this is really sweet, thank you anon <3 as a note, these are just my thoughts, they're not all encompassing or necessarily fully fleshed. there's a lot of what makes their relationship great, but these are a few things that stick out to me especially from a cultural lens.

what i find so interesting about rocketline is that on basic level, they really don't have a lot in common. besides music, they really don't have a lot of the same interests! they're both artists but in really different ways, yet at the same time, they're both very particular and precise, and they really only end up showing what they want to show. i think they're both people who think very carefully before they act, especially now. that instinct is something that they've honed over the course of their careers. vernon has even talked about it before – he thinks very carefully about what he says and what he presents because the weight of being an influential person is very significant to him.

anyway, i digress. what makes their bond so fascinating is that it wasn't likeness in their personalities or interests that forged their bond but this fascinating cultural bridge. i mean, i'm sure there's much more to it, and i can't necessarily speak to that, but i find "identity" as one of the primary things that brought them so close. i always found it interesting to see the way cultural split manifests in them differently. vernon is quite literally split, as someone who's biracial, bilingual, and physically far away from the place and people that carry his other culture. he's talked about being ostracized for being different and for being mixed, but i could imagine there were times growing up where that was really confusing for him because he was basically only ever steeped in korean culture, as opposed to his american culture. was there this dissonance of everyone sees me as different but i don't feel different? i don't fully know, but i think it's been cool to come into the different sides of himself. not to say that his identity matters any less to him now, but i think adulthood and being part of a global group as an artist with creative freedom has done a lot of good for him.

by the same token, it's been cool to see how his relationship with joshua served as a way for vernon to connect with another side of himself, because joshua's differences and "otherness" manifest really differently! he grew up in LA, an extremely diverse city, going to k-town for church were he got to interact with his culture in doses the way a lot of americans do. so many people in the states are products of diaspora, and one of my favorite parts of american culture is that this melding of different places and customs is pretty normal. suddenly he was made to feel like "other" when he moved to korea because he couldn't speak the language as well, didn't practice all the cultural norms, which maybe he knew about or was aware of but didn't need to/wasn't supposed to engage in while living in the states. fortunately, he had vernon, who could speak the same language as him, understand the cultural nuance of the states despite not living there for very long, and who could help him out

they really do help complete each other, and even though they're "split" in different ways, they've matured into such great friends who can rely on each other and go to each other for anything. it's really cool to think about the impacts of culture and language on friendships. junhao are kind of like this as well – they didn't really have anything in common at first, but a shared struggle in adaptation built them the strongest, most beautiful bond.