Pure Love Is the True Ideal Desire

[Troop Train — Air Force 10th Fighter Wing] Since GLOCHOU Couldn’t Make It, the Airmen Covered “Fluffy” Themselves ☁ / “Fluffy” (Original Artist: GLOCHOU) — Sergeant Yoo Shinseong, Sergeant Jung Minjae, Corporal Park Yong, Corporal Jo Gyeongseop, Private First Class Kwak Taemun

1.38M views 4 years ago

#TroopTrain #Fluffy #GLOCHOU

Tirirong, tirong, tirirong.

An iconic synth sound steeped in the Y2K aesthetic began to play, layered with rhythmic guitar chops. An impossibly bubbly narration followed.

Ready? 1, 2! (Soft like cotton candy!)

The moment the narration ended—

Thump.

Five pairs of combat boots struck the floor.

Sunday morning drenched in sunlight

A pleasant breeze starts whispering

Why do the corners of my lips keep rising?

Why does even my reflection look strange?

It was a bright, upbeat dance track perfectly suited to a rookie girl group. Built on a house foundation with a touch of pluggnB, it was distinguished by its dreamy, strangely addictive synth arpeggio.

Every voice that traded lines in the song had an unmistakably youthful quality. The appearances of the people dancing to it, however, were the complete opposite of the song’s atmosphere.

Not a trace of makeup could be found on the faces of the five young men standing onstage. Every one of them also had his hair cut short. They wore military-green jumpsuits—what the Air Force called flight suits.

Today is different from yesterday

Everything is all New

The reason for this fluttering must be It's you!

A soldier wearing thick-lensed glasses fired a love bullet at the audience. He was attempting a wink in his own way, but he was so bad at it that both eyes closed.

The camera briefly panned across the audience. Raucous laughter erupted all at once.

"Wahahaha!"

The performance continued.

My heart blooms soft and warm

It keeps floating higher (I'm floating)

The pre-chorus. The formation changed. Another soldier moved to the center and performed the choreography.

For a stage put together by complete amateurs—ordinary civilians who happened to be soldiers currently serving on active duty—it was excellent. Their movements were fairly sharp, and since all five were taller than average, they made for a pretty decent picture. It was the result of selecting volunteers who were at least reasonably good-looking and had some talent for singing and dancing from among the enlisted men.

But then the chorus began.

My heart is fly-fly-fluffy

And the moment another soldier took center—

Swelling like cotton candy

The entire identity of the video changed. From “a talent-show routine soldiers desperate for reward leave had worked reasonably hard to prepare” into “an idol performance.”

That absolutely did not mean the soldier in the center was as pretty or cute as GLOCHOU, the original artists. Judging by appearance alone, he was further from the original concept than anyone else onstage.

The hairstyles and uniforms unique to soldiers made everyone look rough and guileless. Even celebrities who made their living off their looks were no exception. There was a reason people joked that “the male idol who spent his whole career drenched in decadent sex appeal got completely exorcised the moment he enlisted.”

But not even closely cropped hair and a military uniform could diminish this man’s fierce appearance. The short haircut fully exposed his long, narrow skull, a rare trait among East Asians, while his prominent T-zone and thick, straight, masculine eyebrows only made him look more like a rebel.

And then there was his build.

The man was unusually tall. Even among a group of soldiers who were all above average height, he stood out by himself, so he had to be comfortably over 185 centimeters. He might even have reached 190.

It might have been another matter if he were merely tall and lanky, but he had an impressive body to match. Every time he made a sweeping motion with his arms, the chest of his jumpsuit—zipped all the way up to his neck—pulled taut.

Below it stretched a pair of frighteningly long legs. A jumpsuit that could easily turn anyone with poor proportions into the MiXelin tire mascot made him look like a fighter pilot in a Hollywood action movie.

To put it briefly:

There, in the flesh, stood the ideal K-pop fans had spent decades searching for and never found. A unicorn whose very existence in reality seemed doubtful.

The Platonic ideal of “a sharp-faced delinquent with a solid, thick body” was standing right there....

Walking above the clouds with you

The whole world feels soft

In the K-pop scene, covering a song by an idol of the opposite sex—especially a man covering a girl-group song—had always been a double-edged sword.

Exaggerate the movements meant to accentuate the body’s curves any more than necessary, and people would tear you apart for caricaturing women. Even if you pulled it off as well as humanly possible, you were still liable to get hateful comments about being possessed by a queen. But strip out all “those” parts instead, and people would tear you apart again for having trying-too-hard-to-be-manly syndrome and putting on a macho act.

A girl-group cover could send even a fairly successful male idol straight into the abyss—or, if not quite that far, at least right up to its edge—with a single misstep. The public had become considerably more tolerant as generations changed and challenge culture took hold, but that attitude had yet to disappear completely.

In that respect, too, the man scored well above a passing grade.

I’m feeling fly-fly-fluffy

Riding on a fluffy white cloud

Toward you inside my dreams

I want to come a little closer

The man executed choreography created for a fresh-faced girl group with an average age of 18.4 with astonishing smoothness. A severe mismatch between appearance and concept usually landed in one of two places: the uncanny valley or Mount Hilarity. Yet he belonged to neither.

Fly-fly-fluffy, my down-soft heart

Fly-fly-fluffy, may it reach you

Then, during the first verse’s post-chorus, something unexpected happened. Turning his half-angled torso to face forward, the man pulled down the zipper of his jumpsuit, which had been fastened all the way to his neck, and slipped his arms out.

There was nothing remarkable about what he wore underneath. Just a drab short-sleeved T-shirt bearing the Air Force logo. It was also what more than ninety percent of everyone there, performers and spectators alike, was wearing.

If one had to find something different about it... perhaps it was the way the shirt stretched taut across his chest, and how his muscles completely filled out the sleeves. Either way, it was hardly the sort of sight that soldiers packing the audience would ordinarily go wild over.

"Wooooaaaah!"

And yet the instant the man lightly tugged at the sweat-dampened collar of his T-shirt and let it snap back, an enormous sound erupted—somewhere between a shriek and a cheer. For a moment, it was loud enough to drown out even the backing track.

He smiled with one eye narrowed, then took the empty sleeves of the jumpsuit hanging from him like a shed skin and tied them around his waist. The gesture emphasized the firm waist beneath his thick, nearly bursting chest.

As the formation changed, the man moved to the back. Perhaps because his legs were so long, he covered several meters in only a step or two. Yet the eyes of much of the audience remained fixed on him.

My own cloud nine, open only to you

Now, take my hand! (1, 2, 3, jump!)

Even at the back, beyond the reach of the spotlight, and even when someone else completely blocked him from view, the man remained faithful to the choreography. As though every passing second were too precious to waste. As though this were his first and last stage.

During the part where he was meant to pretend to sulk, he furrowed his straight eyebrows and shook his head from side to side. Then he twisted his upper body slightly and mimed shooting an arrow of love. His broad shoulders and sculpted arm muscles put him rather far from a baby Cupid, but the general intention came across.

He turned his head and looked directly ahead. Then he lifted the corners of his wide mouth into a brilliant smile. His ferocious eyes curved brightly with the excitement of a boy falling in love for the first time.

And finally—

Oh baby, you're so fluffy!

Another member stood at the center for the ending. The man was down on one knee on the floor. Dutiful to the last, he made sure the other member stood out until the very end.

Breathing hard, the man stared into the camera and winked at it. Unfortunately, his wink was not captured in full. Halfway through, the camera angle shifted upward to close in on the soldier serving as the ending fairy.

The thunderous cheers and applause of the soldiers filled the background.

The video ended there.

Chapter 1

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