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the persistent and the cute

Over the last few days, there’s been a really interesting discussion in the comments of my reblog of the gifset @tinngun​ put together of the Utsukushii Kare season 2 finale kiss. I’m transplanting it here because 1) it seems like @tinngun​ could use a break from all those notifications and so forth 2) the conversation was totally getting buried and I think it might be interesting to folks who probably wouldn’t see it without it being brought back out into a main post. So, first, here’s a quick recap of what I posted when I reblogged the gifset post in the first place. Well, the part that’s pertinent to this conversation, at least. I commented on the tropeyness of the scene, including allusions to Hira and Kiyoi’s sexual relationship, which (from what I hear) gets quite a bit of time in the novels but by virtue of TV as a medium, is mostly not portrayed in the series. In other words, since this part of the relationship isn’t shown directly the vast majority of the time, it has to be sketched out through these allusions, including what I’d consider coded language. 

With regard to the coded terms, I brought up something @bookittyboop​ had mentioned to me previously, that “persistent” and “cute” have specific meanings in BL/yaoi/other related genres. Basically, someone labeled as “persistent” is more active/forceful sexually and someone labeled as “cute” is yielding/more passive, with these roles being mutually reinforcing (i.e. the more yielding the “cute” person is, the more forceful the “persistent” person becomes).

Then I talked about the way Hagiwara Riku’s voice shifts in the line, “Sorry, Kiyoi. I can’t wait any longer tonight.” I had checked out some clips of other roles of his and noticed that among other things, he really seems to use his voice to differentiate between characters. This helped me to notice how distinct his “can’t wait” voice was, and I thought this was probably a voice belonging to the “persistent” part of the character. And I was less sure about this, but I thought Yagi Yusei was playing into this as well by reacting to the voice by kind of melting/going all floppy in response to it (he’d been fairly swoony before that, but it definitely seemed to be going up a notch there).

Then @xnoel, perennial fountain of information, pointed me to this quote from an interview translation (highlighting added):

So yeah, this seems like confirmation! I mean, what else would Yagi be referring to when he talks about “Hira’s ‘dark’ side” than this authoritative husky whisper thing?

Then I got some really great comments which I’m going to share here with permission, in part because I asked if anyone could point me toward more information on the “persistent”/”cute” thing.

The ever-helpful @nieves-de-sugui​ said:

a little bit of translation notes for your analysis! Hira is saying, literally, “I can’t hold back (anymore)” and it’s a very tropey sentence to say in BL (and shoujo) right before getting it on.  It’s also the main indicator of taking over/taking charge of the sexual encounter. There’s a lot of one taking over and the other giving in. (I think there’s a lot here about how Japanese people relate to sex and how it should be done).

(I said I’d run into this trope in Kdramas before as well.)

And then the kind and knowledgeable @bookittyboop​ pretty much took me to school on the whole persistent/cute dichotomy! They left comments in two clusters at different times so I’m putting a little dinkus (the line of asterisks or symbol that marks a transition between sections) in there to show where that was. Oh, and I took out some greetings/closings and stuff like that for flow purposes. Here we go:

The best source I can think of (because otherwise this is the kind of thing your get through osmosis once you’ve watched enough Japanese media) is @absolutebl’s post [link added by me] on the whipping boy trope, though there is more to it. I would classify Hira as a whipping boy/attack dog/service top and Kiyoi as more of a kuudere than a tsundere as well as a spoiled prince/pampered princess.

Their characterization and dynamic (and derivatives) is a staple not only in bl but in Japanese media. You’ve got a male character (Hira) who is the unassuming or even the loser archetype but unearths or shows a “manly” and protective side in benefit of his loved ones (many times after his “cowardice” or “uselessness” has let them be hurt) and slowly makes something of himself.

Then you got a (normally female) character who is  a combination of cold and aloof (kuudere) or prickly and explosive (tsundere) but actually wants to be cherished and uses the gruff exterior as a way to protect herself from heartache/rejection.

The first archetype normally admires the second and wants to be at their service while the second sees the potential in them and the adoration makes them feel safe. In normal circumstances the first character has a submissive personality and the other a domineering one. The second character is also going to find emotional vulnerability extremely difficult to express. But in certain circumstances, there is a “mom friend hack” button.

* * *

When character 2 opens up/shows vulnerability, character 1 identifies a need in the other to be cared for and takes confidence from being  chosen to provide that. There’s also gap moe (duality cuteness) and horny “I’m gonna worship you so good you will forget everything else,” "gotta get top marks at satisfying you,” and “you’re so cute I wanna eat you up” buttons.

The second character in turn feels attracted, safe and tethered by that show of confidence and let’s themselves (their barriers) go more and more . Those energies feed into each other and that’s how you get to our kiss scene. Sometimes(Kiyoi’s case) they add coyness and shyness (“no, that’s too much you beast”) because God forbid the tsundere/kuudere lacks plausible deniability when they go back to their senses. (there’s a “baby it’s cold outside"element too)

This is where @absolutebl​ chimed in to say they thought @bookittyboop​ was doing “a GREAT job” with this explanation.

And I agreed, and thanked them for the time and effort involved in such a useful explanation, but asked about the “mom friend hack” because it was new to me. Here was their explanation:

The mom friend is the responsible, caring one, prepared for any eventuality. If you’re a generally anxious person but also the mom friend, you’ve got a hack where you handily navigate  situations which would normally be embarrassing or anxiety-inducing if it’s for your loved one’s benefit.

For example:

-Buying condoms, pregnancy tests, emetics or other "embarrassing” stuff

-telling waitstaff they got an order wrong and to please change it

-asking a teacher to explain something again or revise an exam score

-giving a jerk a piece of your mind

Basically, you may not be able to stand for yourself or even make perfectly mundane, normal requests for your own sake, but the power of love lets you rationalize things, be brave, and do it for others.

I just realized I probably didn’t clarify enough. Hira’s thing is not exactly a “mom friend hack” but it’s similar to it in the sense that “being needed” lets him overcome a mental block.

And they added, re: my theory about Kiyoi’s response to the Persistent Voice:

As for the kiss voice and Kiyoi’s reaction, I too am convinced that was all on purpose. Bl drinks from yaoi manga, which has a treasure trove of visual cues and tropes. If there was a manga version, we’d probably have seen Hira suddenly get wolfy ears and shiny eyes + Kiyoi blushing like a maiden (maybe a fade to black with the dirtiest onomatopoeia known to man) to signal someone’s getting railed within an inch of his life 😂. This is the real life equivalent.

So, yeah. Lots to think about here. I’m glad to know I seemed to be on the right track. It’s funny how there is so much material out there about some tropes and genre terms (googling seme and uke will get you more results than you know what to do with) while other tropes are harder to find anything about. (If only because of the vagaries of search terms, which might be a factor here.) If nothing else I’ll have this post to refer back to and I hope others will do the same if they find it at all useful.

Thanks again to @bookittyboop​ and @nieves-de-sugui​ for their thoughts! And to the illustrious @absolutebl​ for chiming in with praise (for @bookittyboop​) and confirmation.

postscript:

There are a couple of things I keep noticing about that kiss scene since this discussion that I wanted to point out. I guess the fact that, due to both of my reblogs, I had a gifset of the scene at the top of my profile for three days probably has something to do with it.

First, I hadn’t noticed how much Kiyoi really is slipping into a “cute” persona even before the Persistent Voice is used–just in response to Hira’s first kiss. His eyes get very soft and he does that affectionate head-bonk but the pièce de résistance, to my mind, is the rather childlike way he sticks out the end of his tongue. So, yeah. The first stage of cuteness comes before the Voice is even used.

Second, I hadn’t even reckoned with just how floppy Kiyoi gets after the Voice. He’s swaying around so much that Hira keeps having to grab him so he doesn’t just keel over. He’s gone almost boneless.

I guess it’s just really fascinating to me how this set of tropes can be so pervasive in one culture (or at least noteworthy chunks of it) and yet almost entirely novel to me. I mean, I was aware cultural differences existed, of course, but sometimes getting hit by the reality of them is still startling.

I won’t kiss you for a while. What? I won’t do it until you decide to face me properly.

Hagiwara Riku as HIRA & Yagi Yusei as KIYOI 美しい彼 シーズン2 (2023) dir. Sakai Mai

i’m like the joker in the sense that i tell jokes sometimes

Lestat’s relationship with Nicki and how it impacts his relationship with Louis:

So I’ve been re-reading “The Vampire Lestat” recently, and one of the most amazing things, I think, is how well it ties in to “Interview with the Vampire” in terms of psychologically explaining why Lestat was the way he was with Louis, why Louis thought of Lestat as he did, but also, why Louis’ perception of Lestat was so wrong.  There’s countless examples of this throughout the book, psychological excavation of Lestat which sheds so much light on his behavior in Louis’ story.  But I wanted to focus here on one particular aspect of it, and that’s how Lestat’s general positivity as a character, and the ways in which it impacted those around him, how those around him reacted to it, especially Nicki and Armand, would later inform Lestat’s affected apathy and seeming detachment with Louis.

Lestat explains early on in TVL that, growing up, he was often treated as a burden by his family.  That his refusal to accept his lot in life, his persistent dreaming and hope, his persistent attempts to improve and even escape the dreary dead-end of his provincial life caused a great deal of consternation, disapproval and even anger and cruelty from his father and two brothers, even at times resulting in physical and verbal abuse at their hands.  So early on in life, Lestat was already taught by those closest to him that his enthusiasm and fighting spirit and positivity were bad things.  That to truly be himself, to be the free spirit that he was and to fight for what he really wanted, were things he couldn’t do without being a “bad person”.  He even has a conversation with Gabrielle specifically about this, about Lestat’s fears that to defy his father and brother’s is equal to him being bad, that he can’t be himself and do what he actually wants without giving up the ability to be good.  And anyone who knows anything about Lestat’s character should know that the true driving force behind basically every one of his actions is the desire to do and be good.

So already at this early stage of his life, Lestat is made to believe that who he is, his natural personality, is a thorn in the sides of most people he knows.  I know that in this fandom, it gets made fun of often, that Lestat is referred to as “a lot”, and people laugh about his overbearing personality.  But it’s actually incredibly sad, that here we have a person who, because of his innate optimism and hope, was made by his own family to feel like a disappointment and a burden.

Moving on, and looking at how this aspect of Lestat’s personality, this positivity, his refusal to quit and his undying belief in the “impossible”, effects his relationship with Nicki in particular, I think is vitally important in understanding Lestat’s relationship with Louis later on, and why it plays out the way it initially does.

The entire story between Lestat and Nicki is particularly heartbreaking, because of the deep and genuine love which existed between them, and how it eventually eroded and ended in genuine resentment and even hatred toward Lestat from Nicki, and specifically, because of how this ends up effecting Lestat and his perception of himself and the way he ends up conducting himself with the other great love of his life in Louis.

Nicki goes mad, slowly descending into an ever deepening depression and general negativity after he and Lestat move to Paris, and it’s later revealed that Nicki had hoped, by moving to Paris, that he and Lestat would “go down”, to use Nicki’s own words.  He wanted them to fail as a means of rebelling and disappointing his own father, as a way of making his father angry and upset.  The very basis of his reasoning for going to Paris was the opposite of Lestat’s.  Lestat wanted to go to Paris to do something good and positive with his life, to give meaning to his life.  Nicki went to Paris to destroy his life as a final “screw you” to his family, a reason driven by negative emotion, as opposed to the positive emotion driving Lestat.  He never told this to Lestat, of course.  He simply went along with him and pretended to share in his hope and enthusiasm for the future.  He tells Lestat later that he believed that once they’d gotten to Paris, Lestat would become disillusioned with the world and stop pursuing his dream of doing good with his life.  He’d hoped, secretly, that Lestat would give up, the way Nicki himself had long before given up in believing in anything better.  But one of Lestat’s defining traits as a person is his refusal to ever give up.  He’s a fighter through and through.  He’s an eternal optimist.  No matter how bad things get for him, he never loses his hope or belief in the impossible. 

When things really get bad between Lestat and Nicki is after Lestat reveals to him he’s been turned into a vampire, and Nicki uses Lestat’s own generosity and desire to help his loved ones against him, guilt-tripping him for sharing the “Dark Gift” with his mother, but not with Nicki himself, accusing Lestat of giving preferential treatment to his direct family because of their royal blood.  He essentially tells Lestat that giving money and gifts to him, to the actors they worked with and the theater they worked at, was an insult, a dismissal of the less important people in his life.  This is all wrong, of course.  It couldn’t be farther from the truth.  Lestat showers Nicki and everyone else with gifts and material wealth as a means of expressing his genuine love for all of them, given the abject poverty he himself grew up in.  He wants to take care of them, and provide for them, as he’d always done with his family.  But Nicki, suffering from his worsening mental illness, uses this against Lestat, badgering him with it until Lestat’s sense of guilt and driving wish to do good makes him act against his better judgement, and he gives Nicki what he wants, turning him into a vampire too. 

Lestat has a final, climactic confrontation with Nicki in the theater they worked at as mortals, in which Nicki reveals to him how Lestat’s positivity truly effected him.  In which he reveals to Lestat that “his light”, as Nicki refers to it, was a source of anguish and torment for him.  He tells Lestat that his refusal to give up, that his general positivity and ability to push through even the most dire and seemingly hopeless circumstances, that his ability to make the impossible happen and make a success of himself despite all odds being against him, was like a “piercing” to Nicki.  He explains that for every moment of exuberance and enthusiasm and passion in Lestat, it created a proportionate amount of darkness and despair in Nicki, a proportionate unhappiness and hopelessness.  He basically blames Lestat here for causing his own, deranged mental state simply through the power of his own, overwhelming positivity.  He reinforces in this moment what Lestat had already been taught over and over again by his own family.  That his very existence, his natural state of being, was causing harm to those he loved.  You see where I’m going with this?  Lestat is made to feel here, by Nicki, that just being himself is what caused Nicki to lose his mind completely.

“And when we decided to go to Paris, I thought we would starve in Paris, that we would go down and down and down.  It was what I wanted, rather than what they wanted, that I, the favored son, should rise for them.  I thought we would go down!  We were supposed to go down… But you didn’t go down Lestat… The hunger, the cold- none of it stopped you.  You were a triumph!… You didn’t drink yourself to death in the gutter.  You turned everything upside down!  And for every aspect of our proposed damnation you found exuberance, and there was no end to your enthusiasms and the passion coming out of you- and the light, always the light.  And in exact proportion to the light coming out of you, there was the darkness in me!  Every exuberance piercing me and creating its exact proportion of darkness and despair!  And then, the magic, when you got the magic, irony of ironies, you protected me from it!  And what did you do with it but use your Satanic powers to simulate the actions of a good man!”

He tells Lestat that it’s some sort of irony that Lestat, who wishes to do good, should be given a power which can do only evil, while keeping it from Nicki himself, (Nicki, who wishes to do evil and will use the Dark Gift “properly”, unlike Lestat himself), in an effort to protect him. Lestat later imagines that what Nicki really meant, without saying it to him, was that Lestat wouldn’t allow Nicki to have what he could believe in.  The exact words that he imagines Nicki saying to him are “Let me have what I can believe in.  You would never do that.”  Lestat is blaming himself here for crushing Nicki’s own dreams through the sheer force of his personality.  He feels like Nicki’s downfall is his doing because he failed to understand just how depressed Nicki was, that he couldn’t understand how depressed he was because Lestat himself is such an innately positive person, and instead of supporting Nicki in his wish to self-destruct, he encouraged him and tried to inspire him and make him believe in himself as a force of good, as Lestat believed in himself.  Nicki reveals to Lestat that he wanted to fail, and Lestat had refused to let him do it, and that’s what Lestat ends up believing.  That in his efforts to help Nicki, he only ended up hurting him.

We can see then how this experience with Nicki, this sense of guilt and responsibility that Lestat takes on to himself for Nicki’s downfall, later impacts how he behaves with and treats Louis.  Louis is very much like Nicki.  He tends towards depression and melancholy.  He has a tendency to get trapped in his own head and self-obsess and think of himself as “evil”.  These are all traits which are eerily similar to Nicki, and to Nicki’s state of mind before he went truly mad.  Recognizing this, and remembering what Nicki said to Lestat about how his “light” made Nicki descend deeper into darkness, we then see how Lestat doubtless feared that history would repeat itself with Louis.  That the force of Lestat’s overwhelming positivity and enthusiasm would do to Louis what it had supposedly done to Nicki, that is, send him further into despair and self-destruction.

Louis recounts how, later on in their relationship, when he and Lestat would go out to a play or some sort of show, Lestat would afterward go dancing through the streets, reciting the play’s lines out loud with overexcited enthusiasm and passion, even frightening the people passing by with his energy and bursting joy.  This was Lestat’s true personality coming through.  This was who Lestat really was.  Seeing theater productions would remind Lestat of the happiest days of his life, when he was still mortal, living in squalor with Nicki in Paris, working as an actor in the theater, living out his dream and doing something he genuinely believed was good, and it caused, in the present with Louis, his true personality to come to the surface, rather than the biting, dismissive, apathetic personality he’d affected since then.  Louis recalls then how he would express to Lestat, in these moments, that he was actually enjoying his company, and upon doing so, Lestat would again retreat into himself, he would withdraw and once more become that detached, apathetic and dismissive person Louis believed him to be, dispassionate and caring about seemingly nothing.  It would be weeks and even months, then, before Lestat would again ask Louis to go out with him.  Why is that?  Well, in the context of Lestat’s relationship with Nicki, and what Nicki accused him of, of destroying him through the force of his overbearing positivity and enthusiasm, it makes perfect sense why Lestat acted like he did with Louis, why he, upon hearing Louis’ positive reaction to Lestat’s genuine nature coming out, would retreat back into himself and put on the act of someone who doesn’t care.  Because the last time Lestat was in a romantic relationship with someone, and he was himself, that person went insane, blamed Lestat for it, and ended up killing themselves later on.  Really think about that, and then think about how that must have effected Lestat’s relationship with Louis, seeing so many of the same traits in Louis that existed in Nicki, and remembering how Nicki blamed Lestat for his depression.  Louis himself had expressed numerous times his own wish to die.  In Lestat’s mind, mistaken though he was, he no doubt feared that being who he really was, showing his true personality, his true passion and love for life and for people, his true eternal optimism and hope, would drive Louis to self-destruct the way he believed it had driven Nicki. 

This fear in Lestat could only have been exacerbated too by his relationship with Armand, and how Armand, like Nicki, blamed Lestat’s positivity, his self-belief and powerful will on his own downfall, with the destruction of his coven and his way of life.  Just like Nicki, Armand accuses Lestat of coming in and wreaking havoc and destruction through the sheer force of his personality, his refusal to give up or give in.  He blames Lestat for causing the other vampires in his coven to lose belief in worshiping Satan simply because Lestat himself refused to submit to their will, and fought back when they tried to burn him and his mother and Nicki in a pyre for doing so.

From childhood on, Lestat is essentially taught and shown by everyone around him that his personality causes destruction.  That his self-belief and can-do attitude is a burden at best, and a force of chaos and evil at worst.  He’s taught to believe that being himself is somehow the worst thing he can be, because it drives everyone around him to despair and misfortune.  With that in mind, it becomes painfully clear just why Lestat adopted with Louis a personality that was, in reality, wholly opposite of who he truly was, and why Louis, in turn, formed such a tragically false conception and misunderstanding of who Lestat was.