June 26th, 2017

Sigongsa (a major publishing company) blog post

Translated by @BTSARMY_Salon (Twitter)

Regarding to ‘Omelas’ and BTS ‘Spring Day’

“None of my fantasy works talks about superheroes. Even if there are magicians, they are portrayed as someone who makes mistakes and goes through hardships just like ordinary people. I want my fantasy works be as realistic as possible because the reality itself is already fantasy.”

– Ursula K. Le Guin

BTS

<YOU NEVER WALK ALONE>

BTS’ popularity is unstoppable. They won ‘Top Social Artist’ at the BBMA on May 22nd as the first K-pop group winner beating huge artists such as Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez and Ariana Grande! They topped the iTunes Album chart in 97 countries including the us. They have swept international charts like Billboard and Oricon… They indeed became the global star.

<YOU NEVER WALK ALONE>, the side story of <WINGS>, especially the title single <Spring Day> is also generating a lot of buzz. Released in February, <Spring Day> has received spotlight regardless of nationality. It ranked no. 1 on major charts on major domestic digital music charts, the iTunes Song chart in many overseas countries and also ranked no. 15 on the Billboard ‘Bubbling Under Hot 100’ chart. Its music video has almost 92 million views on YouTube.

(Spring Day by BTS)

https://youtu.be/xEeFrLSkMm8

<Spring Day> MV,

and Ursula K. Le Guin

Today, we, the publishing company, will tell you a little different story regarding <Spring Day>. Last year, the publishing industry paid a huge attention to BTS since they borrowed the overall <WINGS> album concept from Hermann Hesse’s classic <Demian>. The literary inspiration wasn’t the one-time event. BTS completed a surprisingly magnificent metaphorical message through the music video of <Spring Day>.

You probably guessed it already. As many BTS fans said after watching the <Spring Day> MV, the music video concept is deeply related to Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”, the short story in “The Wind’s Twelve Quarters”. Not only the music video, but also the message that BTS try to deliver through the song exactly corresponds to this story.

“The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 1974, which is the most prestigious award for science fiction and fantasy genres. Although it is short, it is a masterpiece that you can feel Le Guin’s strong and bold writing style and message. Ursula K. Le Guin is considered as one of three greatest fantasy writers with J. R. R. Tolkien of ” The Lord of the Rings” and C. S. Lewis of ” The Chronicles of Narnia”.

She is literally the ‘living legend’ who swept numerous literary awards. Following is an evaluation of her status in one sentence.

“If a science fiction writer wins Nobel Prize in Literature, she will definitely be the first one on the list.”

Then, shall we look into <Spring Day> MV briefly with the story?

1. The lonely time entirely in winter

“With a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer came to the city Omelas, bright-towered by the sea. The rigging of the boats in harbor sparkled with flags.”

― 『The Wind’s Twelve Quarters』, 「The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas」, 455 p.

This is the opening of 「The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas」. Omelas is a fictional place in the distant past (or distant future). There is no king, war, slave nor sinner, it is literally like utopia. Filled with a laughter, a peal of a bell, a parade, a festival and a racehorse, it is a village where people with equality and liberty gather and live a happy life.

The music video of BTS <Spring Day> opens differently. The members are scattered at a fictional railroad station called 일영 (Il-young: Greeting the rising sun), on a snow-piled railway in the middle of winter, at a beach with absolute silence, and on a train departing to somewhere with unattended bags of ‘friends’. Jungkook is waiting someone cheerlessly in front of a dilapidated ride written “YOU NEVER WALK ALONE”. They are all alone.

Meanwhile, RM passes a vacant railroad car and encounters Suga and J-Hope hovering around in front of a building called ‘Omelas’. RM goes into the building. Here, ‘Omelas’ makes its first appearance.

The author Le Guin says that the word Omelas has a meaning in French, “homme hélas”, translated as ‘Man, alas!’ in a postscript of the work. The world of the story and music video meet at the ‘stage of man’.

“NO VACANCY”, do you see the neon sign flickering?

Then, scenes almost like a flashback are distributed following RM’s view. BTS members are having fun. They go wild throwing a cake and messing up a room. Then, they enjoy their days sticking a firecracker in the cake. However, something is missing and unorganized. Looking at the firecracker, they don’t look that happy. The more time passes, the darker and gloomier feeling gets.

2. Omelas, the society ruled by ‘false happiness’

In a snowy winter night, RM stands in front of Omelas with J-Hope and Suga. Where they are supposed to be is not Omelas filled with the false happiness. How happiness of Omelas is maintained? Let’s read Ursula K. Le Guin’s 「The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas」 together. The writer talks about a 10-year-old child who is suffering from fear and hunger locked in a dusty, damp, and dirt-piled basement room of beautiful public buildings. The following description is even more shocking.

“They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery.”

― 『The Wind’s Twelve Quarters』, 「The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas」, 464 p.

The village’s happiness that is maintained by the innocent and weak one’s miserable life! Le Guin is coldly depicting the modern society’s cruelty. We evasively turn away from its existence, no, we feel a little bit sorry, but justify and enjoy the happiness by forgetting those children – saying ‘That’s the way it is, it can’t be helped.’

And, there are also ‘forgotten existences’ to us. The Sewol Ferry-. Without putting a political spin on the Sewol Ferry Disaster, we have 304 lives who were dying in a spring day of 2014. The fact that most of them were blooming teenagers like the children in 「The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas」 shocked the nation. It was a tragedy made everyone devastated.

All of us cannot move forward without facing this tragedy. ‘The Sewol Ferry’ is the symbol of thrown-out human dignity while all community members were chasing the immediate happiness and security (as Le Guin illustrates). From an Omelas perspective, it was “a sin caused inside the small basement room”.

3. BTS who leave Omelas

BTS sing “Time’s cruel, I hate us”. They give up saying ‘I’ll erase you who left me alone’, but they promise “If you stay awake for just a few more nights, I’ll go to meet you, I’ll come to get you.” Will they do something?

Jimin brings a pair of shoes from the beach. The members and he go to a laundry room inside Omelas. (Can you see shoes next to Jimin?) This laundry room scene is the best part of the music video. (The scene where a clock stopping at *9:35 tells once again that this song and the music video are to commemorate the victims of the Sewol Ferry.)

*T/N: The first guard boats arrived to rescue passengers and crew members at 9:35 a.m.

BTS decide to wash countless victims’ clothes by themselves instead of having Omelas’ false happiness, which is the cake and firecracker. They wash the dirty clothes piled in the darkness that no one try to touch. A ray of light shines down onto the clothes in the dark. Suga is singing in there.

Finally, they realize what their ‘spring day’ is and how it should look like. They are ready to leave Omelas ruled by the false happiness. Then a ‘light’, the symbol of ‘spring day’ comes back to them. The ride that no one visits has *yellow ribbons tied and lights up at the same time. Sitting on top of the train, J-Hope flies a paper plane when the sun rises beautifully.

*T/N: A yellow ribbon is a symbol in memory of the victims of the Sewol Ferry Disaster.

Jungkook opens the door of Omelas again. Passing the laundry room filled with warm hues, Jungkook and the members reunite. Now the wandering is over. It is the end of the days under the endless cold and darkness where it is winter even in August. To them, outside of Omelas is ‘a place where no one’s pain is forgotten’, and their spring day is ‘the time not forgetting someone’s sorrow’.

4. Under the warm sunshine of Spring Day

The reunited members don’t hang around noisily with a firework childishly. They sit around quietly and light up one candle. The mountainous garments are not in the deep and damp darkness anymore. They are piled high in the blue sky together with all of the members.

Also, the members are not alone anymore.

They take the train together, move forward to a field that the snow is melting under the warm sunlight. Reminding the ending scene of the movie “Snowpiercer”, the seven members lean on each other and look at an upright and strong tree standing in the middle of field in this sequence. (A tree is also portrayed as a very sacred living thing in the world of Le Guin’s work in general.)

Enduring the desolate winter, the bare tree is now ready to greet spring- Jimin hangs the shoes that he brought from the beach. Needless to say, it is the gesture cherishing the memory of the innocent soul dwelled in the shoes. The music video ends as the camera captures cherry blossom petals swirling under the blue sky and the tree in the spring day in distance.

How does Ursula K. Le Guin’s「The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas」end? I won’t directly tell you the ending to let you enjoy your reading. However, obviously the conclusion of the story had a great influence on the ending of the music video.

Le Guin left a little more aftertaste and suggested a little more lonely solution than <Spring Day>. Moreover, she revealed that 「The Day Before the Revolution」, the story followed by「The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas」, is “a story of one of the people who left Omelas” in the postscript.

To BTS, greeting a spring day together is crucial. Such commitment is well-displayed in the music video. ‘YOU NEVER WALK ALONE’ is not only the message to the world but also to each other, just like a line in the last track of the album, ‘A Supplementary Story: You Never Walk Alone’.

“Walk with me

Fly with me

To the end of the sky

So our hands can touch

Even if it hurts

You and I, if we’re together

We can smile”

5. Conclusion

In the early 1970s, Ursula K. Le Guin confessed that she wrote 「The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas」 because of “the dilemma of the American conscience”. Perhaps she wanted to criticize Americans who enjoyed the greatest wealth without feeling guilty or debt from underprivileged neighbors and praised the American society. Her message has a universality transcending time and space.

Beyond this work, there are plenty of early masterpieces of Le Guin in 『The Wind’s Twelve Quarters』. Her early works in the 60s and 70s have ‘a scent of growth’ before she became the master of science fiction / fantasy genres. In this perspective, 『The Wind’s Twelve Quarters』will be a great way to meet Le Guin for the first time. Afterwards, I suggest read her major works such as The Left Hand of Darkness and The Earthsea Cycle.

And…. Maybe BTS members are also growing fast as they go through this kind of experience. They are already on top of the world, but I’m sure they will continue moving forward to somewhere higher and more beautiful. I hope that <Spring Day> is possibly a significant leap to them. As quoted in the beginning of the post, what our world needs is not superheroes.

Someone who can share the pain, make mistakes and remember someone’s sorrow is truly the strongest hero. Perhaps BTS already know this truth.

The original post

http://m.post.naver.com/viewer/postView.nhn?memberNo=4226828&volumeNo=8307497

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