#i like music that i can listen to on repeat and that implies a narrative
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Will Logan Ever Be Happy?
An Extensive Analysis of Logan Sanders' Spotify Playlist and Predictions for the Future of His Character Arc
Logan's Playlist on Spotify
Logan's Playlist on YouTube Music
A few quick notes before we delve in…
This is an extensive analysis in the sense that it's currently around 16,930 words long. Please feel free to read it at your own leisure.
The description of Logan's Playlist on Spotify explicitly states to listen to these songs in order of their listing. This indicates a progression of sorts – of feelings, events, and the plot of the story being told here. It is important that we listen in order, and it seems like Logan would prefer us to listen this way to best understand what it is he is trying to convey.
The repeated themes found throughout many of these songs include: isolation, depression, regret, nostalgia, perfectionism, miscommunication, being the odd one out of a group, recognition of flaws, loss of control, being disliked, a love and familiarity for learning, and finding solutions to problems.
It should also be noted that a handful of these songs are told in second-person perspective, using “you” to indicate a main subject, as though the story is being told by the speaker about someone else’s actions to that someone else, rather than explaining anything outright about themself or how they feel about it. By doing this, the speaker is instead choosing to focus on others and only allowing the listener to sense and interpret how the speaker was affected by what the other party in the song had said or done. This by itself can easily indicate Logan’s insistence to let others take that stage, even when it’s his turn to tell his story, or to show off the faults of others in lieu of focusing on his own failings.
It may be important to remember that as we continue.
The Elements by Tom Lehrer is a simple starter song, as we know. Logan began as a friendly teacher character, someone to help guide Thomas through learning and encouraging curiosity and wonder within him. He helped Thomas to find solutions to problems with the most useful answers, and implored him to keep trying, keep researching, until he truly understood a topic. This was something good, something commendable.
In particular, this song involves a listing of the complete periodic table of elements, something that Logan, as Thomas’ Logic, likely would have to have known very well, considering the focus of Thomas’ major in college. This would have been information Logan used frequently in Thomas’ studies and schoolwork prior to the events of the series, which helps to signify this early interpretation of Logan’s character.
This is the early beginnings. It’s a solid starting point, telling us what we need to know about Thomas’ perception of who he believes Logan is meant to be.
Immediately after, we have White and Nerdy by Weird Al Yankovic, which, similar to the first song, is meant to give us a sense of Logan’s character. Thomas sees him as a helpful teacher, but he also sees him as a very nerdy, reserved, uptight, and pretentious kind of person who likes learning trivia and reading mystery novels and watching sci-fi shows and doing puzzles and making wordplay jokes. This fleshes Logan out more as a character, not just showing us who Thomas sees but giving us more perspective on what to expect from him.
[lyrics:
I wanna roll with the gangsters
But so far, they all think I’m too white and nerdy]
Early on in the series, the sides only appeared momentarily to help offer suggestions and advice to Thomas relevant to what he needed. There seemed to be less cohesion with the group, mainly due to a lack of narrative at the time, but the sides still appeared to work together so long as each stayed in their respective areas of expertise. Despite that, lyrics in this song seem to imply Logan had already seen himself as an outlier to the rest of Thomas’ sides. He recognized that this came at fault of the interpretation of his character, the personality he displayed, his mannerisms, even his interests.
From the very start, Logan was being viewed as something different and distinct in comparison to the other sides.
These first two songs are meant to be reminiscent of not only our first impressions of Logan’s character, but also of Thomas’ overall impression of him early on in the series.
Within the first few episodes, this is how Logan was interpreted and seen, as a nerdy but supportive teacher-like character. Based on Thomas’ vine character of the same attire, Logan was originally meant to be respected but relatable, someone who could understand the kids he was teaching, but was also full of incredibly useful knowledge and knew exactly how to convey that information in a way that would encourage and enlighten those around him.
As one of Thomas’ sides, however, he was minimized to only being Thomas’ Logic, someone who still had an incredible wealth of knowledge and used it to teach and guide Thomas specifically, but he was also someone who was meant to be more stereotypically “nerdy” by Thomas’ standards. He was still able to act as an instructor to Thomas and to the audience watching, but his status of authority was diminished, because now he was no longer a teacher, he was merely another part of Thomas.
This is where Algorhthym by Childish Gambino comes into play. This song indicates a recognition of the world and how it functions, but also a fear to do anything about it, to step out of line. This lends to Logan’s perfectionism, yes, but it also shows that Logan is highly aware of his position as Thomas’ Logic, and what is expected of him. He knows very well that he does not perfectly fit the mold that Thomas has made for him to fill.
Early in the song, there are mentions of misunderstanding directions and testing the waters in objectionable ways.
[lyrics:
Made us the guinea pig and did it with no permission
Told her to call a friend, didn’t tell her to listen
So very scary, so binary, zero or one
Like code is like coal mine canary]
Being put in a position without a choice in the matter, Logan is very aware that he has a big role to fulfill. He’s being depended on to do his job right. But there has, at no point, been any guidance for him to follow. It’s not as though there’s a training manual out there on how to be Thomas Sanders’ Logic, which means Logan can only attempt to figure it out as he goes along.
Now, this is no different from the other sides, as they all lack any kind of instruction on how to do their jobs, either. They all just have to make mistakes and learn from them to improve and get better with time. And, typically, this should be a good thing, but in Logan’s particular case, his job requires him to be relied upon as the one with the answers and solutions, so if he’s seen as someone who makes mistakes, that ruins his ability to be trusted to give those answers in the first place.
Making mistakes would contradict his purpose as Thomas’ Logic, but if he didn’t make mistakes, he couldn’t learn from them and get better like the rest of them. However, it’s inevitable that he will make mistakes because he has no idea how to do this job because he didn’t have any training involved before he started. But if he makes mistakes, he could lose that job, or the job itself could become misconstrued or defunct due to his failures. It’s an unpleasant and repeated cycle with no clear end.
Logan aims for perfection, knowing the risk of failure is so high and comes with such consequence, but he still has hope that something might work out. He also doesn’t seem to have much of a choice otherwise.
But he's already beginning to loop back around in circles over this, even so early on into the series, and this leads him to questioning why the world works this way. Just why does it contradict itself so much?
[lyrics:
I dream in color, not black and white]
He already realizes that he is seeing everything in a different way than Thomas and the other sides do. The world is so much bigger than the arbitrary parameters that are being set for it. Understanding and learning may need rigid guidelines to teach a beginner, to not overwhelm them, but once you know the basics, you can take those training wheels off and start exploring just about anywhere. If you want to try more adventurous feats, you’ll need better gear, more specified knowledge, but it’s not as though you are barred from entry. There is always more to learn, you simply have to go looking for it.
But the world somehow seems to think that’s not the case. Many believe that you either know something or you don’t, or that things can only be either one way or another, with no nuance involved. Instead of understanding all the shades of gray and color in between every moment, every idea, that there’s fluidity and the ability to shift and change at almost every turn, they choose to rely on what they’ve already learned and refuse to challenge it, even when the opportunity arises to do so. The world has so much more to offer than the black-and-white to which people often cling.
There’s so much space in between every atom, infinite amounts of empty air, that which we can barely comprehend, yet we see an object, a person, or any full form as completely solid, contradicting what we expect. We may say a penguin cannot fly, and yet you could put one as a passenger on an airplane and that could be considered flying. It has just done what was thought impossible. It is all about our perspective and the rules we set in place for our world that limits what we believe we know and understand, but that doesn’t mean that’s how the world actually works.
Unfortunately, changing someone’s mind can be very difficult, especially when you’re the one who contributed to them learning those basics to help them conceptualize the topic in the first place. It can be very hard to teach someone that knowledge is genuinely limitless, especially when they have found less use for it as time goes on and no longer have a desire to keep learning.
The song then indicates that the way a human behaves doesn’t always make logical sense, but that they value their life and experiences.
[lyrics:
Humans don’t understand, humans will sell a lie
Humans gotta survive, we know we gon’ die
Nothing can live forever, you know we gon’ try
Life, is it really worth it? The algorhythm is perfect, mmh]
Logan can comprehend this notion, even if he doesn’t quite understand and see the world in the same way as Thomas does; even if he believes some of his actions are illogical, he knows Thomas’ ability to live his life to the fullest is something memorable. He can recognize its importance overall, even if he doesn’t fully agree with how it’s done.
Logan likely comes to realize by this point, even so early on, that compromise is the best option here, just as we saw in the episode The Mind vs The Heart. Even if he doesn’t see things in the same way as others, he can still meet someone halfway, and hope that they can meet him halfway in return.
However, nothing is ever that easy, it seems. Just because he’s willing to step back and take another’s perspective into account does not mean others will do the same for him.
This more or less encapsulates the rest of the song from his perspective. He learns to stop challenging that which doesn’t want to be challenged, attempts to follow what is expected of him, even if what is expected of him is a perfection that he is unsure can even be achieved. He has to compromise some of these details and nuances so that the world can still run on its bizarre rules, for Thomas’ sake, and this results in him having to step away from his goals to make way for the others’ instead, or even to be pushed away when his insistence to the contrary isn’t appreciated, like we saw in the episode Moving On Pt 1: Exploring Nostalgia.
He learned fairly well that day that sometimes emotions took priority over intelligence, and even if Logan didn’t fully comprehend the purpose they served in solving that dilemma, he was attempting to find a proper answer that would be of benefit to Thomas regardless. But what he learned instead was that his efforts were unwanted simply because he was viewing the situation from a very different perspective than the others were.
As such, he began to learn not to question these parameters that the world operates upon. He needs to do what he can Within those parameters to ensure Thomas’ survival and simply hope that he’ll thrive with knowledge (and Logan) as his guide.
And that is exactly why the next song is Fitter Happier by Radiohead. The whole song is a monotonous text-to-speech vocalization of varying guidelines one may expect for someone to appear as and/or be human. As the list goes on, the more inhuman the stipulations become, betraying the real purpose behind the list, that this is someone attempting to appear perfectly human while misunderstanding what that means entirely.
Again, Logan was never given a guide on how to do his job, so he had to just make it up as he went along and attempt to do it perfectly without any help or reassurance. From Logan’s perspective, he knows his goal is to make sure Thomas survives to live his happy life, but his expertise in helping Thomas achieve this relies on knowledge and facts, not emotions or empathy. This results in Logan’s attempts coming off as unempathetic, cold, and strict, not to mention completely missing the point of living.
But because he is doing this solo, and because he has awareness of the consequences of failure, he is aiming for perfection and doing his best with what resources he does have – which happens to be his own intelligence and what he can learn through research. Unfortunately, when it comes to life and living, Logan’s limited only to the facts, and his primary focus is Thomas’ survival, nothing more.
[lyrics:
Not drinking too much
Regular exercise at the gym, three days a week
Getting on better with your associate employee contemporaries
At ease
Eating well, no more microwave dinners and saturated fats
A patient, better driver]
This is why some of the lyrics list guidelines such as “regular exercise at the gym” or “eating well, no more microwave dinners and saturated fats.” These are the types of recommendations you would hear from a doctor or nutritionist, examples of efforts that may result in longer life. If someone only cared about extending their life or living healthily, these would be excellent suggestions. But when they are devoid of any emotion, removed from relationships with family and friends, absent of aspirations and goals for someone to enjoy said life, the suggestions instead become robotic and inhuman. Yes, you can live longer by following these steps, but you may not enjoy the extra time you are given to do so if you only follow these suggestions and nothing more.
This is something that was discussed during the Why Do We Get Out of Bed in the Morning? episode, where Logan asserts that creating a balance of daily tasks to maintain his wellbeing will allow Thomas to live a long life. Roman argues that if Thomas spends all his time taking care of himself, it doesn’t give him enough time to pursue his dreams and he insists that he must instead take risks and give priority to his aspirations. In the end, Thomas found his motivation in a balance of both of these recommendations, that he should maintain his health while also taking the chance to achieve his goals.
While a human genuinely needs that balance, to have both sides of this argument included to find true motivation to keep going, these individual sides within Thomas are always likely to see their own mindset and opinion on the matter as the priority, as the “right” way to do things. This is exemplified by Patton’s addition during the end credits scene, where he offers his opinion on the topic about having the opportunity to add positivity to the world. His belief is only an addition to the discussion and wouldn’t detract from Logan and Roman’s suggestions, but it shows that each of Thomas’ sides have their own views on what the real answer is meant to be and that they do not agree on this notion, even if they do see eye-to-eye at times or are willing to work together for Thomas’ sake.
This song is likely meant to remind us of that episode specifically, and what Logan’s opinions on the matter were at that time, indicating his goal is for Thomas to maintain a balanced and healthy lifestyle so that he has the ability to survive and live a long life. It shows us that without the others, there is a lack of balance, but it also shows that Logan is striving for perfection, with special regard to Thomas’ needs, not necessarily his wants or desires. After all, that’s Roman’s department, right?
And this is a big factor in why the sides don’t often get along with each other. They each have their own idea of what is actually best for Thomas, and when it comes to Logan, he has an easier time arguing his points because he has all the data to back him up. This doesn’t keep the others from fighting against him, nor does it keep Thomas from taking the others’ side anyway on many occasions, but it’s still something he can rely on when everyone else is against him.
But even if he cares about Thomas’ survival most, is what he’s proposing truly the “right” way to go about it?
If he learned anything from Why Do We Get Out of Bed in the Morning?, the ending of this song may indicate he recognizes that Thomas may well live a long life with his suggestions, but would not necessarily be happy in that life, so perhaps perfection isn’t the right goal to have in mind.
Happiness, however, can be very subjective. For instance, happiness to Logan would likely involve the satisfaction of a job well done, or the opportunity to learn something new, so what would life for Thomas be if he couldn’t have that?
This is what leads us into the next song, Medicine by STRFKR, which continues the thoughts on perfectionism and the problems that arise from it. Perhaps due to the events associated with the last song, Logan has come to realize that the goal of being perfect is either truly unattainable or, as this song seems to suggest, prevents the desire to continue learning once reached. Logan, of course, would not want Thomas to have peaked when it comes to obtaining knowledge, as there will always be something you don’t know, there will always be something new to learn. If perfection removes a desire to know more, he wouldn’t be able to encourage Thomas to learn anything new, even something for his survival. As such, his goal of perfection is flawed.
However, this now completely conflicts with his earlier notions about his own aspirations of perfection, as he must be knowledgeable and helpful for Thomas, to provide him with what he needs without flaw, without failure. He must be perfect, but perfection is not possible. He must be perfect, but perfection begets disinterest and prevents further learning. So, perfection should not be his goal because it will be of overall detriment to Thomas.
His new goal needs to be something else, but he must still maintain something as close to perfection as possible, because Thomas’ perception of him cannot be altered. Thomas will still expect perfection of him, but he can never truly attain it because it’s both impossible and would ultimately remove his purpose to Thomas as Logic. Such a feat is even more difficult to achieve than perfection, so he’s very much stuck at this point and will need to figure out a new solution to this complicated problem.
[lyrics:
Sorry
So helpless
So help you
Any way you like]
When in doubt, Logan knows he can turn to one thing: Thomas’ preference on the matter. If Logan can’t decide on the best course of action, he will instead choose whatever it is that Thomas wants, as that is how he may obtain his happiness even when working with a less-than-perfect Logic.
After all, if perfection was not the true goal, then perhaps it was meant to be whatever Thomas wanted instead. Logan didn’t need to reach perfection, he just needed to reach Thomas’ expectations. The goalpost had moved, but it was still in sight, and now he’d just have to create a new strategy in order to find success, meaning it was time for some experimentation to his approach.
[lyrics:
(spoken behind music)
The following of them does not depend on believing in anything, in obeying anything, or on doing any specific rituals
Although rituals are included for certain purposes because it is a purely experimental approach to life]
Between the events of Why Do We Get Out of Bed in the Morning? and Learning New Things About Ourselves was a fun little promo episode known as Crofter's: The Musical, and while it may not seem all that relevant in the grand scheme of things, it’s important to remember the focus of the episode relied on Logan’s extraordinary adoration of Crofter's jam.
Given his love for the product, he was ecstatic at his opportunity to be recognized through that which he admired – by being featured on a specialized version of the product itself. It’s a high honor, it’s respectable, it’s cherished. This is a great moment for Logan, seeing a lot of his efforts come to fruition in an interesting and unique way.
However, it is soured by Roman’s bruised ego, as he prefers his spotlight and sees this one moment as Logan being viewed more favorably than him overall, and then it is further ruined by the mention of Logan’s wordplay and puns throughout the episode as him acting unusual, notably unserious. Logan becomes rather concerned during the end credits scene as the others point this out about him, and he realizes that he needs to maintain the status quo after all.
His experimentation in finding a balance, of what was acceptable and what was not, resulted in him understanding that he could not engage in sillier interests publicly so as not to alter the others’ perception of him and his purpose to Thomas or tarnish his reputation as a practical, reliable, knowledgeable side. He must continue to keep emotions removed from his position as Logic, even with perfection off the table as a motivating factor.
Now, before we move on to the next song, I want to re-establish whereabout in the timeline of the series we are by this point.
We had the early origins near the start with The Elements song and White and Nerdy, which likely took place somewhere within the first couple episodes that featured Logan. We dipped into Algorhythm, which likely took place around the time the actual plot and deeper characterization began appearing in the show, somewhere between The Mind vs The Heart and Moving On Pt 1 & 2. Then, Fitter Happier seems to strike some similar chords as the episode Why Do We Get Out of Bed in the Morning? from Logan’s perspective alone, meaning we’re fairly far into the series already. Medicine is somewhere around Crofters: The Musical, which means we are about to get to Learning New Things About Ourselves.
That was an episode that definitely served as a big turning point for Logan and how he readdressed his role as Thomas’ Logic and perceived how he was meant to fulfill his position.
This is also the point in the playlist where things seem to take a much darker and negative turn.
For now, we move on to the next song, which is The Watchtower by The Dø.
Now, @intrulogical has a great analysis of the meaning that may be associated with this song from Logan’s perspective, that Logan may overthink and prefer to hide away from others out of shame when he doesn’t perform adequately, that he recognizes his mistakes and has, on multiple occasions, offered to leave the discussion in order to benefit the others and Thomas. He has taken to suggesting his removal from the situation when he doesn’t seem to have the solution they need or when he has become emotional in times where he shouldn’t be, meaning that he has come to realize it may be a better option for him to leave, rather than stay and potentially make the situation worse.
We already know that he has come to understand perfection is not possible but must still maintain something akin to it, feeling shame when mistakes are inevitable. We know he experimented with his approach to no avail, where he learned he must remain emotionless and cold to be successful. The amount of stress from trying to meet expectations, maintain restrictions, and adapt himself for the others’ benefit is beginning to take its toll on him.
The Watchtower is a song that seems to suggest Logan’s methods are what make him a true outlier among the group, but the lyrics literally start out with “I’m breaking, I need another start” which would mean this is a reaction to his stressful situation, not an action Logan chose in advance.
But he is still prepared when reacting like this. He has weighed the options; he has taken past experiences into account. He has more knowledge now on how to be Thomas’ Logic in a way that fits Thomas’ expectations, and he is no longer blindly attempting to do his best without failure and is instead using what failures he’s already had to recontextualize his understanding and guide his next actions.
But he still needs to appear as flawless as he possibly can, for Thomas and the others, so that he still embodies his role as Logic, so that he can still be relied on and trusted to do his job. While he recognizes perfection is not possible, he will still get as close to it as he can.
While stress may be a factor, this may explain some of the true motivation behind his desire to hide away in these moments, or at least his belief that it would be easier to solve these dilemmas from farther away.
[lyrics:
From the watchtower
Where we can see things coming
Good or bad, at least we see things coming
From the watchtower
Where we can read the future
Whatever it says, at least we know what’s up]
Within these lyrics, we can see that this is a very divorced perspective to have, as though Logan prefers to solve issues from a distance, removed from the situation itself and able only to view it, not directly interact with the parties involved.
Using his influence on Thomas to solve the issue without being present in Moving On Pt 2 after he abruptly left in Moving On Pt 1, Logan has shown that he can be successful when he isn’t there to be talked over and insulted, be overwhelmed by everyone’s emotions and concerns, or have his own uncontrolled emotional outbursts. He can stay unbiased, practical, and clear-headed from a distance and achieve the best results.
This explains why he attempted to leave after his outburst in the episode Learning New Things About Ourselves, because he had seen prior success in doing so.
However, it’s clear that there are some consequences to this approach.
[lyrics:
I don’t mind
if I’m impopular
I’m thinking
And no one in particular]
Another repeated notion throughout the series that Logan is now well aware of is that he is not very well liked. While this seems to stem from a combination of the expectations put on him and his stricter handling of the others’ more outlandish ideas, at this point, and the lyrics suggest he tries to make it seem as though it doesn’t bother him. But we know otherwise, because Logan does continue to attempt to garner favor from Thomas, the other sides, and the audience. It’s why he picked up the slang word flashcards, and it’s partly why he tries to use more relatable metaphors and analogies to explain complicated subjects. He does want to be liked, respected, and Heard, even if he claims otherwise.
His attempts to remove himself from the group to benefit Thomas and perform his duties from afar only seem to add to this dislike that’s been building for him. His absence prevents him from building and maintaining any relationship with the other sides (not that he was making much progress with that around that time in the series regardless). When he has his outburst in Learning New Things About Ourselves and tries to then leave the discussion entirely, he is quickly stopped by Patton who insists he stay instead. He would have preferred to leave, knowing he was more beneficial to Thomas if he was unemotional. Unfortunately, because he stays, he is unable to resolve the issue for Thomas like he had before, and instead spent the rest of the episode uncomfortable and unable to relate to the emotional concepts that were applied.
He comes away from that situation recognizing his own misunderstanding of the others’ actions in their attempts to help Thomas, but there is no solution found, only a slight improvement to Thomas’ mood about the discussion on the whole. And on Logan’s part, he was also left without a solution, resulting in him adding this as another failure to his list and believing that he will need to do more to better accommodate the other sides and Thomas’ emotions in order to achieve the best results.
[lyrics:
I’m breaking
I need another start
Far away from the city lights]
This follows the lyrics at the end of the song, repeating exactly how it started. Nothing was resolved here; Logan only sees his mistake and feels ashamed for it. He still wants to solve Thomas’ issues from a distance, but now he’s more aware of the emotional stakes that he hadn’t been implementing in his solutions before this point.
He has decided that he’ll do better, but he isn’t sure how to do that exactly, and he’s still hurting, but that’s left unacknowledged.
And Logan only comes to realize that the others are pulling away after this, as we see in Selfishness vs Selflessness, where he wasn't included in the courtroom scenario and pushed to the back and out of the way after the one moment where he could be helpful.
Logan can see that this is what Thomas and the others want for him, to stay out of their way, because he apparently can't understand them in the way they prefer. Never mind the fact that the inverse is true, too.
And that leads us to the next song, The Breach by clipping.. At a minimum, this song is very concerning, but also a helpful indicator as to what seems to be happening and possibly even why.
[lyrics:
Generally operating normally
A small anomaly has become evident
And probably should be noted]
In simple terms, something has changed, and likely not for the better. Something is different.
If we’re aware of the timeline of the story, this is sometime after the episode Learning New Things About Ourselves, which means it's likely about Remus’ arrival in Dealing with Intrusive Thoughts and how it signifies Thomas’ declining mental health.
Something specific that should be mentioned about this song first is its lyrics. They are read as a computer observing a situation, assessing the variables, and stating plainly the solution to be enacted by others. This is similar to what Logan was able to successfully do in Moving On Pt 2 and would have preferred to use as his approach in Learning New Things About Ourselves, which is to stay distant from the situation itself but address everything calmly and without emotional disruption.
However, the lyrics are also given in very quick succession, indicating a hastiness to the necessity of these instructions. This could mean that if the subject does not act swiftly, the results may not be optimal.
[lyrics:
First: the recommended course of action should be to
Administer a sedative to all the cargo via ventilation
The ship is fully capable of automating this
But requires an approval code from the administration]
As he learned in Learning New Things About Ourselves, Logan has to better accommodate the other sides’ emotions (as well as Thomas’) and their concerns on the matter in order to competently resolve the issue, so appearing and calmly explaining what needs to be done is the approach he chose. But that didn’t work out at first due to the same issues he’s been having this whole time, which is everyone’s reluctance to listen to him as well as their insistence on keeping him out of the group, especially while they are all so emotional themselves in that moment.
In order for this to work, he would need to convince Thomas and the others to trust him and to listen to what he had to say. In reality, Logan can only give them the advice they need here, he can’t actually fix it for them, hence the lyric, “but requires an approval code from the administration.” They can’t logic their way out of this but using logic can guide them away from the overly emotional response and provide the instructions needed to find that solution.
Logan applies the instructions from the song – administer a sedative? Calm the others back down. The importance of alacrity? Speak with confidence, stay positive. Send security immediately? Logan took charge of the situation at hand because no one else was handling it.
Logan keeps himself level-headed, refuses to show any emotional response (not to Remus, not to Virgil, not to Patton), and displays his worth as Thomas’ Logic to the best of his ability. And it works fairly well, as he manages to calm the other sides and Thomas down while also warding Remus off and tiring him out. It took longer than he probably expected, but he accomplished what he had set out to do.
Despite the end of the song sounding like an electric-powered warzone, the episode Dealing with Intrusive Thoughts had ended on a positive note for Logan, as he was praised by Thomas for being cool, with how he handled the situation so smoothly and didn’t let anything affect him. This marked a success for Logan, and he now knows that addressing situations with swift action, getting right to the point while also allowing for the other parties to vent their feelings on the matter, and staying composed and unemotional himself while addressing the problem was the best course of action, at least while Thomas was in this type of mindset and far more stressed than he had been in the past.
Perhaps he really has finally figured out how to be a proper Logic for Thomas after all.
Unfortunately, whatever elation he had in that episode doesn’t last long, as our next song, Letter C by Zach Sherwin, is all about being embarrassed by others and reflecting back on the situation later to think of something cleverer that could have been said in response.
As this is something he has dealt with a handful of times in the series as a whole, Logan wishing he could have thought up a better comeback to the others’ insults in the moment is not unheard of, and it could easily be inferred that he’s done this type of reflection on his own many times.
[lyrics:
And now it’ll linger forever but I’ve been stewin’ over
What I’d say to him if I could do it over]
The song lyrics mention how this situation lingers, that it’s something Logan thinks about repeatedly, even though we know there have been multiple moments like this. He remembers it for a long time, he thinks back on each one, wishing he could have done something more when he had the chance.
This is a moment more steeped in pride than obligation to his duty as Logic, however. While his desire to be viewed as clever and informed comes from the expectations of him as Thomas’ Logic, his desire to be respected as Better than the other sides in this particular way does not.
As was told in Learning New Things About Ourselves, it seems Logan habitually criticizes the others and becomes more standoffish in response to stress and a lack of order, as though the lack of control in a situation supercedes his judgement on how to behave among the other sides. In attempt to regain that control, he tries to place himself and his importance in the matter above others, which only causes additional problems.
In reality, all the sides should be balancing each other out, but the system currently in place is not balanced at all, and we often see sides like Logan further down the ranks than others on a regular basis. This can explain his desire to level it back out or rise even higher, to prove that he should be listened to and respected, and he could easily convince himself that his reason for this desire stems from his necessity to Thomas as opposed to any correlated feelings of shame or pride.
Thomas needs his logical side, someone to act as his voice of reason when the others are too emotional and rowdy, someone to provide unbiased facts instead of the others’ leaning opinions, someone that he can trust to always be in his corner and do what’s best for him every time. While the others turn Thomas’ gaze to the future or the past, Logan does everything he can to keep him steady in the present, so long as Thomas actually listens.
Logan had spent a lot of time to change and be better for Thomas, to meet and exceed his expectations. He adapted his thoughts, his methods, his temperament, all to best accommodate Thomas and his needs. So, it makes a lot of sense that he’d have a lot left unsaid after everything he has tolerated throughout the series. He wishes he could have the respect he believes he’s owed instead of continuing to endure insults left and right, but for now, he can only make up such scenarios where he comes out on top in his mind.
A moment of respite comes with what's next on the playlist, Galaxy Song from Monty Python (as sung by Stephen Hawking), which has a delightful message of enjoying the wonder found in our universe. There’s already so much to learn on our planet, but there’s endlessly more available to us out in the rest of the ever-expanding universe.
The song jabs at the inevitable stupidity of some people but chooses not to complain or find a way to be better than them. Instead, one should choose to refocus on something positive, to distract themself rather than to dwell on it. It’s better to think about something you enjoy rather than something you hate, right? And this makes it seem as though it’s a response to the last song in this way, that Logan has dealt with another insult or stressful situation and was unable to respond in the way he preferred, so now he’s choosing to ignore it and think about something fascinating to pass his time in a healthier and nonjudgmental way. Ignoring the situation is no better than stewing over it, but at least this way he gets to think about something he appreciates.
Neither of these songs seem to have a particular place in the overall storyline from the series, by the way. They seem to embody multiple similar occurrences over the course of the show, indicating that this has happened before, continues to happen, and will likely keep happening in the future. However, it’s not a great situation to repeatedly have to handle, especially if Logan is still as stressed as we know he is, and if he simply keeps permitting it to happen without speaking up properly about why it bothers him, then it will never change.
The next song, Streaks, is itself a very interesting song that embodies a lot of nostalgia, both good and bad, that Logan holds about his past with Thomas – teaching him, helping him study, guiding his path through school and college. Sadly, we know that Thomas proceeded to let his Chemical Engineering degree collect dust so he could instead pursue an acting career and become a successful Youtuber as an adult. To Logan, these more creative interests overtook his studies and Thomas’ potential for a stable and well-earning career.
[lyrics:
All these years of filling out papers
Building a future
Keeping your head down
Tryin’ to keep a head on your shoulders
Keep it creative
Make it your own somehow]
From these lyrics, we can see the inclusion of creativity as a secondary to getting the work done, showing something that was discussed in Why Do We Get Out of Bed in the Morning? as Logan proposed that Thomas maintaining a healthy lifestyle and doing his work tasks needed to take priority over creative pursuits and aspirations. This could imply that, during Thomas’ school years, Logan may have had a lot more say in what Thomas should do to be successful in his classes and to get into college, and that he didn’t turn away Thomas’ interest in creativity but preferred it to not take priority over his schoolwork.
But, as we know, what may have started as a creative outlet soon grew into a genuine interest and then a full acting career that negated the entire point of all of Logan’s hard work. If Thomas had wanted to be an actor or a Youtuber all along, why did Logan put so much effort into getting Thomas to study, to do his work, to get into college, to earn his degree? He couldn’t even be proud of such an accomplishment because it served no purpose to Thomas as an adult. It didn’t signify anything except wasted effort on Logan’s part.
[lyrics:
Throw ‘em in the water
Let ‘em sink or float
Give ‘em what they need to move on
Then you let them go]
This sounds like something you’d hear from a parent watching their child grow up and move onto adulthood and pursue their own life away from the family home.
Logan had done his part, he taught and guided Thomas in everything he needed to know in order to achieve success. And when it came time for Thomas to follow through, he proceeded to veer off to a completely different path and Logan could do nothing but watch it happen. Thankfully, though, Thomas Had found success, just not in a way that Logan had expected.
He hadn’t even prepared for this type of eventuality – it was unknown territory.
But Logan could adapt, he could make this work. He’d shown he was able to overcome past obstacles, and he found ways to implement research and education into Thomas’ creative career, giving him an opportunity to still learn something new. He just needed to stay relevant and keep Thomas’ interest and continue encouraging him to learn. However, that proved much harder to do when Thomas refused to listen to him.
Thomas had grown to require much less from Logan over time, having moved away from the days of tests and studying to bigger and better adventures. It left Logan with very little to do for Thomas but maybe to appear when he had no one else to turn to.
It was as though it wasn’t just Thomas’ degree that he’d placed up on a shelf to collect dust, but Logan, too. To stay tucked away, unused for years, only ever coming in handy for very specific situations and nothing but an embarrassment or eyesore in others. What use could he possibly have anymore? Why should Thomas be proud of him when he didn’t need him for anything?
Now, if you’ve noticed, these past few songs seem to lean more heavily toward emotions than the ones that came before them. Letter C was about embarrassment and feeling shame over his mistakes and how he’s been treated, trying to use his pride to combat it. The Galaxy Song was about relief and ignoring the situation to escape to wonder and curiosity as a coping mechanism. And now Streaks is about nostalgia, the wistful longing for what once was, and the painful memory of what came of that despite all his effort.
He’s embarrassed, he’s running away from the problem, he’s sad.
You see, Logan is trying to find a solution here by using something similar to what the other sides might try when they are the ones struggling. He’s copying their methods. Roman leans on his pride to sooth his ego and to make himself feel better, Virgil runs away and hides from his issues, and Patton delves into nostalgia and strengthens his sadness, feeling it deeply.
This implies that Logan doesn’t quite understand how to handle whatever it is that he is feeling, but he's paid close enough attention to what the others have done, even if he doesn't understand why or how it's meant to help. Now that he's searching for some sort of solution on his own, he experiments, tries something new based upon his research and facts, rather than asking for any kind of help.
Remember, he can’t tarnish his image as a near-flawless Logic that is supposed to already know everything, who they’re supposed to be able to rely on. So, he will have to solve this one on his own, too, by just trying things out until he eventually gets it right. That is what the experimental approach is for, after all.
But these emotional songs are only the beginning, and they’re about to take a stark turn.
Next is What I Do For U by Ra Ra Riot, which is a song absolutely steeped in frustration and anger. In so few lyrics, it says a lot of what Logan has been mulling over lately in the storyline. We know his frustration over everything has been building more and more.
[lyrics:
I want you to survive
Anything you need]
This song gets right to the point with its opening lyrics and even the chorus. It tells us that Logan’s efforts, all these recommendations to Thomas, all the schedules and planning, all this encouragement for him to eat healthy and take better care of himself, all his guidance and advice and helpfulness serve one purpose and one purpose alone – to help Thomas survive.
[lyrics:
What I do for you
I do for you]
Everything he does, he does for Thomas.
But does Thomas recognize that? It doesn’t seem so.
And this, of course, bothers Logan. It doesn’t just bother him, it angers him. Logan has put in so much of his time and energy over the years into doing everything perfectly for Thomas, with no help in doing so this entire time. Prioritizing Thomas’ wellness over everything, listening to the others even when he couldn’t understand their emotions, remaining level-headed and calm around their puns and insults and threats, hiding his interests and holding back his words so they wouldn’t think less of him. He has worked against obstacles and odds of which the others aren’t even aware. He has bent and molded and reshaped himself in so many ways to better accommodate everyone else, to match their expectations, to make them happy. He did it for them.
But what does he get in return? Mocked, disrespected, and ignored.
And, worst of all, Logan knows just how important he is to Thomas! Well, in function, at least. Thomas would not survive without Logic, and yet Logan seems to be the only one to recognize that fact. He can’t even be respected for his function, his purpose in keeping Thomas alive and well. It’s one thing if they didn't like Logan, but wasn’t the fact that he was needed for Thomas’ survival enough for them to tolerate him, at the very least?
[lyrics:
I’m your only hope
And I’m your savior too
Every single test
You’ve been ever carried through]
On top of that, and as we saw in the Working Through Intrusive Thoughts asides episode, Logan has been attempting to solve Thomas’ issues by himself, relying on his knowledge and experience with Thomas to determine the best approach in every situation without consulting the other sides at all. At some point in the series, Logan came to believe that he was the only one who actually cared about what Thomas needed, that he was somehow the only one actually keeping Thomas alive. He believes he is the only side who’s clear-headed enough to handle Thomas’ problems, the only one who can act as a voice of reason, the only one who offers practical and useful solutions.
This is, unfortunately for Logan, not actually true, but it makes sense why he would come to this conclusion, considering that every side disagrees on what they think is best for Thomas. The other sides tend to focus on their own self-interests and goals as guiding factors while Logan is the one who deals the most in absolutes and factual information. Something that Roman suggests can be complete fantasy, impossible to ever achieve. Something that Patton suggests can be unreasonable to follow through on or would only hurt Thomas in the long run. Something that Virgil suggests can be rooted in negativity and self-doubt, bringing Thomas’ mental health down as a result. Janus’ suggestions can be incredibly biased and not always socially acceptable. Remus’ suggestions…well. They can be both uncomfortable as well as impractical.
But Logan never gives impossible, impractical, or biased recommendations to Thomas. He uses research to find what would work best for the situation, then applies it to his knowledge and experience with Thomas to determine what would suit him most, and then suggests it outright, explaining in simple terms a way in which it can be implemented.
He does all the hard work for Thomas, so that all he’ll have to do is simply follow through. Each time, he does this with Thomas and his needs at the forefront of every offer.
Yes, he can go overboard a bit, just like all the other sides, but he thinks that just means he needs to be flexible and allow for some exceptions to balance things out, allow Thomas to be happy in his survival. After all, he has learned so much over the course of this series, hasn’t he?
He learned to compromise with those he disagreed with in The Mind vs The Heart. He learned that too much or too little of any side’s influence could bring detriment to Thomas in Accepting Anxiety Pt 1 & 2. He learned that emotions could override intelligence and present a major problem in Moving On Pt 1 & 2. He learned that finding some balance between his suggestions and the others’ was optimal in Why Do We Get Out of Bed in the Morning?. He learned that such balance could not be applied to himself as he had to maintain his role as an unemotional Logic and stay serious in Crofters: The Musical. He learned that he needed to expand his understanding of why Thomas preferred emotions over intelligence despite the need for both in Learning New Things About Ourselves. He learned that the other sides and Thomas could apparently solve their issues without his presence in Selfishness vs Selflessness. He learned that his method of taking action and solving the issue for them when they were too emotional to do it themselves was more efficient in Dealing with Intrusive Thoughts. He learned that, despite his willingness to help, the others much preferred to solve issues without him in Putting Others First. He learned that his method of efficiency in solving Thomas’ problems on his behalf was not particularly welcome and would not earn him the respect he desired in Working Through Intrusive Thoughts. He learned that despite continued efforts, the others still won’t listen to him or to each other in Have I Grown? – Five Years Later. He learned that, as the logical side, the others would always assume he was against them and their ideas in Can Plushies Improve Our Health?
He's learned…a lot. Overall, he has concluded that he is needed but not wanted, that he has the answers but not the perfect method to apply them, that he apparently should allow for emotions to guide the other sides and Thomas while keeping himself cut off from them entirely, and that he should be implementing logic only where it is most required or when specifically requested.
Logan has found what he believes should work best for Thomas, but has also realized that Thomas is refusing to listen. Thomas doesn’t want to do things that benefit him, he doesn’t want to do things that will make him feel better, and Logan certainly can’t force him to do them, either, even when he’s sure it will help. Are the suggestions the problem or is it because it’s Logan suggesting them that keeps him from doing it?
Logan is very determined to perform his function, to keep Thomas alive and well. He wants to empower him to overcome the mental health difficulties he’s been facing lately, and to allow him to take care of his needs, but Logan’s doing all of this by himself because he doesn’t believe anyone else is capable nor wants to do what has to be done.
The other sides prefer to only dabble in the fun parts, the emotional parts, and leave the complicated and messy stuff to Logan alone. And if Thomas refuses to listen just because it’s Logan telling him the answer, then it puts everything at a standstill, including Logan’s purpose for even being there.
It frustrates him. He feels like he’s been put in this unwinnable position, always made out to be the bad guy when all he does is care about Thomas’ survival and wellbeing.
[lyrics:
I couldn’t ever give up on you
But don’t thank me]
He, quite literally, could never stop doing his job as Thomas’ Logic. He could never stop doing his part, keeping everything afloat, making sure that Thomas can still function, even when Thomas’ mental health is fighting against him at every turn.
Throughout all of Working Through Intrusive Thoughts, we see Logan pause or postpone his plans so he can redirect Thomas and attempt to salvage his mental health, give him time to refocus. He knows it’s a priority right now. He has learned time and time again that emotions are more important than logic in this world, even if logic is the reason he knows and can implement ways to help Thomas to calm down and manage those emotions.
Logan knows by now that he can only help when he’s asked to or when he’s needed most, but after every obstacle and barrier he’s managed to push through, after being the only one who cares enough to do anything to help, he’s left tired and frustrated. He just wants Thomas to listen, for once, for his own benefit, so that he might understand what it is Logan hasn’t been able to say because he’s been pushed down and away for so long.
He shouts out “Stop ignoring me!” to Remus, but Remus knows it’s not really him that he wants to yell that at, and he’s right. Logan’s frustration is mostly with Thomas, and this song shows that very clearly.
He won’t give up on him because he physically can’t, but maybe he has stopped caring about why that is. Maybe he will just do his job, meet the bare minimum of expectations, and not care about the rest anymore.
When Thomas asks him “What’s next?” in the Have I Grown? anniversary video, Logan simply responds, “You tell me.”
He knows his opinion doesn’t matter. He knows no one listens to what he has to say. His suggestions are ignored, his advice is unwanted. Why should he bother giving a damn any longer if Thomas and the other sides clearly don’t give a damn about him?
And that’s where we get to the next song, Erase Me by Ben Folds Five.
This is a very pivotal moment, and it’s notable that it seems to be something that will happen in the near future of the series, because, as of the last song, we have already surpassed all currently released (and relevant) episodes of Sanders Sides in this timeline of the playlist. Erase Me will be related to whatever happens next in Logan’s arc, which also means everything from here on out is more of a prediction than an analysis.
[lyrics:
What was our home?
Paper, not stone
A lean-to, at most]
There’s a lot going on from the very start of this song. First, Logan’s perspective of the mindscape, the “family” of Thomas’ sides, and the system they’ve been using to keep Thomas going was clearly built on shaky foundation, paper-thin and ready to fall at a moment’s notice. Patton holding back negative emotions and then pushing Thomas to prioritize others over himself, Roman pushing himself too far and letting passion fuel Thomas’ every move in desperate attempts to look like the good guy, Virgil’s persistent presence alone despite his efforts to do better only to turn around and assume the worst of Thomas’ opinion of him, Janus’ meddling and his attempts to get Thomas to understand his issues without saying anything outright and only confusing him more and making him feel more guilty, and Remus being abrasive and outlandish to grab Thomas’ attention at every chance he has even if it comes at a detriment to Thomas’ health. It really was only a matter of time before things fell through.
Thomas struggling the way he has been was bound to happen because he wasn’t taking care of himself, he would only listen to some sides far more than others and wasn’t listening to his voice of reason much at all. This created an unfair and, at times, toxic environment for the sides to live and work in. All of them constantly trying to grab Thomas’ attention was what kept them from paying attention to Thomas and what he needed instead.
This became increasingly evident after Janus showed up in the narrative, and has been explicitly clear since Remus’ arrival, too. Thomas is not doing well mentally, and his sides are all stressed out which is making it worse. Logan can recognize all this from a detached, outside perspective despite also being just as affected. He’s been trying to keep things together for Thomas, working on his own to fulfill every role being left undone while the others are too upset to handle things as they typically could, but unfortunately, Logan’s finding it hard to care anymore.
[lyrics:
And when you pulled
Your half away
Gravity won
Like it always does
Did I weigh a ton?
Would it be easier
To just delete
Our pages and the plans we made?]
So, this song is sung in a very accusatory tone, poking at a specific person (mainly because it is originally a break-up song). The speaker is very upset and angry with the other party, and they are relaying their observations and asking why, asking if it was their fault this happened.
“And when you pulled your half away” implies that Logan was not the instigator of whatever preceded this incident, but as we saw with the last song, Logan holds some beliefs about Thomas and the other sides that are not fully true but are not exactly contested either. He could easily see their insistence in pushing him away, ignoring him, and refusing to listen even when Thomas is in desperate need of help as their act of pulling away from him, even if he is the one who has finally let go.
And while I don’t want to get too particular with my predictions, I do believe it’s very possible a last straw for Logan at this juncture may very well involve Thomas’ mental health and what he genuinely needs for survival.
If you’ll remember, Logan now believes he is only truly needed when it is absolutely necessary and there are no other options, or if he is specifically requested to help in some way, so if there is a situation that requires his attention, only for him to show up and be rejected yet again, he may just give up at that point.
And Logan thinks he is the only side genuinely looking out for Thomas, not just for his needs but his wants, as well. Thomas had specifically asked for his help in the Working Through Intrusive Thoughts episode, only for him to take on multiple roles to keep Thomas calm enough to handle himself. And Logan was the only one who bothered to ask Thomas what He wanted in the Can Plushies Improve Our Health? promo video, before even making his argument that everyone else assumed would be in opposition but turned out not to be.
Logan sees himself as that last remaining straw, really. If something is going to finally break him, it will be Thomas and the others. It will be their negligence, their refusal, their rejection of him that finally bends him too far, pushing him to a point where nothing can ever be the same again.
[lyrics:
So what will you do
With no me for you
I know what we said
What if I left
A thing or two?
We know that you don’t seem
To think about what you need
‘Til you reach to find that you’ve—
Erased me]
Like I said, Logan sees himself as the only one holding Thomas together. He believes that, without him, everything would fall apart and turn to chaos, and he’s probably right about most of that.
These lyrics are the speaker predicting what will occur, that the others won’t even notice his absence until they need him for something, and that’s when they’ll realize he’s already gone. This indicates a potential plan to leave, maybe not fully ducking out but certainly not sticking around either. Something that would keep Thomas’ logic functional for use while also allowing Logan a reprieve from him and the other sides, where he would only be used as one would a tool; tucked away in storage until the moment it is needed, then put right back afterward.
Leaving is the key here, though, and it’s something we’ve already seen result in detriment to Thomas back in Accepting Anxiety Pt 1 & 2, and yet, Logan has come to believe that this is a favorable option. Why? Is this to help him feel vindicated, to teach them a lesson?
It's not as though they want him around enough to stop him from leaving anyway.
You know, both the title and chorus of this song portray a very particular message, as “erase me” is not the speaker’s action, because he is not the one erasing himself. Rather, it is a suggestion to the other party so that they can finally be rid of the speaker. The lyrics are also taunting with these words, as if to say that this is what the other party has wanted all along anyway so they should just do it already.
Logan is asking, pleading, for Thomas to let him go because he obviously doesn’t even want him around. Logan doesn’t want to put up with this anymore, and as angry as he is at how he’s been treated, he knows he can’t just give up on Thomas, he’s literally a part of him. This has to be Thomas’ decision, Thomas’ action. Thomas has to be the one to push Logan away, the one to erase him.
Logan isn’t just angry at this point, he’s miserable. He knows he’s unwanted and barely needed, as he serves so little purpose to Thomas in his current career and doesn’t get along with any of the other sides despite everything he has tried to do to correct that. They’ve made it clear they don’t want him around, and they have already proven they can solve issues on their own without his help. He doesn’t need to be there, so why won’t Thomas just let him go?
[lyrics:
Erase me, and you’ll never have to face me
Erase me, Option-Command-Escape me
And if you feel nothing, guess what I wanna be?]
A fun little tidbit of knowledge here, but the Option-Command-Escape function on an Apple computer is its force-quit option, to completely cease a program from running. The program can’t do this itself; the user has to combine those three keys to make it happen. And when they do, the program will have closed and shut down completely. Often this is used when a program isn’t working the way it’s supposed to, when it fails to do its job. By doing this, you put it out of its misery.
Logan isn’t just asking to leave, to only benefit Thomas from afar or only as needed, he is essentially begging for death. He no longer wishes to function at all, because he believes he has no purpose to Thomas or the others. He is pleading for Thomas to let him go, find someone else who could do a better job as his Logic, someone who they’d actually enjoy having around.
For Logan to reach this low of a point, something truly devastating has to have happened to him. I cannot possibly predict what may truly set him off in this way, but given the most recent events in the series, he isn’t all that far from this point already. Likely, it will involve his worth and use to Thomas, and it won’t just be that he was forgotten or tossed aside like in SVS and SVS:R, but that Thomas or the others doing something that will clarify his uselessness out loud, where it can no longer be denied. There will be a divide that leaves him alone on the other end, finally and truly aware that he will never belong here.
Desperation that turns to anger to hide away its shame and misery, Logan won’t just duck out like Virgil had in Accepting Anxiety Pt 1. He would lash out, make sure Thomas and the others knew exactly why he wanted to leave, and begging that they be the ones to cut that connection for him. Maybe he will do something to push the issue, to give them a reason to do it. Perhaps the Orange side will emerge at this point, either to assist him in whatever he’s trying to do or to take over for him or something else entirely.
Regardless of what happens, Logan has now hit a very low point, and everyone knows it.
The next song is Art is Dead by Bo Burnham, which by itself can imply quite a few things.
As if simmering down from the initial blast of heat in the last song, there's still anger and annoyance here, but also a realization.
Something I want you to understand about this song before we relate it to Logan and why it’s included in this playlist is that the speaker is talking about a position, specifically an entertainer, and is saying that what they do is problematic. The speaker is complaining about another party, only to then turn around and include themself within that party. They are not just saying “entertainers are bad and here’s 50 reasons why.” They are saying “entertainers are attention-seekers, and so am I.”
So, when you then put this into perspective with Logan and the message he’s been trying to convey, he is pointing out flaws that he sees in what is likely Roman, as well as Thomas, but he’s also including himself as part of the problem. He recognizes that he, too, seeks attention – from Thomas, from the other sides, from the audience. And he doesn’t feel that it’s a good thing, he sees it as shameful because he knew why it was an issue, and yet he kept doing it anyway.
This seems like a moment of self-reflection, to see that he is not above the others at all, in fact he’s not that different from them when it comes down to what they all want, which is Thomas’ attention. Every single one of them is trying to be heard, but Thomas has only been listening to some of them. And most of them never feel that what they do get is enough, no matter how much it is.
This song shows that Logan knows he wants Thomas’ attention, but also that he doesn’t feel he’s done enough to deserve it. He believes he hasn’t even earned a right to complain like he has. He’s ashamed for how he’s acted because he thought he was supposed to be better than this. He doesn’t deserve the respect he thought he was owed; he doesn’t deserve anything.
With this song, he has somehow managed to dig even lower than his last low point, he’s just sorry for all the trouble he’s caused. Maybe his emotions got out of hand, maybe the Orange side caused problems but it was his fault because he let it happen – who knows? Even if he felt vindicated in the moment, it was clearly fleeting, and now, after the events of what happened, Logan only feels worse.
And then we get to Equation from The Little Prince next on the playlist, and we’re still in that zone of self-reflection, but it’s no longer about how Logan’s just like the others. No, now it’s all about his own flaws, his own failures, and everywhere that he’s fallen short.
Logan has now managed to dig even deeper than his lowest low, folks! It just gets worse and worse! Can you believe it?
[lyrics:
Will I ever know
How white is the snow
Does it matter after all?
Will I ever learn
How to fly like birds]
In this lowest point, Logan can only come up with questions that have been left unasked. Did he hurt Thomas? Did he ruin whatever he had with the other sides? Will he be forever trapped in this world Thomas created for them, with no way to truly explore the real world, to see its full wonder? Will he ever have a chance to do better, to be better, to hope again? Will he ever reach his true potential? Did he ever even have a true potential?
He had attempted and failed to find perfection for so long. He believed it was just a matter of trying, of wanting to meet Thomas’ expectations of him, that if he put his all into it, then he could see it through and be what exactly what Thomas wanted him to be, to be what everyone expected him to be, to be what Logan himself hoped to be.
Hours, days, weeks, years… In the end, it was never truly possible, and yet he had kept foolishly hoping for so long that he could be enough for Thomas. He had called the others’ ideas irrational, when, really, it was him all along with the impossible dreams.
[lyrics:
Are you good as gold?
Are you far from hope?
Are you well alone,
Dad?
Will I be a brave?
Will I be a bright?
Will I be a good grown-up?]
The future was never certain, but now Logan could never be sure of anything. What will become of him? What will become of Thomas? Is it even possible to recover from this, to start over, to get better?
We then move on to the next song, Sunrise from In The Heights. Logan is not doing well, but something he definitely needs more than anything right now is some sort of hope and motivation to keep trying and keep going.
Sunrise appears to be a song meant to involve either Roman or Patton communicating with Logan, but the purpose in its placement on this playlist seems to infer emotion as a motivation to learn, if you break the romantic intent away from the song itself, that is. Anything can motivate one to learn, even love, and Logan must be able to recognize this and understand that emotions and intelligence do not have to have a clear separation and can instead work in tandem. Learning isn’t just about curiosity or survival, it can have very emotional ties, as well.
For so long in the series, Logan has insisted he did not have emotions, even when this was clearly false. He believed that keeping himself removed from emotions would help him succeed in his job as Logic, that the others would be able to rely on him much more if they could trust his knowledge to be unbiased and unmotivated by unpredictable emotions. He assumed that divide between the two was necessary, and that if the two merged or collided, he would be unfit to do his job, that he would not be taken seriously.
However, doing this kept him from understanding and processing his own emotions as well as being unable to empathize with Thomas and the other sides. He only grew to misunderstand and mistrust emotions more and more as time went on, becoming startled and confused at his own outbursts, not aware of why he would feel a certain way or have a certain reaction to a situation, because he refused to let himself experience that emotion, to feel it. His lack of understanding directly resulted from his choice not to engage with emotions at all, despite their importance.
And finding that importance is where this song comes in, because the crucial point Logan had been missing all this time was that emotions can encourage one to learn, inspire one to research. Love can motivate someone to learn a new language, so they can communicate, as we hear in this song. But something like anger can motivate someone to research an important topic so they can fight for what they believe in with facts on their side. Sadness can inspire someone to look into advice and ways to help, not just for oneself but for others, too, employing empathy and logic side by side. Fear can motivate someone to find truth, to create familiarity with routines and schedules, to calm down cognitive distortions to maintain peace of mind.
Logic and emotions do not need to be separated; they can work together very well. In fact, most people use both in tandem every day.
For so long, Logan had set for himself a barrier he could not, would not cross. He knew there was nuance to the world but learned over time that he could not display his own. He resorted to that black-and-white thinking for the others' benefit and then to his own, finding that it was all-or-nothing when it came to Logic or Emotions. He believed one would merely taint the other, so they must be kept apart, even if that left only he alone on the other side, as the only logical side.
Despite the unfairness and discomfort, he didn’t want to challenge what he had come to think was right, what he’d been using as his basis for how he was supposed to act, which is why he refused to learn more about it, to never dare change the perception that he held.
He had given up, letting the world and its arbitrary rules dictate who he was and how he should be…but that was never meant to happen.
Once he realizes where his thoughts had steered him wrong, it will be like a whole new world of opportunities has suddenly opened up to him, giving him so much more to explore and learn. It will give him what he was missing this whole time. It will bridge the gaps he’d been unable to cross.
Logan does serve a purpose, and it's an incredibly important one, but it’s not something he was ever meant to do completely alone like he has been.
And that, of course, is where we get to the next song, One More Time with Feeling by Regina Spektor.
Firstly, this is a song about recovery, which is definitely where Logan would be by now in the story, processing what happened, and attempting to move forward and do better. As many know, recovery is not linear, and it’s certainly not perfect.
But given everything that has happened, it’s not all on Logan to improve himself on his own. Yes, he will need to allow himself to feel emotions so that he can understand them better, and he’ll need to learn ways to implement feelings alongside intelligence when working with the other sides to help Thomas, but the other sides need to do their part here, as well.
They have pushed him away, refused to listen to him for so long, often for petty reasons that blossomed into their eventual negligence. It won’t be easy to fix that level of miscommunication between Logan and the others. It’s not as simple as Logan finally speaking up, or the others promising to do better; it will require a lot of work from both ends before anyone can truly meet in the middle on this.
Logan had spent a lot of time before all this, trying to find ways to meet the others halfway, only to met with nothing in return. He gave up so much of himself, and now resents their choice to only take and never give anything back. Once the others finally reciprocate and show that they do genuinely care about him, only then will Logan have the chance to start this journey, to finally begin to get better.
The lyrics that we hear a few times in this song “this is why we fight” can have multiple connotations, such as an explanation of why the group miscommunicates and argues so much, why they don’t get along. But it can also mean that this is their motivation to keep trying, to fight for what they believe in.
I believe both of these meanings are present in Logan’s perspective of this song.
[lyrics:
Oh, everyone takes turns, now it’s yours to play the part
And they’re sitting all around you, holding copies of your chart
And the misery inside their eyes is synchronized and reflecting into yours]
Earlier on in the song, Logan believes that the others don’t understand his predicament, even if they want to help. They are still separate from him, even if they’ve all had their own issues to overcome, that doesn’t mean they actually comprehend what he’s going through, how it feels, what it means.
He experiences the world so differently from the rest of them. How could they ever possibly understand?
They are pushing him to do something he cannot do well – to open up, to reach out, to feel – and it’s only condescending and antagonistic how they keep insisting that he try again every time he fails.
“This is why we fight” during the chorus is his condemnation of their actions, that he doesn’t think the others can meet him at his level. He is not in a place yet where he can believe they’ll listen to what he’s actually saying, he can’t trust that they’ll bother to explain these unknown things to him in a way he can understand. And this is why they continue to fight, to argue, to not get along, because they aren’t properly communicating, they’re just making the same mistakes again and again.
[lyrics:
You thought by now you’d be so much better than you are
You thought by now they’d see that you had come so far
And the pride inside their eyes would synchronize into a love you’ve never known
So much more than you’ve been shown]
Logan thought he would be better, not just in regard to being the best he can be for Thomas, to succeed as his Logic, to know what to do, and to have the answers, but also in terms of his own recovery. It’s difficult, and some days are worse than others; he makes progress and then he doesn’t, and it’s shameful because he has such high expectations for himself.
He’s so used to aiming for perfection that when failure is consistent like this, it feels wrong to be told it’s actually okay, that it’s normal.
But he wants to prove that Thomas’ efforts and the efforts from the other sides have not gone to waste on him, that he is improving. And yet, he keeps failing anyway. He was supposed to be perfect; he was supposed to be reliable! But now look at him. Even with their help, he’s still messing things up.
He just wants to make them proud, he wants to earn that attention and respect that he couldn’t get before, even if he knows he still doesn’t deserve it. He wants to prove that maybe he can deserve it, though.
“This is why we fight” during the next chorus is his agreement with the others, that this is the motivation to keep trying, to keep going. Someday, he can be better. Someday, he will be respected and trusted and relied upon in the ways that he wants. Someday, they’ll be proud of him.
Until then, the fight is worth it.
This leads directly into In My Mind by Amanda Palmer as the next song, as we see Logan has held very high expectations for himself, which is why failure had hurt so much. But now that things have changed, he may be beginning to challenge these expectations, to expand upon them and understand that he has a chance for something different now.
[lyrics:
Because I will be the picture of discipline
Never minding what state I’m in
And I will be someone I admire]
Part of the issue really did come down to lyrics like “never minding what state I’m in” because Logan never put himself as a priority. This entire time, even at his lowest point, Logan was never the one who was important, not even to himself.
He was okay with this because this was never about him, it was about what Thomas needed or wanted. His willingness to bend and remake himself to benefit the others was surely a sentiment shared by all of them, that this was just what was needed to accomplish his job.
It’s not until Logan finally realizes that this is not the case, that he needs to put himself in some priority, too, that he’ll ever begin to improve and truly get better, able to be himself or enjoy anything he does again.
A big part of recovery is not setting your motivation on someone or something else – you need to get better because you want to be better. You need to believe you deserve to be happy, to get the things you want. Logan can say he’s doing this to benefit Thomas, to build back a relationship with the other sides, to earn back his position and demand respect as Logic, but that will only fail until his motivation is simply that it’s something he wants to do, for him. When attached to others and their expectations, those strings only come with guilt and can end up making his situation worse.
Logan has to do this for himself.
[lyrics:
And it’s funny how I imagined
That I would be that person now
But it does not seem to have happened
Maybe I’ve just forgotten how to see
That I’m not exactly the person that I thought I’d be]
It starts with recognition, the realization that he hasn’t met those expectations he held for himself. There’s still judgement and he still feels guilty about it, wondering how he could have let it get to this point. Maybe he just wasn’t paying attention properly, maybe he should have remembered that he’d already decided long ago about perfection being unattainable and how that was supposed to apply to him, too.
[lyrics:
Not like me now
I’m so busy with everything
That I don’t look at anything
But I’m sure I’ll look when I am older]
He regrets having missed out on the present, not having the chance to experience the wonder of the world that he so admires due to all his efforts towards achieving perfection and doing his best to handle everything by himself. He was so busy trying to do everything so precisely and getting the result he wanted that he hadn’t given himself the opportunity to enjoy anything in all that time.
He could do activities if they were productive, if they served a purpose, but he was a hypocrite, always aware and sharing the wonder of the universe and all that exists within it, amazed by the here and now, yet spending all his time locked in, looking away from the present while trying so hard to maintain it.
How long did he spend, convincing himself that just as soon as he achieves what he set out to do, then he would have time to do that? How long would he have kept going if something hadn’t finally snapped and broken everything, forcing him to confront this?
Would he have missed out? Would he have been somehow worse?
[lyrics:
And it’s funny how I imagined that I could be that person now
But that’s not what I want, but that’s what I wanted
And I’d be giving up somehow, how strange to see
That I don’t wanna be the person that I want to be]
Finally, a breakthrough. While not quite acceptance, Logan is finally starting to see the difference, that he wants things in a different way now than he did before.
He kept trying to strive for perfection in his recovery, but didn’t he recall how badly that had gone last time? He knew perfection wasn’t attainable, but he believed that was the expectation Thomas and the others had for him. He kept trying to get to it, no matter what it cost him, and that’s how he wound up here in the first place.
And now, after everything, things have changed. Thomas is listening, at least more than before. The others do care, and try to make sure he knows it, too. Logan had wanted to get better, to make them proud, to prove that he deserved what they were offering to him, but… that wasn’t even the point of it all.
All this time, he’d thought he still needed to be perfect, that that was what he wanted, but now that he’s finally had a chance to look inside himself, to experience wonder and curiosity again, he has realized that what he really wanted was to be accepted.
He didn’t want to have to change himself so the others would listen, he just wished they would actually want to listen to him, to like him for who he is, to let him be himself without requiring him to change, to only be the best, only what was needed, only Logic.
He wanted to be more than Logic; he wanted to be Logan.
With that, he finally realizes that doesn’t have to focus on perfection for Thomas’ sake and survival. He can focus more on himself more instead, on what he actually wants from the world, what he wants to do, and what he wants to try. He can be what he wants to be – more than Thomas’ Logic.
Having finally realized what it’s all for and being given the time to explore that, we get to the next song, Not Perfect by Tim Minchin.
This is a song that attempts to use facts and knowledge to explain feelings and thoughts, bringing context to situations that Logan had struggled in doing before this point. Finally beginning to understand what it is that’s going on inside, what these feelings are and why they’re there, to have the words he needs to adequately describe it to someone else, it all must be so relieving.
There’s still uncertainty, sure, but it’s a lot less stressful now, knowing there’s a way to talk to the others, to actually communicate what he means. He may still be startled, caught unawares, but he doesn’t have to shove it down and away anymore. He knows how to pause and reflect, let himself experience it, and he knows how to control his own behavior in reaction to it.
It’s far from perfect, and there’s still a lot he’ll need to learn, but he does so enjoy learning, doesn’t he?
[lyrics:
This is my earth and it’s fine
It’s where I spend the vast majority of my time
It’s not perfect, but it’s mine
It’s not perfect…]
Another thing to note about this song is the ownership behind most of the lyrics. “This is my earth” and “it’s not perfect, but it’s mine.” That sense of belonging is something that Logan has always wanted, and to be able to not only express that, finally, but to feel that it is real, that he is no longer just an outside observer but a part of the world as a whole, must be incredible.
He’s finally found his place, and though it was here all along, he no longer feels trapped in a cage or left collecting dust on a shelf. He has his place, he knows he’s a part of something greater, and that he’ll be appreciated for who he is.
This song has a perfect matching bookend, by the way; it’s three songs from the end of the playlist whereas Algoryhthm was three from the start. Both of these songs involve one’s differing view of the world, recognizing not only how it works but their place within it. One deals with that negatively, the other more positively.
In Algorhythm, Logan still had wonder for the expanse of the world but found himself trapped by the parameters being set. It didn’t matter that he knew things didn’t have to run in this way, he had no power to change it. He was given no other choice but to give up and go with the flow. He could only change himself to match it, knowing he was an outsider who didn’t belong but had to make do with his circumstances.
In Not Perfect, however, he still has that differing view of the world, but instead of being the outlier, he’s now able to find comfort in knowing he has a place within this world. There are so many wonders everywhere, all around, in the biggest and smallest of things. Yes, he sees the world differently, but so do others, and that’s amazing! He may feel alone at times, he may feel infinitesimal among the great expanse of the universe, but he is never truly alone. He knows he belongs here. He has those who understand him, and he doesn’t have to change for anyone. The world can accept him for who he is, always.
It's as though whoever curated this playlist knew precisely what they were doing. They cared deeply enough to ensure this story, Logan’s story, was told exactly the way it was meant to be, to describe the highs and lows, to explain the truth behind every note, and to inspire with hope anyone else who may be struggling, as well. This story, this playlist, says to us calmly and clearly that everything is going to be okay. It’s not perfect, but it’ll be okay.
In Human by Tank and the Bangas, we get to hear that acceptance, that love on full display.
Things have finally slowed down now, a song for a moment that comes at a more comfortable and soothing pace. Logan finally has the time to look around and see what he’s been missing while he’s been so busy with everything else.
This is another song that uses facts not only to describe and evoke emotions, but to inspire awe and wonder. Emotion-driven curiosity, channeling all the wonders of the world, of you, as your inspiration and guide to learn more and appreciate the here and now.
[lyrics:
Don’t you ever become complicit
With living life on a shelf]
Logan had gone so long pushing away parts of himself simply because they were flawed, not partaking in his interests because they didn’t fit the mold he so desperately wanted to fill. But now that he’s found his place, he can appreciate his chance to finally be more, to explore and share what he’s learned, knowing he’ll be heard.
Something we’ve seen from Logan since the very beginning is just how deep and wide his wonder goes. He loves the world, the universe, and everything found within it. He holds such fascination for the innumerable amount of living species in the world, for all the technology that’s been created and built, for every concept born of a mind. Logan loves the world so much, and he wishes so much for others to cherish what can be learned from it, as every moment, something new emerges. So many possibilities, so many chances to do more, see more, be more.
Logan was never meant to be someone who was pushed away, kept from the world that he loves so dearly. And now that he finally has the chance to be himself, to be accepted for who he is, we see that he immediately turns to what he loves most: wonder, and the opportunity to share it with others.
Knowledge can do so much for so many, but it’s best purpose is to be shared openly and freely, given to all who will take it. It’s not meant to be inaccessible, locked away, kept elite behind paywalls and tuition fees. It’s a part of what makes the world as amazing as it is, and Logan knows this and wants it to be shared.
[lyrics:
You have to continue to live
There are too many more interesting lessons]
Logan had made it his upmost priority in life to ensure Thomas’ survival, but this was something that eventually led to him burned out, begging for his own life to end instead. This journey, this long arc full of ups and downs, gave Logan the chance to see that his priorities were misaligned. He needed to take care of himself, he needed to give himself significance, because otherwise, he’d be constantly pouring from an empty cup.
He had to choose not only to live but to give himself the chance to do what humans do, to experience life, to enjoy it. Whatever time they have, they will make the most of it, because it can’t just be about survival.
Back in the song Algorhythm, Logan learned that humans do things very differently, that they don’t always act in ways that make sense, that sometimes they don’t prioritize survival despite its importance. In Fitter Happier, his interpretation of what it meant to be human was so disconnected from reality, misunderstanding what it was truly all for. But now, he has been given the chance to experience that broader spectrum; he’s no longer cut off from emotions and the ties they make to every moment in life.
There is so much more you can do with emotions as your guide, as the heartbeat to fuel your curiosity, your will to keep learning.
[lyrics:
And if you never knew
That that was enough to just be
You obviously don’t know
A thing]
This song has marked this moment out clearly for Logan, that he is finally an important and valued part of Thomas, that he belongs here and has a place here with the other sides, within the world, within the show. And it wasn’t perfection and changing himself to suit their needs that got him there. He was able to accept himself and give himself the freedom to explore and discover more, to find his own way to benefit Thomas, to be Logic, without strings, without repression, without solitude.
Being unabashedly himself was enough. He was enough for Thomas.
And then we get to the last song on the playlist, Time Adventure from Adventure Time.
A charming song to complete the set, to bring us back to how happy and smiling Logan had started out at the beginning of it all, though this time there’s a lot more depth to that smile. He knows more now; he’s learned and changed and improved in ways he never knew possible at the start of all this.
[lyrics:
Time is an illusion that helps things make sense
So we’re always living in the present tense
It seems unforgiving when a good thing ends
But you and I will always be back then
You and I will always be back then]
Existentialism with a positive twist, Logan can recognize the world for what it is, for how it works. But there is always that encouragement to remember where we all are, in the here and now.
Logan values the present the most, even if he’s someone we know who relies on the past for experience and the future for motivation. In comparison, Roman values the future and what it can hold, Patton values the past and what it can mean, and Virgil mixes between the past and the future to keep Thomas on a steady path. Logan is one of the only sides, other than perhaps Janus, who values the present moment above all else.
He wants Thomas to see what’s right in front of him instead of ignoring it for what he remembers of the past or what he hopes for the future. It’s okay to want those things, to appreciate them, but disregarding the present only results in missing out on the world around him, on what’s already available to him right now.
Logan sees Thomas’ potential and aspires for him to achieve it, but he can’t keep his mind on faraway goals without doing what he can in the present. Make a plan today that you can enact tomorrow. Brainstorm that story right now so you can write it later. Hug that friend today so you can remember it later when you miss them. There’s always a reason to act in the present, to live your life right here and now.
This ending song shows us that Logan has grown so much, and came to be happy at the end of the story. He’s come to understand himself, the others, Thomas, and the whole world so much better than ever before and is better for it. From this point on, things will surely be different, but now he has everything he needs to face anything that may come his way. He can rely on his knowledge, but also trust that he has his friends at his side, that he has their support. He knows Thomas values him and what he has to say, and that he can tell him when things are tough, when he needs him to listen.
He is heard. He is loved. And he loves in turn, all without having to do anything but be himself.
Something I absolutely adore about these last few songs on the playlist is that even though Logan is doing better now, after everything he’s gone through, he’s not showing this newfound satisfaction and happiness in the ways that you’d expect of most people. He’s doing it his own way, the way he likes doing it, and he’s thriving for it!
He prefers to work alone, having the time to think and contemplate strategies and plans without interruption. He likes reading in a quiet room, exploring fascinating new worlds and concepts all on his own. He likes sharing what he’s learned, and being relied upon for his knowledge, given the opportunity to explain ideas to others in the hopes that it will fascinate them and encourage them to learn more themselves.
He's not changing himself to do what others want of him. He’s not trying to fit some mold, to be okay by anyone else’s standards. He’s just…being Logan. And that’s everything I could ever want for him.
This playlist has involved such an amazing journey for Logan; it’s a story told through something humans will always love to share – music!
It showed us every crucial moment of Logan's arc, from what we've already seen in the show to what we know is bound to come next. It's clear that Logan has so much more to learn, especially from the other sides, who will be able to understand him once they finally try to communicate effectively and work together for Thomas and for themselves. The situation will improve, they will be happy, someday.
Someday, we’ll get to see the real conclusion to this character’s story, and until then, we can hold out hope for a good ending.
#logan sanders#sanders sides analysis#sanders sides#ts logan#logan angst#long post#like extremely long post#this is basically a very long winded way of saying that i hc logan as the biggest brooder to ever brood#so very broody and angsty#also yes i genuinely just write like this naturally and used to always be called a walking thesaurus#if you need clarification on anything i am always glad to extrapolate on my thoughts#especially because there was so much more i wanted to say here but i needed to reel it in haha#orbs thought bubbles#oh one last thing - i transcribed these lyrics myself in this post bc most websites were so incredibly wrong with these
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Hello, I just wanna say that your scene rewrites are amazing. Seeing Stars has got to be one of my favourites.
On the topic of Octavia, I agree that Viv and her team missed an opportunity with Via. To me in the context of the narrative, Octavia can be a tragic character that is screwed over by the writing. It is implied that she takes after Stolas with her love of astronomy as their form of bonding. Yet, she slowly watches her father drift away from them and is probably wondering if they—she even matters to him. You’re just watching a parent that you had a close bond to just leave you behind because they found someone else that captivated their interest. On top of the divorce that is currently going on would leave a child feeling doubtful.
I also just never understood why the writers want to keep having her being mad at her dad, even though they say that Stella has clearly been ruining the family, yet it’s his fault? Half the time the writing seesaws on Stella and Via’s dynamic because the only time she does care is when Stolas is there and…I get that could be counted as gaslighting, but the character lacks subtlety that it’s hard to tell when she’s always yelling. More often she doesn’t even care for her with two episodes implying this.
I just in general feel frustrated with this family because either avenue could be interesting if the writers took it seriously enough but they don’t and instead choose spur of the moment scenes that we have to use as jigsaw puzzle with some pieces not fitting because world building barely matters.
Sorry for the ramble. You’re version or fix it is probably one of my top favourites for the characters because I can definitely see the use of the loosely outlined jigsaw puzzle. Have a nice day/evening.
Thank you anon, im glad you like my rewrites
I agree 100% with via, they did the same thing with moxxie to her, that being repeating the same arc again of her being mad at her dad but forgive him in the end. It kind of shows that just like moxxie, they didnt know what to do with her which is a shame because the small details she has are there to be fully explored, but they never explore them. Like her and music, she oftens listens it even at the dinner table and with stellas reaction to the cheating affair, we can peice a puzzle of her doing it as a coping mechanism; escaping her problems through distraction. And with seeing stars main plot is around via running away to see a meteor shower, it would've been perfect to explore that side of her along with more knowledge of the family in general to piece this puzzle their giving (like the relationship with her mom, her uncle, the rest of their family, how they react to the situation, how their currently dealing with it, etc...) through flashbacks (since the whole point would've been that these issues wont go away no matter how much you try to ignore them) And yes, her closeness with her father drifting away is definitely tragic and its sucks that it wasnt futhered explored, especially with the entire goetta situation as a whole since were in season 2 and we dont even know how they reacted to it. It makes me wonder why even give us these pieces to solve properly if its so little that it makes it pretty impossible without theorizing from any vague info we have and thats not how problem solving works.
And yes, its odd that shes only mad at stolas but never to stella. I mean, i get she would be on her moms side because of him cheating but still with how stella is written, you'd think she'd hate her too. In this rewrite, stella would actually be subtle in her abuse to stolas in a way where you can still recognise it but also understand why other (like via) wouldnt. An example of this would be my first post where her and stolas confront each other about the divorce, the quote; '-or did you forget? Like you always do?'. Its meant to showcase her most common tactics, shaming. From her background (that i'll explain further in her own post), she oftens picks up things from her family, which shaming is included. She would shame stolas whenever he makes a mistake or does something she doesnt approve of (like if he wore a suit she didnt like, she would say; 'you know were meeting your family right? You think they want to see their son of royalty in that sort of wear?' or them arguing on how much time via should spend on her astronomy lessons; 'Shes going to be a future you and what, you wanna just, make her lazy, huh?!' (or even 'I didnt think you'd care that less for your own daughter....') See these are what you could recognise as shaming but also understand why people may not consider it so, potentially using excuses like 'oh shes probably right because its royalty/she just cares about looking good enough for her family' or 'oh she just cares for her daughter and her future' (ironically enough, those are kind of what fans AND the show itself use as an excuse for stolas lmao) but just because via doesnt recognise stella's abusive tendencies, doesnt mean she isnt upset with her. She very much is, mainly with stella's aggressiveness as stella developed anger issues throughout her life and didnt have anything to help it. Via hates it whenever stella yells because of course she would be, no one likes angry loud noises! Its just that unlike with stolas, shes not as open with her frustration to her mother because shes genuinely scared of her from that aggression that makes it much more harder to truly express her feelings about her, instead keeping it to herself along with her feelings towards how the rest of the family is reacting to it given that it just feels too much for her to be involved in. So the reason why shes only open on being mad at stolas is despite what he did, he's the only one she feels safe in being mad about (I mean, she does have andrealphus as someone safe to an extent though he's very dismissive of telling her whats going on with the goetias and definetly doesnt take being wrong well like stella so hes not much better) that way, it'd be more understandable and futher peice the puzzle of their family and their dynamic. Family itself is quite complicated because of the nuances it has behind it and i wanna incorporate that to the goetias were their not fully evil but tend to care about their statuses rather then whats right in front of them (that being them as a family) since i think its interesting to explore and wouldve suit stolas, stella and octavia really well.
No need to apologise for rambling, i like getting asks of peoples thoughts/ideas on helluva. Hell look, im rambling too. I hope you enjoy the future rewrites i have in store, have a nice day/evening too
#helluva boss critical#helluva boss critique#helluva boss criticism#helluva critical#helluva criticism#helluva critique#helluva boss rewrite#ask#anon
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gimme a whole speech on the writing of visited upon the sons, pls
ok! i hope you mean this for real and aren't going to laugh at me for giving a whole long serious answer (omg sometimes the 'i was a weird kid' instinct kicks in) but i assume your kindness 💙🤍
random trivia: i almost never write with music on, cause my head is so wild about music that it's too distracting, but i wrote this with "money" by pink floyd on repeat and i'm honestly not sure why? (i also wrote "digestif" listening to motorhead...not sure why either but u gotta roll with it)
where to start...
i wrote a really big chunk of the beginning while standing under some scaffolding waiting for a freak summer downpour to end so i could go get iced coffee. that's my favorite way to write--in a weird place on my notes app full of autocorrect mistakes and other things like that because i'm so in the zone that my brain is going way too fast for my fingers to keep up.
i was sooooo Absorbed in fact that i didn't realize until a couple days later that i had written it really oddly without realizing? You know how in 3rd person pov even if you're writing one person's perspective and you're in their head so you know their emotions, thoughts etc, you still narrate with the character's name? Like...Mason chokes on the the sip of water he was trying to take. “Uhhh…that’s kind of fucked up?” he manages to squeak out in between coughs. This is making him think things he doesn’t want to think doesn’t want to think doesn’t want to—He coughs again and runs his fingers nervously through his fluffy hair. that kind of thing? what i realized is that i had written this POV really strangely and tho frank is the POV he never refers to himself by name? is that a thing? i was like "well that's weird" and tried to fix it but the fic refused...it made the POV feel too distant when the point of the fic is that he's increasingly lost in his own mind. the closer you as the reader are to that, the better. i trust my writing instincts like--if i instinctively wrote that way then it must have been for a reason! (note that the middle section is written in the "traditional" 3rd person way which again just--felt way better because that section is soooooort of a coherent narrative--which is also kinda done for a reason)
however this meant i had to repeat mason's name WAY more than sounds natural so it wasn't confusing, and if i just Did that with no explanation, that's the kind of thing i'd pick up on as a reader and would consider to be unforgivably bad writing. so, i called it out directly in the fic, and gave it an in-world reason, which then actually became the fic summary 😂 (Mason, his Mason—It’s the repetition that dulls the emotions (some people would call that repression, wouldn’t they, but that word implies something wrong with one’s mental state and there’s nothing wrong at all) My fic my rules!
this fic was written really in like, 2 or 3 days of writing. it was nearly impossible to just write little bits here and there. this pov was very demanding of my full attention because i also had to disappear into franko's mind to write it and it's hard to just like, do that when you have 10 spare minutes. because of this i almost gave up on it because it felt like i'd never be able to regain the momentum of the first writing day and also--also--i struggled with the structure SO HARD. my initial plan was to have the fic start out normally, and then intersperse frank's memories with the present, and each time he re-joins the present from a memory he gets more and more fucked up. (and of course, mason is clueless to it at first, and then he's all ?????) you can see lil remnants of this throughout--i think mostly in the beginning when he pours the rosé. (His fist clenches around the bottle as he pours and Mason catches that too. For fuck’s sake, he’s not supposed to.) Initially, the first section of the memories section--Dad getting too worked up about young!frank wanting to drink something pink--was going to come right before that, so there was a direct context--oh, he's remembering that while he pours. BUT--
that happened to work there, but i realized if i kept doing it like this i was going to be imposing something way too restrictive on the rest of the fic. i'd have to create each bad memory and then make the corresponding "present day" section relate to that memory and there'd be no way to make that happen naturally without seriously forcing some part of the story, and who wants that? this got me so stressed out especially as the (self-appointed) King of the Flashback that i wondered if i should just leave them out altogether. somehow i decided to write all of the flashbacks i would want to have in an entirely separate document, and then just write the "present" parts all at once, and then decide how i'd want to combine them.
2nd trivia point: because of this, this was one of the only fics in recent memory i've ever written relatively in order from start to finish. usually i write a beginning and an end and then fuck around in no order in the middle till it's done.
i can't quite remember what happened next, but i think i then did skip a bit to writing the end, and suddenly my mind wanted to develop something that came up earlier in the fic, at the beginning, where he refers to the feeling of something pursuing him. i think i meant that more in a vague sense at the time, and wasn't going to explore it, but (maybe something from @new-berry inspired me? possibly?) considering how fucked-up i wanted him to be at the end vs the beginning, and how coming out of a dissociative episode your relationship to yourself and to the world around you can be really wonky and fucked up--at least in my personal experience--i realized what if i could make that concept a lot more Real, and put in the imagery of a ghost in the room. but what kind of ghost? well, obviously not an uwu scary ghost, but you can come to your own conclusions as to what he thinks is "haunting" him.
this meant that i could write that last paragraph, which sincerely is one of my fav endings i've written in a long time, and as often happens when i write endings, the whole fic then made sense to me. and i realized instead of writing scattered memories and having frank's behavior in the present Escalated, i was going to drop the entire memories narrative into the fic in one big chunk, creating a story within a story, and have it be so all consuming that he completely loses track of what is happening. (which i feel like is an especially wild thing to do while you're having a Sexual Encounter and thus leaves mason rightfully disturbed--love me some Wretched Sex!!! sorry!)
i had a couple people tell me they completely forgot what was supposed to be happening while they were reading it, which made me so happy because that was what i wanted!
when i see this mf i see a dude who is so tormented and repressed and shaped by how he was treated as a kid. his dad made football his life so oppressively (in some ways) that he has, as he's said, no hobbies other than football and reading and now that football is no longer a good place for him there's just nothing left. add that to the fact that he clearly has never ever really healed from his mom's death in 2008 (and you can say a lot about his disingenuousness and lack of accountability as a coach, but the extended part about how he dealt with grief and loss on the diary of a ceo podcast was so fuckin real and it was a bit wild to see a famous person be so open) i feel like someone like this has a mind like a haunted house and can't quite go about things "normally." i wanted to create this feeling in the fic.
the best writing experiences turn into therapy sessions and when i was done writing i realized that i was expressing something about myself through it, which is how uncomfortable i feel in situations with a lot of very cishet expectations, as someone who is VERY not het and stealthily very not cis. i had already known this of course from conversations with coworkers, but this fic made me realize how much i fucking resent it--how much anger i feel toward it really--which was...interesting to learn about myself i guess.
anyway that's visited upon the sons for ya. i'm sure i left something out, but i feel sad that i'm no longer writing it, cause it was one of those experiences that make me think writing is fun. i always think writing is fun, but you know what i mean?
(footnote: my fic that i've been referring to as 'bitter mutual cheating' takes place around 2 months after this one, and it's from mason's POV and he reduces the whole upsetting experience to one line (Frank sounds panicked, and there’s only one other time that Mason can remember hearing him sound like this–that night with the West Ham jersey where Frank seemed to go kind of crazy and he had to tell the guys in the dressing room that it was his sister’s cat who had scratched the shit out of his back) which is just kind of a fun mindfuck for me. 7000+ words of agony but all mason even was aware of was...that, lol.)
(OH, i forgot! in the last line: Holding his Mason tight like it loves him, that word "like" is important. is he realizing--just for a moment--that his "love" for Mason is just kind of a placeholder for something else? someone else? we'll see...)
#anonymous#answered#thank you!!!!#this is one of the only fics i've written that i have this much to say about lol#i wanted this one to hit a little different#fic saga#visited upon the sons#long eyelashed tragedy
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Song review: “I’m to Blame” by Tove Lo
Another experiment, this time fumbling its attempted references.
Review by Clove Mera, 27 September 2022.
Track written by: unknown at time of publishing
From “Dirt Femme”, 2022, Pretty Swede Records/ mtheory
Tove Lo’s new record grabs me during its high points but its lows can be hard to overlook as a music producer. While Lo demonstrates further growth in her vocal abilities, there are choices made both musically and lyrically which prohibit it from achieving its implied intentions.
Lo’s earlier single “True Romance” is a showcase of the voice she has come to master. Both there and here she delights me with her ability to navigate her songs’ ebbing and flowing notes.
The lyrics had me ensnared instantly with their confessional destructiveness. Admitting that “Pulling us apart is all I'm good for”, Lo allays my own trepidation toward being candid in my lyrics. People generally have a sense of solidarity with people paying for their mistakes. It's these kinds of words, coming from the heart which stand the test of time. Another such record is Rina Sawayama’s “Bad Friend”.
On select occasions there’s a weird quality to Lo’s voice, notably during “I can’t face what I know” and “Your heart’s colder than stone” in which her voice is briefly garbled. I wonder if this vocal track was recorded in full with live instruments and the whole shebang; a candid moment they chose to retain as a Keepsake of the day.
Sentimental as this idea is, “I’m to Blame” doesn’t give itself enough time to absorb me in its passion enough to not notice such things. ‘I’m to Blame” applies the somewhat dated tension and release technique of intensifying its bridge with new elements before stripping it all back to something raw where the vocalist repeats a previous stanza with pained, finely controlled vocals.
This track’s briefness hinders its application of tension and release. Within 94 seconds we’ve reached the dramatic high and without the time to be absorbed in the stream of emotions and go flying off its waterfall we instead go tumbling down onto a bed of rocks. Such is to say the change isn’t exciting but instead disorienting and confusing.
Its misgivings continue into the third chorus, Lo delivering the same melody as both before it. There’s no escalation or finality and the song abruptly ends with little cues given to indicate so. I think it’s highly likely this occurs because the next track on the album continues right where this one ends. Such seems an odd choice, releasing half a double feature as a single.
Tove Lo’s “I’m to Blame” reads like another of Lo’s experiments in genre like last week’s “2 Die 4”. Talking to Zane Lowe for Apple Music about “True Romance”, the songwriter revealed she in fact pulled its narrative from the movie of the same name. With this interview in mind, the idea of fiction and candidness play tug of war. There are moments when the candid lyrics resonate, attributable to Lo’s performance, but there are other times where I feel like I'm listening to a song intently crafted to play over a montage at the end of an angsty teen drama episode where everything is going to crap for its protagonists.
You can stream or purchase Tove Lo‘s “I’m to Blame” and access the Apple Music interview below.
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If you were to make a short playlist to quickly describe your taste in music, what songs would you put on it?
ooh! buckle up.
woman king - iron and wine
numb - oh land
rusalka, rusalka / wild rushes - the decemberists
anywhere on this road - lhasa de sala
black widow - susanne sundfor
apres moi - regina spektor
howl - florence + the machine
moment’s silence (common tongue) - hozier
#asks#thank you for asking!#i'm also very fond of 60s-70s-80s music but i'm not gonna link you to like. dark lady by cher#i like music that i can listen to on repeat and that implies a narrative#my music taste fluctuates but these r all favorites currently#Anonymous
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Morimyu in Classical reference
So, as for the fact that music in Morimyu Op. 3 resembles classical music in both progression and musical technicality, it's interesting how it's possible to keep coming up with different interpretations after re-watching the musical again and again.
I've made a thread on twitter about this before, but 1) word limitations and thread will never be enough to list all that I have to say lol 2) I'd prefer to have a fuller version noted down, especially one that I can edit and keep coming back over and over again when ever I come up with something new.
Either way, I am still (lol) not a pro in music theory and music history as well. All that is written here are based on my very very basic knowledge on music as well as something that I've picked up (and discussed) with my friends after watching Op. 3.
What's the point of this?
Why is it important? Lol I always need this to keep myself from writing off-topic but anyways. Why do the music sound good (except for the fact that because it does lol), and what do they represent? Surely there must be, and there always are, other things that are implied not only through the lyrics but also the music, and the flow in general.
Apart from the lyrics and the lines, it's also quite interesting to have a close look at the music - melody and harmony itself - to see how they portray the stories.
Most importantly, the continuality. How did Morimyu manage to insert so many songs and still managing to connect them as a whole? And how did they use music to go beyond what's on the pages?
That's the most important thing about musicals - beyond the pages. We don't see stage or anime doing so very often, as they mainly focus on what's already there, bringing them to life as close as possible to how we imagine things might happen.
As for musical, they have the music. They have the arias and the songs. At some point, a character starts singing, and other characters followed suit. They have their very unique way of expressing the plot, and they have the orchestra, the arias where characters get their solo song, and the duets between characters with strong relationships, and the ensemble which emphasizes the plot, and so on.
A funny thing about duets in classical opera, they're often meant to show lovers' relationship because of the harmony but can also use opposition and all to show enemies' relationship. And in SherLiam's duet it's just both of them at the same time - thoughts connected while engaging in a chase, a hide and seek game of mystery. We'll go into that later.
Back to the topic. Morimyu follows the main plot strictly, but also uses their advantage with music to add all the side details that wasn't told in the manga to create a "complete" view of the plot. It is always available for musicals to do something unexpected (like how we never expected Lestrade's puppet show to be a whole 5 mins long piece lol). And where they did that they added arias and duets, they allowed moments where characters express and developed their emotions as well as going with the plan (yes Albert yessss). Of course there's both a good and bad side to this all the while.
💛 The good thing is they went all the way to show us sides of emotions that we don't see much in the manga or stage, the sides of the story that all of them have kept hidden while focusing on their grand plan.
💛 But then it does get too emotional at some point, especially those who came for the plot and the mind games behind all of it (like me - although I won't deny that I had a lot of fun picking out all the emotions behind the music here lol).
Musicals can always go beyond what we knew. As for Morimyu, their music is heavily influenced by opera and classical music, and it's shown quite clear. There is live music playing (instead of the entire orchestra we have a violin and piano duet), and they have distinctive arias and recitatives throughout.
So thanks to that, it's also possible to use a reference from classical music to interpret their songs.
A Sonata formation - The Narrative Series of SherLiam
Yes, songs arranged and analysed with reference to a Sonata formation, especially in the way they progress through the play.
Some notes before getting into the point
1 - Sonata = a piece of music consisting of several movements - very often 3, sometimes 4.
First movement-Allegro: With the quick tempo, introducing the theme of the entire Sonata
Second movement-Adagio/Largo: Slow tempo, can be emotional sometimes, as well as leading more towards the final movement
Third movement-Rondo Vivace: The ending, quick-paced and vigorous, leading the Sonata to a close.
A Sonata always has a general theme, a topic. The theme that I chose to write about is Mystery - the Hide and Seek game between the Detective and Lord of Crime
2 - Aria and Recitative = different types of songs used in an opera
Recitative: Lines within a song that happens like a real conversation, as the characters sing they are also talking to each other
Aria: A solo section where everything else is a freeze frame, while one actor remains and sing their own song about their thoughts, feelings, etc.
In this post we're mainly discussing the arias of Sherlock and Liam, and the duet between them. But there's also some mention of recitatives here and there.
3 - Videos used
To make it easier to understand which songs I'm talking about, I also arranged them in piano. And also to have a listen at how they might connect.
Just in case the videos beneath don't work (they didn't work on my phone), the three songs discussed are Nazo, Liam's solo, Kokoro no Rondo, all piano arrangements.
All of the songs noted in this section are arias and duets from Op. 3 - the Ghost of the Whitechapel. The additional "series" that Morimyu has added spreading throughout the play, Sherlock and Liam's narratives, which portrays both their emotions and the chase between the detective and the Lord of Crime.
First Movement - Allegro: Nazo(謎) song
youtube
Starting from Lestrade's exit after his puppetshow and proceed to the scene, Sherlock's aria introduces the theme of the imaginary hide and seek game that the Lord of Crime has started. The song repeats the word (mystery) over and over again with a continuous rhythm.
Ends with Sherlock just mumbling the word Nazo (mystery) and exiting the stage - no conclusions, just like a mystery that leads into further mysteries with no answer.
♛♛♛ In regards to a Sonata formation, this is the beginning of the entire piece. Quick in tempo, written in 3/4 time and introduces the theme of the entire piece - Mystery.
Uso ka Shinjitsu ka - Lie or Truth song
Starting after Sherlock learns the truth behind Jack the Ripper, wondering if Lord of Crime is a good person after all.
Now I had a really hard time thinking whether this piece should be included or not. For one, it's not an aria.
It can be viewed as a Da capo Aria, a development section of the Nazo song, repeating the theme that is introduced, coming and going rather quickly. So, for continuality.
It also does not fit into the series as a whole, being
1) a recitative. The lyrics focus entirely on Sherlock's deduction and whether he should expose the truth or not, etc. so on.
2) The lines in here, unlike the other arias, are taken directly from the manga, so it's not entirely an 'added' element to this chase.
3) Also because if we compare this to a Sonata form, this doesn't really fit anywhere
However, among Sherlock's arias, this song can also be seen as an interesting development as I have mentioned above, so I've decided to have it here, still.
There's another thing about almost all of Sherlock's arias throughout the 2 stages - they never have a conclusive end. The detective's mind is always running, mysteries after mysteries.
Most of the other characters' songs ends with some kind of closing lines, and piano continues to conclude the piece with a strong end, and then goes on to start another piece. All of their problems in the songs are concluded. They made up their minds in some ways.
But Sherlock, his songs always end with him repeating the melody, a capella, and exiting the stage. Piano waits for him to exit, then starts a new song. Or in Op. 2's Mindgame case going straight into the next conversation. We never get to know how Sherlock's songs end, because they didn't really end at those points. There's a hanging sense of waiting for a resolution, a conclusion. Sherlock never seems to have his problems solved within the songs, they just go on and on.
An idea initiates, then something happens and he is once again in the dark. And he spins around within his own mind.
Screenshot from Op. 2. Even if we look back to his aria Mindgames from Op. 2, this song doesn't really have a conclusive ending as well. He just starts singing, the music stops and he starts shooting and going on, resuming the play. It kind of has been a thing for Sherlock's arias?
Second Movement - Adagio/Largo: Liam's solo
youtube
♛♛♛ The "second movement" - the 'slower' piece - of the series, Liam's aria lol but actually the piano part of this song isn't slow at all but ok. The other side of this hide and seek game. The "development" section of the sonata series, where we see things in a much more emotional way.
This aria is much richer in harmony and melody. Not only Liam's melody, but also the piano's part which plays a beautiful melody in harmony.
I recall an interview where the stage director mentions how the "orchestra" - piano and violin are representations for Liam and Sherlock. It kind of applies here, where his music is created mostly by piano.
There is modulation, emotions rising and elevating quickly and strongly. But the harmony is beautiful, overflowing and rich with emotions. The song repeats certain lines, emphasizing aspects within Liam's thoughts.
Unlike Sherlock's train of thoughts that circles with no destination, Liam's solo has a definite ending in harmony -> Even with all his emotions in mind, Liam still has a goal already set before him. He has a brief moment of slowing down, pausing and sung about his feeling, before resuming the story.
Leading us to the final stage - Kokoro no Rondo.
Third Movement - Rondo Vivace: Kokoro no Rondo
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Rondo formation: Rondo is a type of dance that revolves around a pattern, often ABA, ABACA, or ABACABA - where A is the ritournello ("meguri - kimi ni omou - meguru kokoro no rondo" section) that is repeated over and over with B, C parts in between. Rondo can also be combined with sonata form - this case applies to this song which begins with a key other than the tonic (Fm) before resolving to the tonic key (Fm) to put an end to the entire sonata series.
For reference purposes, the last movement of Beethoven's Pathetique or the very typical Fur Elise is also written in a similar format. I also referred to Pathetique quite a lot when brainstorming this post.
♛♛♛ The "final movement" of this Sonata, the final scene of their "Hide and Seek" game. The song's tempo is vibrant and rapid, combining with the dancing sense, all the while strictly following the structure of a Rondo as mentioned above.
This is the stage where Liam and Sherlock's line interacts and reply to each other, as if in a real conversation - just like how the connection between them are now much stronger than what they had before.
In the ritournello, we have Liam and Sherlock's lines intertwining and chasing after one another, emphasizing the "Hide and Seek" element between the two of them.
The song comes to a definite ending, concluding with a strong tonic (Fm) chord. At this stage, there is no more question to be left open, for Sherlock at this point has already made up his mind to take the next step into solving the mysteries regarding the Lord of Crime.
Their imaginary game of Hide and Seek is coming to an end, as Sherlock came to a decision to take the next step - going to Durham.
That's the end of my first draft.
So far that is some of my thoughts noted down right after watching Op. 3 stream a while ago, with some edition made just now.
On the side note, at some point during my discussion with a friend, we also came up with the idea that a Suite may be a better reference. A Suite consists of 4 parts and a prelude, each of them having their specific characteristic. But we didn't go all the way analysing that idea, as
1) we couldn't find a 5th piece that can be added into the series.
2) Even if we did, the Truth or Lie song still would not really fit into the "aria" vibe of this series, as mentioned above.
But then quite interestingly, after a while, I've found another interesting fact that should have been quite obvious but I've missed for (lol) like ages.
The game of Hide and Seek between the detective and the Lord of Crime has begun ever since after Hope's case - that being said, ever since the end of Op. 1
And what is it that we have in Op. 2? "The Mind games of the Lord of Crime". The one where Sherlock went maniac rapping about all the thoughts he has and end up shooting randomly into the wall.
At first it begins like another recitative, but in the later half, the harmony starts to become more harmonious, written in 3/4 time flowing like a dance.
In that section, the melody of the piano and violin part resembles the one we have in Kokoro no Rondo, the Ritournello section, only that the melody of the violin in Op. 2 and the melody that SherLiam sung in Op. 3 are kind of reversed.
Coincidence much?
So now we have a collection of songs from both Opus, it becomes tricky. How do we connect them? And what's the story?
At this point, all these recitatives, aria and duets all in the theme of the Hide and Seek game. And they all connect to each other through harmony, progressions in harmony.
We know that the Mind games of the Lord of Crime has begun from ever since the end of Op. 1. We know that Sherlock keeps wondering about that in Op. 2, and then he wonders even further after he has been tested by the Lord of Crime. "また俺だけのメッセージなのか?" - Is this a message just for me?, as he wondered in the Truth or Lie song. We knew all of that. But Morimyu didn't let that stop them from emphasizing on this subplot even further.
They didn't let the gap between Op. 2 and Op. 3 stop them from making a smooth flow in plot either.
Correction, they didn't simply create a flow. They established a connection, all the while showing a strong progression of Sherlock's thoughts that goes on from Op. 2 straight onto Op. 3.
Very often, what makes a good plot is how their plots and sub-plots intertwine with each other. Morimyu has a main plot that follows Moriarty gang in the plan of changing society. And they have a smaller plot told from Sherlock's side of things.
And they have this sub-plot told by harmony of how Sherlock is connected to Liam, or the Lord of Crime, by an invisible thread. A connection that is only expressed that clearly in Morimyu.
We have so many things going on, so many songs throughout the play. But each of those elements are all connected to something else, creating a sub-plot that enriches the main plot.
There is no loose connections. For everything that connects to the main plot, they're also linked to other elements. Each scene and every song has their own meaning not only in regards to other songs, but also to the plot as a whole.
Also, did I mention how Morimyu feels like a grand piece of music?
Opus -> What classical songs had that basically shows the order in which they are written. Morimyu - a title piece itself - has 3 Opus, 3 different parts with the same theme.
Classical music very often had all the different elements in it -> Morimyu had an overture, the song they sing just before the main theme song, just before introducing the stage. Then arias, ensembles and choruses. All of them are connected by similar harmony.
Classical music always had a big general theme, with each section having a smaller sequence connecting to each other. Subplots within a big plots. A Sonata piece has 3 movements, each having their own "sections" of development - expositions, development, recapitulation. -> Morimyu does the same to their plot and subplots, as discussed above.
Also, Opera reference
While Opus 2 used an opera reference to tell the story, I feel like Opus 3 has become an Opera itself. During Op. 2 the arias were mostly very loyal to the manga, taking their lines from the original work, like the Mind Games song. Their story progresses steadily but logically.
However starting from Op. 3, the aria became more independent. They developed and expressed even further what wasn't said in the manga. For instance, the 3 songs mentioned in the "Sonata" above. And there's also Albert's solo, and Patterson's solo and Milverton, which I haven't got the chance to discuss all.
But either way, they spring out of the original story, adding more emotions and "colours" to the characters. The aria became more original, all the while also much more expressive. We get to see new sides of the characters that we haven't seen anywhere before.
Anyways, it's probably time to go back to the main question: How Morimyu used music to go beyond what's on the pages.
-> Musicals aren't simply about music added to acting. The characters on stage don't just simply starts singing for no reason. All the songs are meant to express something, and while they do they also establish various connections to the plot's progression.
We don't get to see much of the characters' emotions in the manga. And we don't see much of the side story, the finer details behind each arc. Every time, Morimyu adds something original to enrich their plot. They express and develop what's already known to all the viewers, especially regarding the emotional and motivational side of the characters.
-> The manga shows us the entire plot, with details related, back stories that lead to the present, and all. But it doesn't give a lot of hint into how characters might feel. Surely, reading between the lines, it's up to the readers to interpret them.
But Morimyu gives us all of that, and they leave it to us to read between the music.
And even if we didn't, that's fine. Then the purpose of all of them linking together would be to create a performance where everything is connected harmoniously, allowing us to be emerged in the world of Yuumori.
-> The purpose of having a stage, primarily, is to allow the audience to engage in, experience and feel the emotions along with the characters they see on stage. The point of having a live stage, a plot, and the music, are all to let us emphasize with the characters on stage.
In Morimyu, we aren't just watching a plot between our favourite characters happening as we know it from the manga. We see a combination of mysteries unveiling slowly, the stories on the side of each characters as they slowly progress forward, as well as emphasising with their emotions in the story.
That's what I really like about Morimyu.
So, WHAT'S THE POINT OF THIS?
So I had to scroll back to the top (lol) to quote this and make sure I haven't gone too far from the main theme.
Regarding musical Yuumori, there's always so many things I'd like to talk about. And if I start going on about it then it only gets harder to focus on one single topic.
Since the topic here is Morimyu and their music, especially in classical reference, I've tried to keep everything I've discussed relevant. But whenever I start on something, there would always be something that comes to mind. Like how other songs might also have certain connections, or how they used stage directions and lightings, etc. I really want to look more into stage directions in Morimyu as well, but that would have to wait...
Anyways, I tried to keep this as simple as possible. When I sent the first version of this to my friends, I keep having the feeling that I got too technical with all the theories about harmony and structure lol
And once again, this is only some of my own interpretation of the series that I've picked up.
If something else came to mind... well. Either way, for the purpose of engaging in their wonderful music or for the purpose of watching a beautiful stage just for enjoyment, Morimyu definitely is worth watching. And to watch over and over again. I've said this for Op. 2 but I'll say this ten times as much for Op. 3. Truly magnificent.
And, that's pretty much it that I have for today, I guess.
Thanks a lot to all my friends who gave me lots of inspiration and motivation to complete this ヽ(・∀・)ﾉ
Lots of love to @rikaaki as well ヽ(・∀・)ﾉ
#Youtube#musical moriarty the patriot#musical yuukoku no moriarty#yuukoku no moriarty#sherliam#random thoughts idk why#didn't mean for it to be this long but still just random thoughts I'd like to get down#still love this series too much although I feel like I've watched it too many times#harmony analysis I'd like to call it but there wasn't a lot of harmony analysis going on either#morimyu#morimyu and how their music is just extraordinary
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The Mista fic playlist (now with context!)
So I finally made the Yester-Me, Yester-You, Yesterday playlist public, and when I looked it over, I realized. Some of these definitely need explanations. And also I will take any excuse to ramble about my tunes, so, if anyone’s curious, here’s little explanations for each song on the playlist so far.
(Playlist can be found here)
Spoilers for the fic obviously, and for all of Vento Aureo.
Yester-Me, Yester-You, Yesterday - Stevie Wonder: If it’s not clear, this is the song I named the fic after, mainly because I was obsessively listening to it when I first started writing it. YMYYYD is a Naramis fic on the surface, but when I was playing it on repeat imagining a little animatic that I’ll never make bc I’m not an artist figuring out how this title was going to work in my brain, I pictured the “Me” and “You” referring to Mista and Fugo, in a platonic sense, but take it as you will.
The Sweetest Thing - Camera Obscura: This is the song that inspired the whole thing. Back when this was going to be a oneshot fic (lol), I was actually considering having it as a sort of braided narrative thing between Mista and Fugo in this singular scene at the bar, heavily based off the first verses of this song: Mista going on a date to forget about Narancia, Fugo immersing himself in music to ignore the shadow of Giorno lingering over him, and both of them instead getting stuck in the past. But I ran what would become the first and third chapters by my friend, we decided it worked better as a longer fic, and the rest is history.
The Girl of My Best Friend - Elvis Presley: No deep meaning really, just kind of the Mista vibe at the beginning of the fic with developing feelings for Narancia (although he’s much more unaware of what these feelings mean).
Come Back When You Grow Up - Bobby Vee: Not solely related to the fic, per se, but this is the Fugonara breakup song imo. I don’t talk about the circumstances of their breakup in the fic, really, but I can say it had a lot to do with Fugo’s insecurities; at the same time, I imagine him using Narancia’s “immaturity” as an excuse - hence, this song.
Kiss With A Fist: Florence + the Machine: I just listened to this over and over while writing the Fugo and Mista fightfight scene in chapter 5. Not meant to imply anything romantic, but, again, everything’s open to reader interpretation.
Boyfriend - Best Coast: Just referring to the little Mista/Narancia/Fugo love triangle thing, although I don’t think Mista’s fully aware that it is a love triangle. He’s got a one-track mind, lmao.
Follow that Dream - Elvis Presley: Funny little Giorno song. Something something cute charming sound like his cute charming exterior, lyrics about ambition and dreams and all that.
Jive Talkin’ - Bee Gees: This is one of those meta ones lol. Some fun Bee Gees lore for you guys: this song was originally called Drive Talkin,’ because it was inspired by and composed to the beat of a car driving. So, I listened to this song a lot to get into the vibe of chapter 9, where Mista and Giorno are, well, talking and driving. The more I think about it, the lyrics are a little relevant, too, since they’re about someone lying and putting on facades.
Think For Yourself - The Beatles: Fugo Leaves The Gang Song. If Vento Aureo was a jukebox musical, he’d sing this when he’s having his breakdown and yelling at everyone for betraying the boss. Something like that.
A World of Our Own - The Seekers: Naramis core - that’s why it’s on my Naramis playlist, too. I associate the ending of chapter 10 with this, when Mista and Narancia have a sort of calm before the storm travelling through Venice on the boat. Also, it’s my very specific headcanon that Mista would love The Seekers.
(They Long To Be) Close To You - The Carpenters: Hey it’s that one song that everyone puts on every Mista ship playlist ever (it’s okay I’m not immune). Obviously, this is the song playing in chapter 11, when Naramis becomes Real, and later on in chapter 15.
How Deep Is Your Love - Bee Gees: Another meta one! I initially planned Narancia and Mista’s slow dance/kiss scene with this song in mind, instead of (They Long To Be) Close To You. I changed it because 1) it made more sense to have a Carpenters song, and 2) those lyrics fit the recurring theme of “Narancia is hard not to fall in love with” better. I think the sound of this song fits the atmosphere I imagined better, though, so I second-guess my decision every now and then, but it’s whatever.
Teen Angel - Mark Dinning: Classic teenage death song for everyone’s favorite teenage death in JJBA :))))). Mostly a tune I listened to and thought of Narancia so I’d be sad while writing the chapter where he dies.
(I Just) Died in Your Arms - Cutting Crew: I thought I was So Very Funny for being like. Haha what if I put this on the fic playlist bc Narancia dies in Mista’s arms literally haha it’d be so funny. It’s not funny. It’s a stupid joke and I’m still sad about Narancia.
Two Faced Man - Gary Wright: This is *the* post-VA Mista and Giorno dynamic song. I probably annoyed my partner so much while writing chapter 14, because I wouldn’t shut up about their tragic relationship (friendship? I like calling it a strangers-to-friends-to-enemies speedrun) and how perfectly this song fits what I was going for.
I’m Looking Through You - The Beatles: Same thing. I imagine Mista’s internal turmoil in chapter 14/the PHF bonus chapter as sounding something like this. The tragic moment where someone you cared about reveals that they’ve been nothing more than a facade, the instant change in your perception of them, the stinging pain of betrayal, etc etc.
Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now - The Smiths: I wrote chapter 15, discovered this song, and was retroactively like “ohhh yeah that’s Mista here.” The “two lovers entwined pass me by” line may or may not apply to something later. You’ll have to see. (Idk I think everyone gets the gist of what’s going to happen tbh.)
A World Without Love - Peter and Gordon: Mista’s lonely as hell, if you haven’t noticed. It’s a cycle of blocking others out because the sting of loss is too much, which only makes the loneliness worse as the effects of self-induced isolation kick in.
Sorrow - The McCoys: Yet another Mista and Giorno toxic dynamic song. I prefer the version by The Merseys, but it’s not on Spotify, and The McCoys do a really solid version, too. I could go further than the fic into a rant about this song and It’s All Too Much by The Beatles, which both include the line “with your long blonde hair and your eyes of blue,” but are otherwise very different - this one about festering resentment in a relationship one can’t escape, the other about being completely overwhelmed by drugs love and beauty, and how they’re Mista’s and Fugo’s individual perceptions of Giorno, but that’s a talk for another day.
Run Of The Mill - George Harrison: MISTA AND FUGO SONG 100%. Mourning lost friendship, but recognizing that you’re individuals and your decisions are your own, even if they turn you away from the ones you love. All with a lingering undertone of bitterness. Mista definitely plays this on his guitar when he’s alone and thinks about Fugo. Yeah that’s all.
I’ll add to this when I post the final update, but enjoy this meta content for now while I work on it lol. Thanks for all the support for the fic, it’s been a blast <333
#reading this back i feel so self conscious but im posting this anyhow#jjba#jjba fanfic#fanfic#vento aureo#guido mista#naramis#davy discusses fics
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A small investigation of "Resentment of Chunshan"
The first time Liu Mingyan hears the rumours about Shen Qingqiu's romantic involvement with Luo Binghe happens in chapter 47:
“Who could have guessed that after being rejected, Luo Binghe would become desperate? Overflowing with evil intent, he even lost his mind and went berserk . In a disgraceful and unfilial act, his desire led him to try and make Shen Qingqiu submit by force!”
Shen Qingqiu sunk his fingers into his head of messy hair, sunk in deep despair .
Yang Yixuan was already speechless . The gates of a whole new world had just been opened for that young man, and he was being battered by new perspectives . Liu Mingyan, on the other hand, just let out a soft “Ah . ”
She only carefully said, “So it was like that . ”
It seems pretty obvious that Liu Mingyan wholeheartedly believes the rumours.
Then in chapter 52 we hear about "Resentment of Chunshan" for the first time:
Shen Qingqiu was originally whispering in the ears of the girls next to him, not caring to listen to the music . But, after hearing two phrases, he suddenly felt that he had heard two very unbelievable things . Calling for the songstress to stop, he said, “Young lady, what is this you’re singing?”
The woman said with a tender voice, “This servant is singing the new popular ballad《Resentment of Chunshan》 . ”
Shen Qingqiu said, face full of black lines, “That’s strange━just now I seem to have heard you singing of two names? Could you repeat those?”
The pipa player smiled behind her sleeve and said, “What’s strange about it? Could it be that Mister never heard? The leading roles of《Resentment of Chunshan》, it goes without saying, are those two Shen Qingqiu and Luo Binghe, ah . ”
……
……
……
When did they f***ing get made into a popular ballad?!
In chapter 67 Shen Qingqiu encounters a booklet in an inn that is implied to be bingqiu fanfiction:
After he took a bath, Shen Qingqiu changed into clean clothing. At leisure with nothing to do, he found a few thin booklets stacked by the window. While the cover was extremely gaudy━he was unable to make out the large characters in its title━he recognized the "One," "Two," "Three," and so on. Grabbing a booklet, Shen Qingqiu leaned against the headboard to read.
From a cursory glance at a few lines, he found that this booklet was filled with numerous words. The rhetoric was beautifully written, the narrative touching, all of which were accompanied by extremely beautiful illustrations.
Now, there is no definitive proof that this booklet was, in fact, a fanfic written by Liu Mingyan. But! There are two hints in the text.
First is Liu Qingge's reaction to the booklets in chapter 68:
Liu Qingge was almost out the door when he gave the small table a glimpse as he passed by and seemed to have seen something unbelievable, his foot stepping on air.
Raising his head, Shen Qingqiu saw that Liu Qingge still had not left the room. He sensed that something was off. "What?"
Liu Qingge stiffly turned his head, looking him up and down with the complex gaze of someone regarding something they had never seen before. After a while, he shook his head and finally opened the door to leave. In those short few steps, he seemed to have tripped over the door sill.
The second one is this quote from chapter 81:
He peered at them from the corner of his eyes a few times, only to hear the three sisters say with delicate voices, "Dear big sister, dear mistress, dear senior, can you give me an autograph?"
"We finally managed to find the author, so please let us have a keepsake."
"Is it really out of print? There won't be any more copies?"
They held a pile of garishly bright booklets, stuffing them towards Liu Mingyan. The booklets seemed extremely familiar, and Shen Qingqiu secretly felt puzzled, as if he should care about those booklets a lot. Just when he was about to walk over to see what exactly the three large characters written on the cover were, suddenly a figure furtively flashed to the side of him.
Now, why would the booklets be familiar and why would the author specifically attract our attention to them? It's not like there were other booklets mentioned in the story that Shen Qingqiu paid attention to, except for those he encountered in the inn.
With all of the above, I feel we can pretty definitively say that Liu Mingyan was indeed the author of "Resentment of Chunshan" and she published it even before the gathering at the Zhaohua temple.
Why is that important, you might ask. Everyone knows it already.
Well, yes, but let's discuss the timeline for a bit.
So, Liu Mingyan first hears the rumours in chapter 47. You know, back when Shen Qingqiu was still considered dead and Liu Mingyan's own brother fought every day for a chance to at least give him a decent burial. And what do the rumours say? Luo Binghe sexually assaulted Shen Qingqiu, then organized a smear campaign against him, raped him and drove Shen Qingqiu to self-destruct. Romantic, right?
And Liu Mingyan believes it. Her reaction pretty much speaks for itself: in her eyes, this version of events neatly explains everything.
Now, what would your reaction be if you found out someone you've met has sexually assaulted a close friend of your family member, one you know personally? I like to believe it wouldn't be "Oh, that's the epitome of romance, I must write a fanfic about it", but, you know, I generally like to believe the best in people.
Anyway, Liu Mingyan writes an RPF about Shen Qingqiu (who, again, is presumed dead at the time) and quickly spreads it around, to the point where even Tianlang-jun somehow heard the song. Then what happens? Luo Binghe attacks Cangqiong mountain sect, injures the sect leader, injures Liu Mingyan's brother, threatens everyone in the sect and blackmails Shen Qingqiu with their lives, taking him prisoner. Again, what is Liu Mingyan's reaction? Why, to publish more RPF! Because there's nothing more romantic than a mentally unstable stalker who is willing to hurt your loved ones to lure you out!.. Ahem. And while everyone believes Shen Qingqiu is kidnapped and imprisoned by Luo Binghe, Liu Mingyan spreads her porn literature around.
Try to keep in mind that this is pseudo-Ancient China we're talking about. People of PIDW universe don't have internet. They don't know that "Resentment of Chunshan" is fiction. In fact, people who hear it seem to believe it is a true story. So, not only does Liu Mingyan write about her acquaintance's sex life, she actually smears his reputation with her writing.
And finally, in the extras it is said that Yue Qingyuan tries to ban RPF about bingqiu, but unsuccessfully. Because apparently it wasn't enough to write porn about Shen Qingqiu, publish it and spread it around, no, she had to make sure it is available at the very place where Shen Qingqiu lives and works. His coworkers also need to read this, after all!
...
That is, I just wanted to say that Liu Mingyan is awful. Sorry for the rant.
Oh, the quotes are taken from here: https://www.novelcool.com/novel/The-Scum-Villain-39-s-Self-Saving-System.html
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Music for Films, Vol. II: Chick Habit
For good and for ill, Quentin Tarantino’s movies have been strongly associated with postmodern pop culture — particularly by folks whose reactions to the word “postmodern” tend toward pursed lips and school-marmishly wagged fingers. There for a while, reading David Denby on Tarantino was similar to reading Michiko Kakutani on Thomas Pynchon: almost always the same review, the same complaints about characters lacking “psychological depth,” the same handwringing over an ostensible moral insipidness. Truth be told, Tarantino’s pranksome delight with flashy surfaces and stylistic flourishes that are ends in themselves gives tentative credence to some of the caviling. Critics have raised related concerns over the superficiality of Tarantino’s tendency toward stunt casting, especially his resurrections of aging actors relegated to the film industry’s commercial margins: John Travolta, Pam Grier, Robert Forster, David Carradine, Darryl Hannah, Don Johnson and so on. There might be a measure of cynicism in the accompanying cinematic nudging and winking, but it’s also the case that a number of the performances have been terrific.
The writer-director brings a similar sensibility to his sound-tracking choices, demonstrating the cooler-than-thou, deep-catalog knowledge of an obsessive crate-digger. Tarantino thematized that knowledge in his break-through feature, Reservoir Dogs (1992). Throughout the film, the characters tune in to Steven Wright deadpanning as the deejay of “K-Billy’s Super Sounds of the Seventies”; like the characters, the viewer transforms into a listener, treated to such fare as the George Baker Selection’s “Little Green Bag” (1970) and Harry Nilsson’s “Coconut” (1971). As with the above-mentioned actors, Tarantino has sifted pop culture’s castoffs and detritus, unearthing songs and delivering experiences of renewed value — and thereby proving the keenness of his instincts and aesthetic wit. “Listen to (or look at) this!” he seems to say, with his cockeyed, faux-incredulous grin. “Can you believe you were just going to throw this out?” And mostly, it works. If the Blue Swede’s “Hooked on a Feeling” (1974) has become a sort of semi-ironized accompaniment to hipsterish good times, that resonance has a lot more to do with Tim Roth, Harvey Keitel and Co. cruising L.A. in a hulking American sedan than with the Disney Co.’s Guardians of the Galaxy (2014).
In Death Proof (2007), Tarantino’s seventh film and unaccountably his least favorite, soundtrack and screen are both full to bursting with the flotsam and jetsam of “entertainment” conceived as an industry.
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In just the opening minutes, we see outmoded moviehouse announcements, complete with cigarette-burn cue dots; big posters of Brigitte Bardot from Les Bijoutiers du claire de lune (1958) and of Ralph Nelson’s Soldier Blue (1970) bedecking the apartment of Jungle Julia (Sydney Tamiia Poitier); the tee shirt worn by Shanna (Jordan Ladd), which bears the image of Tura Satana; and strutting under all of it are the brassy cadences of Jack Nitzsche’s “The Last Race,” taken from his soundtrack for the teensploitation flick Village of the Giants (1965). Bibs and bobs, bits and pieces of low- and middle-brow cinema are cut up and reconstructed into a fulsome swirl of signs. And there’s an unpleasant edge to it; the cuts are echoed by the action of the camera, which has been busily cleaving the bodies of the women on screen into fragments and parts. First the feet of Arlene (Vanessa Ferlito), propped up on a dashboard; then Julia, all ass and gams; then Arlene’s lower half again, chopped into slices by the stairs she dashes up (“I gotta take the world’s biggest fucking piss!”) and by the close-up that settles on her belly and pelvis, her hand shoved awkwardly into her crotch.
As often happens in Tarantino’s movies, furiously busy meta-discursive play collapses the images’ problematic content under multiple levels of reference and pastiche. The film is one half of Grindhouse (2007), Tarantino’s collaboration with his buddy Robert Rodriguez, an old-fashioned double-feature comprising the men’s love letters to the exploitation cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. In those thousands of movies — mondo, beach-cutie, nudie-cutie, women in prison, early slasher, rape-revenge, biker gang, chop-socky, Spaghetti Western and muscle-car-worship flicks (and we could add more subgenres to the list) — symbolic violence inflicted on women’s bodies was de rigueur, and frequently the principal draw. Tarantino shot Death Proof himself, so he is (more than usually) directly responsible for all the framing and focusing — and he’s far too canny a filmmaker not to know precisely what he’s doing with and to those bodies. The excessive, camera-mediated gashing and trimming is a knowing, perhaps deprecating nod to all that previous, gratuitous T&A. His sound-tracking choice of “The Last Race” metaphorically underscores the point: in Bert I. Gordon’s Village of the Giants, bikini-clad teens find and consume an experimental growth serum, which causes them to expand to massive proportions. Really big boobs, actual acres of ass. Get it?
Of course, all the implied japing and judging is deeply embedded in the film’s matrix of esoteric references and fleeting allusions. You’d have to be very well versed in the history of exploitation cinema to pick up on the indirect homage to Gordon’s goofy movie. But as in Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino doesn’t just gesture, he dramatizes, folding an authoritative geekdom into the action of Death Proof. In the set-up to Death Proof’s notorious car crash scene, Julia is on the phone, instructing one of her fellow deejays to play “Hold Tight!” (1966) by Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich. Don’t recognize the names? “For your information,” Julia snorts, Pete Townsend briefly considered abandoning the Who, and he thought about joining the now-obscure beat band, to make it “Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick, Tich & Pete. And if you ask me, he should have.”
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It’s among the most gruesomely violent sequences in Tarantino’s films (which do not run short on graphic bloodshed), and Julia receives its most spectacular punishment. Those legs and that rump, upon which the camera has lavished so much attention, are torn apart. Her right leg flips, flies and slaps the pavement, a hunk of suddenly flaccid meat. Again, Tarantino proves himself an adept arranger of image, sign and significance. Want to accuse him of fetishizing Julia’s legs? He’ll materialize the move, reducing the limb to a manipulable fragment, and he’ll invest the moment with all of the intrinsic violence of the fetish. He’ll even do you one better — he’ll make that violence visible. Want to watch? You better buckle up and hold tight.
Hold on a second. “Hold Tight”? The soundtrack has passed over from intertextual in-joke to cruel punchline. It doesn’t help that the song is so much fun, and that it’s fun watching the girls groove along to it, just before Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell) obliterates them, again and again and again. The awful insistence of the repetition is another set-up, establishing the film’s narrative logic: the repeated pattern and libidinal charge-and-release of Stuntman Mike’s vehicular predations. It is, indeed, “a sex thing,” as Sheriff Earl McGraw (Michael Parks) informs us in his cartoonish, redneck lawman’s drawl. Soon the sexually charged repetitions pile up: see Abernathy’s (Rosario Dawson) feet hanging out of Kim’s (Tracie Thom) 1972 Mustang, in a visual echo of Arlene’s, and of Julia’s. Then listen to Lee (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) belt out some of Smith’s cover of “Baby It’s You” (1969), which we most recently heard 44 minutes before, as Julia danced ecstatically by the Texas Chili Bar’s jukebox. Then watch Abernathy as she sees Stuntman Mike’s tricked-out ’71 Nova, a vibrating hunk of metallic machismo — just like Arlene saw it, idling menacingly back in Austin, with another snatch of “Baby It’s You” wisping through that moment’s portent.
For a certain kind of viewer, the Nova’s low-slung, growling charms are hard to resist, as is the sleazy snarl of Willy DeVille’s “It’s So Easy” (1980; and we might note that Jack Nitzsche produced a couple of Mink DeVille’s early records, connecting another couple strands in the web) on the Nova’s car stereo. Those prospective pleasures raise the question of just who the film is for. That may seem obvious: the same folks — dudes, mostly — who find pleasure in exploitation movies like Vanishing Point (1971), Satan’s Sadists (1969) or The Big Doll House (1971). But there are a few other things to account for, like how Death Proof repeatedly passes the Bechdel Test, and how long those scenes of conversation among women go on, and on. Most notable is the eight-minute diner scene, a single take featuring Abernathy, Kim, Lee and Zoë (Zoë Bell, doing a cinematic rendition of her fabulous self, an instance of stunt casting that literalizes the “stunt” part). Among other things, the women discuss their careers in film, the merits of gun ownership and Kim and Zoë’s love of (you guessed it) car chase movies like Vanishing Point. One could read that as a liberatory move, a suggestion that cinema of all kinds is open to all comers. All that’s required is a willingness to watch. But watching the diner scene becomes increasing claustrophobic. The camera circles the women’s table incessantly, and on the periphery of the shot, sitting at the diner’s counter, is Stuntman Mike. The circling becomes predatory, the threat seems pervasive.
If you’ve seen the film, you know how that plays out: Zoë and Kim play “ship’s mast” on a white 1970 Dodge Challenger (the Vanishing Point car); Stuntman Mike shows up and terrorizes them mercilessly; but then Abernathy, Zoë and Kim chase him down and beat the living shit out of him, likely fatally. In another sharply conceived cinematic maneuver, Tarantino executes a climactic sequence that inverts the diner scene: the women surround Stuntman Mike, abject and pleading, and punch and kick him as he bounces from one of them to another. The camera zips from vantage to vantage within the circle, deliriously tracking the action. All the jump cuts intensify the violence, and they provide another contrast to the diner’s scene’s silky, unbroken shot. The sounds and the impact of the blows verge on slapstick, and our identification with the women makes it a giddily gross good time.
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So, an inversion seeks to undo repetition. Certainly, Stuntman Mike’s intent to repeat the car-crash-kill-thrill is undone, and predator becomes prey. But, as is inevitable with Tarantino’s cinema, there are complications, other echoes and patterns to suss out. For instance: as the women stride toward the wrecked Nova, while Stuntman Mike pathetically wails, the camera zooms in on their asses. Bad asses? Nice asses? What’s the right nomenclature? To make sure we can put the shot together with Julia’s first appearance in the film, Abernathy has hiked up her skirt, revealing a lot of leg. Repetition reasserts itself. In an exacerbating circumstance, Harvey Weinstein’s grubby fingerprints are smeared onto the film. Rodriguez’s Troublemaker Studios is credited with production of Grindhouse, but Dimension Films, a Weinstein Brothers company, handled distribution.
When the film cuts to its end titles, we hear April March’s “Chick Habit” (1995), with its spot-on lyric: “Hang up the chick habit / Hang it up, daddy / Or you’ll never get another fix.” And so on. Even here, where the girl-power vibe feels strongest (cue Abernathy burying a bootheel in Stuntman Mike’s face), there are echoes, patterns. Note how the striding bassline of “Chick Habit” strongly recalls the pulse beating through Nitzsche’s “The Last Race.” Note that March’s song is a cover, of “Laisse tomber les filles,” originally recorded by yé-yé girl France Gall. The song was penned by Serge Gainsbourg, pop provocateur and notorious womanizer. The two collaborated again, releasing “Les Sucettes,” a tune about a teeny-bopper who really likes sucking on lollipops, when Gall was barely 18; the accompanying scandal nearly torpedoed her career. Gall refused to ever sing another song by Gainsbourg, and disavowed her hits.
Again, that’s all deeply embedded, somewhere in the film’s complicated play of pop irony and double-entendre and the sudden explosions of delight and disgust that intermittently reveal and conceal. Again, you’d have to know your pop history really well to catch up with the complications, and Death Proof moves so fast that there’s always another reference or allusion demanding your attention as the cars growl and the blood spurts. Too many signs to track, too many signals to decipher — that’s the postmodern. But perhaps we have become too glib, assuming that all signs are somehow equivalent. Death Proof insists otherwise. Much has been made of the film’s strange relation to digital filmmaking, of the sort that Rodriguez has made a career out of. Part of Grindhouse’s shtick is its goofball applications of CGI, all the scratches and skips and flaws that the filmmakers lovingly applied. They are digital effects, masquerading as damaged celluloid. Tarantino cut back against that grain, filming as much of the car chase’s maniacal stuntwork in meatspace as he safely could. Purposeful practical filmmaking, for a digitally enhanced cinematic experience, attempting to mimic the ways real film interacts with the physical environment and its manifold histories. Is that clever, or just more cultural clutter?
Amid all the clutter that crowds the characters onscreen, and their conversations in the film’s field of sound, it can be easy to lose track of the distinctions between appearances and the traces of the real bodies that worked to bring Death Proof to life. Which is why Tarantino’s inclusion of Bell is so crucial. She provides another inversion: Instead of masking her individual presence, doing stunts for other actresses in their clothes and hair (for Lucy Lawless in Xena: Warrior Princess, or for Uma Thurman in Tarantino’s Kill Bill films), Bell is herself, doing what she does best, projecting the technical elements of filmmaking — usually meant to bleed seamlessly into illusion — right onto the surface of the screen. And instead of allowing one group of girls to slip into a repeated pattern, bodies easily exchanged for other bodies, Bell’s presence and its implicit insistence on her particularity (who else can move like she does?) breaks up the superficial logic of cinema’s market for the feminine. She disrupts its chick habit. There’s only one woman like her.
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Jonathan Shaw
#music for films#chick habit#jonathan shaw#dusted magazine#death proof#quentin tarantino#reservoir dogs#grindhouse#Dave Dee Dozy Beaky Mick & Tich
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Mouth Dreams analysis
MOUTH DREAMS
I dont even need to introduce to you the marvelous mash up works of neil cicierega’s mouth trilogy (now quadrilogy i guess). We all know them, we all love them and we all have our own interpretations of what they mean. For some merely musical shitposting, for others clever experimentation laden with phrases, leivmotifs and themes repeating here and there, and for many a deep and rich bounty of lore, hidden messages, subtextual stories and underlying narratives implied across multiple variations of all star, hidden in the meta data and uncovered only after doing spectrographic analysis on the soundwaves of the songs after being played at x0.000003 times the speed. It is usually understood that all the albums together form a unique and rich tapestry, a coherent whole that can be understood in its totality. Im not here to do that.
I came up with my own interpretation of what Mouth Dreams can be read as, independent from the other albums. Think of it as me presenting this entry as the soundtrack of a musical with its own self contained story. It is the interpretation that i chose to go by and i hope its understood the brilliance of these albums lies on how weird and vague and open ended they are such that any number of different readings can be extracted from them. So lets see the one i extracted, without further ado, lets begin.
Yahoo
It is an out of context, in media res, start for the whole story. We hear a voice, echoing in the void, yelling at the top of its lungs, reaching desperately for human conection. One form of looking at this song is that the voice only receives an empty response from its own echoes, but i dont take it like that. The song is too sublime and too beautiful for these, the notes soaring too high, the desperate plead is being answered. Someone is listening to the plead and answering right back, harmonizing.
This whole album is in a way that howl, reaching to others, and we the audience are answering back, listening. But also on another level, this whole album is the protagonist telling the tragic story of his own life to some sympathetic figure who wants to help, perhaps a therapist, perhaps a friend, perhaps a partner, we’ll see. And as the yelling subsides the story starts proper.
Mouth dreams (intro)
We are being slowly taken into the story, entering the psyche of the main character, entering their subconscious, their dreams, their memories and therefore, their past. We’ll see what life they led and how they ended up where they are now and we start right at his infancy with….
Spongerock
Spongebob is a great indicator that we are seeing this person’s early childhood. They seem to be a rambunctious and energetic child. Cheerful and enthusiastic, yet there seems to be some underlying aggression there. The music is a bit to strong, and in comes freddy mercury berating the poor kid “you’ve got mud on your face, you big disgrace”. Who is this entity being so hostile to a poor kid? What lies beneath that image of a happy kid? We are about to see on the next song.
Just a baby
This is where trouble starts. We are treated to a dramatic song about a poor young baby who seems to be having a pretty sad life. Justin bieber, former teen idol, keeps lamenting about the poor baby being stuck in baby jail. This song is very much about loss of innocence. A shadowy figure of the mother is introduced who tells the protagonist to be a good boy. And almost at the end of the song we get a suggestion of what’s so wrong on this poor kid’s life. His mother apparently “shot a man in reno”. We dont know if this is a literal thing the mother did or if this is a metaphor for the mother doing something horrible, commiting some crime, harming someone in some way. While its not clarified we see strong hints of what the mother could have done in the next song
Superkiller
As we worry what may be so wrong with this kid’s mother we come across the title for this song, ominous. Now in the original Psycho killer the killer was clearly the singer, but in here the song is twisted and turned a bit, recontextualized by the beats of “cant touch this”. It seems like this time is the singer the one who doesnt want to be touched by some nefarious figure (the mother? Is the mother a psycho killer?) maybe the kid saw the mother killing people “i dont like people when they’re on fire”. whatever the case might be the kid is clearly strung up and under a lot of stress and we are introduced to the first hint of the insomnia that will plague this persons life who cant sleep because “my bed’s on fire”. The horrible situation in which this kid is living is taking a severe toll on their mental health. How is he going to cope with this?
Get happy
I think everyone can agree that “come on get happy” is incredibly unnerving when mindlessly repeated over and over. A first read might suggest the kid is forced to put on a happy face, to pretend that there is nothing wrong going on with their life. But as the song progresses it could also be interpreted as the kid being tempted to find refuge from the horror by unsavory methods “get happy” as in acquire happiness of a forced and artificial kind, perhaps drugs. But also “we’ll make you happy”. The kid is not running into a rabbit hole on their own, they are being invited. Its possible that the kid is being seduced by a bad crowd to move into seedy circles as an escape from their life.
Ribs
In here we see the kid, probably a young teenager by this point as suggested by the use of marylin manson in this song, falling deep into debauchery. The specific kind is not needed to know, it could be drugs, it could be sexual experimentation, it could be criminality. Point is this is unhealthy and dangerous and depraved, emphasized by the title of the song “ribs” as a reference to the rumor that marilyn manson removed two of his ribs in order to perform autofellatio. Whatever the case it clearly works, the song is actually a great bop, energetic and upbeat, the kid is content with the situation, at least for a while…
My mouth
This song is the coming down from the high. In here we see at full blast how the life of depravity on the one side and their situation at home on the other have turned the character into a hardcore insomniac, their health is severy compromised “My eyes feel like they're gonna bleed
Dried up and bulging out my skull”. Another way to read this song is as we momentarily cutting back to the present. After all, what we have been seeing until now has been dreams/memories and this is a short look at the wreck that the person is as a grown up, stirring awake from their memories and trying desperately to forget or to go back to sleep where they can have a reprieve. As evidenced by the next song
Aerolong
I dont wanna miss a thing is completely turned on its head. As the lyrics clearly demonstrate is the protagonist who cant go to sleep being chased by their memories, specifically the memories of their mother “I don't miss you, babe, and I do want to miss a thing”. As the person is tossing and turning on their bed, unable to sleep they talk about how they dont miss their mother at all and they want to “miss” her as in they want to forget her.
Sleepin’
The character is constantly speaking about how they are “sleeping with their clothes on” this is due to them falling asleep during their everyday life because of their lack of sleep every night, this person is barely functional, their sleep schedule is broken. Also since this song is about the character actually sleeping it also works as a bridge back into their dreams and so into their past.
Aammoorree
Is another vignette about the character sinking into disreputable states in order to escape their shitty situation as a teenager, this time very specifically about being completely drunk and perhaps experiencing romance for the first time. The character is probably at a club or a party, drunkenly hitting on someone, though chances are without much success as the song becomes increasingly more incoherent and we go into a full black out. This gets bad enough that the person finally has to take a look and….
Where is my mom
….stop. It is highly suggestive that in the album the “stop” is part of this song rather than the last one. The person is not only stopping their current alcoholic binge. They are stopping the entire situation and taking a good look at their life, finally confronting face to face what is happening and why it is so wrong. Now “stacy’s mom” was always kind of an inappropriate song due to it being about a child having a crush on their friend’s mom, as sung by an adult. But as it is recontextualized by the instruments of “where is my mind” it takes on a much darker tone. The romantic words are still there but now with a sinister bent. This time the main character asks their friend if they can go and take refuge at their house and when they ask if the mom is going to be there they sound more scared than eager, specially suggested by the way he seems to be stammering the word “pool”, they are nervous and terrified. They also talk about stacy’s mom as “all they want and been waiting for so long”, probably because all they want is a normal, loving mother. Presumably this song is about the main character finally talking about what is going on at his house with a friend, confessing and that confession gives way to realization
Fredhammer
Then realization gives way to anger. During this whole song we see the teenage character finally grasping how fucked up the whole situation is and he gets progressively more worked up with each successive aggravation “Why did it take so long? Why (hoo!), did I wait so long, huh?
Why??? To figure it out, but I did it (huh?)”. From this we transition to the kid actually confronting their mom face to face. The line “So you can take that cookie And stick it up your (yeah!)” can be read as the mother trying to pretend there is nothing wrong or pacifying the kid with empty gestures of motherhood, by making cookies and the kid spitting that back into their face. The kid gets more and more worked up through the song as we seamlessly transition to the next one.
Limp Wicket
This song is pure incoherent chaos but something very important can be rescued out of the chaos. This song uses the lyrics from the “ewok celebration” which is presumably the song the ewoks sing in return of the jedi after the empire was defeated. So in a way is the kid celebrating that he finally confronted their mother and presumably defeated her. This is emphazised by the recurrence of the lyrics ““So you can take that cookie”. Is not specified how the mother is defeated, maybe social services or the police get involved, maybe the kid runs away, either way this song is triumphant. The evil entity that stole his childhood and innocence has been defeated.
Cannibals
This song is slightly different from the rest. It works as a form of victory lap after the defeat of the mother figure, but also as an intermission since it lies smack dab in the middle of the album, and finally as a transitionary song from childhood to adulthood. Is a time skip, we get to see the person grow up in fast forward as the THX song hits its crescendo. This song also makes it perfectly clear that, even though she was left behind, the mental scars that the mother left are still there and still fresh and still very much stopping them from sleeping “She drives me crazy
And I can't help myself”.
The outsiders
This works as a way to recontextualize us in the life of the character as an adult. Our so called “feature presentation”. It is not altogether clear who these people being introduced are. They could be the people who came to mean something in this persons life as they grew up after trauma, probably multiple foster homes, social workers, friends, bosses, co workers, etc. the fact that they are being enumerated dissapasionatly could indicate how most of his social relationships were basically a meaningless blur for him who grew up socially distant due to trauma. It could also represent the multiple roles that our character was forced to take as they grew up and the multiple things that went through his mind or meant something. There is clearly some desperate attempts to recapture their lost childhood as figures such as “inspector gadget” or “the ninja turtles part three” are named. The song is a fast montage of views and places. That prepares us for the next song.
Johnny
We finally zoom in and take a good look at our main character as an adult. A sad, pathetic figure, hurt and lonely, possibly not very well liked and certainly not respected as we hear boos all around. Despite all this the character is clearly committing themselves to be a good person, to not hurt others like he was hurt and specifically to not commit the same crimes that their mother commited.
Closerflies & Nightmovin
These two songs might as well work as a single piece since they are both more or less about the same thing. We reiterate how this person has been turned into an insomniac due to the trauma that they experienced as a child “When I'm far too tired to fall asleep”. They are delirious and barely coherent, possibly hallucinating as they think about their life in bed. This is clearly hell on earth and it seems like its just never going to stop “Can't wake up in a sweat
'Cause it ain't over yet” but, with neil’s classic sense of humor, the song immediately ends.
Now that could just be for the sake of irony but there is also another level in which it could be read. This suffering stops because something suddenly changes in this person’s life. What could that be?
Whitehouse
“I fell in love with a girl”
As the lyrics say, the main character met someone special and they are deeply in love. But also, because of the past that weighs heavily on him, he is very trepidatious about wether to go on with the relationship or not. He knows he is damaged goods and he doesnt want to drag her down as well, these fears make it so he never fully opens up to her about his issues “She turns and says, "Are you alright?" I said, "I must be fine because my heart's still beating."
Wah
The use of “war” by edwin starr is a clever reference about how everything is fair in love and war. Now this song is an important departure since it is sung from the point of view of the girl our main character fell in love with. She is a feisty woman who is very clearly trying to establish the terms of the relationship and demanding her partner to open up which the main character, due to his insecurities, takes as a declaration of war and which he deflects by playing dumb, hence the repeated use of the silly “WAH” by wario.
Pee Wee Inc
The emotional distance from the man is putting a strain in the relationship, so what once was supposed to “feel good” is now this melancholic and unbearable situation. Is no mistake that the song sampled here is “the breakfast machine” from pee wee’s big adventure. After all a neglected partner can feel like a breakfast machine, an object that is there just to make your breakfast. On top of this you can see that the insomnia hasnt gone away “My dreams, they got a kissing 'cause I don't get to sleep, no”. In a lot of ways the girlfriend is feeling used as just a relief from the man’s suffering but not as someone who is being truly loved.
1000 spoons
We go back to the woman’s perspective. At first it just seems like a simple melancholic situation where she is sad the relationship is not working, but then we see the woman have a full mental breakdown as the song changes and becomes much more deranged and we get to see what is really happening. The man ran away on their wedding day. This is represented by the lyrics “is like rain on your wedding day” because it means the wedding has been ruined. She is heartbroken by this.
Mouth dreams (extro)
Appropriately as the previous song talked about a wedding being ruined by “rain” this song begins with the sound of rain. This is the big emotional climax of the story, the music at its most dramatic. Now i will admit, even for me this is a stretch, im willing to concede most of what i am about to say is essentially built out of whole cloth and me wanting to fit a neat full narrative into this album where there is none, but hey, what is art for?
Essentially the man is about to commit suicide, possibly by jumping off a bridge in the rain as suggested by the song being sampled “drowning”. The fact that this song is named after the album is a way to signify how everything that we have just seen weighs heavily on the man’s heart, his whole life, his memories, his trauma, and he is finally ready to end it all. He jumps.
But at the last second his wife jumps after him and drags him to the shore, the last we see is her trying to perform mouth to mouth resuscitation, as indicated by the song,”love me mouth to mouth now…” he is unconscious and presumably finally sleeping peacefully (maybe dead?) “...cover me with dreams, yeah”.
It might look like he will not survive, as implied by the sinister version of all star encroaching over the song. But as it looks like all hope is lost he finally WAKES UP.
In a way this song is also when we finally catch up with the start of the album where we saw the man desperately hollering for human contact and merely echos responding, except now someone finally answered, and he is finally ready to open up and share his story.
Brithoven
Even though this song is sung by a single person i choose to take it as a dialog between the couple, both of them sharing their regrets about their relationship with each other, her recriminating the fact that she couldnt have known what he was going through “oh baby bay, how was i supposed to know, that something wasnt right here” and him finally admitting that he needs help “My loneliness is killing me”.
Finally they both agree to try it again and give their relationship a second chance “hit me baby one more time”
Ain’t
Part of me is conflicted about this song, i kind of want to disregard it, mainly because i think its kind of a weird way to end an album and also because i just dont feel is a very good mashup really. The lyrics dont mix that well with the song, they are paced in an inconsistent way and overall feel like they never truly click. On top of that it just doesnt fit at all with the narrative that i have been building during this analysis.
There is talk about alcoholism and parent abandoment, this time by the father, a figure that was never mentioned during the album. The last line says “say it aint so” which doesnt particularly seem to reflect on any of the themes i’ve been building upon. Ultimately i think i will just leave it besides and be content that i managed to fit almost all of the album into one story, this process was never meant to be a perfect dissection of the carefully planned story that neil deliberately crafted but rather me having fun seeing pictures in a rorshach test.
So anyway that was Mouth dreams, let me know what you thought.
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wtFOCK season 3, episode 5 reaction
This whole episode I kept doing that Marge Simpson groan. You know, the one that’s like tight-lipped and this low, exasperated mmm from deep in the throat? That was me constantly.
Episode 5
Clip 1 - Jens gives Robbe sex advice
Robbe texts his mom and says to her he can’t visit, lying that it’s because he’s sick. One repeated element that does exist in this season is Robbe listening to music on his headphones, which is him retreating into himself, or using music to cope. The song lyrics reflect that: “I used to feel so alone, now I’m feeling better on my own.”
Since I’ve been trying to think of ways to rewrite this season, they could expand Robbe using music as a coping strategy even further. Music should have been something that Robbe bonds with Sander over. And not just Sander’s recommendation of Bowie, either, which is all they’ve done so far - it seems like Robbe should give recs or insight as well. Talk about how important music is to him with Sander. Make it a serious point in their developing relationship.
Jens skates up and talks to Robbe. Robbe wants to get high, but Jens doesn’t have weed with him at the moment. He asks Robbe if he’s thought about the Brrrothers, because they’re not the same without Robbe. Robbe snaps and turns away from him, then lies and says his bad mood is about Noor. Jens has already heard that they’re fighting.
Jens’ talk to Robbe, knowing that Noor wants to have sex and Robbe doesn’t, is actually pretty sweet. Even though he doesn’t understand the real reason why Robbe doesn’t want to, his talk is thoughtful and not shaming Robbe for being a nervous virgin, it’s considerate of him. Considering the Brrrothers have been obnoxious about sex and girls all season, this was a refreshing change. One question I do have is how Jens knew that Noor wanted sex and Robbe didn’t, but I guess it was implied that this explanation was part of the rumor mill.
Of course, the downside is that Jens’ advice prompts Robbe to text Noor about how he misses her and wants to meet up. Bad, Robbe! I don’t know if Jens’ talk encouraged Robbe to text her because Robbe was like “Yeah, I’m supposed to like Noor, better get back on that,” or because maybe he genuinely told himself, “I just don’t want to have sex with her because I’m nervous, yeah, that must be it,” and decided to just move forward with it.
I do like drama that comes from characters trying to be helpful but unintentionally saying or doing the wrong thing - that’s what happens in the locker room scene with Isak and Even. When Isak says he’s better off without mentally ill people in his life, he’s telling Even this as a way of saying that his mother won’t cause problems for them, he doesn’t care what she’ll think of them dating. So taken on its own, I think this scene is fine.
HOWEVER. The pacing of this season is again, SO SO weird, because this scene would have fit right in around episodes 2-3? Right after Robbe tried and failed to have sex with Noor, you know ... the first time? Or the second, or the third? Like … have it be in line with Isak’s episode 3 sexuality crisis, all the “why does he have to be so gay” stuff. It would’ve worked well to have this talk at like, the beginning of episode 3, and then have Robbe making the “that guy is so gay” comment as an unintentional result of this - by trying to convince himself he is just straight and nervous and distancing himself from being gay. We had three entire scenes of Robbe failing to fuck Noor, so narratively, why did we need to wait this long for Jens to talk to him about it?
Clip 2 - AGAIN?
Robbe invites Noor over to bone. He’s lit about a million candles and is trying to make this a big romantic deal, except lmao, he has on David Bowie’s Life on Mars … Robbe … what u doing…
Actually, I’m not sure if this is diegetic music or not, if Robbe is blasting Bowie from his phone as mood music or if he’s only hearing this song inside his head. I think we’re definitely meant to take away that Robbe is hearing the song since it gets distorted as he slinks down Noor’s body, and that it’s not just there for the audience. In either case, Sander is supposedly the shadow hanging over this sad hetero affair.
Tbh listening to Life on Mars is the best part of this season and I wish I could just like … listen to this song play against a black screen instead of watching poorly written, repetitive clips.
They start to get it on and he takes off her shirt, unhooks her bra, yadda yadda, he doesn’t look happy but he soldiers on and it’s implied they went All The Way. On the one hand, I will rage if they actually had sex. On the other hand, if they don’t, it’s yet another clip where the same shit happens, Robbe tries to bang Noor and fails..
Clip 3 - Robbe’s not turned on by Noor and this is BRAND NEW INFORMATION
… okay, so he didn’t have sex with her AGAIN? He couldn’t get it up?
For fuck’s sake. I mean, on the one hand I’m glad it was actually Robbe’s choice (apparently) to put a stop to the sex instead of like, someone else walking in and interrupting yet again, but on the other hand, I feel like we have done this scene SO MUCH. We KNOW. About the only thing that’s changed I guess is that Robbe kissed a boy and now he’s trying to be straight? If this was only like the second time this scene had happened, it would have been fine.
I just don’t have a coherent idea of Robbe’s arc. This season is going in circles.
Anyway, Robbe couldn’t get it up, Noor is sympathetic, she asks if it’s her, Robbe says she’s amazing, he looks sad and haunted blah blah we’ve already seen this play out.
Why were these separate clips? In the first clip, we have Robbe seemingly determined to have sex with Noor, and then in the second, he can’t get it up. So why not SHOW THE MOMENT OF CHANGE? Are these filmmakers on drugs? This is storytelling 101. Like there’s no reason to split up these clips except to cause a bit of anxiety if you happen to be able to watch the clips at the exact time they’re posted, and from a real-time perspective I get it, but that’s ineffective for the vast majority of people who will have to watch later and then will watch these two clips together at the same time. I mean, the fact that it’s not even 10 minutes in between clips … just SHOW THE WHOLE SCENE. Holy fuck. How are they this incompetent?
The pacing of the scenes themselves is so weird. So many of the clips are oddly short, we don’t NEED them to be split into parts. It makes me really appreciate Julie’s pacing: Skam S3 episodes had 4-6 clips each, and in those clips, we got rich scenes packed with details, often multi-tasking within different story threads. wtFOCK’s pacing is simplistic and choppy and unnecessary.
Clip 4 - Milan gives Robbe a pep talk
Robbe is Googling erectile dysfunction which is honestly kind of funny (but again, probably would have been a better fit for earlier in this season, before Robbe had already kissed a dude ...) Milan comes in wanting advice on two shirts, Robbe is annoyed.
Milan tries to get Robbe to talk to him. It takes some prodding (and I do like how Robbe is swiveling in his chair and not looking at Milan) but Robbe admits there’s a guy who likes him and, after Milan asks, admits that it’s mutual.
Tbh … I don’t find it so hard to believe that Robbe opened up to Milan even though they’re not anywhere as close as Eskild and Isak, because I do think another gay guy is a “safe” person to talk to about this situation and I can see Robbe doing it. What I do NOT get is why, here and now, Robbe is now openly admitting it. Why did we go from Robbe trying to fuck a girl and, before that, calling the boy he kissed a pervert and a homophobic slur, to admitting his attraction for a boy? Why the sudden turnaround? Based on the clips themselves, all we have to go off as a turning point is that he couldn’t fuck Noor, BUT this is nothing new for either Robbe and the audience, AND not being able to fuck a girl does not actually mean that Robbe would be able to fuck a guy, or that he’s into guys, and it especially doesn’t mean that Robbe would accept that he likes a guy. I mean, he’s Googling “erectile dysfunction” not “am I gay?” which tbh seems still more like denial than anything. He’s blaming his lack of arousal on a medical issue, not his sexuality.
This scene would feel more true to me if Robbe was like, downplaying his side of it, or playing it off as only Sander had feelings and it wasn’t requited. That’s more in line with the characterization we have just been given, that Robbe is denying his attraction to Sander.
Another way would be to not split up the sex clip and to show like, Robbe flashing back to his kiss with Sander while he’s making out with Noor, so we get that it’s not just that he’s not into Noor, it’s that he’s very into Sander, and we see him grudgingly admit to himself that yes, he’s attracted to Sander (at the very least.) which would make it believable that he admits it to Milan. Cause and effect, etc.
MIlan is like, are you so nervous to tell me you have a crush on another guy (...????? um, yes, Milan, you have to know it’s hard to come out???) but is pretty supportive and says Robbe’s lucky to have him, Milan would have wanted himself when he was going through this. Robbe is just like, I don’t know what I feel and I want everything to be normal, there’s too much shit going on right now. Milan says Robbe IS normal and he doesn’t want to bottle up who he is, the pressure will get too real and he’ll explode, he’ll hurt people. Robbe seems to take this advice seriously, so hopefully this scene will actually lead to cause + effect.
Again, this scene is fine on its own? There’s just something about the pacing of the season as a whole that feels strange.
I don’t know if this is supposed to be the equivalent of the Pride clip, because Robbe doesn’t say anything offensive and Milan didn’t get upset. Milan’s advice is good about not pushing away who you really are, but there’s nothing specifically confronting internalized homophobia, which Robbe desperately needs seeing as he’s had some extremely homophobic outbursts. I think it’s a shame to lose that part of the scene, because it’s got a very pointed and urgent message. (EDIT from the future: We got the Pride clip later in the episode, so that’s good.)
Clip 5 - Robbe tells Jens he likes someone else
Robbe is sitting on the sidelines listening to music again. Jens comes over and asks how things are, Robbe says he took his advice with Noor and Jens is happy that he’s a matchmaker. Robbe is like no, there’s someone else. He says he thought it would go away, but it didn’t.
For a moment it seems like this might be a sudden coming out scene, but Jens finally asks who it is and Robbe clams up and finds it hard to get out. Jens asks if she goes to their school. Robbe is saved by Moyo wanting to play a game against some guys.
This is some plausible conflict, at the very least, Robbe not being able to tell his friends that he’s into a guy. It would have been way better to focus on this instead of Robbe flinging a slur at Sander. Robbe’s friends seem like the clearest explanation for his internalized homophobia.
Now Jens needs to follow up on this development, or else turn in his Jonas card. Because there’s dropping the subject if he senses Robbe doesn’t want to tell him yet, and then there’s forgetting about the subject because Jens isn’t that engaged with what’s happening with Robbe, and unfortunately the latter vibe has come across far more than the first. Like why does it seem like Jens is always walking away?
Clip 6 - Robbe breaks up with Noor
Old Town Road is playing as Noor meets Robbe in a cafe. One thing I do notice is that there are a fair amount of gay musicians on the soundtrack this season, so that’s cool.
Robbe is stressed because we can tell he’s gonna try to break up with Noor. He doesn’t order anything to eat. Noor is sympathetic about him not getting it up with her, but Robbe says he needs some time for himself, he has so much shit on his mind. Noor says she can help with that, he’s like nah, Noor is crying and reaching for him desperately. He gets up and walks out.
L O L I heard all about how Robbe supposedly handled this better than Isak, and I mean … on the one hand, I certainly agree that he did Noor a solid by officially breaking up with her and not just running away from her in the hallway. But er ... first of all, Robbe went wayyyyyyyyy farther with Noor than Isak EVER did with Emma. Robbe and Noor had an actual relationship for what, a month? Isak and Emma made out twice and flirted a bit. They were not exclusively, seriously dating. So yeah, Noor is owed this breakup.
Second, Robbe still cheated on her with Sander before he broke up with her. The fact that they were naked while they made out in the pool frankly adds an on-screen sexual element to the cheating. And technically Isak making out with Even in the pool was not cheating … for sure it was a dick move to lead on Emma and then ditch her like that, I’m not going to say it was NBD, but like I said, they weren’t exclusively dating. I mean, in all my years of Skam fandom, it’s pretty rare that I’ve heard anyone refer to what Isak did as cheating - it’s usually talked about differently than Even cheating on Sonja. Robbe and Sander BOTH cheated on their girlfriends here.
Third, it’s nice he did this with Noor but lmao, kinda small potatoes considering what Robbe said to Sander.
Fourth, Robbe just gets up and leaves while she’s crying, lol. He let her order soup and then he ditched her! That’s cold as ice! Bro, you need to stick around until she tells you to leave, or you needed to pick a breakup location where both of you can leave ASAP without someone coming by with the meal you ordered.
And to be clear, I don’t think Robbe not handling this perfectly makes him a terrible person or anything. It’s more the comparison to Isak with how Isak is supposedly worse and Robbe is much nicer. Nah.
Sucks for Noor and all, but whyyyy are they making the Emma character so tragic and emphasizing this het relationship so much? We don’t even end the clip on Robbe’s POV. Because how he feels about this breakup doesn’t matter, I guess. Does he feel guilty? Free? Unsure? Conflicted? IDK because we close on her, not him! I’m sorry, but it’s not her season!
I mentioned this in an earlier reaction but I’m just super tired of gay storylines that have this intense focus on how much someone being gay hurts a straight person. I believe I mentioned Love, Victor as a prominent example, because Victor’s relationship with his girlfriend seemingly gets more screen time than the relationship with his actual male love interest. And I get why this storyline is relevant to a coming out arc, of course I do, but it really bugs me when the het relationship seems to overshadow the gay relationship, as it does here. At this point I feel like Robbe/Noor has been given equal plot relevance as Robbe/Sander, if not more, and that should not be the case. It’s not about shipping, it’s about wanting a story about a gay kid’s journey of self-acceptance to focus more on the life-changing love story that is the catalyst for embracing his sexuality, than the fake passion-less relationship that is doomed to failure that is just a momentary stumble in said journey of self-acceptance. There is no need to demonize Noor, but there is actually a middle ground between treating her with respect and empathy and making her the real victim of this story.
This narrative choice also does not exist in a vacuum. It is completely fair to be skeptical of the prioritization of a het relationship over a gay one. It’s fair to wonder why we’ve gotten multiple scenes of Robbe getting hot and heavy with a girl, why Robbe spends a pivotal clip being so sad about Noor that he doesn’t seem to really notice or care that he’s alone with the guy he supposedly likes.
I mean, fuck, Robbe seems more upset about hurting Noor’s feelings by breaking up with her for legitimate reasons than he does about hurting Sander’s feelings by calling him a f*g and accusing him of sexual assault.
Clip 7 - Robbe tries to speak with Sander
Robbe goes to school (not his school, Sander’s) and asks where the art room is. He’s in a way better mood, a spring in his step, but LMAO you better pray that Sander actually wants to talk to you rather than kick your ass or avoid you for all eternity because of what you said to him.
Sander is sketching a nude male model. Robbe seems happy just to see him. He walks away and goes to the bathroom, fixes his hair, stares in the mirror, takes a deep breath. Then he goes up to Sander after the bell rings. Robbe wants to talk, Sander is not having it and walks away. Robbe is sad, angsty music plays.
Uhhhhh, serves you right? No offense but I can’t even feel sad for Robbe in this scenario, because what he did crossed a line. Internalized homophobia is a hell of a drug, but there’s such a difference between Robbe just denying that the kiss meant anything or blaming it on being drunk or whatever, and essentially accusing Sander of sexual assault and calling him a slur. It’s not an ignorant mistake, it’s a malicious one. I feel bad that Robbe ever had such self-hatred that he made those comments in the first place and I certainly don’t hate him or think he should be forever alone, but it is 100% understandable why Sander would not want to speak to him after that.
Also, going up to Sander at his school was not the best move, because he’s basically ambushing him. Sander doesn’t have a choice whether to deal with Robbe in that moment. It would’ve been better if Robbe sent him some kind of apology text or voicemail first and left it up to Sander whether he wanted to meet. I get that’s not as good for televised dramaaaa, but it’s kinder to Sander. (And if Sander doesn’t respond, or if he’s blocked Robbe, well, those are just consequences of Robbe’s actions that he’ll have to live with.) EDIT: Robbe actually did contact Sander first via text, wanting to meet up so he could explain. That does make it somewhat better, although I still think he shouldn’t have approached him at school. If Sander doesn’t want to talk to you? Then give him space. Maybe he’ll be willing to hear you out in time, or maybe he’ll decide he’s better off without you, but Robbe’s the one who did something wrong and it’s not up to Robbe whether Sander forgives him.
Clip 8 - Robbe and Sander make up and kiss
Angsty music keeps playing as Robbe walks home. He sees a mom and her kids playing, more sadness presumably due to his own family troubles.
Sander has followed him and says he has five minutes. Robbe’s like “Why don’t you want to talk?” LMAO IDK ROBBE, WHAT COULD IT BE.
Robbe says he’s sorry and that he loves Sander. LMAO WHAT. Is this a nuance of translation where “I love you” isn’t as strong as it is in English? Are you kidding me?
First of all … he LOVES Sander when they’ve barely interacted? They’ve spoken only a handful of times. Hell, they only met in episode 3, and this is episode 5. It’s been like two weeks since they’ve met, and while I could buy that some ships fell in love in that short of time, this is sure as fuck not one of them.
Second … Robbe goes from shoving Sander and calling him horrible things and trying to fuck Noor, to professing his love for Sander, WITHIN DAYS? And this is the character who’s supposed to have a big coming out arc? What is nuance, what is good writing, what is a coherent idea of this character’s struggles with his sexuality and himself... The talk with Milan might convince Robbe to accept his feelings, but it would make way more sense if Robbe was more tentative about them. He doesn’t need to come out swinging the big epic declarations in order to accept his romantic interest in Sander.
Like this isn’t even based on what I personally think is believable for a romance, this is based on what wtFOCK has told me about this character! They made the choice to make him say more viciously homophobic things. They made the choice to have him go back to Noor and try to have sex with her for the millionth time.
I’m glad that Sander doesn’t buy the confession at first, at least.
Robbe says that he was really fucked up and hat Sander is the first dude. There is a cute moment where he’s like “that kiss (mimes fireworks)” but then things went Chernobyl. Would have been great if we saw exactly what made him go Chernobyl and make him regret the kiss. He says he’s sorry but asks for one more chance.
Sander steps in, leans in for a kiss. “What about Chernobyl?” “Fuck Chernobyl.” They kiss, it’s really sweet, but lol they’re kissing in public??? Robbe is ok with this?? I just have abso-fucking-lutely no idea where this kid’s head is. Like ... how is he so cool with this considering where he was just days ago? Apparently Robbe’s internalized homophobia was so extreme that he was all “get away from me f*g” toward Sander with no clear catalyst, but also not so extreme that it couldn’t be fixed with a pep talk from Milan? Okay!
This scene would have been totally fine if Robbe’s mistake was less cruel and amounted to blocking Sander or telling him to stay away or w/e. It doesn’t feel satisfying for what Robbe actually did say.
Also, sigh, because Sander did forgive Robbe just like that, and I don’t buy it. I mean, if anything, it makes me sad for Sander. I want to tell him that he deserves better. I suppose I can buy this as part of his fear that no one will ever love him, that he’s desperate to be accepted and loved and so is quick to forgive.
It would have made more sense for Robbe to have a longer period of self-reflection, have him come out to his friends, etc. and then reunite with Sander an episode or so later, similar to how Isak and Even reunited at the end of episode 7. Or to have Sander take some time before letting Robbe talk to him, during which Robbe works on his own issues.
Sander gets a call from Britt, which he ignores, saying Britt’s the past, he and Robbe are the future (as the song lyrics talk about the future and the past … they’re going pretty on the nose this season. Fine by me, OG was also on the nose.) Lmao but Robbe has no right to be upset about Britt after he explicitly told Sander to stay away. I mean, it’s dubious of Sander to keep dating her after cheating, but he also thought Robbe was no longer an option sooo don’t be surprised Sander is still with her, dude.
Sander goes to meet Britt, but not before some make outs, some handholding. I think their chemistry is good! It’s just that I don’t really buy the depth of this relationship. It legit makes me sad that these actors are getting served this half-assed material.
Clip 9 - Zoë gets a letter
Robbe goes home and gets a text from Sander, with a sketch of them, saying their kiss was Chernobyl. Well, that’s cute.
Milan is telling Zoë about seeing some straight-looking dude on the bus who melted when Milan looked at him. Robbe is in a good mood and is gonna do the cooking. Milan observes that he’s happy and asks if things went well with his (Robbe looks toward Zoë) “lovely girlfriend”. At least Milan covered for him! (EDIT from the future: Ahahaha, funny considering how casually people out Robbe this season...)
Robbe hands Zoë some mail that turns out to do with Viktor, the apparent Nikolai in this version, about the case going to court. She has to testify. She is upset and walks out of the kitchen.
I complained a bit about Zoë/Senne drama taking up time in Robbe’s season, but to be clear, I have no problem with them following up on this plot point from S2. It’s a hugely important story. But I also think it works best if you integrate it into Robbe’s story, by drawing a parallel to their situations, finding a common theme, etc. And it depends on whether Robbe’s story is otherwise satisfactory, because if the writing is pretty tight, I’m not really bothered by digressions in other characters’ subplots.
Clip 10 - Robbe and Sander get cozy
Oh hey, it’s the big cuddling clip! Robbe and Sander goof off, pillow fight, smoke a joint, make out. Mostly make out. Sander shows Robbe a sketch of him (Robbe) and implies how good it would look on a wall (big).
Robbe’s fave actor is Leonardo DiCaprio, because hasn’t Sander seen Romeo + Juliet? It’s fucking beautiful.
Man, on the one hand, sick Skam reference, and it’s just a simple, cute little nod to OG, not something complicated. I can dig that. But on the other hand, now I’m annoyed at how Isak got all of this beautiful development and watching R+J actually meant something for his character, and Robbe has absolutely nothing like that. Stuff like the fact it’s Robbe who likes R+J instead of Sander, WHICH IS FINE, but like … doesn’t say anything about Robbe’s view on masculinity or w/e, doesn’t do much for his characterization.
Sander takes pics of Robbe. Their chemistry is cute. Once again I despair at gifted actors being given subpar material leading up to this clip.
LMAO at them copying the dialogue from OG, Sander being all life is like a movie. Again, irrationally annoyed because this dialogue MEANT something to Even. Even was a huge film buff and an aspiring director. Sander hasn’t mentioned movies at all, he’s into art and David Bowie and photography. So why not have Sander quote some Bowie lyrics that explain his thoughts on life? Mention what art means to him? Personalize this dialogue so that it’s specific to Sander. Or, if you’re going to borrow this chunk of dialogue, at least establish Sander as a film enthusiast prior to this clip.
Also that Isak brought up the multiverse theory because he was smart and inquisitive, but I have no idea who the fuck Robbe is. Does this make sense with Robbe’s prior characterization? Shrug.
I do like the multiverse reference to Spider-Man because HELL YEAH Into the Spider-Verse!!! Fucking masterpiece! I could be watching that for the 20th time instead of the upcoming gay-bashing hate crime.
I do like Sander’s acting in this scene and his reaction, how the music (“Ocean Eyes”) stops when Sander starts talking about multiverse theory. His dialogue is a little different here than OG, about thinking about what he’s done and wondering why he thinks something, his thoughts never stop, which fits in with bipolar disorder.
Robbe notices he’s a little agitated, Sander says the only way to stop your thoughts is from dying. So I guess we’re putting in the suicidal thoughts in this version?
“Sometimes I forget how young you are.” Are they the same age in this version? Lmao. It’s a joke so it’s not a big deal.
Robbe starts kissing him and asks when Sander fell for him. Sander is like, before you! When Robbe was spraying the graffiti he knew Robbe was the one. Robbe is like … you were there??
I mean. this is cute and all, but doesn’t it kinda take away from later events, if Sander goes back to Britt, then like … knowing Sander has been Pining All Along should create way less doubt in Robbe’s mind? When Even went back to Sonja, there was room for actual doubt in Isak’s mind (and the audience’s) about the sincerity of Even’s feelings. I think people forgot that the “I saw you the first day of school” moment at the end of the season was a surprise. I was in the fandom and I don’t think a lot of people thought Even had fallen for Isak that early. So Robbe now knows that Sander fell for him well before they even talked, doesn’t that remove some of the tension about Sander’s motives? I suppose it depends on how the story goes from here, but if it’s similar to OG, then I think it slightly lessens the ambiguity and tension.
Also, another reason why it would have been good to actually see the graffiti scene play out in episode 1… and to see what Robbe tagged on the wall … come on. COME ONNNN. Let’s see what got Sander’s attention! Did Robbe create something funny or clever or insightful? Wouldn’t that have been a great detail to show their connection? This is basic storytelling, hello?
I guess if I’m being fair, we don’t know exactly what Even saw in Isak that first day of school, either. But then again, we didn’t see the first day of school in a clip, while we definitely saw the graffiti scene. Just a missed opportunity, IMO.
They kiss and Sander gets a text from Britt. According to Sander, he told Britt about him and Robbe, but she doesn’t believe him, which is what I assumed of Sonja too, btw. At least, that’s what I thought at Emma’s party where she initiated the kiss with Even. Sander says Britt is so controlling. Robbe seems uncertain.
Sander says there’s probably another universe where Sander is still with Britt, but he’s glad to be in this universe. I do like this part.
Clip 11 - Milan schools Robbe on Pride
Robbe’s alarm goes off in the morning. He smiles a bit, though, presumably because he’s got Sander in his life. He gets a good morning text from Sander, which is cute and makes him smile more. Goes into the bathroom and Milan is there. Sander texts Robbe that he’s been thinking about him in all universes, Robbe is happy.
Milan is like, when can I meet your boyfriend??? Robbe says soon. Awww, this interaction is pretty sweet. Milan is like, welcome to the club! You know, “our” club meaning dudes who like dudes.
Robbe is like, just because I’m with Sander doesn’t mean I belong to some club, I’m not like you. Milan is like … and how am I? Robbe gives the usual Isak-ish response of dressing up and talking about BJs, Milan gets upset. Robbe says there’s nothing wrong with being gay but when people think of being gay, they think of that and it’s not fair to those who aren’t like that. Robbe’s not going to put on leather pants and dance at pride just because he likes Sander!
Milan gets very upset and goes into the Pride speech. I always appreciate this scene and I’m grateful that it’s one thing the remakes don’t really fuck with, since it’s so important (I think the remakes all recognize that it’s amazing, heh).
Senne wanting to use the bathroom is kind of a jarring thing, they should’ve just let the moment sink in.
Robbe takes a Good Hard Look at himself in the mirror which is on the nose but like, better than nothing. I think there was a mirror earlier in the season? I confess that I’m so hung up on the basic writing fumbles that I might be missing stuff that’s actually supposed to be symbolic.
Anyway, all things considered, I think they did fine with this clip. Robbe coming out to Milan earlier in the episode did help pave the way for this talk since they didn’t have the close relationship as Isak and Eskild. Like, any issues I might have with it are related to the bigger issues in the season, but on its own, I felt like it was decent, and the “welcome to the club” comment is something I can believe Milan would say and something that would make Robbe reply with a boneheaded comment.
Clip 12 - This fucking scene
Robbe and Sander flirt in a bar and get touchy-feely with each other. For some baffling choice, we start with some rap/hip-hop song and then it cuts to “Two Men In Love” by The Irrepressibles … like … you could just start the clip with that song instead of this weird non-transition?
They kiss and then move outside the bar and then kiss and cuddle some more (again … I ask, where did Robbe’s boldness with gay PDA come from ...) Robbe jumps on Sander for a piggyback ride. They kiss passionately in the street.
Ahahahahahahahahah HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAHAA FUCK YOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
Some homophobes spot them and call them slurs. Robbe and Sander try to grab their bikes and quickly leave. The bigots manage to grab them and beat the shit out of them. It’s really brutal, like we get POV shots from the ground as the guys kick them. The guys call them f****ts once more before leaving Robbe and Sander crumpled on the ground in the fetal position. The wheels on the bike go round and round.
I mean … where do you even start.
OK, I’ll start here: worst decision made in a Skam S3 remake yet.
“Yeah, Skam season 3 was a masterpiece and all, but you know what I could have used more of? Violent gay-bashing,” said no one ever.
I don’t get triggered by media, not really, but boy am I glad I was spoiled for this. Because I do get fucking angry at media. And I’m angry now, but if I was watching this unspoiled? Man, I would’ve popped a couple of blood vessels. And I feel so, so sorry for people who watched this unprepared and were triggered. Because yeah, it is a remake and not 100% like the original, you can’t predict everything that will happen. But this isn’t something that you expect in S3, because you expect the writers to know enough to leave this shit out. This isn’t made with kind intentions for the audience, it’s made for shock value.
Consider that the WHOLE POINT of this very, very short clip is the hate crime, btw. It’s like two minutes long! They dropped a clip just for a cute kissing montage and then to interrupt it with a brutal beating! Something about that makes it even more repugnant than if it were like … a long involved scene about something else, and this happened. IDK, something about it feels even more tasteless, like this beating is their cinematic setpiece.
The first-person POV of the beating = not necessary. Like of ALL the fucking times in your season to actually give a shit about the importance of POV, lmao. This isn’t a video game. I’m not shooting zombies or getting jumped by bandits.
Remember when Skam faded to black on Noora’s blackout? And cut away from Even walking naked out of the hotel? Yeah, there are plot and POV reasons for those, but they were also ways to respect the audience and not include pointlessly triggering, exploitative material.
There’s just so much to say about this bad choice that I’m at a loss. Why did we need to go here? In particular, why did we need to go here knowing how the rest of the season plays out? Because for me, that’s what clinches this as a terrible decision. This isn’t a shitty scene with a satisfying follow-up. The resolution - or non-resolution, as it turns out - of this plot development is what exposes wtFOCK’s true character.
There is an AMAZING Evak vid set to Two Men In Love and I recommend you watch it to get the bad taste out of your mouth from this scene.
HOW I WOULD REWRITE THIS EPISODE:
Sigh.
This is just textbook bad writing for coming out stories, not to mention packed full of tired cliches.
Closeted gay guy is violently homophobic (Robbe calls his love interest homophobic slurs and accuses him of being a pervert) - I’m sorry but I am so tired of the “dating your bully” trope and this is what it fell into for me. Why should Sander take back Robbe after that? After Sander told Robbe he was afraid no one would ever love him?
Gay-bashing For The Drama, to make sure you know homophobia is bad, really bad.
Overemphasis on the heterosexual love interest (“love interest”) and how it’s hurtful to her, like I get that it’s a delicate topic with not demonizing her, but I always feel like there is SO much interest on straight characters in these stories! It’s not about them!
The hate crime has to go. Really. What is even the POINT of it in this particular story? As if there wasn’t enough angst in S3? Especially if you consider: they wasted a few episodes on repetitive nonsense. Their pacing is fucked up. And now you have to insert this monumentally offensive storyline and its fallout into a season already full of problems? Next.
Okay, I will offer ONE way to incorporate the hate crime, and that is simple: Make the rest of the season about the fallout. Similar to Noora’s season with her assault, dive deep into the trauma, spend a few episodes with Robbe and Sander recovering, telling their friends about it, going to the police about it. Cut back on other drama from S3. Don’t fuck around with Sander going back to Britt, unless you tie it in directly to him being afraid to date a guy after the hate crime. Don’t fuck around with Noor outing Robbe considering he has enough shit on his plate. If you want to bring her back, make her support him through the trauma. Honestly? Don’t fuck around with the hotel incident. Like I truly hate to lose Sander’s mental illness as a vital part of the season, but adding a full-blown manic episode on top of gay-bashing is way too much misery porn. I think you could probably show how the hate crime and resulting trauma affect Sander’s mental state without pushing it into full-blown wandering the streets naked while manic.
Do I particularly like this plot? I mean, no, not compared to the original, and I feel like this is better off as its own thing rather than a S3 adaptation. But at the very least, I can see the attempt to take the hate crime seriously. You cannot just throw in this type of scenario to shake things up and leave it at that. This show is specifically made for teenagers, to take their struggles seriously and to give them positive examples of how to handle problems. If you prioritize the violent act itself because it’s dramatic and shocking, rather than the recovery (because that’s like, boring and uninteresting, amirite), then you’ve shown your ass. You don’t understand the purpose or the appeal of Skam in the first place.
Jumping ahead, I think this is exactly where wtFOCK exposes its true intentions. wtFOCK does not care about helping vulnerable teenagers find solutions to tough problems. wtFOCK does not care about healing or educating. wtFOCK is about shaking the audience so hard that viewers get whiplash. If wtFOCK gave a shit about helping the audience, the rest of the season would focus on Robbe and Sander dealing with the assault, giving them options to report it, showing them ways to cope with the trauma. Things that might help audience members who unfortunately also found themselves victims of hate crimes or homophobic violence. Those are not present in the rest of the season. It’s just a fucking soap opera.
If you MUST have a homophobic incident to go with your dark ‘n’ edgy season, you can still limit it to some assholes yelling homophobic slurs without resorting to violence. That’s bad enough, and it did happen to Isak and Even later in the series. Even if you decide you MUST have a violent angle to this incident for whatever reason, I don’t fucking know why but OK, you don’t need to film it in this super exploitative manner where our heroes are getting viciously beaten on the ground. But there are so many ways to incorporate external homophobia without this shit.
Wouldn’t this dreadful scene make more sense at least if it had happened after the pool kiss? Like they go out a few days later, the hate crime happens, and then THAT’s why Robbe pushes away Sander and calls him names? Because now he’s afraid and he’s internalized what the bigots said? It’s tragic and gross, but at least there’s some character-driven logic in that sequence of events.
Another thing that really doesn’t work is that they’re straying so far from the original script, but at the same time they keep jamming in scenes from the original, except there isn’t the same buildup. Or any buildup, sometimes. This results in an incoherent mess of a season and of a POV character, where Robbe is part-Robbe, part-Isak.
I think all the remakes do this to a degree: there are certain beats they feel they must hit, and they hit them even though they’re off course. You need to commit either to doing a mostly faithful adaptation of the original, or to doing a remake with your own spin on the characters, but you need to be very, very careful not to just haplessly mix ‘n’ match the two. Does a scene from OG make sense within this remake universe? No? Then drop it, rewrite it, do what you need to do, just don’t carelessly recreate it if it doesn’t fit.
The way they’re writing Jens is bizarre because he seems to care enough about Robbe to ask him how he’s doing, but also not care enough to stick around and listen once the next shiny thing comes along. From the beginning they’ve set up the friendship tension with the boy squad as not just Robbe’s fault, but as a failure of his friends to pay attention as well. Like in the first episode Robbe is trying to talk to them and they just ditch him! They really need to make Jens more aware of how he himself has messed up with his friend, and not act like this is all Robbe’s doing.
We don’t need another Noor blue balls scene, thank you, bye. But if we keep this one, then we absolutely needed to see what exactly made Robbe stop in the act of sex with her, such as him flashing back to his kiss with Sander. Or even just letting us see him make the decision, because goddamn, what’s with wtFOCK not letting this young actor actually act out some of the meatiest material?
Overall, give Robbe more baby steps in his personal development, and not unbelievable leaps and changes in his behavior because the plot demands them.
I did try to think of a way to incorporate much of the same material from this week, including a hate crime, in a way that made more sense and was not ridiculously OTT or offensive. It’s hard because I really think you need to go back to the beginning of the season, but here’s what I came up with, borrowing some elements from the last episode as well.
Robbe wakes up the night after kissing Sander. He’s happy and glowing, he sees a cute text from Sander and smiles. Then he goes to the kitchen and Milan is there with a black eye or something, he’s talking to Zoë and Senne, maybe they’re tending to his injuries. Robbe asks what happened. Milan had a date last night and some homophobes started giving them a hard time, Milan wasn’t having it, punches were thrown. Milan is very shaken and upset. So is Robbe, who panics. Is this what he has to look forward to if he’s dating a gay? Will people harass him just for being out with his boyfriend? The implications of what it means to be a gay person in this world hit him really hard. He looks at Sander’s text again and ignores him and possibly blocks him. At some point we will establish that Robbe is also ignoring texts/calls from everyone else, too: Noor, Jens, his mom...
Sander shows up the next day outside Robbe’s place after Robbe has been ignoring him. He tries to talk to Robbe, but Robbe is freaked out and visibly nervous, his eyes darting around - he’s paranoid now about being seen with Sander, due to Milan’s incident. He’s worried about being a target for homophobic violence, understandably so. Sander doesn’t realize that Robbe’s frightened, however, and keeps talking and being nice. Robbe tries to play off the other night as just him being drunk, it was a mistake. When Sander physically gets too close to Robbe, Robbe yells that he’s not gay and runs inside, leaving Sander alone.
Robbe encounters Milan at home alone. Milan is still bruised from the homophobic incident. Milan is unusually subdued. Robbe says he’s sorry for what happened to Milan, it’s terrible. Robbe then sticks his foot in his mouth by saying something well-intentioned but hurtful and ignorant about how maybe Milan shouldn’t be so gay in public or w/e, since that will just attract homophobes, and that not all gay people act like Milan (meaning flamboyant, etc.) Milan gets really, really upset and snaps at Robbe about how gay people have been beaten and killed for just being who they are - basically a version of the Pride speech with a somewhat different context - and that it takes bravery and strength, Robbe doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about. So that ends on a bad note for them.
Now trying to get out of the house since he’s fought with Milan, Robbe meets up with Jens, or maybe Jens finds him at the park or whatever. Jens comments on how it’s been a while since they’ve talked. Robbe says he was just worried about what the guys would say since he blew up at them previously. Jens is like, dude, we’re your friends. You have to talk to the people who care about you, you can’t just ghost them and avoid facing your problems. Robbe takes this advice to heart. Jens tells Robbe that he’s ready to listen when Robbe wants to talk. Maybe Robbe sees something that reminds him of Sander, like graffiti on a building, and despite his fears, we can see that he really misses Sander, and that his feelings for Sander are stronger than his fears.
Next he meets up with Noor. She’s really upset that he’s been ignoring her. He apologizes and a version of the breakup scene goes down. When Robbe leaves, we see him walk away with a conflicted expression. Sorry that he’s hurt Noor, but understanding that this was the right call, and relief that he doesn’t have to pretend any more.
Robbe sees Milan again and apologizes for what he said last time. Milan accepts his apology. Robbe admits that he’s been confused lately because he likes a guy and he doesn’t know what that makes him. Milan says something like that’s great Robbe likes a guy and that Robbe doesn’t need to label himself right now, he should just follow his heart. Maybe that liking boys is scary (Milan points to his black eye) and sometimes you need to be careful, but at the end of the day, Milan has to be himself and live his life honestly, and so does Robbe. After Milan leaves, Robbe takes out his phone and texts Sander saying he wants to talk.
Sander meets Robbe somewhere and Robbe apologizes for ignoring him, says he freaked out because that was the first time he kissed a guy, but now he’s made up his mind that he wants to be with Sander. They kiss and make up, yayyyyy.
This is by no means a perfect solution (like the thought of then going into the shit with Britt next episode on top of this makes my head hurt), this is just an attempt to include stuff like homophobic violence, Robbe’s ghosting Sander, scenes with Jens and Noor, etc. in a way that makes a little more linear sense to me and doesn’t feel as haphazard, and isn’t super triggering or exploitative. I think if you have a hate crime happening to Robbe himself, that really needs to be the main focus from here on out, for at least a few episodes; if you have something off-screen happening to another character, you can address the topic of violent homophobia without having it dominate the season or featuring triggering scenes. And hopefully it would still have some emotional impact, because we see how it affects Milan, and some clear consequences for character development, because we see how it affects Robbe, as the situation he may find himself in one day.
If I missed anything, cultural notes, translation nuances, let me know!
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First things first, I must let you know that you are an absolute star and I love you! I also especially love your explanation for 'Kori Ni Tojikomete' and thank you so much for translating Shiho Ochi's thoughts on the lyrics. I was just curious if by any chance your beautiful mind had any thoughts on 'Nexus'? That is honestly my favorite Promare song and I've been listening to it on repeat, but I've also heard it's Lio singing to Galo?
thank you that’s very sweet!! and that’s true, it’s from lio’s pov! all promare songs with vocals have certain povs they’re written from, many of them sang from galo or lio to each other or as a duet. songs from lio’s pov are ashes, kakusei, and nexus; galo’s are gallant ones and kori ni tojikomete. inferno is a galo and lio duet. we don’t have eramorp’s pov confirmed as far as i know, but i’d guess it’s a duet as well since the pov feels like it alternates or is unfocused on a specific character
anyway, i do have a lot of thoughts on nexus! nexus IS lio pov and he is talking to galo / we’re hearing his feelings abt galo through it, that’s the majority of the lyrics. it brings up a lot of interesting things they don’t really talk about in the movie but we know ARE present through the lyric choices. promare songs are cool like that! a lot of the narrative is communicated THROUGH the music.
so to talk about the word ‘nexus’ first of all- it means a connection linking two or more things. promare is a fan of bringing words from different origins and languages into it, and (google tells me) nexus is of latin origin and means “to bind or tie.” there’s other ways it can be defined, but since the song literally has a part saying “we’re connected you and i” it’s more obvious it’s talking about THIS definition of nexus. the song, then, is really about lio and his connection to galo. lio is relying on that connection for his words to resonate with galo.
some songs in promare have pretty straightforward lyrics, and nexus is one of them i think. with nexus it starts off with gems like “you can’t believe in what you hear” so the rest of the song is basically “don’t believe the propaganda, fight back with me instead.” a lot of the lyrics are also pretty impossible to view as anything but romantic so its also a “be gay with me instead” song lol
since i talk so much about the rest of, i’m not really gonna go into the first verse- lio’s feeling drained and dejected and wondering if fighting for so long for so hard is going to be worth it. there are, however, some lines in it that made me think a little harder, which i talk about in this post here i wrote while thinking abt this ask, but those thoughts are too long to include in this answer lol. they’re relevant to discussing lio and his connection with galo though
the pre-chorus is interesting, because it really is lio talking to galo specifically. everything about nexus is framed like lio trying to tell galo to listen to him. to realize what is going on with the burnish and with the foundation, to understand why lio is fighting so hard. lio wants him to understand that everything he’s doing, he’s doing for a purpose. that’s why lio told him about the burnish and about the foundation in the cave- he wanted to be understood and heard. i don’t think he counted on galo actually taking him seriously and listening. ok, moving on!
“Hate
Blinding me, and your love
When you're talkin' about him
Sound just like a broke' record!
There's a reason why”
the pre-chorus, to me, has always come off like lio’s bringing up how kray’s propaganda is basically just brainwashing galo and everyone else in promepolis? ‘he’ typically seems like its referring to kray, while ‘you’ is referring to galo. ‘i’ is lio, of course. ‘you’re repeating the same shit he’s feeding you, you can’t give me a good explanation for what’s going on, and there’s a reason for that. you’ve been told lies all your life and you don’t know what’s really going on.’ the line ‘sound just like a broke’ record’ nailed that one in, since you just repeat the same rhetoric you’ve always heard over and over without truly hearing yourself or comprehending or thinking more critically about what you’re saying.
and then the rest of the pre-chorus talking about what kray’s doing, keeping secrets, profiting off his lies, killing lio’s family. because to lio the burnish are his people, his family.
there’s also the part about being blinded by hatred which is interesting because there’s a bit of a narrative thread promare’s got going on about not becoming consumed by your emotions... hate blinded lio to his moral code as the dragon and galo was the one who stopped him from doing something he’d regret.
‘blinded’ by an emotion is also brought up in a line in the movie, when kray says heris is ‘blinded by her love for her sister’ when heris turns on him. galo was blinded by respect of kray and viewing him as the closest thing he had to family; lio was blinded by hatred. though you can see where both of them are coming from; galo had good reason to not know when kray was manipulating him, and lio had good reason to be fucking pissed about his people being used to power a spaceship. promare likes to bring up certain lines or words or concepts multiple times to clue you in on there being something there to think about.
and then we got that fucking AWESOME chorus.
“So spend some time with me
I really like your company
We're not so different
Flip the coin it doesn't matter
And if we don't survive
I'd rather die than live a lie”
this one’s also more obvious :) gay people! lio also reminding galo we’re not so different in a lot of different ways. ‘you and i could’ve been the same- we’re similar people, if our roles had been reversed we would still be fighting for people. fundamentally at our cores, we are people with similar goals who are alike in a lot of ways’. lio wants to save people. his character is built around this. so is galo’s! and the “if we don’t survive i’d rather die than live a lie” could refer to lio not wanting to live a life where’s forced to pretend wrt being burnish, maybe saying he’d rather die and expose kray for the monster he is than live while his people suffer, maybe that if him and galo die then at least they died fighting. it can also be read as a double metaphor for being gay. just gonna throw that one out there
then there’s these lines, important though often overlooked:
“I can see your tears inside
Hanging on the deepest pain
Yeah, we both are bruised
He's the reason why
Are we gonna let him choose?
We're connected you and I”
these are important lines because it implies that lio knows what kray did to galo. even if he doesn’t have specifics he knows how much he hurt him. ‘i’ve been hurt by kray, but so have you, and we both know it. are you going to let him keep controlling your life, manipulating the way you see our world and keeping you from seeing the truth?’ and then ending with the iconic “we’re connected you and i” which is just.. sweet and sad. they’ve both been deeply hurt by foresight, but that’s another thing they have in common. another thing lio is reminding galo about to get him to fight for the burnish. not like galo needs persuading! but lio doesn’t know that yet. anyway, lio’s acknowledging the connection they have. the one that the movie keeps going back to, the one that promare is BUILT on. its because of their connection that they were able to do what they did; able to save the world.
(there’s also the “never see the game” as part of that verse as well, galo never seeing what kray was doing and it being just... a game to kray and not real human lives he’s affecting. ‘never see the thirty years of burnish suffering’ is another way to look at it.)
so to end this answer that got very long, nexus to me is like.. the serious side of the promare experience- effects of propaganda, effects of oppression, gay people, trauma- encapsulated in a damn good song. like promare, nexus is written to bang so fucking hard you forget there’s some deep shit going on there. i hesitate to say beneath the surface because its not like it’s buried, it’s right there in the lyrics, its just dressed up! that’s a unique way to go about a narrative for sure!
#ID PUT THIS UNDER A READMORE BUT I DONT WANT IT TO DISAPPEAR IF MY BLOG GETS DELETED SRY#anyway tysm for asking! this was a lot of fun!#anon#fess replies#long post#promare
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LUDO (MARS, PETER, ARNOLD, DAMIEN, WHATEVER ELSE ALT YOU’VE WHIPPED UP LATELY), THE OWNER OF ONE OF US:
it’s been a long time coming, and you know why it’s all come down to this. you’ve manipulated enough people during your time on roleplayer.me that i’m sure you thought you’d get away with it forever. well, it doesn’t work that way. you get what you give, and you’ve given enough grief to last a lifetime.
you’ve put people who once called you friend through hell, and now you get a taste of it. and i want to make this point very clear: i do not care about your sob story. i do not care about how much you’ve been hurt. i do not care about how you got to where you are today. none of what you can say excuses the absolute hell you’ve put others through. take accountability. apologize. do what you can to right your wrongs. the pain you’ve caused is YOUR responsibility. you can’t put this on anyone but yourself. you can’t expect to hurt so many people and not be held accountable for it.
this case was rather personal to me because ludo likes to use his personality disorder as a crutch and an excuse to get away with his nasty abuse. i have the same disorder. by using your personality disorder as an excuse, ludo, you are glorifying it because you are making it your escape route. this disorder is NOT to be used as a crutch. no disorder is. you use it as a crutch as if you aren’t in crutches because of this debilitating disorder. you’re the reason our disorder is looked upon with suspicion instead of understanding. you cannot use your disorder as any type of “please forgive me” card unless you are actively trying to get better. and you aren’t. because you think therapy is a farce.
before i go into the evidence i wanted to ask for testimonies from those who were hurt. i was given this:
“There are a few things that should be said before you take your time reading all this. This is a place of roleplay and to escape. Unfortunately, some people use the hobby incorrectly. You ruin and sabotage the experience for others. A good amount of the users on this site may have a lot going on away from the screen, some don’t. Those who struggle are the victims of these narcissistic tendencies. Their emotions get involved without their control. They try to be there for someone despite their own issues. Sometimes they even try to put that other person first, which causes them to break. Then, there are some of us that cannot be emotionally manipulated and that is when these mind games go wrong. That is when the manipulator becomes so little and they try to blame other issues in life for their shit behaviour.
This place does not, and I repeat - it does not give anyone the permission to attack and belittle others because you have difficulty having a voice in your real life. It does not give you the right to attack someone's real life, because you said it yourself that you feel like you have not done anything great in yours. Your real life problems, your conditions, there are no excuse for those who have been degraded by you. There are a lot of them, by the way. Those people you still accuse of having abandoned you despite you being convinced that you were good to them? None of these people have abandoned you. They cared. They had to leave because you tried to show some sort of superiority and belittled them as a person. You tried to control them in and out of roleplay. They got tired of your negativity and your toxic attitude towards life.
A penny for your thought - have a muse, be honest, but don’t ruin it for others. You cannot attack people and then expect them to be there for you. This place does not give you the right to manipulate others into a friendship that it is not wanted nor needed either. You cannot and should not hurt people's experiences by deceiving them. Something you still actively still do with the active alt in your own group who you introduced as your real life friend. Think about it - if you punch a stranger in the middle of the street would you expect them to reciprocate with an embrace or punch you right back?
You cannot excuse behaviour you have radiated off yourself for months, targeted people with disturbing words, with lies, deceived multiple people that would have stuck up for you, all because of what you may be going through in real life. All you did was show who you really are. There is roleplay, and there is real life. If that line between those two worlds are so thin and so blurry for you - then perhaps this is something for you to reconsider.”
now for the evidence.
i made an imgur album of all the evidence as well as my commentary, so if you want to read it on imgur, there it is. i’m going to post the evidence directly onto here as well, however, just in case.
to start out we have an e-mail sent to roleplayer.me admins (basic rundown of ludo's offenses:
(roleplayer.me admins have done nothing so if that doesn't tell you they don't give a single shit idk what would)
here is the member who was reportedly “kicked” from one of us peacefully pulling their role:
the other member reportedly “kicked” peacefully pulling their role:
and here is ludo manipulating the situation to make it sound non-peaceful:
and ludo lying in a bulletin saying said members were “kicked out”:
now we have ludo speaking about his alts. here he is admitting to having a freelance (non-affiliated account):
ludo admitting to being another “member” of one of us, mars:
ludo admitting to using mars just to lure another member into shipping with them:
one of ludo's alts:
ludo posting one of us promos on his alt:
proof of one of us promo:
another one of ludo’s alts:
now lets get into his harassment and toxic behavior. here we have him harassing another member (18 YEARS OLD) through instagram dms:
(his instagram is rather well known with many members and he likes to post his music to make his members listen to which is connected to his instagram)
this shows ludo mixing ooc with ic and straight up lying about another member:
here one of his targets of harassment expresses their fear of him possibly stalking them:
the group owner from another group ludo was in countering ludo’s claims to peacefully leaving said group (reminder, ludo is damien):
a conversation between the owner of said group above and ludo about his harassment and stalking, as well as him shittalking to manipulate other people into believing his narrative:
here ludo tries to act like the victim and gaslight the owner:
here is proof ludo makes his “enemies” into villains for one of us and portrays them in a negative light (the name he used is their real name, making this 10x worse):
explanation from an rp ex of ludo’s about the harassment they suffered:
the screenshot shown above:
ludo harassing an rp ex over instagram dms and displaying classic abusive behavior (reminder, he has his instagram rather public to his members):
"i can genuinely admit when i am wrong" implying their ex cannot. also gaslighting because he can't admit when he's wrong. this will be further highlighted through these instagram messages.
"this does not mean that i take back anything i've said before, about how you've hurt me" contradicting himself when he said he can genuinely admit when he is wrong.
"i thought our friendship was real... but evidently it wasn't the same for you" guilt trips. the rest i'm sure you can pick out on your own. it's all very obvious.
"we're no good for one another. you hurt me a lot and i hurt you a lot." not taking responsibility and instead pulling the
"we are the same, you and i" trope to minimize his responsibility.
also further guilting them by writing a song about how they "abused" them.
description: "Emotional abuse is just as bad as physical. Ask for help."
(fun fact, i discovered this song before my birthday and related to it so much. it brought me to tears. fucked up it was used against someone in a moment of manipulation to make his target feel bad. peep the suicidal ideations in the lyrics)
ludo using an incident in their life against them:
"i miss you. also not like that matters" passive aggression and guilt trips.
gaslighting about spies. guilt trips. also admitting to using exes' names in his storylines.
more guilt trips. more gaslighting. more excuses for exhausting his partner.
projection: "you just have this mentality where you constantly deny that you've hurt people so you can feel better about yourself."
gaslighting by trying to make their ex's friend sound like they would "throw [them] under the bus in a heart beat")
here ludo is guilting their ex friend from above on line for not spending enough time with them:
self deprecation used to manipulate them.
here is a diagram shown to me by one of ludo’s ex friends:
they further detail their testimony in this google doc
and the text messages (between ludo and one of the members who pulled their role peacefully while ludo tried to say they were kicked) below will show you exactly what they mean:
using other peoples’ feelings to manipulate them:
dismissing the stress they are under with real life, gaslighting by saying they haven't done the effort when they are clearly burnt out. aggression:
guilt trips:
pushing them away. guilt trips. using others feelings to manipulate them. gaslighting by asking a clearly passive aggressive question and saying it's "genuine":
"i'm just relaying my personal frustrations" when he already has time and time again. let it go, damn. give them a break. stop being overbearing.
passive aggression. implying he means less to them when they are saying their friend put it into words they could understand.
blaming them coping with his abuse on them. that's like telling someone shouldn't retaliate to abuse because their retaliation is "hurtful" YOU DON'T GET TO TELL THE PEOPLE YOU ABUSE TO NOT RETALIATE AGAINST YOUR ABUSE.
twisting words. not taking responsibility for his lack of understanding and instead saying "what you said came off the wrong way". not their fault that you didn't get it.
this. THIS is what sent me. how DARE you use your mutual disorder as a way to guilt and manipulate. i have the same exact disorder as well and guess what? all THREE of us are different people. and don't say "change who i am" as if it's a BAD THING. YOU are the reason everyone leaves you. YOU are the reason no one wants to be around you. YOU are the reason you can't keep stable friendships. YOU DON'T GET TO FUCKING PULL THAT BULLSHIT. if you care for someone you will work on your goddamn self. you expect everyone else to change for you, but you can't do the same goddamn thing? IF YOU GAVE A SHIT YOU'D STOP THE BEHAVIOR THAT IS HURTING THE PEOPLE YOU CLAIM TO CARE ABOUT. FULL. FUCKING. STOP.
guilt trips. pity.
condescension. lose lose situation.
"IT WAS A JOOOOOOOOOKE" excuse.
"but whatever. i hope whatever has you in a bad mood gets better and you feel better" passive aggression. pretending to care. fake comradery.
"you gaslight me" is a form of gaslighting, especially when there IS NO GASLIGHTING. this is also an example of projection.
making them walk on eggshells.
"i'm willing to sort it out of you stop being defensive" punishment and reward.
"i'm sorry IF..." not taking responsibility.
"this was my response" ie: this is your fault i'm acting this way, when he is the abusive one.
"you constantly use my natural reaction as your excuse for not being around..." YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR REACTIONS WHEN YOU ARE THE ABUSER. STOP HAVING THIS "this is me take it or leave it" ATTITUDE AND THEN WONDER WHY EVERYONE FUCKING LEAVES YOU.
gaslighting. trying to say they were not coming around BEFORE he started calling them a shit friend.
"we both act some type of way when we're hurt and you know it" gaslighting, using their mutual disorder against them. AGAIN. YOU (ludo), ME AND THEM ARE THREE DIFFERENT PEOPLE WITH THE SAME DISORDER. stop acting like y'all the same goddamn PERSON. stop PROJECTING YOUR SHITTY ACTIONS ONTO OTHERS.
"not even saying this to be a bitch" the "NO OFFENSE, BUUUUT" tactic to "lessen the blow" of the shitty thing he's about to say.
USING OTHER PEOPLE AGAINST THEM, AGAIN.
"it's the only way i know how to be" THEN CHANGE IT. GET HELP. STOP USING YOUR DISORDER AS A WAY TO GET AWAY WITH SHIT. therapy isn't a con, you are.
and then, after he knows he has no control over people, he pesters.
an ex friend requested this be used at the end. i feel it sums up the feelings of everyone ludo has wronged quite well.
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Meditation With Your Law of Attraction Practice
There are many types of meditation practices. A comprehensive description of the types of meditation would take a great deal of time. Instead, I will talk about some simple meditations that a busy person might use in this article. I will also present a simple mindfulness meditation that can be used. It will be up to you to explore further and decide upon a meditation practice if you so choose.
Mindfulness Meditation
This mindfulness meditation was adapted from a Buddhist meditation called Vipassana. Start by choosing a quiet place where you will not be disturbed. Then sit in a comfortable position. You can sit in a traditional cross-legged position or in any other position that is comfortable. You can use a chair if you want. It is important thing is to keep your spine straight to prevent you from becoming sluggish or sleepy. Initially, the goal of meditation is to lessen distractions and clear your mind.
Sit with your eyes closed and turn your attention to your breathing. Breathe naturally, preferably through the nostrils. Do not attempt to control your breath. Now become aware of the breath as it enters and exits the nostrils. This sensation will be the object of your meditation. Try to focus on it only.
Your thoughts will eventually stray to more mundane matters. That is perfectly alright. As soon as you realize your thoughts have strayed, return your focus to the breath. Use a timer and do this for fifteen to thirty minutes per day. Just like anything, this requires practice. Try to avoid frustration with the process. On some days, meditation will work better than on others.
Mantra Meditations
Centering Prayer is a westernized form of meditation in the Christian tradition. Its main proponent is Father Thomas Keating. First you choose a "sacred word" which resonates with you, such as "Yeshua." You then sit comfortably, close your eyes and silently repeat the word in your mind. As your attention wanders, return your mind to the sacred word. I used this method for many years with good results.
Attraction and Desire with a Meditation Practice
Be aware that some meditation practices have associated philosophies that encourage the releasing of desires. This would imply that desires themselves are undesirable (strange logic). Law of attraction teachers, however, will tell you that there is nothing wrong with a healthy desire and that it is the resistance, not the desire, which you want to release.
Brainwave Entertainment
There are soundtracks available using binaural beats technology that can entrain your brainwaves into theta states similar to those of someone who is meditating. You need to use headphones to get the full effect. After using some of these products, I can attest to the fact that they do move your brain activity into different states as advertised. However, I don't know that the long term benefits are the same as meditation. Through meditation, you learn to move on your own into higher states of consciousness.
Guided Meditations
Guided Meditations are available from various sources as audio programs on CD or MP3 format. A guided meditation is one where the leader speaks a narrative, usually to background music. The words lead you into a deeper meditation. For some people that have difficulty meditating on their own, guided meditations are a good idea. Guided meditations are particularly good for noisy or busy places such as public transportation.
Times and Places for Meditation
While it is best to practice meditation in a quiet, private place, with practice you can meditate in other places. Any place where you can find a moment of aloneness will do. Public transportation, airports, parked cars and public parks all are places where you can practice meditation. You may need to use background music or guided meditations through headphones to offset any noise in the environment.
Of course, don't meditate or listen to guided meditations while driving or operating equipment.
Meditation Resources
There is an abundance of meditation teachers and classes both in person and online. Techniques range from the simple (like the one in this article) to in-depth multi-year programs. Sometimes a good teacher can help you if you have any difficulties meditating.
Regularity of Practice
To achieve the full benefit, you should meditate at least once daily, for at twenty minutes to one half hour. It is important to be regular and not skip days if at all possible. Once you have developed a consistent practice, you'll wonder how you ever did without it.
Using Affirmations with Meditation
Affirmations are affirmative statements used by students of the law of attraction describing their reality as they see it and know it. For instance, "I am attracting wealth everyday" is an affirmation. If you use your affirmations when you are not feeling in alignment, you will not get the benefit that you seek. Instead, use your affirmations after your meditation, when you are in a higher vibrational state and more receptive.
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I die inside while dissecting Jesus music
For this fun little exercise in self-torture, I’m going to find a weird worship song and dissect it. Today I feel like saying death-cult a distressing number of times so I’m going to find one that talks about how the next world is supposed to be better for this one.
I’m probably going to regret this. And probably cope by blasting metal while I do this.
I’ll go with a bit of low-hanging fruit for this first one: Even So Come. It’s attributed six ways to Sunday because like seven different artists/groups have a recording of it somewhere out public, but this lyric site thingy says Chris Tomlin. Some of these songs get wildly popular to the point where even as a church guitar guy (read: very large fan of this shitty music) I tended to find it a bit confusing to tell who originally wrote them. This is an example. I think it was probably Kristian Stanfill but uh... I can never be 100% sure. I’ve been wrong about ones I was way more sure about before.
This song is repetitive as fuck, like a lot of these, because what helps indoctrinate people more than literally singing the same words for 15 minutes?
Let’s get into this shit.
The song
I’ll spare you a few minutes of your life if you want to keep it. I already linked the lyrics, but I’ll give this a quick listen to make sure Stanfill doesn’t literally freehand some new lyrics during the video; if he does, I’ll discuss that too I suppose. The whole point of this is that I’m listening to this shit so you don’t have to. But if you really want to, then go off I guess. I can’t and honestly wouldn’t try to stop you. Unless this shit is triggering to you. In that case please don’t listen. It used to fuck me up hard when my brother would blast songs like this in the shower after I deconverted. I don’t want that happening to anyone out there. Tread with caution.
Okay. I wrote that while I was listening, and apparently he doesn’t yeet off into new spontaneous lyrics at any point. I think that’s more of a Bethel thing, but I don’t remember it being exclusive to them so I had to make sure.
Ok, let’s do this more or less in order. I’ll take it a verse at a time. But first, let’s talk formatting. The first two verses aren’t separated by anything, and the third is after the first chorus. After the third verse they play the chorus again, then the bridge. The AZLyrics entry under Tomlin lists it twice; Stanfill plays it twice. When I was on the worship team at a church, we’d typically play the bridge four times for extra drama. After this, they end with two tricks. First is that they play the first half or so of the chorus, then a whole chorus right after it. Again, this is for extra drama. The leader of the worship team at my old church would tend to point to one part of the song as the “climax” and we’d do a fair amount of this kind of shit leading up to it. In this particular case, it’s actually most of the chorus, leaving off only the “even so come” lines. The break is at a lyrically appropriate place more often than it’s just like “haha 2 bars into the chorus” or something like that because of course the message has to be consistent.
After this, they fade the song out by repeating the last line or two, like, umpteen times to foster a contemplative mood. (It works. I’ve been on both ends of this dynamic. If you’re in a more charismatic crowd, my experience suggests that this final repetition is the most likely point where someone’s going to fall out and start speaking in tongues or something. Also, in those circles sometimes one of the vocalists, most often the team leader because of course, will give some kind of “word from God” to the congregation.) That’s the format, and it’s a very common one. At church camps and retreats and events like those, often they’ll loop choruses or bridges or ending tags or, sometimes (but far less often), verses and extend a song like this one to like fifteen or twenty minutes. In a typical church service they don’t really do it that way though because people might get impatient or something.
On to the lyrics of this song. I’ll address the verses in order, then the chorus and bridge, then talk ordering, because doing this chronologically would get annoying as fuck.
The first verse is as follows:
All of creation
All of the earth
Make straight a highway
A path for the Lord
Jesus is coming soon
Notice the equivocation in the first two lines here. The author most likely believes this is an accurate thing to equivocate, and so do most of their audience.
The next two lines are a similar repetition, using both modern and more Biblically-flavored language, in reference to Mark 1:3. The particular language used is not altogether different from most English translations. These lines, both in the sense that the author intends and in their function in the song, are meant to prepare the listener for what follows:
“Jesus is coming soon.” A reminder of the inevitable apocalypse most Christian sects teach and, in their view, the second chronologically of two most important events in the entire history and future of the world (the first being the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ). Every verse of the song ends with this reminder.
To boil the message of this verse down into one word:
(I have entirely too much fun with this image lol)
The second verse:
Call back the sinner
Wake up the saint
Let every nation
Shout of Your fame
Jesus is coming soon
“Call back the sinner” implies a return to origins and contains an implicit reference to the prodigal son in the parable in Luke 15. The implication is that being a “sinner” (and I’ll discuss the dichotomy in a second here) is a life of running away from God either by ignorance or by choice, and that they were originally with God. The typical narrative on the mechanisms of the fall of man seems to suggest otherwise because only Adam and Eve were technically originally with God and everyone else starts out separated because of that lovely little generational curse thingy, this is a bit of an odd take, but in light of the evangelical perspective that not only a god, but their god is so self evident that people have to make the active choice to not believe, this makes an entire hell of a lot of sense, and “calling back the sinner” could entail saying “lol stop wasting your energy running from what you know.”
The next line engages in a bit of common guilt-tripping. Saying “wake up the saint” implies that believers and churches have fallen asleep in some sense, and that’s actually a perspective referenced in the letters to the seven churches in Revelation, each church getting a different flavor of messaging like this. When churches and saints are called to “wake up”, it means to cease engaging in whatever behavior is apparently polluting their message, i.e. forgetting the original reason they’re doing this, normalizing “worldly” practices, bad leadership paradigms, etc. Thus, I’m inclined to read this line as something like “you’re better than the rest of humanity; act like it.
Also of note is this dichotomy established here between “sinners” and “saints”. This is, on paper at least, the only important distinction in evangelicalism. (In practice they have a lot of shitty perspectives on women because of Paul’s writings as well as some class and/or racial biases, unconscious or conscious depending on the particular congregation.) A “saint” is a “true” Christian, one who is “set apart” from the world by God. A “sinner” is literally anyone else. In addition to their entire laundry list of harmless actions that are considered sins, Evangelicals (and probably many other Christians honestly) will say that to be non-Christian is a sin. In my old church and its affiliates I often heard that to remain non-Christian for an entire lifetime is the only unforgivable sin, identifying it with the “blasphemy of the Holy Spirit” referenced in Matthew 12:31. There are a wide variety of perspectives on what this “blasphemy of the Holy Spirit” actually means, and I can really only confidently speak to Calvary Chapel’s perspective on that. In any case, this song makes use of the “sinner vs saint” dichotomy common in Christianity. I analyze it as a typical “us vs them” with an added twist that says “the ‘them’ can become us and that’s better”.
After this is a reference to the passages in the Bible that speak of the Gospel being spread to “every nation” and things such as that, and that every nation will come under Christ’s lordship at the end of time. Then there’s a reminder that the singer is awaiting this apparently fast-approaching end.
The third verse:
There will be justice
All will be new
Your name forever
Faithful and true
Jesus is coming soon
This third verse is mostly a reference to events predicted to occur after the second coming of Christ. In Revelation, among other places, there is a described sequence of events in which the world comes absolutely fucking unglued, falls under the thumb of a tyrannical world government run by some guy who lets himself get possessed by Satan, and then is yeeted by God and soaked in the blood of Satan’s armies at the final battle. A bit later, for some reason Satan has to be let go for a bit, but he loses hard once again. After this, God yeets the unbelievers into hellfire and makes a new world which he rules forever. In short, the collapse, battles, and Great Divine Yeet are what this “justice” describes. The remaining lines speak of this renewed world run by Jesus himself. Lastly, we have the reminder that this is all going to happen before very long here.
There’s a bit of a double-reference thing going on here and in the second verse too, and I’m honestly not entirely sure what to make of it, but it shows up often in contemporary Christian music. They’ll switch between referring to God in second person (Your name forever) and in third person (Jesus is coming soon). It seems ...most likely to be a matter of convenience, and I’m rather inclined to treat it as that because the other things I think of seem either counter-productive or very, very outlandish. Like, are they alternating between addressing God and addressing the listener? Maybe, but the message of this song is so much more listener-directed that I find that thought kinda weird.
In any case, that’s the verses.
Now let’s get to the chorus. This is repeated after the first two verses and again several times after the third, and it contains a lot of deeply cursed metaphors. I mean holy fuck.
Like a bride
Waiting for her groom
We'll be a church
Ready for You
Every heart longing for our King
We sing
Even so come
Lord Jesus come
Even so come
Lord Jesus come
So the first two little couplets here refer to a metaphor found in several places in scripture where the church is the “bride” of Christ.
This.
is.
CREEPY!
In the old testament, the role of the wife is often analogous to that of property, so that’s deeply gross. Further, Paul says men are the head of women, i.e. have great authority over them, and women should be subservient. Jesus doesn’t honestly do a whole hell of a lot to resist this, and powerful women throughout most of the scriptures are either defined as attaining their power in “God-honoring” subservient ways like Esther or as dangerous demonic influences operating under the “spirit of Jezebel”. (”Jezebel” is literally a scriptural term for this kind of thing; one of the church letters in Revelation uses it. Many evangelicals/fundies add “spirit of” because of their borderline-animistic take on spiritual warfare. I might describe that in more detail in a later post. It’s a metaphor based on an old-testament queen who is presented as manipulative and narcissistic, taking the real power in the kingdom from her husband by manipulation and doing a great deal of damage with it.) Thus, in this context, I find the “bride” metaphors inextricable from a tyrannical, abusive relationship in which the man, or in this case Christ, is the absolute head. Biblical ideas on marriage and family life are an entire problem too, establishing what I feel very confident in describing as an abusive power dynamic. Thus, this song references a metaphor by which Christ is described as having abusive control over his people. @kristian stanfill thanks I hate it. @whoever the fuck wrote the bible thanks I hate it.
The couplet in this song is describing a situation in which the church is waiting to submit to an abusive authority and it’s fucking disgusting and I hate that I used to live that way.
The next line, “every heart longing for our king”, indicates that it’s normative to strongly desire this power dynamic and expresses a probably-genuine (mine was) desire for more of Jesus on the part of the writer and the singer. So with these preconditions established, they say, “we sing, even so come, Lord Jesus, come”, repeating “even so come” and on twice for added weight. The chorus and bridge are, by the way, where this seems to get deathculty.
Remember that in referencing the coming of Jesus, they reference ideas that this world is shitty and being dead and in heaven/having the world destroyed by God and replaced is going to be a hell of a lot better. The Bible and many churches, particularly evangelicals, will even use language like “dying to oneself” to refer to the process of laying down one’s life for the cause of Jesus. Thus, death metaphors infiltrate their literal daily living. The general attitude that’s expected for people to have in those circumstances is one of “I won’t seek death actively but I will welcome it when the time comes”, and coupled with the way the other forms of abuse broke me, this had me fantasizing about dying in third-world countries for getting too annoying about Jesus. So that’s pretty wack, I suppose. This belief system is one that puts death on a very disturbing pedestal. This entire song is about preparing for the return of Jesus, which is going to bring a hell of a lot of death if it happens as they predict. This very deadly event is what “Jesus is coming soon” entails, and it’s one of two possible interpretations that I can think of to apply to these “even so come lord Jesus come” lines. The other is that they believe that Jesus is present with them when they worship (Matthew 18:20) and they seek to experience this presence. But the preparatory nature of this song, in my experience at least, puts very strong priority on the first sense, even though it can be, and in church settings often functions as, both. These lines are a plea for personal transformation and for the apocalypse. In the vanishingly unlikely event that the Christian version of the divine turns out to be true, billions will die in wars and disasters (some actively caused by God’s agents) and many of those same billions and many more people, including me, will be victims of the Great Cosmic Yeet and land in hellfire forever. And they want this to happen sooner rather than later. That’s literally the main point of this song.
So we wait
We wait for You
God we wait
You're coming soon
This is the bridge. It’s typically repeated kind of a lot. Like, I mean holy fuck they repeat this. It’s literally just “we’re excited for the second coming of Christ”. You know, in case someone needed a reminder that they want billions dead, even more people yeeted into hellfire, and the entire world destroyed. Evangelical and fundamentalist strains of Christianity are literally a death cult.
So with that rant-filled analysis out of the way, let’s see if I can talk formatting without dying inside again or getting too pissed off.
On the lyric site I linked above (and I’ll link it again so you don’t have to scroll through whatever literal mountain of text and cursed images I’ve produced) this goes verse 1, verse 2, chorus, verse 3, chorus, bridge twice, weird most-of-chorus tag, chorus, the last two lines like several times over. Thus, already we have multiple repetitions of most concepts found in this song. Also, this two verses-chorus-third verse-chorus-bridge several times-chorus twice-ending tag format is quite common in contemporary Christian music, in the studio recordings, official lyrics, and chord sheets you’ll find out there. But I cannot stress enough that this structure, especially the bridge and latter choruses but the entire structure including the verses, is extremely modular. Anything can be repeated, or repeated more times. Anything can be re-inserted in another place. This is mostly a Bethel thing in my experience, but there can be instrumental breaks for one of the vocalists to yeet out entirely spontaneous lyrics. There can be massive empty instrumental breaks, or instrumental breaks with spoken words in them. And I’ve seen even less of that, but parts of other songs can be inserted just about anywhere too, and I’ve actually participated in that one on occasion. To an extent, any music can be handled in ways like this, but it seems to me like contemporary Christian music is consciously designed that way because its target audience goes nuts over long, “spirit-filled” songs played at church camps or an extra spicy church service.
It’s also worth noting, and if I end up doing a whole lot of these I’ll probably explain this in a great deal more depth, that these songs can get reasonably similar to one another. I think that’s because to a very large extent, the words and structure matter a hell of a lot less than the way they set the mood. You can get the same impact on a crowd of willing Christians from probably literally any combination of these songs. I always had my favorites but that didn’t seem to matter that much.
I’m inclined to say some of the same things about a lot of modern music, actually. It has common structures, a lot of music is interchangeable for certain moods, etc. But I can’t say a thing about the modularity of modern music. A song seems to be way more of a distinct unit in most environments. Mashups do happen, but massive repetitions of one piece of a song generally don’t in any context that I’m aware of. They’ll jam out on an instrumental for a while at concerts sometimes, but you really don’t get this, like, singing “Crawl on your belly til the sun goes down, I’ll never wear your broken crown, I took the road and I fucked it all away, in this twilight how dare you speak of grace” more than like the twice they do it in the studio recording from most groups like you do in very many Christian music settings. (The example chorus I put here was from Mumford and Sons- Broken Crown. It’s an amazing song, I totally recommend it lol it was the first one that popped into my head for this purpose.) Some other commonalities are present in a lot of modern music, but for the most part, that modularity would just come across extremely weird. I think just about every time I’ve either seen or been involved in the playing of Even So Come at a church, the musicians engaged in at least some degree of modularity, most often by repeating the bridge but sometimes uh... holy crap. Because of the extreme prolific use of these songs in church or retreat settings, I’m inclined to list the modularity as the single most important aspect of the formatting of this song and of many others.
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2, 4, 20 for the writing ask meme!
(thanks!)
2. Is there a trope you’ve yet to try your hand at, but really want to?
Honestly, loads! I'd love to manage a Groundhog Day!AU because I like the hurt/comfort potential in it, and I like messing about with narrative time, but it would be grossly self-indulgent :D
More seriously, I've never written anything mature/explicit? In terms of sexual content, rather than graphic violence, which I write a fair bit. I want to, especially because I'd like to write something that looks at both Jon and Martin's relationship with asexuality and their early approaches where they explore their interests and limits together, but I'm a bit of a coward whenever my writing gets even a little bit saucy, so that one might be a while, and will definitely be published on anon xD
4. How many fic ideas are you nurturing right now? Care to share one of them?
Christ, too many. I start quite a lot of post-160 hurt/comfort fics and never finish them (they’re all your bog-standard, Jon or Martin get hurt / Jon or Martin worry, but hey, the formula ain’t broke), and most of their situations have been jossed by canon anyway so it’s unlikely they’ll ever come to anything.
Fics with an actual possibility to finish – probably a Martin-centric daemon!AU, feat. Elias being a canon-typical bastard, how the Lonely affects people’s daemon connection, and Jon being awkward and soft.
Also I'm really interested in that throwaway line in 161 where it's implied that if Martin sleeps, he will have nightmares that Jon can do absolutely nothing to prevent nor rescue him from once they start, and the horrific mindfucky potential of that is delicious, so I've a few ideas related to that.
20. Describe your perfect writing conditions.
Cup of tea, my room, late evening-ish. I like listening to music, but only something I know and like already, and that poor song will play on repeat like desiccating some husk till I'm happy that whatever emotion the song had, my fic's got it now lol
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