Ima hop in talking to throw my two sense about this major break that’s coming up for 5sos, anonymously as someone who runs a anonymous 5sos confessions blog.
There’s a lot of new people in this fandom who’ve never experienced a 5sos break, and still have trauma from either 1D or other bands who took a break and then disbanded before the reunion. Or are fans of bands who are also in a limbo and are worried about what’s going to happen. (Looking at 1975 fans, I wish the best for yall)
And I’m a mixture of both! I was here for the first break, but drifted into other music genres during it, and kinda forgot about 5sos for a while, but came back within the last 3 years.
Plus for those who were here for the first break - there’s a lot of different factors that add into the uncertainty this time, like Michael becoming a dad!
There’s a lot of feelings being thrown around in the music industry of what happens before/during breaks that adds to what a break means now vs when the first break happened. It’s just… a lot.
Okay, look, I'm nice and I'm understanding but right now I'm gonna sound like a bitch and I don't care. Whatever experience anyone has with any other band doesn't matter. What happened with one direction is different from what is happening with the 1975, that's different from what happened with big time rush, that's different from what happened to why don't we, that's different from what happened to the Jonas brothers, I can keep going but you catch my drift. They are different bands, formed by different people, in different ways, with different believes and way to make music. No one thought backstreet boys were ever gonna come back and they just did a world tour, NSYNC was seen together just last month for the first time in YEARS, bands can take breaks and reform and regroup and move on if they want. I think this expectation that you're owed content all of the time is crazy. Album cycles shouldn't be just month long things. They should be allowed to work on something for longer. They should be allowed to not tour every 6 months. 5sos released 5 album in 10 years. An album every 2 years is a fucking good number. But even if it takes them another 2, 3, 5 years, it's their right as humans to take as much space as they want. I understand why people might be scared, but no one has the right to demand anything from anyone. Maybe Luke and Ashton will release more solo music, maybe they'll go on a tour, maybe Calum will drop a poetry book, maybe we won't see them for 5 years and then they'll announce the announcement of a new song. They can do whatever they want. You can't honestly expect to have access or content or tour at all times. They are grown men with lives and families who worked hard to learn how to exist outside a band they started when they were teenagers.
And yes, Michael is gonna be a father, but one, he's not the first musician ever to have a kid so that doesn't mean anything, but you also can't expect him to not be there for his daughter. Baby girl Clifford should be his priority but in nowhere is stated that you can't be a father and a musician.
And to compare 5sos to one direction is not a fair comparison, one direction was formed in a reality show by people who only wanted to explore them. 5sos were friends first and they are still friends first. Maybe they won't drop an album every year anymore. Maybe they won't make a tour with 101 concerts in less than 8 months. But that doesn't make them any less of a band, it they are doing shorter tours and longer album cycles.
Also, if they break up, they broke up, we can't force them to stay a band.
But I stand by the fact that these men went through quarantine, lost a whole record with calm due to an internal error, dropped their label, their management, both Ashton and Luke released solo albums, with Luke signing a 3 record deal if I'm not mistaken , Michael got signed as a dj and a producer, and they still released a whole album independently that was made the way they wanted. If they were gonna stop being a band they would've done in it in 2020. They're allowed whatever breaks they want or need. They are real humans. And they are not one direction.
But this break they are taking is something that they planned around it, or do you think it's an accident the tour ended just in time for Michael to be back home for the birth of his daughter? This tour wasn't scheduled, they could've not done it. But they chose to do it. But to look at them and accuse of being about to breakup and lying about it because they are taking a break for a very specific and unbelievably valid reason is bullshit.
I don't care about whatever trauma you may have about other bands. What happened to other bands happened to other bands. You can't make a different situation about them because it's never gonna be the same because there's different people involved.
Is their life. Their choice. We're just along for the ride. It's a hell of a good one so far and if this is it so be it. It's their choice.
And honestly, if you're actually this affected by one direction breaking up and this is not just some exaggeration for the bit or a joke, get help.
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I’ve seen some people (on TikTok mostly I don’t actually know about tumblr cus I avoided the tag for spoilers) hating on Simon and saying he didn’t try to understand Willhelm and his situation enough and I’m just like HELLOO??? DID WE WATCH THE SAME SHOW. I already found season two hate about Simon ridiculous BUT FOR SEASON THREE???
Simon has been so understanding and has sacrificed so much. He deleted his socials and all the memories with his friends online for the royal court. He thought the protest of the students was stupid but still joined for Willhelm. He sat down with the people who mock him for his activism despite them doing the same thing for lesser reasons. I would go as far to say he gave up his IDEOLOGIES for Willhelm. He has a lot of political opinions about social issues and the royal court but he’s not allowed to express any of them. He sometimes slips out a negative comment but he has been holding it in for the entire season. He knows he can make an actual difference and is close to someone who can but he can’t do anything about it. His partner doesn’t even seem to care about the issues he’s so passionate about and dismisses them. Yes Wilhelm has his own personal problems but the way he talked about LGBTQ+ issues was honestly hard to watch and you can tell Simon was hurt. He must’ve had bad opinions about Erik after he heard about the initiation thing but he didn’t say anything negative about him because he knows how important he is to Willhelm.
And I think NONE of these are the reasons why he broke up with Willhelm (atleast not the main ones). Simon saw how much the title of crown Prince damaged Willhelm. How broken it made the relationship between him and his mother and how broken he became. Willhelm changed for the crown and lost himself in the process. Simon finally stands on his principles and decides that he no longer wants to support the system that hurt both him and the boy he loves so much. Their relationship can’t survive with that toxic title being held above their own personal feelings
Can you really blame him for not wanting to fully understand the system that is so flawed and damaging to everyone around him?
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Building off of what I wrote in my fic "Sparks," I'm really compelled by the idea of Ford genuinely no longer being interested in sailing around in a boat with Stan by the time they were seniors in high school.
I like the idea of it not being just a symptom of the resentment that had been building between them, nor it being a dream of Ford's that only paled in comparison to west coast tech, but it being a genuine loss of interest on Ford's end. I think it complicates things even further in some really juicy ways.
Like, imagine going through high school slowly losing more and more interest in the dream you've shared with your twin and only friend ever since you were little kids. How do you break it to him? How do you explain it to him without making it sound like a rejection of him? Without it making him hate you?
How do you explain it without it feeling like a spit in the face to all the hard work he's put into a plan that started out as a way of him comforting you by telling you "it doesn't matter what people say about you, you're going to be an adventurer who sails away into the sunset and never has to hear their mockery ever again, and there will be babes and treasure and heroism, and then they'll all see how cool you really are!"
And all through high school you think to yourself, "he's going to move on to more realistic dreams any day now, and then I won't have to say anything about it!" But no matter how many times you mention something else he could do with his life that he seems interested in, or bring up the challenging logistics of traveling around long-term in a boat, he sounds just as committed to the childhood dream as ever, and completely oblivious to how apprehensive you sound.
So resentment grows, little by little. Because that's easier than confronting the soul-crushing levels of guilt that are building up inside of you, every time you don't take an opportunity to tell him you don't want to do the plan anymore. You don't have a single person in your life who modeled how to have difficult conversations for you. As far as you know, having this conversation with Stan would crush him into tiny little pieces and then he would hate you forever, and you can't stand the idea of losing the only friend you've ever had.
So tensions grow. A lack of interest turns into a bitter resentment that, if you were really being honest with yourself, is directed more at yourself than it is at Stan.
And then the falling-out happens, and it seems like you were proven right. Stan hates you now, and he's never going to forgive you for giving up on his dream. But two can play that game, so you try to hate him too. Because if you hate him too, then maybe it won't hurt as much that he never came back. That he never even turned up at school, or by the boat, or in through your bedroom window in the middle of the night. He knows what dad's like, and how he says impulsive exaggerated things when he's angry, and haven't you both dealt with his harsh words countless times before and been able to dust yourselves off and joke about it later? So why isn't he back at home, joking with you about how absurd your dad acted that night, being impossible and belligerent about ruining your dream, but at least now you're even, because you've ruined his dream too.
-
And now imagine you find out he risked the lives of everyone in existence to bring you back, right after you had accepted your fate was to die killing Bill. It would be terrifying and confusing and infuriating. If he cared so much, why didn't he do something to reconnect with you sooner? Why did he ignore you in favor of trying to make it big without you? Why didn't he take the infinitely safer and simpler action of reaching out to you without you having to track down his address and send a desperate plea for help? You were convinced that he didn't care enough to bother with you unless you had an important enough reason for him to come. But even then, he thought your plans were stupid. He didn't want anything to do with you, not even with the world at stake.
Did he save your life out of guilt? Does he pity you that much? It doesn't add up with what he did in the decade leading up to shoving you into the portal. And the dissonance between the version of him in your head that hates you, and the man who held out his arms to welcome you back to your home dimension, is so strong that you feel like you're being lied to again, like you're back in the depths of gaslighting and manipulation that Bill put you through, even though there's no way that's what Stan is trying to do... right? You can't figure it out, so you run away from it. You don't want to know the answer to whether or not Stan hates you, because you don't know which answer would hurt more, so you try to make him hate you more than ever, because at least then you would know for sure how he feels.
And in the end, after he sacrifices his memories for you, and for the world, things seem clearer. The layers upon layers of confusion and anger and hurt seem to have washed away like drawings in the sand, leaving behind the simple truth: that you two had an argument, and didn't move past it for forty years, and despite everything you put each other through, you both still want to re-connect.
So you sail away in a boat together.
And at first, it's wonderful. It's exactly what you want. It feels like an apology to Stan, and a thank-you for saving the world, and a once-in-a-lifetime chance to heal the rift between you two, and it's good to be back on earth, and you wonder why you ever doubted the dream you two once had.
But then, after the first long journey you spend on the sea together, when you get back home to dry land, Stan is already talking about planning your next adventure out on the open sea. He recaps every adventure you had on the first trip, over and over again, and he wants to chat with you all through the morning and long into the night, and you don't have the words to explain to yourself that you don't have enough social battery for this, and suddenly you're slipping back into the horrifyingly familiar feeling of Stan being overbearing and needing space from him and how could you think that? How could you think that about him after everything he's done for you and everything he's forgiven you for? But the longer this goes on, the more you realize that you still don't want to spend the rest of your life sailing around with Stan. It's great fun in moderation, but the idea of your whole life revolving around Stan and going on adventures with Stan and being in a boat with Stan with no time to be by yourself thinking about your own things and figuring out your own dreams makes your skin crawl with a claustrophobic kind of panic that you still don't know how to put into words forty years after the first time this feeling grabbed you by the throat and ruined your friendship with Stanley.
But the first time this happened, it nearly ruined his life forever. You can't let yourself feel this. You don't feel this. You're happy to spend the rest of your life fulfilling Stan's lifelong dream, and making up for the time you crushed his dream, and sure, maybe he crushed your dream once too, and maybe it would be nice for him to support your dreams like you're now doing for him, but you can't say that. He saved the universe, and it would be horrible and ungrateful and cruel for you to try to voice these feelings, especially when you don't know how to voice your feelings without it making other people feel like you twisted a knife into their gut. So you try to pretend the feeling isn't there.
You go out on a boat with Stan again. You planned out another incredible journey together, and this should be fun, and you should be happy about this, but the unspoken feeling you shoved as far down in yourself as it could possibly go is eating you alive. The worst part? Stan is starting to notice. You have never been good at hiding your emotions. The trick to it has always been to convince yourself you don't feel it at all, and not think about it, and that has always worked like a charm. But whenever the emotion claws its way back up to the forefront of your mind, you can tell Stan knows something is wrong. So you can't even give him the happy ending he deserves. You can't even convince him that you want to be here on the open seas forever with him, like he deserves. And you keep trying and trying to hide it, but Stan keeps asking in roundabout ways, like "You're being awfully quiet, sixer," and "whats that look on your face?" and eventually it comes exploding out of you like a shaken-up soda bottle dropped on its cap.
And then it's like you're back at home in New Jersey again, standing in the living room while dad grabs Stanley by the shirt. It all comes pouring out of you, in the worst possible way, with the worst possible phrasing, like a pandora's box of monstrousness, and Stan tries to fight back against the sting of your words, but you're made out of acid and you're burning through him and you can see it on his face, and there's never any coming back from this, not this time, you'll just have to either jump into the ocean or become a monster forever, so Stan can hate you more easily again, and-
-and at the end of the outburst, you're still on a boat in the middle of nowhere in the ocean with your brother, in dangerous waters, and you have things to do to keep the boat running smoothly.
You can't run away from him. He can't run away from you. You're stuck here for at least a couple more weeks, even if you turned around and sailed back towards shore right away.
-
And the thing that compels me so much here, despite how unbelievably angsty it all is, is that it sets up a situation wherein the Stans might end up forced to actually address the decades of resentment and confusion and wanting-to-reconnect-throughout-it-all that they thought they could gloss over and heal with enough time spent adventuring together on a boat. They might end up forced to actually address the crux of the issue that drove them apart in the first place: Ford wanting a little more space to feel like his own person, and to feel like he's able to have his own dreams, too.
It wouldn't happen easily, nor right away, but if they were stuck together on a little boat in the middle of nowhere surrounded by magical creatures they have to protect each other from in order to make it back home alive, then after they had one fight where they brought up all the things they silently agreed to never bring up again, it would probably happen many more times, and each time it would leave them both angrier at each other than ever, until eventually something honest slipped through amidst all the saying-anything-except-what-they-mean bickering. And once enough of these honest moments slipped through, then they would have a thread to tug on to start to unravel the gargantuan knot of their decades of unresolved conflicts.
And then, eventually, maybe Stan could learn that he can have a good friendship with his brother without needing to be glued to him at the hip, and Ford needing a certain amount of alone time doesn't mean he dislikes him or wants to abandon him, and Ford could learn that he can be honest and have a meaningful connection with someone without it driving them away and making them hate him.
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alright, so if we do end up fighting Kris in the last chapter of Deltarune, we will most certainly win. For we are the player, and we have the power of saving and loading. Debatably, Kris has this too, but either way the end result is the same- This will be a fight of iteration and endurance.
I hypothesize that this fight will have two (or three, depending on how you look at it) endings: You persist, or you relent. Persistence would likely look like a LOT of grinding, figuring out which actions in what order will allow you to "win" and take control back over Kris. And relenting, or perhaps convincing them to relent, would look like A: fleeing or mercy, or B: the same thing as persistence, but choosing to pursue mercy. The third option would be death, and subsequently giving up.
Now, we must remember that Deltarune is a 2018 video game developed by American indie developer Toby Fox. Deltarune oriciy came from Toby's fever dream portraying the ending of a video game. So there's every chance that rather than having the option to either fight to achieve mercy or simply give up and die, you can only die. That IS the only way to free the game from the player. Any other way, and you'd still be in control.
This option also would align with Toby's "there is only one ending"- The ending is persistence, and taking over Kris again. The other "endings" are just death.
This alone makes me inclined to believe that that's exactly how it's gonna go. The only thing that makes me doubt this is how Deltarune is a commercial venture, and that's a pretty unsatisfying "ending". But I could absolutely see Toby doing it anyway.
For we are the player. And if we fight for it, we WILL win. But winning means making Kris suffer, and the only way to avoid that is to no longer fight.
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