hi! i'm the anon who asked you about fangirling with some degree of emotional safety/detachment over men who are not confirmed to be safe since we just don’t know
https://consciousferality.tumblr.com/post/798717414525353984/ive-been-thinking-about-your-reply-to-this-ask
your reply made me cry in a good way, and i’ve actually experienced some semblance of peace while fangirling that i couldn’t access before. thank you for that! i don’t know how you did it but it’s something i couldn’t manage to achieve by myself and something in your reply must have made things click.
maybe i’m not as self-aware as i thought i was despite all the time i spend wallowing in my own head, because i wasn’t even aware that i was being hard on myself lol. i wasn’t even aware about trying to be a Good person, even now i wonder am i someone who tries to be a Good person or am i just a libra? XD
everything you said about the pain of being a person in the world and recovering when we are wounded, and bad people sometimes making enchanting art, and that it’s okay to love something that was crafted to be enticing, all of it just Helped. sorry i can’t explain how it helped but like i said i realised i don’t understand myself as much as i thought i did
another thing i didn’t quite understand was “He’s very dreamy, but he’s not the sun. You are.” i interpreted it as, yes Yunho is lovely but it’s our attention that illuminates his loveliness or makes it visible. is that what you meant? did i interpret that right?
also curious what motivates you when you write nonfiction rpf headcanons and meta if it’s not theorising about the Truth. working with available materials to uncover various possible meanings in a This Would Be Fun Regardless of If True kind of way? for me it’s partly The Characterisation Is Never Complete (because they are not a character enclosed within a story, the canon material is ever expanding) but it’s also been, like, a relentless desire to figure out a truth that convinces me/seems truthful to me. i’m consciously resisting that desire and trying to be all about the Characterisation.
submission sent November 18, 2025
I'm glad that having a back and forth with me made some part of your life feel a bit easier and more enjoyable. This is extremely gratifying.
I think that you have really, really high standards, but you might want to consider revising the one you have about how we're supposed to come to a self-understanding. I think self understanding is actually only achieved with the participation of at least one other person. As far as I am aware, in the whole of human history the only person who was fully a human and lived and died as one, who came to a self-realization on his own was Buddha. And he's Buddha, you know? It's confusing in both English and Korean, because concepts like self-understanding and self-realization and so on make it sound like you're supposed to do it alone, but I suspect that this is impossible.
As for Shonda Rhimes' immense important, "He's very dreamy, but he's not the sun. You are," these are my interpretations of what she meant by that.
Gendered, in the context of human society. In most places on the planet during all of their history, women were not "the sun" in the solar system of our own lives. We did not have others revolve around us. We revolved around other people, if we were lucky, and if we weren't lucky but only ordinary, women were satellite moons that revolved around a planet that itself then revolved around the sun. The 'You are the sun' phrase is to tell you to be the center of your own solar system - to dream your own dreams, rather than help clarify someone else's, and to spend your energy on achieving your own goals, rather than assist someone else in achieving (usually) his.
Feelings for an object that will not reciprocate: If you love something or someone you will never know, you need to be aware that what you are doing is pouring out what is in you. You are seeing something lovely in the other, because the loveliness is in you. It's not that the loveliness is there and you're seeing it. It's that you are creating the loveliness you are experiencing because it's in you and it's your own.
Corollary to 2: You're seeing what you think you're seeing because you need to see it. You're not illuminating anything about Yunho or anyone else. You're seeing yourself, and you're learning about what you need and what you like and what you want. I say this not only because I'm a very self-and-ego centered autistic person (admittedly, a disabled and warped point of view, but not a useless one) but because there are Atiny who love the band, love the music, have gone to the concerts, stood very close to Yunho as he performed in the concert and felt ... nothing, and saw... very little. There's no there there, except what's in you. I think we can use our positive fandom feelings to circle back to the earliest point I made up top, which is to get self-understanding.
I hope this is at least a little bit clarifying.
