#bts reflection

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It’s been a long time since my last posts in the Timelines series (May 22, to be precise)! While August 30 is the latest entry of all the Notes published to date, references have been made to events later in September that trigger more time loops. I doubt this will be the end of the series—and I am also certain that I will be revising and reissuing posts for earlier key dates, including this one, as more information is revealed. My goal with these Timelines posts is to trace SeokJin’s specific efforts to manipulate events and to highlight these changes within the different versions of each date’s texts.

There are currently 4 entries for SeokJin on August 30: one from Tear, one from Answer, and two from The Notes 1. The version from Answer, excerpted above, is apparently the “repaired” timeline: rather than intending to confess his love to the girl that night at the fireworks display, he confesses that everything he has done for her was taken from the diary she lost. On the other hand, the entries from Tear and Notes 1 seem to present (an) earlier version(s). The uncertain parentheses are brought to you by the fact that, while they seem to describe the same unfolding of events—the girl being struck in the road as SeokJin looks on with the smeraldo bouquet—the texts are slightly different.

Both the Tear and the second August 30 entry from Notes 1 include the quote captioned in gif 3. The full quote (sourced from Notes 1): “The bouquet of Smeraldo flowers fell from my hand. She was lying in the middle of the road. Blood began to spread out from underneath her tousled hair. Dark red blood flowed down the road.” But the following lines are different. Gif 4’s caption is from Tear: “I thought. If only I could turn back time.” Gif 5’s caption is from Notes 1: “With a loud pop, the first set of fireworks burst into the air on the night sky in the distance. Somewhere, I heard a mirror crack.”

“I thought. If only I could turn back time.” To me, this is a fascinating turn of phrase. We are most likely assuming, at this point, that SeokJin has already time travelled. In the Save Me webtoon, it certainly appears that he begins returning to April 11 much earlier in order to save his friends. But what if that wasn’t the case? What if his thought wasn’t a reflex but a sign that he had not yet been sent back in time? There is plenty of evidence in other entries that the number of loops SeokJin has tried and failed is affecting both his character and his memory. Still, I’m only tentatively posing this as a possibility because the ambiguity of the Tear version’s placement in the overall timeline of the narrative is further complicated by its first paragraph (also not present in Notes 1):

“Can anyone remember the moment they fell in love? Can anyone predict the moment their love will end? What could be the reason that humans don’t have the ability to recognize those moments? And why was I given the power to return [restore] all of those things?”

— SeokJin, 30 August Year 22. The Notes: Tear. Translation cr. @origamifirefly tw.

Therefore, it seems possible that the Tear entry, as a whole, is written from two different perspectives: a SeokJin who is aware of his time traveling and a SeokJin who has yet to embark on that journey. But like much of the Notes, it is really up to interpretation. What do you think? Please come yell at me in my inbox if you have thoughts to share!

Note: I unfortunately do not know Korean and do not own either the Korean Notes 1 or Notes from the album (with the exception of MotS:7), so I rely on the official English translation of Notes 1 and fan translations of the album Notes (I do my best to compare multiple versions of the latter). Any mistakes in misunderstanding the differences between the text are my own. Particularly in this instance, I recognize the possibility that some of the variations in the August 30 texts occur between the translations of Notes 1, rather than between the Tear and Notes 1 entries. If you have the Korean Notes 1, I would LOVE to hear how similar its August 30 entry is to its English counterpart, especially in regard to the fireworks/mirror cracking line that seems most different from the final line in the Tear entry. (And/or if you also happen to have the original Korean Tear entry, that would be a fantastic point of comparison too!)

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