#Isat Mal du pays

[ohwormwood]

wake up!

-

s.sweats. hiiiii guys...... its been a bit..........

yeah uh. i got sucked into oc hell and i havent posted any of the art. but uh. here's a commission for @livesworthlivingau ! turned out pretty cool tbh....

-

[rottknightofrage]

"How can you be homesick if nowhere is home"

[siffrinsometimes]

(THEY DON'T WANT TO SEE YOU AGAIN.)

[ack-cough]

(You run and run and run and run)

(through the lightless sea and melting stars, your legs burn. So so much begging you to stop begging you to rest but you don't. You won't!! Not now)

(only a bit closer,, a little closer.)

(the cold around you stabs your lungs like spears,,but)

(THE BOAT ITS IN YOUR REACH!! JUST IN YOUR GRASP AND-)

(...)

(...)

(it's a child..)

---------

Hi take a silly doodle of a random thought I had.

While Marble is possessed by Sir Sol

Mars is um,,

Yeah!

[starvingnarcissistmusic]

I've had this drafted forever and I'm not entirely sure why I didn't post it. Oh well, better late than never!

MAL DU PAYS (the song) fun facts:

(Like the original post, spoilers for Act 5 ((and also 2hats)))

- Originally, after finishing the game, I wanted to write a song about Loop. They're one of my favorite parts of the game and I really loved their character, but I ended up scrapping that idea very early on, as I couldn’t really find a personal tie to anchor the song to me. While I did want to write a song about the game, I didn’t want to write something that didn’t resonate with me and my musical “mythos” in some way. It's a fan song, but it's also a Starving Narcissist song, and I felt it was important to strike that balance. MAL DU PAYS (Monophobia) only got released because I felt that it was something that fit into the larger body of my works even without the context of the game. So in the end, I chose to write about Siffrin, as I found them a lot more personally relatable. The final version, lyrically, is almost like I’m using Siffrin as a vehicle to write about my own feelings. Some lyrics are his, some are mine, a few are both of us, it’s a weird sort of style I’ve never really written in before.

I do have some leftover lyrics from the scrapped Loop version, though!

“There’s a you you’ll never be, across the cosmic sea / Who has everything you wanted, now it’s everything you need; is it over yet?”

- I think originally the song had a lot more of an exhausted vibe, but with most of the stuff I write, the tempo usually gets faster the more I play it. At some point in the writing process the song channeled more of a manic energy than I had originally intended it to. Loud and shouty is kinda just my default lol.

(The first ever demo for the song, recorded September 15, 2024. Features some slightly altered lyrics!)

- The title was also subject to change! I think for a while I was going back and forth on just calling it Homesickness, mostly because I was a little nervous that my song’s name was technically a late game spoiler. Half the reason I wanted to even write the song was because I thought MAL DU PAYS would make a great song title though, so in the end I just sucked it up and went with my gut. The alternate title was also not set in stone, I think originally I was considering just calling it Mania or Paranoia, but I thought those would be a bit generic. Eventually, I settled on Monophobia, because I felt it was apt in describing the song as a whole. I write a lot about loneliness, and Siffrin is afraid of being alone, so it felt fitting to name the song after the fear of it. (And also, a bit more superficially, I thought Monophobia made a better song title.)

- The song is the only Starving Narcissist song on a nylon string guitar, and it's also the second song in a completely non-standard tuning (third if you count ITWYW?, but that's just a half step down from standard). MAL DU PAYS (Monophobia) in DADF#BD, with a capo on 1.

- THIS SONG HAD SO MANY REVISIONS. I don't think I've ever had this many versions to a song ever. It got so bad that I made a specific folder just to hold all the different variations I had for the song. They're not all too different from each other, and they're all built on the same take of the song, but I was playing around with mixing and structuring and vocal layering and its a whole mess. Honestly, the fact that it's a song about a timeloop makes it probably the funniest song this could have happened to.

- And that's about it! To end off this little fun fact post, here's a little something I wrote for Genius (where lyrics for this song and all my others are posted! plus annotations I write! <3) about the song. The response to MAL DU PAYS (Monophobia) has been pretty wild, and I'm glad it managed to resonate with people, even some who don't even know the game it's about.

That's all. While I guarantee this year will probably be slower for Starving Narcissist, rest assured that I am working on stuff, just very slowly. There's a very low chance I'll ever do something as flagrantly self indulgent as this song, but whatever I do end up doing, I hope you're around to see it.

In the meantime, stream the song on spotify! or buy it on bandcamp! or even just go watch the lyric video i made for it (please i spent like a week on this)!

Thanks for everything, see you later <333

Happy one year anniversary to In Stars And Time! tldr; i wrote a song about it. if you wanna skip all the gushing and just listen to it, click here. (spoilers for act 5) If not, behold this big rambly mess of a thing i wrote:

So funny story, I kind of wasn’t planning on releasing anything for the rest of the year. The album wore me out, and the only other idea I had sort of fell through, so I was content on just letting the album be the only thing of note I would make in 2024.

… and then, in September, I played a little RPG called In Stars And Time. beat the whole thing over the course of three days, then spent the next couple weeks ravenously consuming all the fan content I could get my hands on. my friends have been forced to stare at my siffrin pfp every day for two months straight at this point and frankly i think they are tired of me talking about it.

i love the art, i love the story, i love the music, i love the characters, i love the world. siffrin sort of immediately became one of my favorite protagonists like,, ever. and it definitely did not help that i am also a scrawny forgetful person who has to regularly fight off the part of my brain that convinces myself that All My Friends Secretly Hate Me.

I’ve never really been so called out by a character before. The spiraling, the deflection, and the agony of being a stranger to yourself. the yearning for something you cant even name, because how could you? you cant even find the words on your tongue. not being able to tell anyone how you feel because its just easier to live with it, easier to let it eat you from the inside out then to bother anybody else. its easier to keep the mask on, stick to your lines, let the show go on.

all that hit just a bit too close to home. so i did what I usually do When Things Hit and wrote about it.

(like i said, spoilers for Act 5; It’s pretty devoid of context but they’re spoilers nonetheless)

MAL DU PAYS (Monophobia) is a song about cyclical burnout, self-estrangement, and homesickness. It’s half about Siffrin, half about me, but mostly it’s a rumination on loneliness and the hell that is the self.

Out now wherever you listen to music.

“How can you be homesick if nowhere is home?"

[tortillakitten]

guys help i think they're taking over

[bpdloop]

act 5 or something

[valictini]

🎶You’re out of touch~ You’re out of time~🎶

🎶And you’re out of your head when I come around~🎶

[systelon]

「 MAL DU PAYS 」

[ohwormwood]

(don't leave me alone here.)

-

made this last week, i'm actually really proud of it! i have never had to draw so many hands consecutively in my life,,,

[pillowspace]

PSYCHOLOGISTS BAFFLED BY WORLD'S FIRST MENTAL ILLNESS TO SLAY

( i changed it a bit, but outfit inspo )

[prismatiger]

smile for the camera! :)

[loop-lover-central]

The long awaited part 6 of garbage textposts

As always it's mostly the loopers again.

[ginumo]

this is like. the third time im reposting these BUT I JUST KEEP ADDING MORE AND MORE THINGS

WITNESS MY COLLECTION BOY. I AM VERY NORMAL

[tortillakitten]

got a chance to steal my sibling's drawing tablet again and this creature has been on my mind non-stop

[avloki-pal]

Loop Train

[(How many versions of yourself exist?)]

.

.

.

Hello! This turn’s song is: Lag Train

I’ve been planning this one ever since listening to the song after joining the ISAT fandom, it was a bit troublesome to make but I loved it, and I finally got this idea out. It won’t be this time I make an ISAT animation/animatic, but who knows! The plans are there, maybe one day they’ll be fulfilled

.

.

.

I love how I’m low key revealing the playlist song by song