I Played This At A Staff Workshop I Ran On Gender Norms And Even After Seeing It Dozens Of Times I Teared

I played this at a staff workshop I ran on gender norms and even after seeing it dozens of times I teared up a little. Park Jimin, 사랑해요 💜

PARK JIMIN BTS World Tour 'Love Yourself' In Seoul: Commentary Film

cr. namuspromised

Is it a match??

If it's not, its pretty darn close.

https://x.com/natsukoginko/status/1816465748979560957

What's jikookers explanation about these lyrics ? WHO isn't written by him I agree but Be Mine is.

Lovers come and go through my heart.

So you are saying he doesn't have a crush because he's in a long term commited relationship with his bandmate but he falls in love with different people every other day ?

Thank you Anon, for including me in what i assume is widespread spamming of all the Jikook accounts.

When you send these asks, do you think Jikookers are crushed by the devastating blow of a question like this?

I'm going to tell you a secret... Don't tell anyone else but I LOVE getting these asks.

I have a quiet laugh, not only at the foolish things you ask me, but also at the energy you spend interacting with Jikook content. Anon, have you considered what this means for your algorithm?

And really, all you're doing is giving me an excuse to post MORE about Jikook. Well, since I love posting about Jikook this is no great hardship for me. In fact...

Thank you for handing me the mic.

💛💜🐥🐰💛💜🐰🐥💛💜🐰🐥💛💜

So, about the lyrics:

Lovers come and go in and out of my heart

Using this - a single line from one song on the album - to try to disprove a long term relationship seems a little desperate honestly. But I'll play along.

I'm going to skip over the aesthtic writing considerations like poetic licence, rhythm, the sound of words in different tenses, the way vowels change in singing etc.

The most obvious answer is....

... it's just not logical to assume Jimin wrote every word of this song sonce there are SIX other people credited as writers. And consider also that these are English lines and English isn't one of Jiminie's strengths.

I'm going to guess that the English speaking writers might have tweaked or even contributed the English lines. Because that just makes sense.

They're not likely to be writing the Korean lines, are they?

Now, feel free to enjoy these beautiful photos of Jimin and his bro-pal-bandmate-buddy, Jungkook....

💜🥰💛

you're welcome

They do! It's a friendship that GLOWS with affection and genuine care for each other. I love seeing them interact. Joon seems to soften and relax around Jimin, and I think Jimin cares deeply about Joonie's opinions and feedback. They hold each other in high esteem for completetly different reasons, and they are so supportive of each other.

Minimoni ~LOVE~

I just watched this, and LOVED every single minute of it. Namjoon and Jimin have such a sweet and special bond.

This brough so much warmth and joy into my day. I'm grateful for the content that they give us, as it is a reminder that they do love ARMY. And, they love each other! 💜💜💜

Grab a cup of coffee or tea, and sit with them for a bit!

Back to WHO : the MV

This is a continuation of the earlier post that discusses the song WHO, by Jimin. That post was a first impression focused on the lyrics - while this one looks more closely at the MV.

(Remember this is my interpretation, not an official statement by Hybe)

The more times I watched the music video, the more I wanted to yell, because look...

IT'S REALLY STARING US IN THE FACE.

And again, kudos to Jimin's team because it's the most obvious thing in the world ever but only if you ALREADY KNOW what's going on.

Here's a summary:

The music video loosely represents Jimin's attraction/sexuality/love life as a timeline.

New colours - a new spectrum shall we say - filter into his life even though he's trying so hard to 'keep to the program'.

He searches high and low for a girl to love, but alas, nobody makes the fireworks happen for him. Then Billboard Boy crashes into his life, threatening to destroy everything. Jimin has to weather the storm and figure out where his place is because Billboard Boy is a major disruptor - a tornado in fact. In the end, the fireworks are popping and the chaos is happening, and Jimin has to just go with it and finds his place again. His colours have been getting brighter and louder as he goes along and in the end he's prepared to walk away from everything in order to be the spectrum he is.

<<I'm not saying it's literally a count of how many girls or boys or enbys he's kissed. I hope his kissed all of them and then some, frankly, but that's none of my business.>>

A few things to pay special attention to:

Burning cars > cars = masculinity. fire = hot. 1+1=2.

Dancers > people he's interacting with

Rough weather, as represented by the wind-whipped papers and eventually even cars being tossed about the set > His attraction to men (and dare I say it, culminating in a focus on one man in particular)

Colour flares, machine text, and marks on the tape (horizontal lines etc)

Are you ready? Let's go...

Jimin enters the scene looking like sex on legs (no surprises) and strolls casually onto the road. Immediately our view of hm is blocked by a pop-art style poster blowing across the screen. It's immediately followed by a car coming around the corner onto the road. The car is on fire. Jimin watches it pass by and follows it.

He follows the burning car.... and so it begins.

The narrative starts from before BTS even exists. Jimin encounters several female dancers who he has brief and sexy interludes with. In fact i don't think there's a single woman in this MV who he doesn't at least look at. He really does try everything (and everyone) in his efforts to find HER.

BUT WAIT.... rewind...

Let's go back to the poster... it depicts a street scene much like the one we see here, with the words:

WHO IS!! TORNADO OF LOVE

Note: those are exclamation points not question marks.

It's not a question. This is telling us UP FRONT IN BIG LETTERS that 'WHO' is tornado of love.

I could probably stop here and just say 'ok go watch it again' but it's too much fun to go through all the details.

So let's continue...

Jimin has a little more steamy choreo with the female dancers before the lyrics tell us he has so many people to see and places to go, and he leaves them and joins 6 other men in what looks like a work environment....

Hello we are BTS!

Yes you guessed it... like Yoongi did in Haegum, Jimin has his members represented here. (Fan chant going off in my head...) and more delicious choreography follows.

Notice that while Jimin was dancing with the girls, the only signs of rough weather were a few glittery specs floating through the air, barely noticable. Those bits of glitter multiply when he joins the 6 men, and instead of a sprinkling of glitter, it starts looking like a light snowfall.

That's all about to change....

The first moment of reckonning:

At the end of this section of choreo, as Jimin sings 'who is my heart waiting for' and moves into the next phase we have a barely visible flash of light across the screen and rainbow colours bleed into the footage (at 1.14).

This is also the moment the significant rough weather starts. I'd say this is where Jimin starts noticing how he feels, and the turmoil begins, because this is also where he makes eye contact with the camera (1.23).

He sees us watching.

Fuck. I had a moment here. There's a look on his face as he walks past the camera and stares right into it.

AUTO CALLIBRATION...

As another millisecond flash of light and rainbow colours seep into the footage, The machine text 'AUTO CALLIBRATION' appear on the screen and flash there for a couple of seconds.

CALLIBRATE: To standardise... by determinning the deviation from a standard so as to ascertain the proper correction factors (Meriam-Webster definition).

"Get a hold of yourself, Jimin. Reset (your behaviour and desires) to correspond with expectations"

Jimin makes a very determined bee-line for the nearest girl and dances with her, ignoring the burning car in the foreground.

This brings us to the next phase of the narrative, and the next location - the performance space in front of the OASIS cinema.

(Do you see the doors of the cinema - BTS referenced again).

As he dances with this girl, the camera zooms out and we see that a crowd has gathered outside the cinema, watching them, but the crowd does not seem friendly and the dance seems performative - the movements are exagerated and obvious. The girl has Jimin in a headlock at one point and then she pushes him away and leaves. All in all it's an unpleasant event.

At this point the BTS members return (Although now there's one missing) and they dance with and around a number of female dancers. flashes go off in the crowd as the choreo is performed.

As they dance the wind picks up quickly and papers and cans are blown about. Even when Jimin is obviously interacting with female dancers the weather continues to pick up. Dancing with the girls isn't helping.

The camera pulls back and we see the same car as before, still on fire.

This is the moment when the penny (or billboard) drops.

All the other dancers scatter, dissapearing in a matter of seconds as the billboard comes crashing down. The billboard blocks his path. Wherever he had been planning to go - or whatever course of action he had planned to take - this man on the billboard forces a new decision. Jimin has to rethink his plans.

Jimin turns and goes in the opposite direction to everyone else. (A similar scene occured in Like Crazy, Jimin going the other way, rejecting the norm, going against the tide).

The machine text flashes "REWIND ... REWIND" on the screen and we see Jimin heading back to where all this started... where the original car on fire was seen.

He's travelling his own path now, but as he walks, alone in what seems to be the wrong direction, we see the store lights brighter, reflecting off cars and filling the space around him.

He's going through the motions with the girls he passes but the interactions are brief and in one case he actually dodges the girl completetly.

He retraces his steps amidst the chaos, and the weather really goes nuts. Now there are cars being thrown through the air, streetlamps exploding. The storm is almost upon him.

As Jimin steps into that original street again, the one with the neon letters spelling BLISS, the machine text reads PLAY. It's almost ike he's having a redo, where he accepts who he is from the start and allows the chaos to happen. And the chaos DOES happen, because the tornado has arrived.

THE TORNADO OF LOVE.

There's a flash and the whole screen is flooded with colours, blanking out the footage.

Jimin can no longer dance in step with everyone else at this point. He's doubled over, belting those high notes at the climax of the song while the chaos rages in the background. Without the music to give his actions context, it almost looks like hes in agony.

Sparks fly, lights flash, even the film itself is affected...

He eventually gets it together and rejoins the choreography, picking up his life so to speak. But his callibration is forever changed. the colours that bled into his life are there for good now, and and as he walks away after the music stops, we see that those colours are not just for the performance, they exist outside of that.

A note about the light flares we see throughout the MV:

It was really hard to catch these, some of them were literal milliseconds. I had to slow the MV down to play at .25 original speed and even then they were fleeting - well hidden.

Only the one at the very end was really visible.

In this one, the word PAUSE appears, as the MV ends. I wonder if that relates to their military service?

The flares of light and colour, those rainbow flashes, aren't always easy to find. Youvhave to be prepared to seek them out.

We will find them if we look for them, but i think Jimin won't show his true colours until after the lights go down and the performance is over.

I respect his decision (if that's what that is) and i will continue to meet him here his stands. I'll support everything he does knowing what I know and I'll continue to search for and uncover the hidden messages he sends us.

So...Who then?

A BRIEF SYNOPSIS of WHO:

Jimin is searching for the girl he thinks is out there for him (one who he can give the world and more to). He can't understand why he hasn't found her. Who is his heart waiting for?

Clue: it's the person who literally falls into his path. This is the ONLY person for him - everyone else has walked away.

I have to confess... I didn't hear WHO as more than a generic pop song the first couple of times i listened. I was in my car driving home from work when i first listened, and then bustling around with domestic stuff as i listened a second time.

Its very unusual for me to be so casual and negligent with first listens but my head wasn't in the game. I didn't want to push it.

So I consciously put it aside until i could give it the attention it deserves.

I want to clearly state that if WHO was purely a fun and impersonal pop song i wouldn't be judging the song or Jimin for that. It's got a catchy tune and i enjoyed it, and I'm not expecting everything Jimin creates to speak to me personally.

Some things are just for fun and that's okay.

But I think there more to this song...

As with much of Jimin’s work, what seems simple on the surface is more complex when you dig a little deeper...

I watched the mv with the lyrics onscreen and my impression is forming (It's still basically a first impression though so i probably missed things)

What i notice, reading the lyrics as i listen, is that it's not the love song i first thought it was.

It's not a love song at all.

This song is all about about Jimin

and it's full of questions...

She's always on his mind, this woman he has yet to find. He thinks about her every day.

He's not telling us his standards are too high, or all the girls he likes are unavailable, or he never goes out to meet people.

He's telling us he's been searching but he hasn't even MET her yet.

Hes telling us he doesn't know why he hasn't found her.

((Why the insistence that it has to be a 'her'?

That's easy:

Anyone who was raised in a hereronormative environment is going to go through life thinking they will find love with the opposite sex. It's the default expectation. Everything in society tells us this from advertising, to entertainment, to the government. For a lot of gay or queer people, you expect that to happen. You kiss a lot of girls or boys and you expect to feel that spark (shoutout to the enbys who nobody can see).

And the spark just isnt there, so you keep looking. You search for that one individual who will make you feel the way you're *supposed* to feel.

The lyrics of this song are basically saying exactly this.

If you believe - as i do - that Jimin struggled with his identity and that he didn't recognise his love for JK as ROMANTIC love until JK started returning his affection, then it makes sense that he believed he would (or should) fall in love with a girl.

And look, he dances with ALL the girls. He has a red hot go at this. He really tries, but nothing sticks.))

Now back to the song...

He tells us that he goes out and meets a lot of people:

But he still doesn't know who she might be.

HE'S NEVER MET HER...

"We've never met" he says it twice in succession. So he hasnt even met a girl he thinks COULD be the one?

🤔

Can i take a guess?

MAYBE THERE'S A CLUE HERE:

"Who is my heart waiting for," sings Jimin as a BILLBOARD falls from the sky.

Its "crash landing on you" but figuratively, not literally.

The face on the billboard looks very familiar 🤔

And also...

KEEP GOING>> says the billboard.

When asked in an AMA what he would say to his debut self, Jimin said "You nice. Keep going."

We know how tough things were in the lead up to debut, especially for Jimin. He nearly lost his place in the group several times. And it's no secret that as a group they struggled to be taken seriously by the industry.

But wait... what else does the billboard say?

W H O

Not 'WHO?' but WHO

It's a statement, not a question.

If you're looking for a sign, this is it.

THIS IS LITERALLY A SIGN

Dont forget that this billboard/person crashes into his life - falls directly in his path - when hes alone out there.

There's nobody there but Jimin.

And for Jimin, there is nobody else

🐰🐥

ETA: Here's the next part of my response to 'WHO'. This post looks at the MV Specifically.