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As if Joanne couldn't get any shittier, she misgendered and insulted a woman who called for support, all because the woman had PCOS/PMOS and "didn't sound feminine enough."

Fuck her.

I still believe it’s imperative that our faults and fears not rule us, but—in saying they could not even be acknowledged, I was letting them do exactly that. Until paranoia and shame fueled our every action, and the Honmoon became brittle and timid in response.

And it's an absolutely banger line but it also struck me, when reading it, that Jinu's biggest problem was that he was letting his faults and fears rule him. Which led me to the thought that being a demon in the KPDH-verse is letting one's faults and fears control one's behavior. Maybe it's just that Jinu's flavor of fault is his shame and other demons have other faults driving them - cowardice or greed or arrogance or sadism. Crucially, all things that one can stop acting on, though it takes strength of character to do so.

Although in a kpdh context I hadn't thought to extend it past shame, since Jinu and Gwi-Ma talk about the pattern = shame connection like it's 1:1, and presumably they would know. But then again we have no reason to think Gwi-Ma wouldn't lie about that. And the Faceless seem to be just as much under Gwi-Ma's control as any other demon, even though they seem to be too mindless for shame to have any meaning for them; relatedly if Gwi-Ma's bargain with Jinu was honest, and he really was planning to take away Jinu's memory, that would presumably also take away Jinu's shame, but Gwi-Ma doesn't seem concerned that he'll lose control of Jinu because of that.

Zoey's aesthetic is the most butch. She wears a lot of skater gear. She also sits and stands in very traditionally feminine poses, not taking up space, making herself smaller, hands folded between her thighs, looking polite and delicate. She's conflict-averse. She's appeasing. She smiles. She wants people to be comfortable in a way that feels like a survival skill, because being liked will keep her safe and get her access to things that she has no means to achieve herself. She almost never makes a major decision, instead following either Mira or Rumi's lead. She worries about being too much or not enough, ie, is she performing her social role correctly, which controls whether she can have love or friendship.

Rumi's kind of in the middle. Her posture is usually politely feminine but she doesn't do shy or cutesy or draw into herself the way Zoey does. She's fairly conflict-averse with people she loves but doesn't hesitate to argue with strangers and, patterns notwithstanding, is pretty confident. She doesn't see hostility as dangerous or affection as necessary to keep herself safe or get what she wants, but she does clearly want to be liked and considers social approval to be valuable currency. She's the leader but she's nevertheless more patient and collaborative than decisive; mostly she rubber-stamps democratic decisions the three of them make as a group, and when she does disagree with them (eg Takedown) she waffles around behind their backs and makes demands and needs them to be on board with her rather than just confidently making a choice and letting them respond. She worries roughly equally that she'll be rejected or that she'll lose herself, ie, whether she has direct access to love and safety, contingent on her failings as a generic person and not whether she's following the rules of her role correctly.

Mira's aesthetic is the most femme. She wears skirts and darted tops. Like Rumi, she does some traditionally feminine body language but never makes herself smaller the way Zoey does; unlike Rumi, she also frequently manspreads and takes up space when she walks. She doesn't want conflict, but she doesn't fear it; she pushes Rumi because it needs to be done. She's assertive. She has RBF. She's not rude or mean - she's actually extremely kind and thoughtful - but she does not apologize for existing with her posture, facial expression, tone of voice, or word choice the way Zoey does. If you do not like her she does not feel that she needs to respond to that fact in any way; she does not see hostility as dangerous or affection as necessary to keep herself safe or get what she wants. She is decisive; she walks into Rumi's room without being invited, draws on Rumi the moment she damages the Honmoon without knowing if Zoey has her back (or needing Zoey to have her back to make that decision). She worries that she can't have a family, which is again about direct loss of something desired, something she does or does not intrinsically deserve rather than something she can or cannot perform correctly enough to lose access to.

Attachment is when possessing becomes more important than anything else, right, when your fear and greed to keep, your anger at anyone else interfering with your having, become more important than your morals or other people’s rights or safety. And the road out of that is accepting that nothing is forever and loss will happen and it will suck and you will keep moving.

And mostly we see that in reference to stuff, people, tangible positive things with obvious value. Fear of losing your wife. Desire to bring back your parents. Anger at the universe that took what you love. It’s looking at something in your life that gives you joy and saying you’re willing to betray everyone you love, murder children, burn down the galaxy if that’s what it takes to make sure it stays yours.

But it can be about a mindset, too. If hatred of the universe is an attachment, so is all-consuming grief, a pain you’re unwilling to give up because you don’t know anything else, because healing feels like betraying the people you’re mourning. So is shame, hatred for yourself for surviving that you can’t let go of because it would mean accepting you’re a victim too, that there wasn’t anything you could have done then and isn’t anything you can do now. No matter how awful it feels, it’s yours, it’s what you have left, what you are, and you can’t let go of it.

(And like I get that tonally, the movie as is can't really support addressing the hundreds/thousands of dead people but like... *why did you have your main love interest kill hundreds/thousands of people if you weren't actually going to do anything with it*)

And like, the movie explicitly states that missing persons have doubled or tripled during the time the Saja Boys were active.

And that's before an entire train of people "go missing"

And those people are still going to be missing after the movie.

And I can't imagine that Rumi's feelings towards Jinu are going to be any kind of simple once she's removed from the immediate emergency of imminent demon invasion and has to see grieving families on the news and on social media and the vigils for the victims and the inevitable conspiracy theories about the government/foreigners trafficking people

One part of her wanting Jinu back and another part, seeing a mother passing out flyers about her missing children (they were on the subway heading to school, please, her son had a Huntr/x hoodie), wondering if he deserves another shot at life

It's like, he threw himself on a grenade for her. But he was the one who disassembled the anti-grenade shield (after she asked him for help reinforcing it), pulled the pin, and threw it at a crowd of people he knew it was her duty to protect.

Rumi told Jinu that hope is a choice. The corollary is therefore also true - abandoning hope is a choice, and that's the choice Jinu made after Gwi Ma threatened him. How much does him choosing hope again at the very literal last second make up for that?

(There was good in him, but that good did not drive him to act as he watched thousands die from his actions - he only considered doing something after she asked. It did not stop him from hurting her, publicly, in the worst way he could. It did not stop him from leading tens of thousands to their deaths - but it did drive him to act once she joined that number.)

Eg I've seen exactly one fic that attempts to tackle the train specifically, but I had to bail out when it posited that, actually, Huntr/x valued each other's lives more than the Honmoon or their duty or any number of strangers' lives, so if they failed that duty in the course of protecting themselves that was okay, it was human and fair and what the other two would want, and the narrative seemed to think this was reasonable and cathartic for a team of actual superheroes, and not a sign that either Celine or the Honmoon has incredibly stupid and irresponsible taste in champions.

(Honestly that Us First vibe is an extremely common take in general, in my experience - that "if gold might hurt Rumi we quit right now, we choose her over the world immediately and without hesitation or guilt" sort of True Love declaration.

Which, in the actual canon, Celine arguably did. Zoemira demonstrably did not.)

That said, Rumi does go straight from the train scene to singing Free with Jinu, which is all about herself and him. She's doing it because she thinks it'll get him to help turn the Honmoon gold and once its gold there will be no more demon incursions and no more train incidents but if you step back and look at the context of the tragedy that just happened, it comes across as really callous.

But, for what it's worth, while I agree it's way too harsh, I don't actually think it's especially inaccurate; she didn't choose to fuck up on the train, but the fuckup on the train is a direct result of her choices.

ie, Hunters know they need harmony to do their jobs, and Rumi is continually sabotaging Takedown, acting weird about the Saja boys, sneaking off, and refusing to explain any of it. All conscious decisions on her part that are guaranteed to cause conflict, that she can see are already causing conflict. But admitting to Zoemira that she's talking to Jinu (and trying to turn him and that it's making her question what they know about demons) comes with the risk of losing the selfish comfort she's getting from her meetings with him.

(How selfish depends on what ratio you think her motivation is, between altruistic compassion/belief that turning him is genuinely their best chance/desire to be understood/pure horny on main, but the selfish reasons are there in some amount.)

Like she's not a monster, she does not bear a fraction of the responsibility the actual demons do, she could not have predicted those specific consequences, and all of her choices were understandable and not at all cruel or callous when she made them. But there was never not going to be some shitty consequence.

(And like I get that tonally, the movie as is can't really support addressing the hundreds/thousands of dead people but like... *why did you have your main love interest kill hundreds/thousands of people if you weren't actually going to do anything with it*)

And like, the movie explicitly states that missing persons have doubled or tripled during the time the Saja Boys were active.

And that's before an entire train of people "go missing"

And those people are still going to be missing after the movie.

And I can't imagine that Rumi's feelings towards Jinu are going to be any kind of simple once she's removed from the immediate emergency of imminent demon invasion and has to see grieving families on the news and on social media and the vigils for the victims and the inevitable conspiracy theories about the government/foreigners trafficking people

One part of her wanting Jinu back and another part, seeing a mother passing out flyers about her missing children (they were on the subway heading to school, please, her son had a Huntr/x hoodie), wondering if he deserves another shot at life

It's like, he threw himself on a grenade for her. But he was the one who disassembled the anti-grenade shield (after she asked him for help reinforcing it), pulled the pin, and threw it at a crowd of people he knew it was her duty to protect.

Rumi told Jinu that hope is a choice. The corollary is therefore also true - abandoning hope is a choice, and that's the choice Jinu made after Gwi Ma threatened him. How much does him choosing hope again at the very literal last second make up for that?

(There was good in him, but that good did not drive him to act as he watched thousands die from his actions - he only considered doing something after she asked. It did not stop him from hurting her, publicly, in the worst way he could. It did not stop him from leading tens of thousands to their deaths - but it did drive him to act once she joined that number.)

Eg I've seen exactly one fic that attempts to tackle the train specifically, but I had to bail out when it posited that, actually, Huntr/x valued each other's lives more than the Honmoon or their duty or any number of strangers' lives, so if they failed that duty in the course of protecting themselves that was okay, it was human and fair and what the other two would want, and the narrative seemed to think this was reasonable and cathartic for a team of actual superheroes, and not a sign that either Celine or the Honmoon has incredibly stupid and irresponsible taste in champions.

(Honestly that Us First vibe is an extremely common take in general, in my experience - that "if gold might hurt Rumi we quit right now, we choose her over the world immediately and without hesitation or guilt" sort of True Love declaration.

Which, in the actual canon, Celine arguably did. Zoemira demonstrably did not.)

But I do wish more people would think through the ramifications of what it means to actively not turn the honmoon gold.

Because what it means is that people are going to die. It means that the girls have decided that X amount of people per year is an acceptable number of people for them to sacrifice to the demons indefinitely just so Rumi doesn't get hurt/stays alive.

(What if some of those people are Zoey's family? Their colleagues? Bobby?)

(Does that calculation change then? How many strangers is the equivalent exchange of Zoey's cousin? Of their stylist? Of their assistant?)

And eventually they do have to train their replacements. They're supposed to look three kids in the eye and say what?

Actually, there's a way to stop the demons forever but we've been letting them kill people becuase *our* friend might get hurt?

Please don't make the honmoon gold until she's dead, yes that might mean letting thousands die in the meantime?

(And like I get that tonally, the movie as is can't really support addressing the hundreds/thousands of dead people but like... *why did you have your main love interest kill hundreds/thousands of people if you weren't actually going to do anything with it*)

And like, the movie explicitly states that missing persons have doubled or tripled during the time the Saja Boys were active.

And that's before an entire train of people "go missing"

And those people are still going to be missing after the movie.

And I can't imagine that Rumi's feelings towards Jinu are going to be any kind of simple once she's removed from the immediate emergency of imminent demon invasion and has to see grieving families on the news and on social media and the vigils for the victims and the inevitable conspiracy theories about the government/foreigners trafficking people

One part of her wanting Jinu back and another part, seeing a mother passing out flyers about her missing children (they were on the subway heading to school, please, her son had a Huntr/x hoodie), wondering if he deserves another shot at life

And this is where I think people get a little too wrapped up in the demon = some kind of marginalized person symbolism. There are elements of it and Rumi as a character is good representation for anyone who views themselves as some kind of outsider looking in. Whether it be a mental illness, race, body image, sexual identity... Marginalized people saw themselves in her and that's valid! She definitely was created to have similar struggles. But where we have to be careful is isolating that symbolism to just her character (and Jinu as well) and ignoring what literally every other demon in the movie was like. When we're looking at our two main characters, and especially Rumi, we can see their struggles and their remorse and self hatred and we can sympathize. We can see it as "they're demons, but they don't want to be/aren't evil like other demons" and it's easier to attach our own feelings of being demonized by our own society for something society deems as "wrong" with us.

But in the bigger picture of the world in this story, demons are bad. Like, bad bad. Even if many of them are victims of Gwi-Ma's manipulation, we aren't shown much of that. Aside from Jinu (and maybe that one flight attendant demon who had to go back to Gwi-Ma alone), we don't see a single demon show remorse for anything. Many of them actually seem to revel in what they're doing. Even the cute crying one everyone loves wasn't crying because he feels bad for taking souls: he was crying at the idea of the demon world losing the war against the Hunters. He cheered with everyone else once the Saja Boys starting pulling souls into the underworld.

And yeah, it doesn't help that the only demon we spend any length of time with is Jinu. And I guess an assumption could be made that maybe it's all an act and all of those demons actually feel really, really terrible about killing countless people. But we aren't shown that. We're shown demons cheering about people's souls being devoured by an evil bonfire and gloating about how many of Huntr/x's fans they're going to eat. We're given one demon who feels bad, and still goes along with the mass murder anyway.

(And don't get me wrong: I like Jinu. I thought he was fun and charming and has a good platonic relationship with Rumi. But he still did that. And if we're going to narrow it down to thinking only of the emotional impacts to our main characters, he also took information Rumi told him in confidence and used it to expose her in the most demoralizing and embarrassing way possible. Him dying at the end was the narrative giving him a balanced end to the crimes he committed, and even then, it doesn't feel wholly satisfying because now there's no follow up. He's dead. Rumi can't confront him about anything. None of the human victims will see any sort of apology or payment for what he did. Even Mira and Zoey can't yell at him they way they probably want to.

This is kind of like how Darth Vader dies at the end of Return of the Jedi (spoilers if you live under a rock). For the whole trilogy he was The Big Bad until an even eviler dude showed up. But he was still responsible for countless death and misery, even blowing up a whole ass planet. But he was also a victim of manipulation and bad choices. We can sympathize for him, and we can cheer when he does finally do the right thing and save Luke from the Emperor. But he still had to die, because he did so many bad things. He could have lived but he either would have been executed or thrown in jail for what he did. There would have been a lot of people who wouldn't see his redemption the way Luke or we the audience saw it. So the story would have had to suddenly mind wipe those people, or ignore them and say their pain wasn't valid. Bear in mind, his daughter Leia would have been one of those people because it had been her planet he blew up. Him dying solves that moral dilemma, because he's gone. He faced "the ultimate punishment" and he is no longer around to cause any more pain.)

#a lot of people who claim to be sex positive are actually just sex compulsory when you get down to it #it's "enthusiastic consent" until it's ace people #then it's 'you have to do it for your partner because you owe them and it's abusive to say no' #or "you haven't given it the arbitrary amount of tries with the mandatory amount of people so you're not allowed to say no" #or "if you don't think and feel the same way about sex as I do there's something wrong with you and you must be 'fixed' by any means" #and then you realize maybe it's not actually about consent or positivity but just about controling other people's bodies #yall can cry about "puritanism" all you want but if the alternative is forcing people to have sex when they don't want to #with people they don't want to have sex with…then it's not actually any better than the thing you claim to be pushing back against #you're merely being reactionary and not actually progressive…and ultimately all you do is further rape culture

If you do not actually want to have sex, but you feel pressured into it because of societal expectations, that's coercion.

Society pushes the narrative that obviously everyone loses their virginity in their teens. It's a "rite of passage".

But there are plenty of reasons why someone might not fit that narrative.

When you enter into your 20s, and if you still have your virginity intact, the pressure increases exponentially. "Just get it over with" and "it's just sex, stop being a prude about it" and "you're such a late bloomer, you were supposed to do that ages ago."

These messages whittle away at consent. Your priority becomes conforming to social pressure, and not your personal desires.

And if you enter your 30s or above as a virgin, there is so much stigma around this that many people don't talk about it at all.