All Children but Five Grow Up: Fire, Water, and TXT's Music Videos
“...and thus it will go on, so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless,” says the ending of J.M Barrie’s Peter Pan, a perfect summary of a story that in equal parts celebrates and cautions against the obliviousness of childhood. The boy who refuses to grow up is unburdened by the responsibilities of the world and finds magic in everything; on the other hand, his childish naiveté and selfishness causes unintentional harm to his friends, like the Darling children. Peter Pan’s complexity in his adventures with the sensible Wendy Darling makes him an important recurring reference in South Korean boy band Tomorrow x Together’s (read as “Tomorrow by Together” or TXT) discography which grapples with themes of friendship, growing up, and the experiences of today’s youth. TXT’s music videos take a page from J.M. Barrie, blending a bright magical world (complete with their own magical island) with the drab real world to tell a story about the five boys, the members Soobin, Yeonjun, Beomgyu, Taehyun and Huening Kai, who are reluctant to grow up. Their struggle is depicted through the motifs of fire and water. Seen particularly in the “Run Away”, “0x1=Lovesong”, “Sugar Rush Ride” and “Chasing That Feeling” title tracks, but also in b-sides “Magic Island” and “Fire Island”, fire represents the realities of the world they wish to run away from while water represents the fantastical escapism they seek. Chased by these elements, the boys must decide if they will grow up or remain, like Peter Pan, gay and innocent and heartless forever.
“‘I’m youth, I’m joy,’ Peter answered at a venture, “I’m a little bird that has broken out of the egg.” Peter’s proud self-declaration resonates throughout The Dream Chapters, TXT’s first trilogy of albums, which tells of the boy’s first encounter with the real world and their naive response of running away. “Run Away” begins with their school looming like a prison over the wistful and miserable boys. As Yeonjun restlessly defaces his school book, it suddenly catches on fire. The five boys rally together to put it out. Beomgyu grabs a fire extinguisher. Taehyun researches “Put Out the Fire” in the library. But the fire rapidly spreads throughout the school. Their unhappiness with life has become the fire that grows out of control. Unable to contain the flames, they abandon their attempts and run away. In the sparks of trouble, their friendship is forged. As the boys flee, they stumble across the school’s pool. Here is Peter Pan’s promise to never grow up and face grown-up things again. Forget the loneliness, forget the fire. Jump in and be youthful and joyful. Huening Kai takes the first steps into the water. After a breathless moment, his head pops up above the water. He signals to the other boys, and they all happily dive in. Their friendship and escape become the water they play in, reinforced in group choreography scenes where they dance inside a drained pool and amongst sprinklers on the field. And Peter’s promise is kept. At the bottom of the pool they discover a portal to Magic Island, a Neverland of the boys’ own making. Here they can avoid all their troubles. Here they can be with their friends forever. Only a large ominous door stands in their way. Interspliced shots cut back to the fire consuming the school. Yeonjun sets the door on fire, severing them from the real world and its consequences, and the boys sit back to watch, content in their friendship and magical world.
But like the ticking crocodile, the fire follows them. Their childish carelessness will have dangerous consequences just as with Peter Pan where “...the sport that engrossed him one moment would suddenly cease to engage him, so there was always the possibility that the next time you fell he would let you go.” In “Magic Island”, the boys have found a safe haven in each other and in their own little Neverland. They spend their days exploring and playing together, ignoring whatever eerie presence seems to lurk at the edge of their peripheral vision. As children, they can be oblivious, but also as children, they do not see danger when it arrives. They play with sparklers in the dense woods, and the forest catches fire. Smoke and flames quickly consume all of Magic Island. The boys have nowhere to run. Trapped, they are killed by the eerie entity following them. Consequences will always find them, and their desire to avoid hardships only allows trouble to seep into even their friendship. After all, “Thus children are ever so ready, when novelty knocks, to desert their dearest ones.” “Can't You See Me” takes the story back into the modern world, and the boys are just childhood friends hanging out at Soobin’s house. Fire blazes in the oven as they bake cookies. On the surface, they seem happy together, but hurt glares are tossed quietly. The song talks about feeling deserted and isolated by friends. These are boys who haven’t learned to grow up, and their inability to grow and trust in each other fractures their once safe haven. As in-infighting, mistrust, and violence escalates between them, the house catches on fire and slowly grows out of control. This time, nothing is stalking them, but still, the safety net of their friendship falls through. By the end, the boys are broken up and left to deal with their problems, and face the fire, on their own.
“None of them knew. Perhaps it was best not to know. Their ignorance gave them one more glad hour; and as it was to be their last hour on the island, let us rejoice that they were sixty glad minutes in it.” The end of their innocence backdrops The Chaos Chapters, the next set of TXT’s albums, as the boys become young adults. The albums simultaneously yearn and mourn for the fantasy of their youth as they experience the hardships of the real world for the first time. In “0x1=Lovesong”, the flagship song for this era, they are crushed by the pain of reality. They beg for that one person to love them back, a drowning man’s plea that this love can save them from this harsh world, and it echoes the boys’ earlier desire to remain safe within their friendship, free and innocent forever. In the music video, Yeonjun is trapped in a difficult home, alone and miserable as his parents fight in the background. His world brightens as he steals the car keys and reunites with his friends. Together they escape from the hellhole and drive off together to the middle of nowhere. As they drive, giant iridescent betta fish swim in the sky alongside them. The boys stumble upon an abandoned building complex, and upon exploring it further, they discover the complex’s drained indoor pool. The pool echoes the one in Run Away, but this one is starkly derelict and abandoned. The water and the fantasy are gone. The boys don’t care, though, and they chase each other and play around the pool’s rim. And suddenly at the bottom of the pool’s basin, heated portable pool appears. The boys jump in, splashing each other and relaxing, carefree in this secluded world they have built for each other. In the cold reality that the song speaks of, they find warmth and meaning in each other. As they swim together, betta fish swim in the water and in the sky alongside them. Only then do intercut shots reveal that Yeonjun has a fishbowl at home that he stares at all day. The boys are the fish in the bowl, not free, but oblivious and content just being together.
But “0x1=Lovesong” is about pleading for a love that is no longer there. Like for Peter Pan where “the difference between him and the other boys at such a time was that they knew it was make-believe, while to him make-believe and true were exactly the same thing,” the boys try to blur make-believe and truth and hold onto the fantasy that is already gone. In the climax of the “0x1=Lovesong” music video, the boys attempt to start a fire in a trashcan. They sacrifice their jackets as kindling, hoping the warmth of the fire will be enough to stave off the cold wind. They hope to have the best of both worlds, a small dose of reality and the safety of their friendship. Trying to start the lighter, Beomgyu accidentally burns down the car. The boys, though shocked, rejoice. Like the door burning in Run Away, their one link back to the troubled real world is up in flames. They are not careless children about to burn down their Magic Island anymore, but they still have successfully overcome the painful reality of heartbreak and loneliness by escaping it altogether. They can ignore the echoing loneliness of the abandoned complex surrounding them because they saved each other. Together they are free. But in the final moments of the music video, Yeonjun makes his big splash into the heated pool. He wakes up on a bed in the middle of the complex. The car is fine. He is alone.
"'How lovely,' cried Wendy so longingly that Mrs. Darling tightened her grip.” The act of growing up for these five boys is inevitable. Or so it seems, at least, until the dream from their childhood comes knocking at their window one more time. The Name Chapters, TXT’s 2023 album duology, sees the boys as young men who have learned the consequences of their carelessness in The Dream Chapters and survived the world’s loneliness in The Chaos Chapters. But the final step in growing up is choosing to accept it, and the “devil by the window” is here to offer the chance to run away again. “Sugar Rush Ride” opens with a drop of rain splashing on Yeonjun’s face. The boys wake up, shipwrecked on the beach of an island. Unlike the small set piece of the “Magic Island” music video, this Magic Island is a fully real, uninhabited tropical paradise. The boys are initially elated to be back, running around together like children and oblivious to time wearing on. Their clothes become disheveled, and they submissively become entwined in tree vines, drifting in and out of psychedelic dreams. Soobin, in particular, is entranced by any body of water he finds. It’s only as they lounge by the lagoon that Beomgyu realizes something is wrong. The island wants to trap them here forever. One by one it begins to attack. Soobin, so lulled into submission, enters the lagoon and begins to drown. Magic Island is desperate to keep them at any cost, but it’s a place they have outgrown. To be lost in the fantasy has become a nightmare. The boys know what they must do. They escape through the forest at night and find their way back to the beach where a small boat awaits to take them away. As they get into the boat, Huening Kai gives one last look back, but it’s not out of longing. It’s a look of serenity in their choice. And here, by being the way back to the real world, the motif of water is flipped. The new fantasy, they hope at least, is to be able to grow up and find a way to face tomorrow, whatever it may hold.
“You need not be sorry for her. She was one of the kind that likes to grow up. In the end she grew up of her own free will a day quicker than the other girls.” At the core of Peter Pan is the choice to grow up. While Peter chooses eternal childhood, Wendy chooses to grow up, and her acceptance of it allows her to grow up “a day quicker”. In the same way, the boys choosing to grow up allows them in on a powerful truth. “Chasing That Feeling” begins with the boys waking up at the bottom of a sewer, as if the ocean they’d just crossed had left them there. Suddenly appearing before them are brightly colored balls of flames, beckoning each of them down a different tunnel. The song says they feel like they’re on fire like a shooting star. This fire is not just the fire of the cruel real world. It’s the unique flame that lives at the core of their being. The boys take off in different directions, chasing their fires across the busy metropolitan city. As each boy captures his own fire, he is suddenly able to do impossible feats. Taehyun sprints up the side of a building. Yeonjun skates on the cement streets. Beomgyu drives on the tunnel ceiling, cruising by all the other cars. Soobin rides on the roof of a train, and Huening Kai on the hood of a car. By embracing growing up, they finally have the maturity to embrace all the inner pain they tried to avoid and the inner joy they recklessly sought. That radical acceptance of themselves gives them the power to take on this relentless adult world and to do so, in fact, in impossible new ways. At the climax of the music video, the flames converge together and explode, and the boys are united once more, dancing in the streets. The city bends and distorts around them like a Marvel movie, yet they remain, the only stable thing in the world. And here lies the other powerful truth: They never needed to escape to Neverland to find friendship and magic. Magic lives in their love for each other, and that they will have wherever they go. At the end of the music video, the world rights itself, and the boys laughingly hurry together off the street and towards whatever comes next.
The world today is especially troubling for young people growing up. With its increasing violence, dangerous online world, pandemic, economic recession, a rise of fascism and the destruction of the environment, it is incredibly discouraging for any young person. What hope do they have that it’s worth it to grow up and face the future as it is? It would be easier to escape it altogether. And TXT knows this. Their story is filled with a desperate loneliness and a deep reluctance to face the future. But TXT also knows that as much as we want to avoid the future, it will come whether we like it or not. So instead, like Peter takes Wendy’s hand and shows her how to fly, TXT takes their listener’s hand and shows them how to face tomorrow. Each step forward becomes a step towards meeting our true selves. Though hardships and heartbreak can’t be avoided, by confronting them head on, we can discover own inner strength and magic. TXT doesn’t promise a bright future, but they do promise that we can shape our reality more than we know. And going beyond Peter and Wendy, who both must ultimately face their destinies alone, Tomorrow x Together are going to, well, face tomorrow together. Because nothing can be so broken so long as we have each other. And for young people growing up in a very broken, cynical world, the belief that this world is, in fact, worth facing as long as we do it together can be very powerful indeed. Peter Pan may be able to fly and fight pirates, but for those of us who choose to grow up, our “awfully big adventure” begins with this simple 2024 lyric from TXT: “I look forward to the miracle that is tomorrow.”
