act i - notes from hometown.angel
here is some extra information on the story. these are not super analytical and don't contain much of my own interpretation - i do have other posts like that, but this is more just providing footnotes - some clarifications to alleviate potential confusions but also just some fun little facts.
i refer to the protagonists by buda (yj) and toto (bg) in all my posts to emphasise that all i say is fiction and not at all about any real people
msaahba stands for madsummer - an adaptation by hometown.angel. when i quote other shit i will reference it directly below (not using formal academic conventions tho, not sorry)
i've uploaded a timeline of act i here just bc i know that it can be hard to stay on top of chronology sometimes, especially as the story goes on (there were times i rearranged the story a little in order to provide clarity on the order in which things occured - i'll state when these points happened)
also just want to warn you that the actual story of my madsummer adaptation is like the only space in this whole project where i'm going to be eloquent. on my tumblr (including this post lol) n on twitter i will probably be very stream of consciousness n longwinded n unconcise n informal n laidback, but still coherent. pls don't let any of my casual posts deter you from reading the story itself - i promise how i type on my tumblr is not a good example of the writing i'm really capable of. in real life i am incredibly unfunny and cringe and while i hope that doesn't pollute my madsummer adaptation it most certainly will contaminate this page. i also cannot spell.
as always i have so much admiration for kyrie and the amount of detail and nuance and symbolism she packed into this story. there are things she very clearly researched in great depth and only alluded to in the narrative itself so that only people who are mad enough (i.e. me n the other sweet summer children who are madsummer fanatics) to look further into the most seemingly mundane will be rewarded by the finding of deeper meaning (pretentious but i'm typing this late at night)
♱ bôa's duvet is the song that kyrie linked with the first part of mad summer. as i've mentioned ni other places, i've titled all three of my acts after the songs that kyrie linked at the end of each chapter.
♱ one aspect that contributes towards any raw translation of madsummer so unreadable is that the pronouns of the protagonists and whether the story is being told from a firstperson or thirdperson perspective kept changing - further confused by the linguistic issue of how in many third-person queer narratives, the fact that both protagonists often use the same pronouns makes it difficult to tell which of the charactesr is being referred to when the author says 'she', 'he', or 'them' (here is a youtube short that explains this more eloquently than i ever could). my adaptation is told primarily through buda's firstperson perspective as a semi-omniscient narrator, and then each act begins with a prologue from toto told in thirdperson. this decision helps make the narrative intelligible, makes the most sense and also serves the symbolic purpose of letting you to see how both characters change or grow up - buda's internal monologue gradually becomes less cocky and more vulnerable and toto learns to open up and be honest about what he's experienced
♱ i was very deliberate about the names and nicknames that toto is addressed by throughout this story - pay attention to how this changes :)
♱ according to kyrie the beach that buda and toto meet is malecón, cuba (check out the locations in the navigation panel)
♱ the story starts on the 29.09.2019, meaning that toto's first day on the beach was 20.09.2019.
♱ in my mind toto is wearing large ripped jeans, a holey shirt n a jacket (he's also barefoot)
♱ while coconuts are served to tourists in cuba, i honestly couldn't find much info on them being sold by children. (as someone who lives in a developing country, the petty bitch in me loves kyrie for presenting the american tourists as cringe and generally incompetent)
♱ i added this little bit about the pretending-to-drop-the-surfboard. we don't see the first meeting between buda and toto. i loved the image of toto daily pursuing something so out of reach (buda) purely because it is the only familiar thing to him and because it is the only thing that gives him any hope (keep track of hope and promise)
♱ the first person who read my translation (who i'll from hereon out refer to as parsley (i will be referring to parsley a lott)) started laughing when she read the line this was how it was when you were raised by the streets - she jsut said it felt very lego batman smh (parsley also sent me a seven minute voicenote crying as soon as she was finished reading the whole of madsummer haha)
♱ i'll talk about this more at a later time because it'll be much more relevant then, but cuba used to have two currencies - one used by locals/for local products and the other by foreigners/for foreign products (a gross simplification but again i'll go into more detail be patient)
♱ in a few chapters i mention that buda had previously sworn and screamed at toto to try and get him to go tf away. the reason that i count the could you please kill me?/what? discussion as their first interaction is because i specifically state that [these are the first words that they ever exchanged because these are the first words that buda has ever heard toto speak]
♱ many knetizens have created their own version of the wanted posters (click here to see a full list)
♱ let the dogxcat dynamic begin 🗣️❗ (feel like cinderella naega byeonhae)
♱ over the course of madsummer, buda will come to own two pistols, but the gun buda uses in this scene is his browning.
♱ it was an eternal june/this was our first encounter - gagged when i first read that line (i fear i ate)
♱ hope that it's obvious enough, but this scene is buda retelling his own story, the things that have happened to him over the past few years.
♱ the hangul for yj's name (연준) directly translates to the fed. this led to so much confusion when i was reading the raw translation - at first i thought that buda was also nicknamed the fed and was waiting for this epithet to also be explained
♱ the maths in this story was also so confusing - i'm quite mathmatically challenged and so i struggled to calculate and keep track of these numbers lol, but i wanted to write them out in letter form for the vibes
♱ mojitos are the national drink of cuba, where alcoholism is quite prevalent (my country also has high rates of alcoholism and substance abuse rip)
♱ i had to do so much research on illicit substances for this story - to first understand the drugs this story speaks about in order to be able to translate passages on them appropriately. hopefully i've not done an awful job or made any mistakes that would be obvious to people knowledgable about drugs because i'm amusingly inexperienced when it comes to those things haha - the most out-there substance i've ever consumed (excluding prescribed antipsychotics/antidepressants and the egregious amount of caffeine i consume on a daily basis) was the one time i smoked weed on a holiday when i was eighteen, coughed for five minutes straight because i inhaled so deeply that i physically could not breathe, and didn't even get high.
♱ so irrelevant but trying to get the pronouns of the dog/bitch/bastard paragraph make it clear who said what and who beat up who had me losing my mind. it flows alright now, at least
♱ since buda lives in the backstreets santiago de cuba, the mountains where his father was buried are most likely the sierra maestra? but given that the geography for this story is kind of all over the place sometimes (that isn't a read, i promise) perhaps these mountains are more of a hypothetical or liminal (the friends we made along the way)
♱ diego maradona was a real football player (soccer not american football). however, i can't find any information about him declaring down with cocaine/abajo con cocaína. in one interview in 2018 he did denounce cocaine (the first link below), but the exact phrasing was never used. here's more information about the football player:
Diego Maradona opens up on cocaine hell when daughter woke him from coma as he’s unveiled as new manager of Mexican side Dorados | The Sun
Diego Maradona dead: 2018 World Cup, cocaine collapse
Diego Maradona says wine binge caused his collapse as picture sparks social media cocaine conspiracy theory following Argentina's dramatic World Cup 2018 win over Nigeria | The Sun
Maradona news: 'I was wasting away' - Argentina legend talks about cocaine addiction in Dorados introduction | Goal.com South Africa
♱ i like using words that linguistically make sense but aren't technically words - case in point - uncreasing and airplaning. many more curious words to come
♱ cuba's rainy season is from may-november, while its summer is from june-august
Cuba is rainiest in late spring and summer (May to November). It rarely rains all day long, however – you’re more likely to encounter heavy downpours in the hot, humid afternoons when travelling during the rainy season.
June, July and August are usually the hottest months in Cuba. Although the temperature averages don’t look too high at first glance – Havana sits at 32°C all summer – the humidity can make it feel much, much hotter. Spend your mornings and evenings exploring and the hottest part of the day crashed out on a cooler coast.
- Best time to visit Cuba
♱ buda owns an old red ford. there were little things that i changed throughout the story to make contemporary references to txt music or lore, and one of these was that i had at first decided i wanted buda's car to be a grey volvo like in the 0x1=lovesong era mvs. after a lot of research on knetizens posts i realised that there was a lot of sentimentality around the red lil car, so i changed it back. the car is featured on the front cover of mad summer's second edition
♱ i know nothing about cars or how they work (i failed my learner's test 7 times and my drivers test 3 times)
♱ okay logistically speaking this is one point where you need to suspend your disbelief in terms of geography. buda's house is located in the backstreets of santiago de cuba while malecón is in havana (for more info on both these places pls check out the locations tab in the navigation panel)
oh hold on let me scroll up a little...
yeah there's next to no way that buda and toto could walk 875km before the sun sets (that's around 545 miles for any americans who happen to be reading this (get on board with the metric system guys wtf))
♱ parsley (my friend, remember?) is also uncapable of smelling weed smh
♱ so the cigarettes mentioned in the quote below
A few years back a state-run tobacco company had started producing thin paper-white cigars marketed at women who didn’t normally smoke, which many men started purchasing under the claim that they were doing so to wean themselves off of nicotine. All of the seated men smoked languorously these very cigars. Some of the smokers rose to welcome me.
- msaabha
these cigarettes are a reference to a real campaign where a tobacco manufacturers habanos launched cigarettes called julieta...the brand, who ha previously primarily produced cigars for men, is called romeo y julieta. boom. another romeo and juliet reference let's go
There are two different cigar brands called “Romeo y Julieta.”
Originally, it was produced in Havana, Cuba, by Rodríguez, Argüelles y Cia. However, at the time of the Cuban revolution, the company and its brand moved to the Dominican Republic, and is now under the ownership of the Spanish firm, Altadis S.A.
After the communists took over in Cuba, the Cuban government began producing a cigar using the same name – “Romeo y Julieta.”
However, the U.S. copyright of the “Romeo y Julieta” cigar brand, which was originally owned by Rodriguez, Argüelles y Cia, now belongs to Altadis S.A. So, you cannot buy the Cuban knock-off in the U.S.
- Where is the Romeo Y. Julieta cigar made in Cuba or Dominican?
The world of Habano smokers is predominantly male, but the island's largest cigar manufacturer has now set its sights on the other half of the world's population - women.
Last year, the company Habanos - an arm of Cubatabaco, the country's national tobacco company - announced a mission to overcome perceptions among women that Cuban cigars are made up of "only strong tobacco for men".
The result is the Julieta, a milder version of the renowned, strong-flavoured Romeo Y Julieta brand, which was founded in 1873.
Until now, cigars marketed specifically at women have tended to be flavoured or extremely mild cigarellos - a short, narrow cigar.
The Julieta is bigger, 4.75 inches (12cm) long, 0.5 inches (13mm) wide, and far more pungent.
- BBCCaribbean.com | Cigar makers target Cuban women
^from wikipedia (guys your high school teachers lied to yo wikipedia really is a decent resource (perhaps not for work produced within higher academic instutions but its perfectly fine in causal contexts)). i'll explain the symbolism in the essay i'll eventuall write on madsummer and romeo snd juliet but argh it's crazy the attention to detail kyrie has, good lord - i mean even the fact that the julieta cigarettes were (re)released the year that buda was born
♱ kyrie's layout of buda's house looks like this:
^ however, i imagined buda's house to look different (learn more about buda's house under the locations tab in my navigation panel)
♱ buda smokes cloud 9 cigarettes. i'll speak more about this at a later stage when it's more relevant, but yeh for now just know cloud 9 is a korean brand of cigarettes.
♱ bingle bongle keep an eye out on park dongjae
♱ okay so the quote below describes buda's phone
In an era where people daily used smartphones that had fourty million pixels, I had bought the cheapest flip-phone available at the first corner store I’d walked into the day I arrived in Cuba. I’d never changed its preprogrammed ringtone - a greetingly genial tune, the first sixteen bars of an old lovesong.
this phone is talked about more specifically in a bonus scene that takes place in later reprints of the physical book (that i don't have access to ripp) so
One of the Fed's ancient relics, following the red Ford and the video tape. It was a feature phone with no Wi-Fi, and the model name was unknown. It was a Cyon, and the onyl specs were a 16-note phone and a 400,000-pixel camera. I don't know about the other two, but I heard that Xiaomi released a 100 million-pixel smartphone a while ago. It was exactly 250 times different from the Fed's. Beomgyu opened the Buddha's cell phone, which was 250 light years behind the lives of his peers in advanced countries. The small LCD was black and white, and even that was digital.
-extract from a bonus scene in kyrie's mad summer reprint
♱ woah infodump get ready - buda's ringtone is said to be love greetings/salut d'amor.
i searched for "love greetings" and it turned out that the composer wrote this song for his fiancee. its about two people with completely different backgrounds who met and got engaged.
-anonymous chatter on a madsummer public chat forum
2 old samsung phone models come with this ringtone built in - this phone is confirmed by kyrie to be a cyon. (source for video below here)
here is the story behind the tune:
Edward Elgar (1857-1934) composed Salut d’Amour as a love song to his future bride, Alice Roberts. In the summer of 1888 (age 31), Elgar decided to take a holiday with his dear friend Dr. Charles Buck. As Elgar departed Worcester for Dr. Buck’s Settle, Yorkshire estate, Alice gave him a poem she had written entitled Love’s Grace. While at Settle, Elgar, much taken with Alice’s poem, decided to reciprocate with a short piece of music especially for Alice. He titled the piece Liebesgruss (Love’s Greeting), dedicated “To Carice”, a mashup of Alice’s forenames Caroline Alice. Elgar presented the musical love poem to his future bride on his return from Settle. They were married the following year. At the birth of their daughter two years later, they named her Carice.
- Salut d’amour, Op 12 – Program Notes – Clinton Symphony Orchestra
alice's poem sent in response to love's greeting, love's grace (initially entitled the wind at dawn, alice changed the name of her poem upon receiving the musical piece elgar dedicated to her), goes as follows -
And the wind, the wind went out to meet with the sun
At the dawn when the night was done,
And he racked the clouds in lofty disdain
As they flocked in his airy train.
And the earth was grey, and grey was the sky,
In the hour when the stars must die;
And the moon had fled with her sad, wan light,
For her kingdom was gone with night.
Then the sun upleapt in might and in power,
And the worlds woke to hail the hour,
And the sea stream’d red from the kiss of his brow,
There was glory and light enow.
To his tawny mane and tangle of flush
Leapt the wind with a blast and a rush
In his strength unseen, in triumph upborne
Rode he out to meet with the morn!
- The Wind at Dawn (Elgar, Edward) - IMSLP
alice roberts also wrote another poem about elgar, named love alone will stay -
Closely cling, for winds drive fast,
Blossoms perish in the blast,
Love alone will last.
Closely let me hold thy hand,
Storms are sweeping sea and land,
Love alone will stand.
Kiss my lips, and softly say,
Joy may go and sunlit day,
Love alone will stay.
- Between Worlds: Lady Alice Elgar's poems
one article on the couple, their love and their artistry ends -
After Alice died in Elgar's arms in 1920, he wrote to a friend:
"Bless her! You, who like some of my work, must thank her for all of it, not me. I should have destroyed it all and joined Job's wife in the congenial task of cursing God".
- Between Worlds: Lady Alice Elgar's poems
anyway, very long winded but i think the kyrie's meticulousness is unmatched, good lord - buda's literal ringtone being a reference to timeless, profound, ineffable love? ingenious
♱ pay attention to the use of home/house
♱ most nights the streetlights blinked intermittently - -- --- … - / -. .. --. …. - … / - …. . / … - .-. . . - .-.. .. --. …. - … / -… .-.. .. -. -.- . -.. / .. -. - . .-. -- .. - - . -. - .-.. -.--
♱ pay attention to the use of okay ;)
♱ i've already made a massive point of emphasising this story's content warnings but i bet you weren't expecting the story to get so sad so quickly
♱ bananas are a massive part of the cuban agricultural output (i won't be sourcing this bc i know you don't care)
♱ was toto humming the salut d'amor or the lovesong at the center of this narrative? the world will never know
♱ argh okay so my adaptation says a good tree cannot bear bad fruit and that is obviously a reference to matthew 7:18 in the bible, but this was the result of so much trial and error around trying to find a proper way to translate the original thing. the raw translation says
They say that dead trees don’t bear fruit. Superstitions that would come out of a Joseon shaman’s mouth were believed even on the other side of the world.
- raw translation a
Dead trees are not open to fruit. On the other side of the world, the superstition that might come out of the mouth of a Joseon shaman was also believed.
- raw translation b
so i had no clue at first how to make this make sense. it seemed like asaying or an idiom or a proveb, n the only one i could thtinko f was matthew 7:18 bc that's so close to what is beign said excpt that it says nothing about dead trees. it may have been a proverb from the joseon dynasty, but because i was also struggling with finding more context on that i went with matthew 7:18 n added more context n surroudign sentences.
A good tree cannot bear bad fruit. On the other side of the world, a lifetime ago, he had heard a pastor utter this sentiment. The banana tree hadn’t been able to hold him. Could a blameless tree bear dead fruit?
- msaabha
♱ an excellent line from the raw translations:
I liked hanging myself to death, but I didn’t want to be beaten to death. I wanted to die, but I didn’t want to die even if they killed me.
-raw translation a
I liked to hang myself, but I didn't want to be beaten to death. I want to die, but I can't believe I don't want to kill you.
-raw translation b
He had intended to kill himself, sure, but he hadn’t planned on being beaten to death. He wanted to die. He didn’t want to hurt.
- msaabha
guys i enfdured so much translating this story but it was worth every second of it
♱ forgot to say earlier - a little chagne i made was turning the single bed with a pink bedspread (say that fast ten times in a row) into a pink fold-out-couch. there is an intended symbolism behind this that i'll explore during my act iii notes but i hope somebody picks up on the kind of metaphorical function this change serves
♱ woah it's time for the evident fact that i know nothing about drugs to be made even glaringly-ier evident. the things i had to google to even attempt to understand some of these passsages- if anybody without context opened my search history they'd probably be very concerned as to why i have been googling so much about cocaine - tbf tho, the actual context (that i have spent six months adapting a fanfiction in a language i don't actually speak that well about a gay pairing i don't actually romantically ship just bc i'm nosy) isn't much better
♱ argh guys ok so buda speaks korean with dongjae and toto only. i really tried to make the vibes come across through tone bc english doens't do honorifics
♱ getting into more semi-omniscent narration...
♱ so just to clarify, the list of things i know nothing about includes numbers, drugs and cars. luckily only one of these features as a massive plot point. unluckily that happens to be the same one i know the most nothing about
♱ flakka is a real drug. in the country where i'm from, it is a substance that concerningly is becoming increasingly more prevalent. there is a drug used in this story that kyrie invented for this story, which i'll acknowledge when we get there. from what i understand, kyrie has a fairly extensive interest and understanding of illicit substances.
lastly, let me talk about materials and research. although i am an engineering student with a minor in chemistry, i have always been interest in drugs, even if it was not my major. i like related documentaries and research a lot of materials. so i have never had a hard time or had any trouble finding materials.
- kyrie responding to an anonymous user in a public chatroom, raw translation
she then recommended the following pieces of media in public chatrooms n anonymous ask forums -
약국에 없는 약 이야기 박성규 저자 - Park Sungkyu - Talking about drugs that aren't in the pharmacy - ISBN 9791190116121
Roberto Sabiano - Gamorrah - ISBN 978-0374165277
Qiu Miaojin - The Last Words of Montemarte - ISBN
9781590177259
Breaking Bad - a 2008-2013 tv show
Narcos - a 2015-2017 tv show
zerozerozero - a 2012 tv show
♱ on abysm - eyes are the windows to the soul oop
♱ guys i promise i'll write the whole post on the abysm soon bc that rabbithole goes deep but just know that the image of a bottomless pit lowkey is a massive point of contension when it comes to mad summer inspiring 0x1=lovesong
♱ recurring-nightmares parallel lets go
♱ okay so kyrie put this sickfic passage a little bit later (i'll say when) as a flashback that happens when toto and buda are driving to retrieve the suitcase. however i wanted tokeep the chronology of this story as linear as possible n there had already been two recent flashback scenes (buda explaining his past, then toto's nightmare) and flashbacks are one of my least favourite narrative tropes
♱ okay also i added the little bit about the rope scar myself. i wanted to create in buda more intruige/concern around what happened in toto's past, but also just bc realistically if toto had attempted to hang himself a only a few months back and also bc he had very almost succeeded and then fallen to the ground from the branch the rope was hanging from (good lord that was incoherent) he most certainly would have at least some kind of scar
♱ ooh i love talk about cleanliness in relation to love, beauty, morality and the religiously traumatised (pls allow me to feel proud of instances when my writing ate)
♱ in my timeline i use dj to refer to dongjae if that wasn't clear eek
♱ guess which private new purpose buda will dedicate his life to?
♱ i also added this bit where buda attempts to feed toto when toto was sick. (justification for this retrospective passage - it feels more reflective than it feels like a flashback :P )
♱ chocolate is a large import in cuba. i also added this point in bc very rarely in the original text does it ever actually talk about eating food? i saw one knetizen ask if buda and toto ever ate anything at all because kyrie barely mentions food in the story which made me laugh
♱ this was categorically untrue - buda biting lore unlocked❗❗
♱ added in the detail about the dragon kites - guess which movie i'm talking about?
♱ such quirks made me more of a loser - a lover with a dollar sign❗❗
♱ i spent ages trying to figure out which kind of paper can be used to store coke (the fbi agent on the other side of my computer was probably judging me very hard)
♱ y'all the raw translations kept trying to tell me that the policemen snorted drugs using the syringes. which. um. even i know that that isn't really how things are done
♱ so this is round about where the sickfic flashback occured in kyrie's version of mad summer, aroud about somewhere in between the first three paragraphs of this scene
♱ woah guys its anther point of similaritiy between madsummer and 0x1=lovesong - that the protagonist constantly compares his lvoer to an angel
♱ parsley had asked when she was reading madsummer the first time - butterfly jasmine, more commonly known as white mariposa flowers are the official national flower of cuba
♱ no clue which beach this takes place on. it might be omehwere near the sierra maestra mountain range where buda buried his dad, or it could be on one of the three main beaches that kyrie spoke of in that earlier menitoned anonmyous ask forum - malecón, varadero or playa ancon (if i can find the screenshot where this last beach is mentioned i'll put it in)
♱ i had rewrite some parts of this story when i did more research on the locations (look at rabbithole research spiral notes 1 and 2). the current description of the cave is different than it was at first. initially, i had pictured the cave as a large space that both buda and toto could sit in:
He finally stopped walking, turning to face me. The waves were more violent so far out from the beach. They tore at him, spat at him. He remained unfazed. I watched his lips move, but I couldn't hear a word over the roaring waves. He pointed at the cave and I nodded. In close enough pursuit, I came to see that this cave was much smaller than it appeared. I stepped through the cove's mouth and into the hollow in the cliffside, ducking down under the hanging lip just like he did, sitting next with my back against the cave’s wall while he foraged around purposefully in the stalagmites. The cave looked at the horizon from a slant and as it was around midday our surroundings were relatively well lit. Of course, the deeper you got into the cave, like where the he was crawling, visibility was low. I thought of Plato. I watched the boy emerge from the shadow struggling with a large rectangle-shaped shadow. A carrier bag, made from synthetic aluminum. He wrestled it to the ground. It hit the floor with a thunderous bang.
- msaabha
♱ when i rewrote the passage above i put an insane amount of effort into trying to find synoynms for the word cave
♱ i still have no clue what 0313 symbolises i spent an embarrasingly long amount of time trying to figure out what 0313 represented only to realise that is toto's (n bg's) brithday
♱ toto is lying - there is only one suitcase
♱ the case still rattled each time its aluminium base hit the concrete of the boardwalk - he fought to meet my pace, fumbling over himself like a clumsy puppy. another instance of me tooting my own horn but the phonetic implciations? the onomatopoeiac imagery? i fear i cooked once more
♱ as someone from a developing country where the government is corrupt and constantly cutting our access to electricity? i feel that. (granted, within that devloping country i am considerably welloff given the centuriesold and racialised structures of abject poverty that still hold my country back in the present day and so on and so on)
♱ any guesses as to where toto got all that money?
♱ ik everyone has different versions of it but i learned this version of lord's prayer when i was five or six - glad it finally came in handy haha
♱ also pay attention to the word strange
♱ 50000 korean won notes have the porrtrait of shin saimdang on them - more of shin saimdang here
there's another thing about the money that comes into play later - this revelation confused me a lot upon first reading and so i had to do so much research n feverish googling to understand, but lucky for you dear reader, i shall share with you what i have learned soon as the time is right
♱ bureau de change's are also known as currency or money exchanges. curiously txt lore references a money exchange in the loser=lover music video, which contains footage also used in an alternative 0x1=lovesong...will be discussing this in the post i'll eventually make on 0x1 and madsummer
♱ i'm assuming yk who jesus christ is. an asura tho is a mythical creature from hinduism, buddhism, as well as other religions that emerged in close proxemity to these.
Asuras have been featured in many cosmological theories and legends in Hinduism and Buddhism.
In the oldest verses of the Samhita layer of Vedic texts, the Asuras are any spiritual, divine beings including those with good or bad intentions, and constructive or destructive inclinations or nature. In later verses of the Samhita layer of Vedic texts, Monier Williams states the Asuras are "evil spirits, demons and opponents of the gods". Asuras connote the chaos-creating evil, in Indo-Iranian mythology about the battle between good and evil.
Scholars have disagreed on the nature and evolution of the Asura concept in ancient Indian literature.
Kuiper calls Asuras a special group of gods in one of major Vedic theories of creation of the universe. Their role changes only during and after the earth, sky and living beings have been created. The sky world becomes that of Devas, the underworld becomes that of Asuras. The god Indra is the embodiment of good and represents the Devas, while the dragon Vrtra is the embodiment of evil and an Asura. During this battle between good and evil, creation and destruction, some powerful Asuras side with the good and are called Devas, other powerful Asuras side with the evil and thereafter called Asuras. This is the first major dualism to emerge in the nature of everything in the Universe.
Many scholars describe Asuras to be "lords" with different specialized knowledge, magical powers and special abilities, which only later choose to deploy these for good, constructive reasons or for evil, destructive reasons. The former become known as Asura in the sense of Devas, the later as Asura in the sense of demons...Asuras are non-believers of God and can believe in their own powers.
Asuras...are a type of supernatural beings (antigods, demigods, or titans) in traditional Buddhist cosmology and a realm of rebirth based on one's karma in current or past lives. They are described in Buddhist texts as creatures who live in lower levels of mount Sumeru, obsessed with sensuous aspects of existence, living with jealousy, and endlessly engaged in wars against the creatures who are Devas (gods).
- extracts from -> Asura - Wikipedia
♱ knsl - i won't tell you what this means yet, as there is a more pivotal moment in the narrative where i want to reveal it. however, i have hidden a clue somewhere in the information i've put out around the first act - it shouldn't be too hard for you to find out ;) (i, however, spent literally two hours straight trying to figure out what this word meant - scoured dozens of posts from knetizens, obbsessively google translated) just know that it is a question
♱ pagafantas - literally meaning the guy who pays for fanta (pagar+fanta), this term has several meanings
a guy who buys things (like drinks) or goes to great lengths for their crush because of an ulterior motive - often in order to sleep with them.
similarly, a boy who has reluctantly and bitterly been friendzoned (there's a famous spanish movie called pagafantas that has this premise)
a boy who is willing to overextend himself and be the second option for a girl he likes - buying her things and treating her kindly, only for her to turn and get with another man
in other words, the closest english translation would be simp or a nice guy
however, it also has another less obvious or common meanings that comes from how the word translates over to korean.
pagafantas -> 빨판 (ppalpan) -> sucker/loser
빠가판따스가 it's so hot
tonto útil -> useful idiot/fool
호구 -> someone who is easily fooled or scammed, often someone is gets friendzoned / a pushover / danger
extracts from the links below:
pagafanta / pagafantas | WordReference Forums
Spanish New Words Explored #02 Hokou : Naver Post
스페인어 신조어 탐구생활 #02 호구 : 네이버 포스트
♱ tom and jerry type shit
♱ i added most of the things on this list ha - i think the original ones were teh tearoff calender, broom and dustpan only.
♱ the worker named k is a reference to the original madsummer's author kyrie
♱ when writing i really like inventing words that are linguistically and etymologically sound/plausible but don't really exist - aphroditean (a-fro-di-ee-shun) being one such word
♱ the paragraph that feaures the word aphroditean is the one i associate with bôa's duvet
♱ remember - buda left korea before graduating middle school, and so he would never have used melon
♱ this was a small detail i changed, but i loved the connotations n implications of buda's crucifix being made of glass - i was thinking of something like this (i am so aware that there are next to no similarities between these reference photos but pls humour me)-
♱ the cojimar pier is one of the most important locations in the story. located in havana, it stands close to the hemingway monument. (go to the locations tab whoopdoop)
♱ boom. the beginnings of toto lore.
♱ i added in and emphasised the details around strawberries and the colours pink and red throughout madsummer, especially in relation to toto. in one thread a knetizen (if i find it i'll link it here) asked what colour best represents madsummer and a user responded with the colours pink and red. i'll talk about this inits own post, but the juxstaposed yet coexistent implications of love, danger, flesh, tenderness, blood, rage etc
♱ kyrie revealed that the book of korean poems that toto finds is called 문학동네시인선 038 - 오은시 집 우리는 분위기를 사랑해 (Literature Village Poet Selection 038 - Oh Eun-si's House We Love the Atmosphere).
^ a raw translation of one poem in the book
here is a poem from the book (all quotes from this book are from publically accessible samples). though they don't translate over well i still love the sentiment of them. the link to other translated samples from this collection is found here.
dopamine* (012-015)
the mirror breaks
i can't stand being alone
because i'm not alone
i can't stand it
i need to tear this scene apart
i need to scour this moment
element breaks through the set
i start building a
black castle on a white
piece of paper. too low to
collapse. too thin to tumble.
creation gives birth to another creation. the
more you talk about it, the more you have to say.
the complementary set penetrates the entire set.
outside the black castle you are
away from the scene
away from the moment
i drink coffee with you, you
exchange glances with me, I
sneak out and smoke a cigarette, and in the
meantime you drop a drop of whiskey into your mug
you help me, i pretend
to help you, you imagine being
helped by me, i think i helped you, and
we feel good about eachother
my heart is racing
riding a sports car
and sharing chocolate
love your enemies!
love your elements more!
far-sighted and thin-eared people are startled
we need a bigger
stimulus to get closer,
to get thicker
to become a solid element
to become a large set to
become alone to
become not only alone to be, come alone
if you can't stand it, you can't stand the
scene and the moment, you can't
stand to tear the assembly apart,
you can't stand to break the mirror
hurry!
more cheers,
more applause
my head hurts as if i've poured
out too many words and have been rereading
them one by one
in the broken mirror
my pieces shine sharply and shout, arthur!
* it is a neurotransmitter that plays a role in transmitting the excitement of brain nerve cells. it affects movement, attention, learning, cognition, and motivation, and it is known that a deficiency can cause parkinson's disease, and an excess can cause bipolar disorder or schizophrenia
♱ another moment of artistic liscence, it wasn't mentioned in kyrie's ms but this is the colour i was imagining for the condom wrappers
♱ similarly i just decided to make the pen look like a surfboard - i was thinking of smth kitsch like this, made of wood or like pseudo wood idk
♱ 토토 refers to mostly sports betting that occurs mostly over the internet
♱ toto - from this point on, this is mostly what buda calls the brat. toto is the real name of a parrot bg had (which most moa should know)
♱ at first i was trying to figure out whether purple was a reference to lean or to heroin, but the chatrooms came though for me - purple is a drug that kyrie inventing, describing it only as a narcotic (below is the raw translation of a discussion between two knetizens on a public forum)
♱ toto starting to curse - the more you know someone the more they become you
♱ in the standard edition of mad summer, the items on the bucket list are not revealed in this moment (two are mentioned at later points in the story though). however, from scouring knetizens chatrooms, i was able to find information about toto's full bucket list (more raw translation extracts yikes) which is featured in the reprints on mad summer
♱ i chose october 27th as toto's d-day because it was the day that baz luhrmann's 1996 film romeo and juliet first premiered (kyrie only mentioned a random date in ocotber)
♱ had to change this to be relevant to the avctual seasons of cuba lol
♱ the blue aloha shirt is another reference to romeo and juliet. i do love the cockiness and kitsch of buda loving this shirt so much
the official madsummer fanart that came with the physical copies of eacg book features buda in his blue hawaiin shirt and toto wearing the shirt in the photo abvoe the fanart photo
♱ to show how deranged i am, i spent literal hours trying to figure out which church kyrie had taken inspiration from, since all other landmark locations in the story were based off of real places - i learnt though that this chapel in particular is not a real location and more an amalgamation of several chapels, including the iglesia de santa ana. (said it once i'll say it again - check out my locations folder whoopdoop.) the church depicted below is from the official fanart that came with physical copies of the book - it's of a scene from act iii where buda visits the temple and hugs the statue of mother mary. again, he's wearing his hawaiin shirt here.
♱ here are the stories i imagined to be on buda's shelf - Peter Pan, The Alchemaster’s Apprentice, The Little Prince, Coraline, The Time of the Fireflies, Through the Looking Glass, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. at some point i'll make a goodreads list of books to read if you liked madsummer, as well as all the media refernced in the story (clarifying whether it was me or kyrie who firt alluded to thst piece of media in our rendition)
♱ if it isn't obvious enough, the film toto watches is baz lurhman's 1996 romeo and juliet movie. this fiim is at thte centre of madsummer - narratively, thematically and symbolically
♱ i added a reference to shakespeare's romeo and juliet here.
A double suicide. A violent end.
-msaabha
These violent delights have violent ends
And in their triumph die, like fire and powder,
Which as they kiss consume. The sweetest honey
Is loathsome in his own deliciousness
And in the taste confounds the appetite.
Therefore love moderately; long love doth so;
Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow.
-william shakespeare romeo and juliet
woah is that foreshadowing?
♱ the song that played at the end of the movie is radiohead - exit music for a film
♱ there were times in the original narrative where kyrie refers to buda and toto as other animals, but i wanted to do my best not to mix metaphors - instead of ending the thoguht about the cocaine dog wehre kyrie did (toto laughing at the thoguht of buda being a cocaine dog) i made toto laugh at teh thoguht of buda being a cocaine sniffing cat (i would die for buda+toto's cat+dog dynamic)
♱ staring yearningly at your homie's back while you're sharing a bed at a sleepover is a core part of the queer experience i don't make the rules sorry
i will update this if i remember to add anything, if anybody has any questions or needs clarification on anything. at some point maybe i'll spellcheck this but maybe i won't. we'll have to see lol. here are three final points
♱ the below fanart was comissioned for madsummer's printing, n postcards and postcards came with each purchase. i'll make a post on each of these fanarts maybe, going into more detail abbout each, as wel as the book covers
♱ remember that madsummer was set in 2019
this is what the person toto was based off looked like in 2019
this is what the person buda was based off of looked like in 2019
these are literal babies.
and i will leave you with that thought.
☀︎ with love - hometown.angel ☀︎
