!!
Now let's goooo
The mv depicts the story of two boys who are actually were-men. Bang Chan is a werewolf and Hyunjin is a wereferret (at first I thought both of them were werewolves but folks on youtube said that it's actually a ferret. Also, we only get to see their were-forms only once and it's very distorted but looking closely, the shadows are definitely different creatures.)
Their world is basically like x-men where the mutants are deemed as a danger to society and captured. They've probably spent most of their lives in some institution isolated from the world with others like them. I think so because they were looking at everything with such naked wonder on their faces. Every mundane thing brought new joy to their eyes (and the audience just feels sad looking at their joy, because if such simple things are enough to make them happy, what kind of life were they leading up until now).
All they have in this cruel world is each other. And this is a personal headcanon, but I'd say both their families were killed in childhood and they were put in the institution. Maybe they did not get along at first because of their rough personalities but some incident brought them closer and over time they become each other's most important person. All they care about is the other one.
They show their love for each other in unconventional ways, they wrestle, they rough each other up like pups, and to outsiders it may look like they are fighting, but they are clearly enjoying it (as is evident from their unhinged smile while in a vulnerable position with the other pinning him down, yeah... they are not fighting.)
As for the nature of their relationship, simply going by what's depicted it's quite undeniably homoerotic. How does one put a label on such a relationship? They've probably never had a normal relationship with boundaries and such with anyone so yeah. But they are each other's everything, the most important person, each other's world. No normal friendship has this amount of obsession, this level of co-dependency, if their circumstances were normal this would be soo soo toxic and would not work. It is most probably still toxic but here it works:)
(Think saint and shin from high school frenemy. Think ivan and till, had they managed to escape that one time.)
So they enter that abandoned factory seeking shelter from their pursuers. And experience the wonders of free life in that dingy place. They let their wild selves free in that place. They experience genuine freedom and joy for probably the first time in their lives.There's the scene with the goldfish where they are shown to be tenderly appreciating it instead of all the other scenes before where they were vandalising everything. But then bc shatters the tank and presents hj with the shard of glass. What could this mean? That it's their nature to destroy? They are not peaceful beings and the way they grew up is certainly not going to make them well adjusted. All their suffering will inevitably spill and cause harm and whose fault is that? It's to show that yeah these dudes are fucked up, but you get it, you still like them and root for them.
Hj appears to be the more volatile one of the two. He is also a pyromaniac there were so many scenes of him playing with fire (ive always like to play with fire, heh). But I think that bc is the one who is more dangerous because he is more level minded. He isn't so impulsive (this would become more apparent later.)
They've barely had a moment of happiness when the authorities catch up to them again. They are caught off gaurd in their fleeting moment of bliss. They run hand in shackled hand until they come upon a dead end.
Hj sacrifices himself for chan (see, impulsive!) and leads the pursuers away from him and eventually gets captured. He's kept in a temporary facility with not so good security, which doesn't make a lot of sense because the authorities should be competent enough to keep him where he would not be able to escape again. I think maybe that's because they want him to run away and go find the other one for them so that they can capture the both of them together.
Also The Shard of Glass. The way he holds onto that as if armed with just that fragile thing he could take down any danger for his friend. (Sobs.) Treasuring something so fragile, so sharp and dangerous but so beautiful when the light hits it just right. That's them! That's who they are!
Chan is sick with worry for his friend but on the night of the full moon he feels the presence again. This makes me think their bond is on top of everything else, supernatural also. Hj in his cell also feels the shackles on his wrist sort of guiding his way (like they were kinda levitating idk). Almost as if they recognise who they wish to be bound to and it's not the bars of this cell. (Sobs again)
We have the reunion. It's the full moon, their forms are distorting, we see the creepy werewolf and ferret (creepy ferret, ha!). That hug. The way their bodies just slam into each other like it could crush anything that came in between them.
And then the pursuers descend upon them but this time they realise the strength of their bond. They know that the only way out is through. They overcome their fear. For once, they fight, instead of running.
We don't find out the outcome of the fight. Can these dudes with no experience beat those who have the expertise in shackling those like them and have probably killed those much stronger than them? Who knows? That is the appeal of the ending. Maybe against all odds they win ...
Or... maybe the ferret dies and the wolf escapes and the Railway mv is actually about how chan fueled by the desire for revenge against his tormentors is out there pulling beating hearts straight from the chests and crushing them within the palm of his hand (it's a wonder they have a heart at all).
The whole werewolf and ferret thing reads as a metaphor for repressed and ostracized minorities (queer kids or kids who are otherwise different and don't fit it in society as it is, so much so that it actively feels like shackles binding them). This whole mv reads sooo queer. I don't know or care about the exact label but the relationship that the main leads depict is so queer-coded. It's not even subtext. It's the whole damn text when coupled with the lyrics. I love them so much for that. And when we combine the mv of Railway with the tragic ending headcanon it fits so perfectly with the theme of 'child is was not embraced by the village will be the one to burn it down to feel its warmth'.
Alright I watched the mv again and it ends with the shot of shattered glass with a shard shattering in two and I am afraid that adds weight to the tragic ending theory in my delulu mind.
It's that shard. The shard that chan gave to him. And glass is fragile but it breaking like that does not seem like a good omen.
Wow... this has gotten so long. I want to write down this mv as a story and capture its vibe as it has bewitched me heart and soul, so watch out for that;)
Also do share your own thoughts and interpretations, I seem to never get tired of reading those.
Thank you for reading my ramblings. Have a nice day/sleep!<3
kianamaiart
theartofmadeline
blakekathryn
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
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