So I don’t do Vlog reactions because I’m too lazy to figure out how to record and embed and all that. But here – you can have some text. Heh.
WARNING: SOME SPOILERS TO THE BTS 화양연화 on stage : prologue are contained herein. If you haven’t watched it yet … which would be surprising … then effing watch it already. BUT DON’T until you are in a safe, relatively private space, definitely with tissues, preferably sitting or lying down, and also preferably with something or someone to cuddle. I’m just saying.
Anyway.
Let’s begin with Rap Monster’s Tweet, approx. half an hour after the teaser dropped:
처음이자 마지막에 관하여
Now, the text is simple the title of the song – “About the First and the Last.” But lets look at these lyrics – which, I should note, RM doesn’t often post the whole of as part of his screen grabs.
Lyrics Translation:
Fanny Fink – About the First and the Last
As it were, you and me making shallow roots
Not knowing, up in smoke like a desert flower
In the end, you are dead inside and inside of me
The sad fact that we had to be more careful
Such an experience will be about the first and the last
We heard laughter anywhere, anytime
The song is fading away, lost even though we have it on tape
What do you see? Don’t turn your heart away from the question
These days are done, and this is how it ended
I do not know whether such thoughts are different than before
I can’t stand the thought that yesterday’s winds will blow again
In the end, the dead in and within me
The sad fact that we had to be more careful
Such an experience will be about the first and the last
Translation: Sapokiko @ PrincessOfTea.com
First, I want to say that this tweet serves to show that Kim Namjoon is a consummate trollololol-er. (I also want to say that you can tell it’s Namjoon because his battery is almost NEVER charged. Someone listens to MelOn on their phone a bit too much….if that were possible, which it isn’t.)
So I watched the prologue on the V App on my phone around 11 AM EST, fooled like most ARMY into thinking this was another cute/hilarious/entertaining pre-recorded clip of BTS doing BTS like shit. I remember being actually excited that a broadcast was going to start at what is for me a reasonable hour – as opposed to 5 o’ clock in the damn morning like most of the broadcasts I want to see on V. So I made a special point to be able to see it when it aired. Therefore, like most ARMY, I was UTTERLY UNPREPARED for what I watched. For a good while I could not be reasonable, because the feels are so feeling. INSFIRED. (And Jin and V both need to be in dramas, ASAP, beeteedubs.) This said, tryin to say or think a thing about a thing wasn’t happening.
I MEAN, YOU DO NOT START YOUR VID WITH TAEHYUNG CRYING TO CLAIR DE LUNE AND EXPECT ME TO BE OK.
And then, at about 11:30 PM that same night, this word vomit below started happening for me. Here is what I think, at the moment, about the teaser’s plot and “meaning.”
When V called Jin (I believe he was calling Jin), V was still alive. V wasn’t hurt in I NEED U, remember – all that blood came from the man he stabbed. And the woman in the room with them was younger, not mother-aged. The picture from the mattress and the pool, though, is an older, faded pic of a baby with his mother, I’m fairly certain. So what I feel happened is that when V called Jin and said he misses his friends, he was telling Jin that he was going to join the rest of the boys in ‘heaven.’ V couldn’t deal with what he had done, and also really did miss the rest of the boys – so he felt killing himself was the way to get back to his friends and get rid of the guilt. (The only think I’m not sure about is how V knows that almost everyone else is already dead. But … timey-whimey?)
When the scene in the abandoned pool starts, he’s wearing different – and clean – clothes and he’s totally alone, waiting (?) for the other boys to join him. The picture in his hand, I think, is specifically of him and his mother – he crumples it up because he knows he’s done with that life and can no longer go back. BUT AN ALT THOUGHT – V and Jin are both still alive (RM’s “You/we have to survive” on the mirror is a message to them maybe – and could also support the idea that none of them are yet dead but some of them are closer than others) but V is trying to decide if he’s going to end his life and join the members who are likely already dead or if he’s going to stay with Jin. That Jin is kinda a voyeur in the whole episode leads me to believe that he’s the only one with his life not totally in danger or already over. So I wonder if V did try, but didn’t yet quite succeed, in killing himself – so he’s kinda at a point of limbo where he needs to decide whether he’s going to stay in ‘heaven’ or go back to ‘life.’
This is not heaven exactly, but more a state of happiness and simplicity – “Nirvana,” as Rap Mon’s t-shirt of a legendary band states. (Seriously, that shirt effed with me the ENTIRE clip, along with the fact that Suga, Kookie and Hobi are basically wearing the same clothes as they did in I NEED U, just slightly different colour schemes). There is no one else in this world – RM pumps the gas (poor guy and gas stations, I swear), J-Hope buys snacks but the whole station store is dark. No one on the road, the beach seems miles and miles long with no one around; this place is for the boys only. Anyway – one of the things that lends to the idea that V is either newly dead or in limbo is that the first the RM says before he pulls V off the mattress in the pool scene is basically, “What’re you doin’?” – like, why are you lying here on your back in an empty pool all alone, moron?
And then Jin joins them – Jin wasn’t there until now, and he’s ‘watching’ through the camera. It seems like the boys didn’t even realise he was missing until the moment Kookie points him out. Maybe Jin is dreaming what the boys are doing, or maybe (this is me being seriously too much) he’s linked to the others through V, who’s in-between life and death…. That might be fitting, for the alien. Just thinking….or maybe Jin is also just a little bit headed towards death through grief? But his role as the person recording these scenes tells me that he’s in a different ‘state’ that the others, whatever it is.
Anyway – they play around and be crazy and themselves at the pool. This is informed by the single screen of text during this scene, that translates to something like, ‘I can smile if I’m with you.’ I just wanna say, it’s amazing to me how much joy they find in simple things. I see it with group after group – simple games, (really freaking graceful) stick fighting, random dancing, just hanging out – it’s something I don’t think we do like this in Western countries. We can’t be satisfied, often, with the simple pleasure of one another’s company and the simpler pleasure of silly, “childish” games. That, to me, is one of the beautiful things they have.
Back to the clip – near the end of the pool scene, first Jin is off with his camera where he spots the butterfly. This is what makes me think that Jin is, effectively, still alive (read the lyrics to the song, if you haven’t). Then a bit later, V foreshadows the end of the clip. This is the part where I started tearing up the first time – he looks so alone, even though he’s with the rest of them. It’s one of the reasons I think he might be between life and death and also one of the reasons I’m sure that the guilt is getting to him — and also the reason that I’m like, WHY IS THIS DUDE NOT IN A DRAMA ALREADY YO OMG.
Then they’re back in an approximation of the scene out of I NEED U … Suga still playing with that effing lighter and looking like he gives no shits. And Jin pulls out a Polaroid and asks Hobi if they should go “there.” (I should note, the first few times I saw the clip, I couldn’t make out anything on the polariod because the screen resolution was too low or my screen was too small. I didn’t know it was actually that long stretch of beach until much later.) So Hobi agrees, Tae agrees – the others seem to acknowledge things but it’s less deep that Tae or Hobi … but what this means to me is that Jin is literally driving this vehicle. His watching is directing the scenes we see. That’s another thing that lends to the idea that Jin is the one ‘watching’ from the living side.
(……OH MY GOD if Butterfly is a single/title track and Jin ‘watching’ his ‘dead’ dongsaeng in ‘heaven’ is the focus with all this I think we should all just go ahead and order our gravestones now, y’all.)
So then they play around and be cray on the beach – more simple pleasure, more joy in one another’s company; the clip really does a lot to impress upon you how beautiful these moments actually are. (That shot of Jin turning on his own with the camera is really one of the loveliest things I have seen in idk how long….and holy mother of Mary I just realised that the same sort of shot is repeated a few moments later from a panned out camera, where Jin is spinning but all the boys are around him – it’s the same shot. Jin is imagining the rest of the members around him there, too…. Sorry. If it makes you feel any better, I didn’t do my feelings any favours here, either. Y.Y) Then there’s more Jin looking out over the water with his camera – again noticeably to me, there is no one else in that particular shot, though he’s standing at the truck and we just saw that all of them are there – and then scene shifts and they’re near the scaffold at a pier, all of them together looking out at the miles and miles of ocean. And V does V and decides he’s gonna climb the scaffold. Jin is the first one to notice – and what he does is lift his camera and watch. Then the others notice – and they motion for him to come down. Then Kim Taehyung begins his campaign for an Oscar, does a thing with his gaze and then that smile and then that sniffle that legit made me cry literal, serious tears, and takes off running.
I do not know if Tae jumping is Tae deciding to be dead or Tae deciding to live. Something in me believes that he decided to live – because Jin didn’t object (though maybe Jin is powerless in this nirvana). But that he just watched and didn’t even try to tell Tae to come down…. The others were the ones waving for him to come back down, but he looked at them, then steeled himself, and jumped. (AND OH MY HOLY GOD THAT WAS ONE FUCK OF A CINEMATIC SHOT. “Very Good Camera,” eh?)
A few other small snippets raised by fellow ARMY:
One – In the pool scene, there’s graffiti everywhere – but most noticeable is the letters OMN, which are repeated a number of times. I can’t really figure what that might mean, BUT – when JHope is snoozing and Suga tries to take a pic with him, behind and around him on the walls is OMN, but also OMNI and OMINI.
First – I’m not sure what OMN would be. Unless it’s a repeated, unfinished version of one of the words below –
In other places it was OMNI, which if you wanna get Latin about it (and Bang PD-nim has done that before; Optatum anyone?) meaning … “foreboding, omen.” Yep.
And in two places, specifically on the walls in the part with JHope snoozing and Suga and Kookie waking him (hehehe – Suga wakes up JHope; ah, poetry) it was OMINI – which, if you wanna get Spanish about it is the plural of omino, which means “small male person.” Ha.
Hahaha.
Ha.
And it could also just/also be a graffiti tag, since hip hop and graffiti are pretty intricately tied.
Two – another friend raised the idea that the scenes are parallels – that V was the first to die, and the others died from grief; Jin’s grief was just the least destructive. What we’re watching is some of Jin’s memories, while I NEED U was what happened because of V’s death.
So… from this video I have taken two things (beyond news of another now ridiculously anticipated but also TOO SOON gah, rest will you!? comeback): what is beautiful about life are two things. The simple happiness of being with friends … and then dreadfully complicated state of limbo between living your life, feeling all these things, making your choices, and that same life at some point being over.
In conclusion: Bang-PD-nim is a JERK.
Noona out.
The Noona 