magpie24601 - magpie24601
magpie24601

She/her. Liking very random things led me here. #TumblrNewbie

442 posts

So, I've Been Geeking Out On All The La Pluie Discourse Over The Past Couple Of Days. And I Find Myself

So, I've been geeking out on all the La Pluie discourse over the past couple of days. And I find myself re-blogging posts that may seem to contradict one another. However, each POV, ultimately, affirms the position the show is taking.

- First, the ideas that people are soulmates AND that love is an action - one we choose to do (or not do) each day - can both be true at once.

- Second, the show seems to be moving towards some kind of choose-your-own-adventure conclusion - open to a number of interpretations.

All the bloggers mentioned above have described this much more eloquently and in greater detail, so take some time to check out their deep dives.

But there's one thing I want to add to the conversation or offer up as a possibility. Most view Tai/Patts as the couple that will choose to love one another without regard to being soulmates, while Tien/Lomfon are the pair falling for one another IN SPITE OF how the stars have aligned. The contrast is a great plot device and I can see the appeal of juxtaposing those two narratives.

Yet (and perhaps, I'm alone here), I can't help but think that Tien and Lomfon are fated AF ... IF we define soulmates - not as people who can hear each other in the rain - but people whose lives keep connecting in ways that are so unexpected and numerous, it can no longer be simply coincidence. In my eyes, that's where their story is headed.

I'll admit that when Tai first described the unknown person who helped him deal with his parent's divorce, I like many people mistakenly assumed that would be Lomfon; this week, that was revealed to be a red herring, because it was always Patts, the Kind One.

Similarly, from the moment Lomfon mentioned the keychain and the unknown person who saved his life, I've known it would be Tien. Somehow, some way, that thread leads to Tien. I'm dying on this hill, people! (Note: episode 10 did kill me; Resurrected by episode 12!)

In the end, both couples are going to push the boundaries on our views of love, self-determination, and cosmic connections.

I’ve been noodling a bit more on this week’s episode of La Pluie, which once again inspired debate about what this show is trying to say about soulmates. This week we learned that Patts used to spend quite a bit of time right next door to Tai when he visited his grandmother, and that two years ago, the two were in touch via exchanging anonymous notes and small gifts to comfort each other through hard times. Patts supported the boy next door when he heard his parents were going through divorce, and Tai supported the boy next door when his grandmother died. They did all of this without ever meeting or knowing each other’s names, and with no motive beyond being kind to each other. The kindness is the point. (@bengiyo)

@respectthepetty suggested that this shared connection in the past is another sign that Patts and Tai have a Big Destiny and the universe was going to push them together no matter what, and read that as the show confirming they are in fact soulmates. @heretherebedork @manogirl and @shortpplfedup emphasized a different perspective, that the importance of choice is a common thread throughout this story regardless of opportunity and coincidence, and that Tai and Patts are not together because of pre-destination but because they have decided on each other.

I posit that the show is knowingly playing with these ideas in order to inspire this kind of debate because they are specifically interested in interrogating the romantic notion of destiny and its use in the romance genre, though I tend to agree with the It's About Choice camp on Patts and Tai’s romance. I’ve already done a full rundown of all the ways the show has subverted the soulmates trope to date, so I won’t repeat all of that here. It’s also important to note that in this universe, the concept of soulmates is tied to hearing loss, that this pen pal revelation is not connected to their hearing loss at all, and that the show is in the process of dismantling the hearing loss connection as a sign of pre-destination in Lomfon’s side of the story as we speak. Tai and Patts were already connected via hearing loss during the time period where they exchanged these notes, but where the more explicit “soulmate” bond was a barrier between them, with the expectations and pressure of that stripped away, they found an opportunity to simply be kind to each other and connect based on who they each are as people.

So how to interpret this new information we received in episode 9? One could look at the reveal this week from either angle:

it’s a sign that the universe was going to throw them together no matter what until they finally met and therefore they are fated; or

it’s another demonstration that when these two are able to connect without the “soulmate” bond getting in the way, Tai and Patts choose to care for each other.

Both of these are valid interpretations, and I don’t think figuring out which is “correct” is actually the point. I don’t believe the show intends to give us a firm answer about whether soulmates are real. Their intention is to make us curious, to make us question, and ultimately to share a message that whether soulmates are real is beside the point.

Perhaps there is some magic at work between Tai and Patts; perhaps there’s nothing but lucky coincidence. It doesn’t really matter, because throughout this story we’ve seen that the characters must do the work to care for each other and build strong relationships, that coincide or fate alone won’t keep them together, that they have choices and more than one path to happiness, and that what they think fate is telling them may not actually be what they want or need.

What matters is that they decide who they want to love and that they choose every day to be together, to be kind to each other, and to keep putting in the work to understand and care for one another. I believe that’s the ultimate message of this story.

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More Posts from Magpie24601

2 years ago

And so it should be.

Congrats to Tay for winning #1 Causer of Gender Envy in a BL!!!!

Congrats To Tay For Winning #1 Causer Of Gender Envy In A BL!!!!
Congrats To Tay For Winning #1 Causer Of Gender Envy In A BL!!!!

Congrats to Tay on the gender!! Special shoutout to all the other contestants' gender, just because it maybe doesn't incite as much envy as another's gender, that doesn't mean it isn't great!!! I'm going to stop myself here before I put my degree at work and start philosophizing about the nature of gender lol.

But as always, thank you to everyone who participated!!! These brackets are only possible because of y'alls involvement and I'm glad that y'all continue to like what I'm doing and I hope that I can continue to improve and make this a more and more enjoyable experience for all!!!

There will be 2 polls going live once this is posted. 1 for the next bracket topic and 1 special bonus round featuring 10 BL Actors where y'all get to pick who gives you the most gender envy out of them!!! And keep an eye out for the next bracket!!!!

2 years ago

Man's fans are loud as f*ck. Rightfully so!

But, when I tell you I am not ready for Ben's "IN LOVE" face ... Friends, I'm about to be undignified.

They really are

They Really Are

Coming for my throat

They Really Are

Unfollow me now, This is gonna be the only thing I talk about for the next week. I've wanted this for months fuck. What the fuck.


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2 years ago

La Pluie has been saying 'what matters is what you choose' and then gives us an episode of people just making TERRIBLE choices to reinforce the point and bra-fucking-vo, 12/10. My alley cat Tai wrong and he knows it and he decides to double down the more cornered he feels about it. Patts still not over getting ignored for 2 years, still feeling insecure about it. Lomfon...*sigh* is a messy motherfucker who lives for the drama, cuz this literally could've been an email if he wasn't obsessed with being right about things. The only person I feel sorry for right now is Tien, cuz he was just vibing, having a great time and now he gotta deal with this mess and HE AIN'T EEM DID NOTHIN.

2 years ago

Soulmate Skepticism vs Romanticism in La Pluie

I am a soulmate skeptic. I don't believe there's one person destined for each of us on this planet.

I'm also a staunch pessimist on matters of romance and love. I constantly conduct a cost-benefit analysis in my head for every romantic relationship I see in my life. "It doesn't make sense" is almost always the first thing that pops into my head when I see people in love.

Soulmate Skepticism Vs Romanticism In La Pluie

Do I sound an awful lot like someone from La Pluie? Why yes, it's our resident Soulmate Skeptic and Slenderman wannabe, Lomfon! That must mean that I liked him immediately, right?

Soulmate Skepticism Vs Romanticism In La Pluie

Love is not a competition that you can win or lose. It's something you feel and share. There are a million things in and around love that can be made sense of, and added up like a math problem, like interests, hobbies, morals, desires, and fears, but the feeling of love itself is not logical. And I hate the part of me that can't get over that fact, and I'm working on it.

That's why I was initially so wary of Lomfon. I thought the show was gonna let him run amok and then teach him a "lesson" about love, after all the destruction is said and done. And then, episode 8 came around, and Lomfon became the character with the most potential for growth in the coming episodes, and I was so excited to see how the show would take him on this journey.

How do you teach a skeptic to believe? You give him a situation that he cannot logic his way out of, aka, two potential soulmates. This is the story I expected to play out last night, but of course, they subverted this expectation because this show is made by people who are much smarter than me.

Episode 9 is crafted to make skeptics believe in spontaneous, head-in-the-clouds love, rooted in coincidence, but the target is not Lomfon, but me. And possibly you. And all of us, the audience.

I'm going to take a broad, but confident guess that the people reading this piece are non-believers when it comes to soulmates. It sounds too good to be true and so fantastical to ever happen in real life.

Soulmate trope exists for a reason. It's comforting to think about a person who exists right now who might cross paths with us on a random day and change our lives for the better. When life is cruel and relentless and we long for better times, we wish we could reach into the future and get a hug from the person we haven't even met yet, but who will someday mean everything to us and more. When life is kind to us, on a warm sunny day, we could be hit with sudden melancholia for a lover we have not loved yet.

In La Pluie, Patts and Tai wanted to defy their destinies at different points in the show. And they did, in their own way. In episode 8, they decided to be with each other not because they could hear each other when it rained, but because they like each other and choose to be together.

Soulmate Skepticism Vs Romanticism In La Pluie

The show constantly puts the soulmate trope under a microscope and analyzes it, criticizes it and subverts it. But episode 9 was different. It leaned into the trope. It established a connection between Patts and Tai that was completely circumstantial and could end abruptly at any given moment. And it did, with the death of Patts' grandma.

Soulmate Skepticism Vs Romanticism In La Pluie

I've been wondering since last night: why take this detour? And I believe that the show knows its audience, know that our cynical brains would get extremely excited by a piece of media dissecting the idea of fated love and commenting on it. How choice matters more than anything else. And I see episode 9 as its attempt to nudge us in the opposite direction, ever so slightly. Because while the Rainverse of La Pluie can bring many complications to the love lives of the main characters, real life is much, much worse.

In the sport of modern dating, a clear mind with sound logical abilities is the key skill required for success, according to all the self-proclaimed relationship experts on social media. Our guts are not to be trusted anymore, since we are all traumatized and will automatically seek a shitty relationship because that's the one that feels familiar. Love-bombing is a manipulation technique, you must read about it and be aware of the ways to spot it. Do you know what Negging is? The red flags, green flags, and beige flags? Every action, every gift, every romantic gesture might have a sinister intention behind it.

Finding love is an exhausting process. Yes, it is important to be informed and safe, but in the process, we tend to forget the beauty of the very thing we are trying to find. The beauty of love is not singular in the choices that we make. Mature and time-hardened love is beautiful in its strength and choice, yes, but budding, fledgling love can also be beautiful in its spontaneity. And while finding your perfectly compatible person can feel pretty amazing after hours of meticulous swiping on apps, so can the knowledge of finding out YEARS later that your lives were ever so briefly intertwined in the past and you didn't even notice it at the time.

Emotional maturity and compatibility are necessary to sustain love, but spontaneity, silliness, and sometimes, happenstance are the ones that sweeten it. The show appreciates the skepticism about destiny and fate, but it also makes sure to never position itself against romance. Against the possibility of life surprising us in the moments we least expect it. Because while we strive everyday to make some sense of the chaos life throws us into, it might not hurt to let our heads float to the clouds, every once in a while, and see the beauty in chaos.

2 years ago

Please write that post about Pat's maturity. Even though he's so young, he's been living on his own and caring for himself for years. Even though all his friends are older than him, he's the mature, stable one in that friend group.

I love that when we meet Pat and Jeng, they are both recognizing that, despite their successes and skills in many areas, they still have a lot to figure out.

So last week I had some thoughts on Jeng and how he might have responded to Pat asking if he liked men so heartbreakingly because he can and does pass as a straight man. This week, episode 10, while I loved and adored the episode, Jeng felt a little off to me. That’s not to say that I think it was out of character for him, but it felt like Jeng wasn’t entirely himself. He let himself get lost in Pat and their relationship and I spent the better part of the night and this morning trying to figure out why. A lot of other people have shared their thoughts on Jeng this episode, but I’m going to approach it as an addition to my thoughts from last week.

I will start off with the one thing I’m sad we didn’t get and I think this episode didn’t do well and that is Jeng’s reaction to Pat’s confession. From the 9 episodes we had previously, Jeng should have been holding his breath (either literally or figuratively), he should have been staring at Pat with anxious longing even as Pat broke down and cried in his arms. We should have seen Jeng’s face right after Pat admitted that he liked him back. At this point, Jeng has had one major breakdown and is just kind of running on fumes from Pat’s initial rejection. Jeng is operating under the belief that Pat sees them as coworkers. Jeng telling Pat “It makes sense to me” did not get a response, so Jeng has no reason to believe that Pat is feeling any differently that how he felt during the rejection. So we should have seen Jeng realize that it’s reciprocated. Jeng has had blinders on when it came to Pat and Pat’s confessions should have visibly ripped them away.

That said, everything after the confession, including Jeng’s undeniably reckless behavior in regards to their relationship, makes sense. First of all, those two not only love each other, but are intensely sexually attracted to each other. It makes sense that they couldn’t keep their hands off of each other. Plus that’s just a thing that happens during the honeymoon phase in a lot of relationships. It might seem weird because we don’t get that a lot in BL, but it happens. They are both consenting adults and they both want each other. Desperately. Now imagine being Jeng, who has been pining for god knows how long after Pat. Jeng, who has held himself back for so many reasons, finally letting himself cross those boundaries he worked so hard to maintain. At this point, the boundaries have been crossed so what’s the point of restraining any further? (I mean there’s a million reasons why but Jeng can only think that he is finally, finally with Pat and damn the consequences.)

I think Jeng knows though. He knows that at some point, the other shoe is going to drop and he isn’t ready for it. When the cracks start to show, he starts to hold on even tighter to the little bit of happiness he finally managed to carve out for himself. A place where he’s allowed to be completely and totally himself. A place where he is able to be an out gay man and the people around him understand that. The people around him and Pat are all Pat’s friends and family, and because of that Jeng is perceived as attracted to men. He’s not being seen as the straight boss. The friend who’s just a really good ally. He is Jeng. He is attracted to Pat. And he doesn’t have to explain that to anyone. But when gossip at work starts to spread, Jeng does what he shouldn’t do and he ignores it. If he acknowledges it then the new relationship bubble he’s been in with Pat that offers security, safety, and happiness will burst. Then Pat does the unthinkable and tries to talk about the very real and pressing issues that are affecting him (this was the incredibly mature thing to do and I honestly think that Pat is the most mature and communicative character in the show when it comes to his relationships but that’s another post and this is, yet again, about Jeng). Jeng does his best to keep Pat from popping that bubble. Those issues aren’t real and can’t affect them if he doesn’t think of them. What Jeng doesn’t know is the extent of the bullying Pat is facing at work as a result of it. People at work are judging Pat for their relationship but saying nothing about Jeng, so of course it hasn’t come back to Jeng just how bad it is. Pat isn’t going to mention the awful things being said especially after Jeng shut down the conversation that Pat needed to have.

So Pat leaves. I don’t think Jeng expected that outcome because Pat is so communicative. But he didn’t leave Pat much of a choice. And here Jeng is, his greatest fear happening. The other shoe dropped and now he has to face the world that he wasn’t ready to face. He has to face the office that bullied Pat into resigning. He has to face his father who is expecting him to take over the company and live the life laid out for him. Jeng lost himself in his bubble because he knew what would happen when it was gone. He knew when the bubble burst, he might be forced back into letting the world think he’s straight. Jeng let himself enjoy his relationship and acted like a teenager in love because he probably hasn’t had a relationship where he could do that before. Jeng has had rigid expectations placed on him for his whole life and it was different when he was with Pat.

So now that Pat’s gone, those expectations come rushing back and now if he wants Pat back, he is going to need to fight for it. And he is going to need to fight for it as Jeng, the rigid boss. Jeng, the good son. Jeng that his father can use and let people see him as straight. But Jeng is out of that closet now. The bubble has burst and Jeng doesn’t want to go back. He wants his young love. He wants Pat. So he needs to find a balance between the Jeng that was pining and the Jeng that was in a relationship with Pat. Without that balance, he can never get Pat back. He lost Pat by doing the same thing Put did. He wasn’t listening. He had a good reason not to listen (he was terrified of what facing those obstacles meant and he was finally allowing himself to be selfish and be with Pat) but having a good reason doesn’t stop the outcome and doesn’t mean that Pat’s needs weren’t ignored. Episode 11 is going to be painful but Pat and especially Jeng need to get through it in order to find the balance in their relationship.

This kind of got away from me by tldr is I think Jeng makes sense. I don’t agree with how he handled a lot of things this episode but it makes sense to me. I think we’ll get the more adult, mature Jeng back going forward because he allowed himself that selfishness and lost Pat because of it and one thing this show has been excellent at is letting the characters learn from their mistakes and not repeat them.