I’ve been silent long enough ! I wanted to do my post on how everything is connected first but I’m obviously too lazy and drained from the day to do that right now I will discuss the Lucky One MV and only that one (not Monster) in this post
There are a few huge points we need to address and one of them is currently a bit of a running fandom joke: the mv’s aesthetic, the ending reference to the overdose maze, the display of powers, and Kai’s lack thereof.
The first of these is huge. Let me tell you right now: everything that happens in this music video is not. real. At all. It relates to the overall storyline but this is largely one big hallucination. EXO is literally having a hallucination within a hallucination and this is not a drill.
The first hallucination is that they are all brought together in a strange hospital with “nurses” akin to those of superhero movies. They were never in there. As the ending demonstrates, they are still trapped in the maze from overdose. Just as in overdose, they are trapped in a maze of obsession. They are, however, being watched by figures who look very much like the ones in their hospital hallucination – in fact, we can liken the figures in the hospital to projections of the ones who are “above” EXO. The second level of hallucination in this is that they think they are getting away from the hospital when the hospital doesn’t even exist in the first place. Going deeper, it becomes apparent that their escape attempt isn’t real because –
Kai cannot use his ability to teleport. I was expecting Kai to use his teleporting ability just like the others were using their “powers,” but he suddenly started dancing instead. People have been joking about this but this is no laughing matter: the fact that he just does what he can and no harm comes to him even still demonstrates that what they’re experiencing is not real. Teleporting involves physical displacement but it’s his mind (and the others’ minds) that is displaced, so he cannot teleport. In Kai’s case, he may also need to see where he’s going just like Nightcrawler of the X-Men does. This would in turn point to the revelation that they are all still in the maze as well. Kai cannot simply teleport out of the maze because he has no idea where he’d be going or what beyond even the first wall he encounters. Kai’s inability to teleport is a serious plot detail .
So what about the others’ powers? Well they are not only limited in effect and capacity – vastly so compared to the displays in MAMA to be frank – but they are also able to be imagined rather than jongin’s. You can imagine the appearance of a flower, imagine fire coming from your hands, imagine conjuring water. You can imagine your powers hurting the enemy. As a matter of fact it seems like the .. overlords as we’ll call them, wanted exo to believe they were winning the fights and escaping. Display a power and the experimenters went poof or simply fell out. But this doesn’t apply to xiumin, suho or jongin.
This is tangential to the points I mentioned early in my post, but this needs to be addressed. During Pathcode, Xiumin also drank water and then froze the glass before running out the door. Suho was never near water – though he seemed to be searching for it – until the end of his teaser wherein water suddenly rushed in (and drowned him? maybe?), but we never see what becomes of that . What if those pathcode teasers relate to xiumin and suho’s juxtaposition and drinking of water? From what I could tell, xiumin didn’t freeze the glass he was drinking out of, and Xiumin did seem to have more ~awareness~ than most exo members during pathcode given the screen he saw. The only other one who had a similar experience during pathcode era was Lay, and he seemed to react to his phone’s change as a sudden, “oh shit!” incident rather than Xiumin, who seemed to believe the flashing screen meant something – he knew it did and that’s why he headed out.
Now if he had so much knowledge then … what if the attempt at drinking water was a way to wake him and suho up, or snap them out of the hallucination? We theorized during pathcode era that Suho was trying to snap out of something and the only way to do so was to “drown.” What if xiumin, who recalls the drink he had before the tv screen flickered and told him about Edinburgh, believes that that can serve as a tether to test reality and bring them back to it?
Going deeper still, Xiumin and Suho had the exact same parallels this time in Lucky One that they did in Overdose. Thankfully someone (x) gif’ed them and made my life easier [screencaps below]:
Because they both realized they were trapped in EXO, had similar “realizations” during Pathcode, I can only conclude they were the only two aware far earlier than the rest that they were still trapped – except this time trapped within a trap. This makes sense since their powers, ice and water, are so similar and closely related. They should have similar intuitions at the very least.
I’ll go on more about the string between Overdose, Pathcode, and Monster + Lucky One later in a different post, but it’s very crucial to recognize that you will need to understand previous comebacks even a little to fully appreciate what’s going on here in these new releases.
TO PUT THE FINAL NAIL IN THE COFFIN: we realized last comeback (before SFY) that LMR was set in a universe parallel to that of Alice in Wonderland. Guess who is also revealed at the end of her story to have simply been “dreaming” all along? Alice! If we take Lucky One to not be real, and the universe in Alice in Wonderland to not be real, then EXO had another hallucination during Love Me Right as well ! Considering the debate about whether Pathcode alluded to Inception, and Pathcode’s relationship to … well everything (I swear I’ll clarify that in another post I swear I will) we can easily deduce that EXO is having a crisis with reality !
EXO does not know what is real and what is not except that they cannot find the “real” and they somehow have manifested different powers in relation to that pursuit. Overdose is very much real in that they are indeed trapped in a maze, as Lucky One does confirm; does Monster represent a way in which they escape? The short answer is that Monster is just a short story of conflict within the overarching story, just as you have battles within a war but those individual battles do not necessarily end a war. Monster and Lucky One do, as I said previous, encompass alternate realities and experiences, and just as I suggested before, the one in Lucky One is not real up to the point they believe they are escaping. The omniscient revelation that they are still trapped, however, is real, and that will affect the connection between EXO’s comebacks that I will finally discuss in the near future (aka tomorrow).
To tie up some loose ends that may be bugging people since I mentioned Pathcode and Monster: Yes Kyungsoo does not fit into this very nicely especially in regards to talking about how Xiumin and Suho are the ones that “know something” instead of him, and yes it doesn’t agree with Baek being a ring leader and a mole that helps free them in Monster. I will resolve that in another post which will probably be 2x as long but let’s just say for now that they fit different pieces in the jigsaw puzzle. Their abilities and roles in this play allow them to act similarly to but still different from Xiumin and Suho.
tl;dr Kai does not just dance for aesthetic; Kai cannot use his ability to teleport because he is trapped inside a mental prison; the overdose maze might be a mental maze of obsession; 90% of what happens in Lucky One is not real; Xiumin and Suho have similar intuitions and can tell they are locked away from reality in a way the others cannot; and everything EXO is doing is connected exactly like we thought it was during Pathcode era.
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