#anthology writing

[butch-reidentified]

*reposted without anon - it didn't take a genius to figure it was some sort of drama/receipts blog, but I've been told it's worse than that

idk how to make this any clearer: I am here to exchange feminist ideas and thinking with other women, to share my thoughts and hear theirs, to be a voice that women and girls can find peace and self-permission in when so much of society is trying to play tug-of-war with her sense of self as a female human being. I apologize to my followers for ever letting myself get pulled into drama in the past; I let things become personal and lost sight of my priorities. Please consider this a promise to work harder going forward to stay focused on the commitments I've made to you all and to all women & girls.

in related news, my wife and I, the Wilder Wives, are currently reworking a number of my characteristic accidental-PhD-thesis posts so that they function as stand-alone essays without the context of Tumblr, radblr, etc., in order to anthologize them. This is just a passion project, but I figured some of you might be interested 🩶

[peachesofteal]

Through Me (The Flood) Simon Riley masterlist Anthology

Simon Riley / female reader secret baby fic / 18+

Something at first sight Surprise on the street The world looks different Too much and not enough Puzzles Fish and chips Seen Emergency contact Family or not Take your baby to work day Moon and stars Hard truth Liar Come home Daddy Cold Groceries mimosas Dinner Holiday in the sun Skinny dip Home Delayed Mistakes Touch Healing BDU Birthday Bump Constellations costumes Bath voicemail splatter finger wake up Next

Alternate Universe: Price/Simon/mama (f!reader) threesome Alternate Universe: Price/mama (Simon's widow) - Fix You

[rhysuje]

Frame redraw! Salim saving Jason from the spear.

(only one of many times these two save each other)

https://ko-fi.com/rhysuje

[asoftepiloguemylove]

Joan Tierney Why Are You Haunted? / @/oceaii (tumblr) / Liv Ullmann Changing / The Elektra Complex / Rosario Castellanos Monologue of a Foreign Woman from "Meditation on the Threshold: A Bilingual Anthology of Poetry / unknown / @/violentcherries (tumblr) / @/nutnoce (tumblr) / Jean-Paul Sartre Nausea / unknown

i. Joan Tierney Why Are You Haunted? [ "This haunting is architectural. It is not about you. It is about where you are. There are bones in the foundation. This house is a graveyard. This house is a corpse. You are inside the corpse. That makes you the maggot." ]

ii. @/oceaii (tumblr) [ Black and white illustration of a deer. The deer looks forwards in the first panel and turns back to face the audience in the second panel. "Turn and face / the person you've become." ]

iii. Liv Ullmann Changing [ "I will never forget the loneliness I knew as a child. For a period in my life I hid behind a mask. Did not want to acknowledge any longing. / Now it is a part of me-something I can share. / Both the loneliness and the longing." ]

iv. The Elektra Complex [ "If you were to peel the skin of me apart as a fig's, you would finally understand. I am my mother's daughter. From poisoned seeds sprout poisoned fruits." ]

v. Rosario Castellanos Monologue of a Foreign Woman [ "I didn't want / to be the dead star / that uses borrowed light to survive." ]

vi. unknown [ Black and white illustration of two deer. They are both labeled with words. The deer in the background says "just be." The deer in the foreground replies "just being is the hardest part." ]

vii. @/violentcherries (tumblr) [ "the environment you are not thriving in is not yours forever / IT'S OKAY TO LEAVE / ... / IT'S OKAY to abandon the things you used to love" ]

viii. @/nutnoce (tumblr) [ Black and white illustration of a scorpion doing chores. It's tail just barely curls over the front of a clothes line. Various pairs of socks hang from the clothes line. It stands before a bucket with more clothes inside. "I come from the toughest, meanest place you can imagine. / I want to be gentle, I want to die gently, but / It seems that when life gets hard / I have to get harder to match." ]

ix. Jean-Paul Sartre Nausea [ "I am going to outlive myself. Eat, sleep, sleep, eat. Exist slowly, softly, like these trees, like a puddle of water, like the red bench in the streetcar." ]

x. unknown [ "1. Man is a MORAL animal. / 2. You can get human beings to do anything - IF you can convince them it is moral. / 3. You can convince human beings that anything is moral." ]

[raven-at-the-writing-desk]

Hi Miss Raven! I've seen a panel from the anthology that I'll put bellow, and I don't get the joke. Is it going over my head or is it something in Japanese that didn't translate? Thank you!

The Japanese language is famous for its wordplay! This is one example of that.

In the page referenced above, Trey suggests eating fried shrimp, which is called "ebi fry" in Japanese. The katakana for the term "ebi fry" is エビフライ, and it is pronounced "ebifurai".

The word "fly" is written with the exact same characters and is pronounces the same (furai) as the "fry" in "ebifurai". Therefore, it is easy to confuse the two if you ignore the context in which the phrase is being used. Here is the original Japanese version of the manga page for comparison; you'll note that if you zoom in, you can see the katakana フライ written next to the English "fly". This helps to distinguish it from its other meaning, "fry".

Trey is essentially saying a pun here. Jade wonders what he, a sea creature, can do to improve his flight/flying abilities, to which Trey makes a dad joke by telling him to eat fried/"fly" shrimp. The two words look and sound similar in Japanese! (And you can tell that the fan translators made an effort to carry over this pun into their scanlation!)

... I guess Jade must have a taste for punny humor (at least following the manga anthology's canon) if Floyd says he hasn't stopped laughing about the fried/fly shrimp joke since yesterday 🤣

[searchingforserendipity25]

Dracula lovers, this may be of interest to you: Dracula Beyond Stoker Press, which specialized in publishing all things Dracula, including short stories, will have an open call for short stories about our friend Jonathan.

Starting Nov. 1st and ending December 31st, the Jonathan Harker Anthology Open Call starts soon! Wordcount 1500-5000. AND accepted pieces will be paid (55 dollars).

CORRECTION! - thank you to @wiliecoyotegenius and the Anon for pointing out I misread the instructions! 55 dollars seems to be for reprints. Regular compensation should be .05 cents/word.

[ellatholmes]

I'm creating a Disability Fantasy Anthology!

This intersectional anthology will feature 12 stories from 12 different authors of different disabilities and experiences, set in different worlds with different narratives and perspectives.

Please like and share to spread the word, and donate if you can. We're so excited to bring this anthology to life 🥰

The submission call will be put out soon as well, if you or someone you know would be interested in submitting! I'm posting updates on my twitter.

[kazbiter]

this email and the fact he was writing him literal poetry. like this is not really an email it is not really a letter it is almost entirely a piece of poetry that alex writes about the way that he loves him. the way he loves henry. henry with the great passion for queer poetry. henry who dreams of the anthology he didn't know he would get the chance to write yet. hello.

[ink-flavored]

spitballing some hypothetical magical ailments to use for my urban fantasy anthologies

Wizard Cramps

Caused by having a spell localized to one area for long periods of time

Stiffness or soreness in muscles, skin discoloration (can be many colors or change colors regularly), mirage-like shimmer over the affected area

Taking an over-the-counter magic suppressant until symptoms subside

Enchanter’s Burn (also Creeping Runes)

Caused by having active runes on one area of the body for long periods of time

Rash, skin discoloration (can be many colors or change colors regularly), burning sensation, runes on the body in the place they were written even if previously washed off

Taking over-the-counter magic suppressants and/or using magic suppressing cream on the affected area

Spell Fatigue (also Hex Aches)

Caused by casting too many spells in quick succession or one spell that drains a lot of capacity

Seeing flashes of color, muscle spasms, extreme fatigue, headaches or migraines, inability to cast spells for an extended time

Rest, refraining from casting spells, drinking a magic-replenishing potion, eating food

Potion Sickness (also Hocus-Pukeus)

Caused by drinking too many potions in quick succession, one extremely powerful potion, or a poorly made potion

Nausea and/or vomiting, dizziness, hand tremors, odd-smelling breath

Rest, drinking lots of non-magic fluids, over-the-counter flu medication or magic suppressants

Premature Abscission (also Autumn Heart)

Exclusive to dryads; caused by stress or anxiety, depression, lack of sun or water, or a particular branch being choked of nutrients

Flowers and leaves rotting and falling off too early in the season/before autumn/falling off at all if the dryad is an evergreen species; can be all leaves or only a particular branch

Depending on the cause, there can be many treatments. Most professionals recommend additional sunlight and water no matter what, potentially a pruning if the dryad is particularly wild-growing

[burgeurger]

"NINE LITTLE KILLERS" i named it that because the number 9 shows up in here a lot (sometimes unintentionally LOL) and it reminded me of that one christmas song few other versions! :

idk what happened here it just looks cool. i think i solarized it

aaand this is the scanned version without any filters. since the paper i used was too big to be scanned in one go, i had to scan four different pieces and then stitch it together to complete it, which may be the reason why the filters did that freaky background thing that i love. nature is healing

[peachesofteal]

Through Me (The Flood) - secret baby fic Simon Riley / female reader

Simon is silent.

He should be focused. He should be going through the plan, the optics, over and over in his mind until it's memorized.

He should be Ghost, but he's stuck on Simon.

Simon has a baby, and you. He has a family now. A family that will need him.

And you need him.

You didn't say it outright. You didn't ask for anything, actually. You only asked what he wanted, how involved he wanted to be, what he wanted to do. You told him he was welcome in Orion's life, as much or as little as he wanted, and you promised you could continue on without him, if that's what he decided. You talked about the baby's life, custody and trading off and everything else, all while he nodded along, watching the way the sun refracted in your eyes, how it shimmered across your skin.

You don't understand yet, but you will. You and the baby, you're it now. You're the only things that matter.

You're his.

"Alright, LT?" Johnny shouts over the roar of the plane, and Simon can only nod, still lost in the morning stretched to early afternoon, the memories he's so desperately trying to scar into his brain. They're fleeting, and short, and he holds onto the hope that he'll get more of them, more moments, more time.

A buzzer sounds. A light turns green. He takes a deep breath, rolls his shoulders-

and stands as Ghost.

He waits patiently at your door.

His bones ache, still decompressing from the last two weeks, mind and body trying to slowly slink out of fight or flight into something else, something new and unsteady.

Into being... this, whatever it is. A stranger to his child and future wife.

He triple checks his phone on the way to your flat, ensuring he's following the plan, the meeting time, the invite to a T.

Come for a late breakfast, maybe we can take a walk? You're more than welcome to come see him, anytime, and we can chat.

Anxiety crawls up his throat and back down, settling in his stomach like hot stones, tipping him over from one side to the next, nearly making him unsteady on his feet. He trips over his doubt, his fear, his worry again and again, brows creased together as he tries to push it all from his mind.

How is he supposed to leave you two here, again? How will he make sure you're safe? He'll need to move you to a secure home, somewhere in the country, most likely. A small town, where-

"Simon, hey." The door swings open and there you are, Orion on your hip, a soft hand supporting the juncture of his head and neck. He's grown in the two short weeks Simon has been away, the agonizing reminder that he's missed so much.

"G'morning." He rasps, and you smile shyly.

"It's good to see you."

"You too." 'You too' doesn't even begin to cover it, he thinks wryly. Doesn't even begin to encapsulate the breadth of emotion he's holding now, the obsessive circle of thoughts that revolve around you and the baby, his family.

Just standing in front of you, seeing the two of you whole, soothes an ache in his heart, a bleeding hole from a wound that only you could heal.

It's too much, and not enough.

C'mon in. I'll make some tea."

[xoxo-honeyy]

wake-up call

^ he's such a scrumptious dilf, jus' wanna eat him up

summary: you wake up to strange noises coming from the bathroom and decide to go investigate. when you open the door, you find vander in a very compromising position...

warnings: afab reader, unprotected vaginal sex (don't be silly wrap your willy), cuddle fucking, dom!vander, sub!reader, tried very hard not to describe readers looks (implied chubby reader? kind of), somewhat of a size kink? (blink and you'll miss), male masturbation, use of pet names (princess, love), cockwarming, barely proofread, reader walks vander like a dog, smut that ends in fluff. reader is a stressed out mama, porn with little plot, please let me know if I've missed anything!

author's note: so i wanted to write a somno fic with vander but i didn't really know how to go about it so here's this mess that i don't know what to do with! this is also crossposted on ao3 at xoxo_honey!

wc: 1.6k

It had been a long day at work. Fights needed to be broken up, various repairs had to be made, and one of the beer taps broke which made business go a lot slower than usual. All of this caused Vander to come home a lot later than he usually did which put him in a bad mood.

All day while he was at work, Vander couldn't stop thinking about you. your soft touch. The way your plush body slotted perfectly against his. How you curled up against him this morning when he tried to get out of bed. the way your tight cunt wrapped around his cock so perfectly the night before, drowning him in orgasmic bliss. And all day he was trying desperately to force those thoughts away to avoid any awkward boner situations with his customers. but, towards the end of the night, his nasty thoughts came back in full force and flooded his head with a lust-filled haze. 

So when he got home, Vander already had two strikes against him. He was grumpy and sporting a half-hard cock. 

He unlocked the front door and closed it behind him. He quietly crept past the kids' room and made his way into your shared bed where you were snoring softly. 

Today hasn't been much better for you either. It was your day off of work so you decided to take the kids around the undercity and entertain them with the various light shows and firework displays. What a terrible idea. Not only were all of the children extremely giddy to spend the day with you, but they also made pancakes loaded with sugar and syrup to get them extra hyper. 

So, your day consisted of carting four restless, sugar-high kids around the Undercity, but you were also running on little to no sleep thanks to Vander and his outrageous libido.

When it was time to get back to your dingy little apartment, the five of you were exhausted and decided to go to bed early. 

Unlucky for you, a horny and cranky Vander had just laid down right next to you. The neon lights shone in through the moth-eaten curtains of your bedroom and cast a dim glow over your sleeping form, outlining the plump curve of your breasts and highlighting the gorgeous planes of your face. Which really wasn't helping Vanders...situation at all.

Deciding that he needed to relieve himself before getting a good night's sleep, Vander moved to get back up from the comfort of your shared bed and made his way to the bathroom. 

It had been a while since he needed to jerk off. Trying to remember how exactly he used to do it before you came along, his mind started to wander to different pictures of you. Vander could only remember your lips wrapped around the base of his cock while his tip repeatedly hit the back of your throat making you gag and moan around him.

Fuck.

The soft clinking of his belt becoming undone filled the muggy air of the cramped bathroom. Vander moved his pants and boxer down so they hung low on his waist, exposing just enough so his girthy dick was able to spring free from its confines. 

He spit on the palm of his large hand and wrapped it around his shaft, slowly moving it up and down. The rough calluses on his palm only served as a reminder of your soft one stroking his cock, finding different ways to tease him and make him cum. he moved his hand back up his penis and made contact with his leaking tip. His thumb moved back and forth over the slit and more pre-cum spilled down his length.

No longer able to control the noises coming out of his mouth, Vander bit down on a wad of his shirt. But this only helped stifle the sounds to a certain extent.

Down the hall in your bedroom, you were awakened out of your stupor because of strange noises coming from the bathroom. worried that one of the kids was sick, or god forbid, there was an intruder in the house, you decided to get out of bed and go investigate.

As you made your way down the hall, the noises became clearer and they were similar to the noises you heard during previous nights. You immediately knew who was in the bathroom.

You opened the door and found Vander hunched over with his hard cock in his fist, with his balled-up shirt in his mouth. 

Now Vander had three strikes against him. He got caught and was still horny, but his bad mood lessened upon seeing your beautiful face. 

Immediately Vander moved to pull his pants up while fumbling over his words trying to come up with an adequate explanation as to what exactly he was doing. 

You quickly cut him off, "What are you doing?" a slight smirk played at your lips. You knew exactly what he was doing.

"M sorry princess, didn't mean to wake you." He avoided the question.

Stepping closer to him you responded in a soft, sultry, whisper, "That's not what I asked."

Stopping his actions, you took his erect tip into your hands and started stroking him. Repeating the same motions he was doing just moments before. He immediately let out a guttural moan and you stopped your teasing movements. 

You turned your back to him and walked out of the bathroom knowing full well he was hot on your trail. 

The two of you made it into your bed and laid down, but Vander was confused, "What are you doing love?" 

Not responding, you simply pulled down your cotton pajama shorts along with your thin panties with a noticeable damp spot in the center and rolled over so your back was pressed up against his broad chest.

"'M tired Vander." You explained, "Don't feel like doing anything." 

But there was an underlying message that Vander had not yet caught onto.

You gave him a moment to think, and when his eyes brightened, you knew he had figured it out. 

Slowly, Vander moved impossibly closer to you and moved two of his thick fingers to your heat. the digits moved at a tantalizing pace, up and down your folds to work you up for his girthy cock. Your slick was dripping around his fingers and when he pushed one in, it came out soaking.

Letting out a whimper, you started to rut your hips against his hands in hopes to relieve the ache in your core. 

Vander only chuckled and whispered, "All you gotta do is ask princess. I don't know what you want if you don't tell me."

Broken words tumbled from your lips, "Please, wan' your cock."

"Where do you want it? your mouth?" He responded knowing full well exactly where you wanted it.

You couldn't wait anymore, "Want it 'n my pussy."

Deciding that you had enough, Vander finally gave you what you wanted. He slipped his hefty dick into your tight, wet heat. Each time you had sex, it took you a few moments to adjust to the sheer size of him because he was just so big. the two of you sighed a breath of relief, hours of wanting and lust-filled brains had rendered you both into horny teenagers. Vander's large arms wrapped around your waist so he was holding you firm into his body. The embrace pouring love and protectiveness through your very being.

After you had gotten re-used to his impressive girth, Vander started to lightly thrust in and out of your core. His movements were more akin to grinding than thrusting but he was too tired to fully complete his movements. His hand moved down to your red, needy clit and started rubbing tight circles on the bundle of nerves. 

As a small form of punishment, Vander lightly slapped your swollen clit a number of times until tears formed in your eyes. stopping the harsh movement, he started gently tugging at your button until breathy moans fell from your lips. 

The added movement of his fingers combined with his dick repeatedly hitting your cervix, you felt your stomach clenching and your thighs shaking, a sign of your impending orgasm. Letting out a series of high-pitched moans you shoved your face into the pillow and bit down on it. 

Vander's hips faltered and the hand that was tugging at your clit started lightly quivering. He was also close. revived with newfound energy to finish the two of you off, Vander's thrusts became more powerful. The sound of skin slapping reverberated around the room.

Suddenly your mind went blank, the only feeling you were capable of discerning was pleasure as your orgasm rolled over you and took over your entire nervous system.

Sensing that Vander was at the precipice of his imminent orgasm, you decided to help him out by meeting his harsh thrusts by grinding your hips back onto his, overstimulation be damned.

It was all too much for him. The clenching of your cunt, the way you wrapped so perfectly around his cock, the feeling of your soft body safe in his arms. His seed spilled into you filling you up with warm, gooey liquid, the familiar sensation was oddly comforting. 

You removed the pillow case from your teeth and took in lungfuls of the cool night air. Vander massaged your waist and hips to get rid of any potential bruising and whispered into your sweaty skin, "Maybe I should wake you up like that more often."

Laughter bubbled up your throat and reached Vander's ears.

"M extra tired now." You sighed, thinking of all the things you had to get done in the morning.

Vander, already knowing the amount of work you had piled on your desk suggested, "Why don't you take the day off tomorrow? The six of us could have a spa day or something?"

Leaning your head against his sweaty chest you closed your eyes and smiled, "Yeah, I think I'd like that."

hope you guys liked this, i had sm fun writing it! this is also cross-posted on ao3 at xoxo_honey, the link is in my pinned post!

[plutoispurplw]

Fresh Out The Slammer

Summary: You're going to see Spencer after he spent three months on the prision.

Couple: Spencer Reid x Fem!Reader

Warnings: Little angst, mention of prision and murder.

A/N: Hi everyone, guess who is back to write like is running out of time! Someone has to take TTPD away from me, now this is an addiction.

Sorry if this doesn't have to much to do wuth the song and remember, english is not my first language, so please tell me if I have an error.

Plss reblog it and request are open!

Masterlistᝰ.ᐟ

When Spencer was being held in custody in Mexico, you were anxious, you visited him and he was completely different from who you were accustomed to.

It was like he wasn’t mentally there, he looked like a mess and his mental stability was almost inexistent, you almost broke down when you saw him in that state.

After that visit, he didn’t let you go again to see him, he didn’t want you to see him in that state and was worried about your mental health even if he was worse in that matter.

You felt hurt at that moment but you decided to understand him and didn’t visit him again but you sent him letters, the first few letters he didn't respond to you, after some time he started to respond to your letters.

You have been feeling down all the time, being in your apartment made you feel miserable knowing he wasn't there, it felt lifeless there without his presence.

Your bed that once was your favorite place in the world became the worst place to be without his arms around you holding you and protecting you from all the things that happen out there.

You were cleaning the apartment when your phone started to ring, you took it to check who it was and when you saw his name you let out a scream. You quickly answer the call.

“Spencer, are you okay?” You said immediately when the call started, your voice was full of worry for him.

“Yes, I’m already out and I’m alright, don’t worry angel.” His voice sounded reassuring, even if he wasn’t alright he wouldn’t have told you but something inside you told you to believe him.

That calmed you instantly, knowing he was alright made your mind at peace, and the overthinking in your mind stopped even if it was for a moment.

“I’m going to be there in a couple of hours.” His voice sounded tired, knowing him you know that he hadn’t slept more than two hours or less in those three months

Now you were waiting for him in your apartment, sitting on your couch trying to read a book, but that task seemed impossible right now, your mind was only focused on the clock in the living room, checking it every few minutes.

It felt like the minutes were slowly becoming eternal, your heart was beating like it was going to get out of your chest, and your mind was running through a million thoughts at the same time.

Then you heard the door opening and you ran towards the entrance just like a little kid, when you saw him you just hugged him while tears began to spill from you’re eyes.

“I missed you so much.” You whispered against his neck, your voice breaking with every word you spoke. His hands were rubbing your back in a calming notion.

When you pulled back enough to see his face, you noticed that his face had tears spilling from his beautiful eyes, you removed them with your thumbs while you held his face in your hands.

“You don’t have any idea of how much I thought about you, All those nights, you kept me going. I read every letter you sent.” He pulled you towards him for a kiss. When his lips touched yours it was like being in heaven again.

You pulled away a little and put your head on his chest “I’m sorry that you had to go through all of that.” Your voice was weak and filled with sadness thinking about all the things that he had suffered, you looked to another side.

He pulled away a little and took you by the chin to make you see him, he started to speak again. “Even if I go through all of that, knowing that you were here is enough compensation for all the things that I had suffered in my life.”

You kissed again but with time it was more slowly and gently, the kiss was filled with the love that the two of you had for each other. You were sure that the love would never end between you two.

He was the one who you want to spend the rest of your life with him.

[francixoxoxo]

Have the most devious idea for a coryo series that lets me work around all the moral implications and the disgust for him…… hear me out hear me out you are covey and Lucy gray already left but she begged you to stay behind, she simply had a feeling in her gut that Coriolanus would come after her, one way or another. And you’re sincerely doubtful, but you love her like she’s your own blood, you agree to wait for a month before meeting the rest of the covey and Lucy Gray up north. Turns out, the Coriolanus, the one Lucy Gray hasn’t shut up about, the one you’ve been separated from your family for, the one that inadvertently is making you feel like chopped liver, actually shows. ‘Course he’s doubtful, he doesn’t know you, he doesn’t know if you’re really covey. You’re doubtful, you don’t know him besides the fact he’s capitol. That’s enough to despise him.

But Lucy Gray loved him, so you figure that’s enough. You find a means to convince him to follow you north to her, assuring him you’ll be his escort through the thick woods, his beloved Lucy Gray left a map with their route outlined. You travel with him, cook meat over campfires with him, fish with him, trade stories with him, appreciate the views with him, laugh at the first snow with him. Oh, how guilty you feel for falling for someone so obviously Lucy Gray’s. Someone so devoted to her that he’d follow a stranger to find her.

And how awful Coryo feels, falling in love with someone so similar to Lucy Gray, falling in love with someone so close to her. He feels like scum every moment he catches himself admiring you, smiling faintly at the mud caking your dress, azure eyes tracing every line of your face. You’re nothing like Lucy Gray, he finds. You aren’t a performer, you have no act, you have no farse. You are raw, perhaps sometimes rough and crude in your honesty, but that makes your kindness all the more genuine. He hates himself for finding that his affections for Lucy Gray are waning, waning in the face of every minute spent under the pine with you. What does he really know about Lucy Gray? Really? Not much. He was infatuated, he won’t deny, but was that love?

No matter how heavy the guilt sogs your heart, you find yourself dreaming that all the problems might be solved before you reach the North. Coriolanus might fall out of love. He’d see that he didn’t know a damn thing about your dear Lucy Gray. Maybe she’d realize that she knew nothing about him. None of it will go away in an instant, that history. So it’s all you can do, to wake in the morning and resist brushing fingers over his rosy cheeks, pushing a hand through his grown-out buzzcut— you instead jog him awake by the shoulder and remind him that it’s time to get hiking again.

[wavesoutbeingtossed]

The TTPD Deep Dive (Part ?)

It’s no secret that I have a lot of Thoughts about The Tortured Poets Department and it has lived rent-free in my head since it came out earlier this year. I’m absolutely blown away by how underneath the chaos, it’s actually an exceptionally cohesive story and is probably the closest to a concept album Taylor has ever done.

There are so many themes that have stood out to me over the last five months, and there’s one in particular that I think not only drives the entire album, but ties into previous albums to help deepen understanding of it.

This is it, my fangirl magnum opus, my months of posts consolidated into one place. This is also my disclaimer that this is just my interpretation of the album, and my summary of the story it tells, and I don’t pretend to have any special insight or authority. I’m not saying I’m correct at all, do not take any of this as fact, it’s just what it sounds like to me, and these are my silly not-so-little thoughts about it.

(Under a cut because it’s way too long and involves discussion many may not care for or be sick of.)

Come one, come all, it's happening again (I'm thinking too hard about Taylor music)

The overarching theme in TTPD to me is: Grief. If you’re looking at TTPD as a story being told (instead of just as someone’s real life), the inciting incident of TTPD is loss, and the grief from that loss is what drives the narrator’s actions and the fallout, as well as unpacks those complicated feelings and how they apply to the her life in general. By the end of the standard album, it’s also about recovering from that pain, moving on from it and learning from it.

The loss specifically is the loss of the dream of having a family (with one’s partner). One thing that is abundantly clear both on the top line and under the surface in TTPD is how Taylor (as a person and as narrator) longed not only to for marriage but specifically parenthood, and the fear and then realization of losing that chance absolutely wrecked her— which is why the next lover’s (the conman's) wooing worked so well, because it preyed on that yearning. Yet that loss also dovetails into the grief of many things: of youth, of idealism, of relationships, of ideas, even of self, which causes almost a deconstruction of a belief system to piece one’s life back together by the end.

THE CONTEXT

TTPD weaves in the topics of marriage and motherhood both explicitly and in the subtext, in various forms and scenarios. The cheating husband in “Fortnight.” The wedding ring line in “TTPD” the song. “He saw forever so he smashed it up” in “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys.” All of “So Long, London.” Running away with her wild boy in “But Daddy I Love Him,” fantasizing about weddings and joking about babies. The imaginary rings in “Fresh Out The Slammer.” The cheating husband (again) and the friends who smell like weed or “little babies” in “Florida!!!” “You and I go from one kiss to getting married,” “Talking rings and talking cradles,” and “our field of dreams engulfed in fire” in “loml.” (And arguably: “I wish I could un-recall how we almost had it all.”) “He said he’d love me all his life, but that life was too short,” in “I Can Do It With A Broken Heart.” They may not sound like much on their own, but they paint a picture about how the topics pervaded her thoughts and her writing, and in many cases express her desires, and her pain.

It’s something that goes back several albums when you pick up on context clues. You get the first hints on Reputation with “New Year’s Day,” and “you and me forevermore.” Then Lover is very forward with it: “Lover” is basically wedding vows, “Paper Rings” is very engagement-coded, “I Think He Knows” is cheeky but low-key “you better put a ring on it,” “It’s Nice To Have A Friend” has wedding/marriage imagery in the last verse. As a self-professed diaristic writer, it’s the type of stuff one presumably doesn’t put out there unless those conversations have already happened, and she was very excited about it at the time it was released.

Then the pandemic happens and folklore comes out, and while there is still happy love there (“invisible string”), there are also the first indications that something has happened to put a halt to whatever future she once dreamed of (“hoax,” “the lakes”) and that she’s trying to reassure herself and him that it can still happen even if she’s scared it might not (“peace”). Notably, as far as I can remember it’s the first time Taylor explicitly brings up the idea of family (with her partner) with “you know that I’d give you my wild, give you a child,” which stood out at the time because it’s so incredibly vulnerable, but it’s even more poignant when you really take in that the whole song is like a confession of her deepest worries, and this is her vowing to give him these things that she holds most sacred if he’ll let her. These are what she cherishes most dearly and wants to return in kind: her youth and commitment (my wild), the family she craves (a child), unconditional support (swing for the fences/sit in the trenches) and understanding/compassion (silence that only comes when two people know each other).

Evermore follows an even darker path, and suddenly the album explores relationships that end and grappling with loss. There are toxic relationships (“tolerate it”), dangerous marriages (“no body, no crime,” “ivy”), failing/broken relationships (“Coney Island,” “champagne problems,” “happiness,” “‘tis the damn season”), as well as grief (“Marjorie,” “evermore”). Even some of the happy songs have uncertainty in them: in “willow” she’s begging for him to take her lead, like she’s still trying to decipher him and ask him to commit; in “cowboy like me,” still a beautiful love song, she’s thinking, “this wasn’t supposed to work and we were supposed to bail on each other but we fell in love instead”; “evermore” is about the depths of severe depression (and more) with the love story being the one saving grace in her darkest hour. And it’s also notable that after all the “fiction” writing, shortly after this album she writes “Renegade” where she’s telling the subject: I’m ready to start the next phase of our life now, why aren’t you? Is it me you don’t want after all? It’s like there’s something telling her that this stall might not just be a stall.

Midnights is a jumble (in a good, but in hindsight, also sad way) with the “sleepless nights” concept, but it seems pretty clear now that the themes and events and relationships she was revisiting tied into a lot of what she was feeling in her present life. I wrote the cliff notes version awhile back, but she’s questioning so much of her life that’s reflected in past events and relationships. Am I actually always the problem? How did we lose sight of each other and what we had? We only seem to work when we block out everyone and everything else. Can we ever go back to when things were good? Why are you neglecting me? I once thought I was going to lose everything but you saved me in the nick of time, can that happen again? I chased my career, but did I give up my chance at having a family in the process? Nobody knows what I really suffer from behind closed doors and I’m all alone.

And so on, which in retrospect now that we have TTPD, is very much what she was grappling with in private while writing and releasing the album. The inspiration behind the songs may have been different events and muses, but regardless of their origins they all end up feeling too familiar, like she's seen this film before (ahem). We’re seeing her view of commitment change too, or rather how she writes about it: she’s not making the outright declarations of it like on Lover, or even the implied ones on folklore, nor is she talking of the dark side of it like evermore. For the most part it’s a return to the early days of some relationships, before things got hard, or the end of them when there was nothing left, and also pushing away the discussion of it altogether by the outside world. “Sweet Nothing” is a sweet slice of life, but even at that, it’s the peace of the home in conflict with the pressure of the outside world. Now that we have “You’re Losing Me,” which was written at the same time as the rest of the album, we can probably deduce that she was going back to the start because something happened that made her doubt the future.

THE SETUP

So much of Midnights directly ties into TTPD, and I said in the post I linked that it’s like Midnights is asking the questions that TTPD answers. But there’s one song in particular on Midnights that sticks out to me as being key in the broadest sense to understanding the state of mind that led to the events of TTPD, and that’s “Bigger Than The Whole Sky,” because the way it expresses grief is reflected in the theme of mourning a life built and the dreams along with it that are never realized in TTPD. There are several instances in TTPD that are basically variations of: “every single thing to come has turned into ashes,” and that’s what makes her snap, and leaves her vulnerable to someone who promises her those things when she’s bereaved at losing them in the first place. (In other words: “the deflation of our dreaming leaving me bereft and reeling.”) The song tells a story about how that loss of hope colours one’s entire mindset, and in some ways is a bridge to TTPD to understand what such a low point feels like.

I think that that grief, and most importantly losing hope for an imagined future in its wake, is fundamental to understanding TTPD on so many levels: both the decline with one partner that kept her hanging on then led her such a dark path, and why she fell for the conman's apparent bullshitting because it offered an express pass to what she was losing with her partner. And I also feel like it plays a part into the ruminating she’s doing all over Midnights, trying to make sense of where she finds herself when she’s writing the album, which directly leads to “You’re Losing Me.” Loss permeates so many of the stories on Midnights: of lovers, of innocence, of youth, of faith, of control, of life’s work, etc. “BTTWS” is just one of the ways in which it is expressed so fully, capturing that deep depression and subsequent extinction of faith in something that once felt assured and very much wanted. (Which is also mentioned in her writing process in the “Depression” playlist on Apple Music.)

If you understand why that feeling of loss in general across so many parts of life is so important to Midnights, then it illuminates so much about the “narrative” in TTPD too. If on Midnights she’s wrestling with the seeds of grief and loss (on multiple fronts), TTPD is her reckoning with it in its full form. “So Long, London” is the song that is the most explicit about it: How much sad did you think I had in me? How much tragedy? Just how low did you think I’d go before I’d have to go be free? You swore that you loved me, but where were the clues? I died on the altar waiting for the proof. It’s the sequel to “You’re Losing Me.” It’s, the air is thick with loss and indecision, I know my pain is such an imposition, I’m getting tired even for a phoenix, all I did was bleed as I tried to be the bravest soldier, I’ve got nothing left to believe unless you’re choosing me, my heart won’t start anymore, but from the other side of the break.

This is highly speculative, but if you follow the thread about the topic and the relationship as told from Rep through TTPD, in broad strokes it goes: young love with a serious connection (Rep) -> growing up and making life plans (Lover) -> something happens that delays those plans or makes them grind to a halt (folklore) -> serious doubts arise and cause a loss of faith in their future (evermore) -> struggling with the loss of that future and trying to make sense of the problems in a last ditch attempt to save the relationship (Midnights) -> fallout from that grief after the blowup of the relationship (TTPD). Understanding that progression of events (through the music) explains not only the storytelling side of TTPD (e.g. the jump from the partner to the conman) but also how the experiences/muses blend in the music, and how the music that on the surface is about the short-term relationship is really driven by the destruction of the long-term one.

Following the music, it’s IMO implied that Taylor (the narrator) was holding out for marriage and family with her partner, for years, and it seems like it was at one point a shared dream until something happened to pump the brakes, and seemingly on her partner’s end. And extrapolating further, given how the sorrow expressed in former albums bleeds into TTPD, it sounds like a plan that had been concrete in some form before it had fallen apart, and losing something that once felt so tangible is what drives her in her grief to find any kind of respite from the pain. Which is why the situation with the conman becomes so appealing as the one with the partner splinters further and further.

(If everything you’ve once touched is sick with sadness and you don’t want to be sad anymore, what are you left to do?)

THE STORY

So (one part of) the story kind of sounds like this from the standard album: the relationship with her partner as well as his mental health slowly deteriorate and he withdraws emotionally (“London,” “Fresh Out The Slammer”) and physically (again, “London,” and “Guilty As Sin?”) and takes his resentment out on her (“London” and arguably “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys” even though I don't want to get into muse speculation here). As she sinks deeper into her own depression as a result, the weight of the failing relationship starts feeling like a cage— or a noose (“London,” “Guilty”), but coming to terms with the loss of their life together and the future they’d dreamed of was killing her (again, “London,” but also “I Can Do It With A Broken Heart”).

Enter the conman who she reconnects with at the very point where this is coming to a head (knowing that IRL she reconnected with him around the time Midnights was being worked on) , and if you read between the lines, she confides some deeply personal things to him (“Down Bad” and “hostile takes overs”/“encounters closer and closer,” “Smallest Man” and the entire sleeper cell spy imagery which is one of my favourite things and I could write a whole essay about the meaning of it, “loml” and “A con man sells a fool a get-love-quick scheme”). Then after she’s confided these secrets to him, he insinuates himself back into her life (“Guilty,” “Down Bad,” “Smallest Man”) and sells her a dream that HE can give her all these things she hopes for (again, “Down Bad,” “Smallest Man,” “loml,” song “TTPD,” “Broken Heart”).

But the thing is, he only knows these are the things she wants because she’s revealed it to him, and presumably, told him that was what she was losing by staying with her partner. And instead of the normal response of, “that is really sad that your partner is not supporting you and you deserve to be treated better,” to a friend in growing distress, it seems like it was, “well I can give you all those things!!!! Right now!!!! Trust me!!!!” And worked on her until she believed it, and jumped at the chance at a precarious time in her life. And one thing I want to underscore is: Taylor has agency in the situation always, it’s not like she’s been kidnapped and brainwashed. (In fact, she implores on songs like “But Daddy” that SHE is in charge of her own choices, good or bad.) She chose to rekindle the friendship and then relationship, and she chose to eventually leave her long term relationship for another man, and she reiterates on the album that she owns this all. But it’s also: nothing exists in a vacuum, and she makes choices based on emotions and information she has at the time, which is why it gives so much whiplash.

THE ALBUM

When you look at it as, the situation with the conman only happens because of what happened with the partner first and that the appeal of the conman and the fantasy he sells her is a direct reaction to that, it makes the “swirliness” of the music make so much more sense. And for much of it, even many of the “conman” songs on the surface are really “partner” songs underneath.

Fortnight

A suburban gothic allegory about a broken marriage with a distant husband with a wandering eye, which makes the rekindled romance with the neighbor so appealing. She’s miserable caged in her stifling house because she’s been abandoned by her spouse, so the reappearance of this past love reignites the passion that’s dead at home.

TTPD

“So tell me, who else is gonna know me?” “I chose this cyclone with you.” I’m gonna kill myself if you ever leave. Everyone knows we’re crazy. She’s laying it out there that she’s already in a dangerous state of mind, and she’s actively putting herself in more danger by pursuing the conman. “At dinner you take my ring off my middle finger and put it on the one people put wedding rings on, and that’s the closest I’ve come to my heart exploding,” spells this whole thing out so clearly: whether it’s an actual event (likely) or a metaphor for the promise he makes to her, the reason why it makes her heart explode is because it’s the thing she’s been waiting for forever with no movement, and here this person comes in and slips it on her finger in an instant like it’s nothing. (And eventually, as we’ll come to know, it is absolutely nothing to him.) You mean it could have been this easy this whole time?! (Well, no. Not until a certain other suitor makes his appearance later.) It feels like she’s finally getting everything she wanted in the blink of an eye! How lucky! How convenient! What was that about the get-love-quick scheme you say? (Unsaid: the reason why this feels so urgent is because there’s a sense that time is running out in so many aspects of her life and not just the obvious. Which reappears later on.)

Down Bad

“Did you really beam me up in a cloud of sparkling dust just to do experiments on?” sets the scene for this euphoric experience in the moment that starts to feel violating once the dust settles (which is then followed up in “Smallest Man” and the spy mission on her). The bridge spells out how he weaselled his way into her life, preyed upon (intentionally or not) her emotional state, sold her a dream and then vanished, without the benefit of hindsight yet we see later in the album.

The alien abduction metaphor is pretty brilliant, because it shows both how she was desperate to escape the place she found herself in, and how much it screwed her brain to then be left stranded when the affair was over. “[I loved your] hostile takeovers, encounters closer and closer,” is so evocative because it details how the situation came to be: his overtures under the guise of friendship blurred lines until he made her an offer that she eventually couldn’t refuse (hostile takeovers) as he infiltrated her life more and more intimately. The sad thing is that the song has parallels to how her relationship with the partner started too in earlier albums, in that they ran away to live in their own bubble (or planet) only for him to metaphorically abandon her as the years went on. (Oven, meet microwave.)

My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys

Being continually emotionally broken down by a person who knows he’s hurting you but still acts the way he does. (The original voice memo version makes this even clearer and it’s rather heartbreaking.) “He saw forever so he smashed it up,” speaks to the loss of a future the person became scared of, and the original lyrics (“he saw forever so he blew it up”) somehow cut even deeper to me because it feels so much more intentional.

Also in the original version, “he was my best friend and that was the worst part,” also speaks not only to the loss of an entire partnership in the wake of this hurt, but also to the feelings of betrayal that the person you trust so deeply has the ability to hurt you in this way too, and how it’s a one-two punch of not only losing the relationship but also your closest confidant. (It’s like the sequel to “Renegade” and the missiles firing to me.) Again, there are shades of both/many situations in the song, pointing to an unfortunate pattern in some ways. The situation in “My Boy” is part of why she was so low, and why the “get love quick scheme” was so appealing later on. And it dovetails nicely into…

So Long, London

The most explicitly “partner” song that puts a coda on “You’re Losing Me,” and is Track 5 because it’s the emotional underpinning of how she got to where she was, and drives the events of the rest of the album. It spells everything out: He withdrew, she tried to fix it for both of them, eventually even that stopped working, he was oblivious to or minimized how badly she was suffering and his (in)actions couldn’t reassure her, he wouldn’t move forward on their future plans and stewed in his own struggles, she was spiralling out of control trying to hang on and ultimately felt like she was going to die if she didn’t leave.

But Daddy I Love Him

Like a direct reaction to “So Long, London” in that she breaks free from the death of one relationship and throws herself with reckless abandon to the next, fuck the haters. How dare you judge me, when the relationship you think I should have stayed in was killing me? (Dutiful daughter all the plans were laid. All you want is gray for me.) Fuck all of you, I’m going to choose whoever I want! (So what if I have a baby with HIM, huh?! I tried doing it the proper way and look where that got me so now we're back to square one) It’s again her imagining how wonderful and freeing this “wild boy” is going to be for her, and how wrong she’ll prove everyone. THIS TIME she definitely got it right. So what if she has to run away! So what if she scandalizes the whole town! They don’t know what she really wants or needs anyway! She’s the only one of her (hee-hee-hee) and she’s the only who gets to decides how this goes. (Because: she longs for control in a situation she’ll eventually realize she has little of it in, which we’ll find out is a recurring theme in her life.)

Fresh Out The Slammer

Also spells out what happened with the partner in the first verse and the pre-choruses, which is what makes the conman so appealing as the imagined jailbreak. The bitter loneliness vs. the sultry passion she builds up in her head as she awaits her release from prison is key to understanding the two sides of the story in the album. There’s this whole outlaw imagery (which is also carried through in “I Can Fix Him”), but it’s contrasted in the end with her and her reunited lover sitting on park swings like children with “imaginary rings” — because “Ain't no way I'm gonna screw up now that I know what's at stake.” What’s at stake is lasting love and the promises that come with it (marriage/family) that are precious and time-sensitive. The imaginary rings are both a nod to the youthful dreams of her and her new/old lover, but also has a double meaning to me because those promises aren’t built on anything together; they're made up, intangible. (They’re no more concrete than the plans that went up in smoke with the partner.) Like with most of the conman situation, it’s all a fantasy in her head that has yet to happen, and as we find out later in the album, reality ends up leaving much to be desired.

Florida!!!

Broadly speaking, it’s running away from your problems and wanting to disappear from your life. (But again: the life she’s disappearing from is the cheating husband she may or may not be feeding to the swamp-- another miserable marriage.) What kind of flies under the radar though is the “I don’t want to exist,” line, which points to her dire state of mind that led her to fleeing to that metaphorical timeshare down in Destin. In many ways about cheating death.

Guilty As Sin

Yes it’s the “masturbation song,” but again the nuance is that she’s left to pleasure herself because her partner has abandoned her emotionally and even physically, i.e. “my boredom’s bone deep.” To be blunt: they aren’t even intimate anymore, so she starts fantasizing about the guy she used to have chemistry with who’s reentered her life and is making moves on her. And realizing that she’s now finding release in another man (albeit imaginary) breaks her even as it reinvigorates her because she finally understands that the relationship she’s in is effectively dead. (“Am I allowed to cry?”)

Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me

This isn’t about relationships, but about society and its reaction to them in a general sense. But again, she’s left to stew in all this anger and hurt as she’s been abandoned at home, then abandoned by public opinion, and the public attack on her is part of the origin as well as the end of that story. The trauma inflicted upon her detailed in the song is the reason why she felt trapped in the first place, which led to the decisions she’s made and habits she’s leaned on ever since.

I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)

This is one of the few songs that is the most completely conman-coded, and shows when the delusion finally breaks at the end of the song. She spends the whole song being like, “no really, I alone can make him better! You’ll see! I know he’s gross, but he’s mine! It’ll be fine I swear! You don’t know anything! Uuuuuum hmm wait actually what the fuck—“

Loml

Oof. THE song. Again the surface reading is about the “conman” who comes in and sells her the lie, but the pain is because all the dreams she writes about are HER dreams and implied that they were the dreams she built with her partner that the conman sold back to her. I could do a deeper dive on this but most of the song is applicable to both relationships, which not only shows the “swirliness” of her writing, but also how they both ultimately did the same thing to her in different shades.

The bridge and the last chorus are kind of fundamental to understanding it all, and her ending it with “you’re the loss of my life” is about, among other things, how falling for this trap blew up the life she built and dreamed of for good. (I could talk about this one forever.) “You shit-talked me under the table, talking rings and talking cradles” to “Our field of dreams engulfed in fire” is a hell of a line and progression, and again, indicative of what the real driving force behind the whole album is. The shit-talking is because he took her dreams (of marriage and children) and hyped it back up to her tenfold whether in a moment of his own delusion or for more nefarious reasons — much like how the man prior kept promising these things but never followed through, which left her vulnerable to someone who appeared to offer them enthusiastically. The field of dreams isn’t just the one with the conman, it’s the one with the longterm relationship she’d built the dream with in the first place, because the conman’s actions are part of the reason the LTR went up in smoke. (Not the reason for the rift, but the consequence of the final break.) And THAT is why it’s the loss of her life, so completely.

When she says “I wish I could un-recall how we almost had it all,” IMO it’s not just the fake future that the conman lures her into, but also (and perhaps mainly) the once-real one she had with her partner and the loss of which that made her susceptible to falling for the con in the first place. There’s honestly so much between the lines in this song that covers every theme and speaks to the grief of seeing the life she imagined slip away, slowly by the first man then annihilated by the second.

I Can Do It With a Broken Heart

The juxtaposition of “He said he’d love me all his life, but that life was too short” and “He said he’d love me for all time, but that time was quite short” sums it up to me (and parallels “loml”), because they are two different situations, but they cut her just the same. In the first, “that life” IMO was the life they’d built with the dreams that went along with it and it was too short because he never followed through, and in the second, the “time” was quite short because it was the frenzy of the whirlwind romance that fizzled as quickly as it began. The life that was too short led to the time that was quite short.

The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived

This is definitely THE conman song. The rage, the shame, the violation, it’s all in there. But the key to it is the bridge and the espionage imagery woven through it. A honeypot scheme is when spies target a mark and seduce them to gain their trust and their privileged information for their homeland. So her likening him to a sleeper cell spy who set her up just to mine her deepest secrets and use them against her is a heavy, loaded statement. And implied: that valuable information she unknowingly held were her longings of marriage and family (the aforementioned shit-talking about rings and cradles she never got to have), and more importantly, those dreams preceded him reentering her life and then beginning his mission on her.

The insinuation then is: she confesses these are her deepest wishes which are now seemingly unattainable in her current situation (e.g. with her partner) -> he convinces her HE will give them to her and make the dreams she pines for come true -> she falls for him and blows up her life to make it happen -> he gets what he wants (thrill of the chase/sex/the idea of her/whatever his intent was) -> he abandons her when he gets what he wants, or rather it isn’t what he wants or can handle -> she’s left a) all alone b) with dreams unfulfilled c) with no answers d) feeling used at having her most sacred wishes used against her.

Again, the song is unquestionably about the way the conman absolutely destroyed her, but he was able to do that because there was this thing she wanted more than anything, that was dying in her previous relationship, that he was able to prey upon to seduce her, then discarded her and her dreams as soon as it was inconvenient for him while absolutely hollowing her inside out. (And again: the devastating thing is that this also applies to other relationships she’s written about, in different ways.)

The Alchemy

Not about either the partner or the conman directly, but it (loosely) touches on her finding herself after the whole oven-to-microwave experience and opening herself up to life and love again. #GoodForHer

Clara Bow

This isn’t about the romantic relationships on the surface, but it is about how damaging the entertainment industry and public life are on women, and how women are only valued for their beauty as commodities until they can be discarded and destroyed in the process. Which I think plays into the circumstances that led her to make the decisions that she did years ago, and why she makes the ones she does now. (But also, being valued for physical traits and appeal for the male gaze brings us to…)

The Manuscript

The “original sin” that kicks off all of this. Again, at first light this isn’t about the partner or the conman, but the person it is about is the reason why she has made all the decisions she has ever since in relationships (and that’s Mr. Plaid Shirt Days from “All Too Well”). The realization that her first serious adult relationship is what cemented these patterns, and this view of herself and her worthiness in relationships, is profoundly sad. An older man who valued her for being so mature for her age and implying that the mature activities ahem associated with that were the performance benchmarks in her ability to carry a relationship, only to leave her, was earth shattering. She placed her faith in this person, but then the way he treated her changed her view of love and of herself.

She took his innuendo about “pushing strollers” as a sign of potential commitment, whereas he ultimately meant it as foreplay, and she was too young and naive to know the difference. So not only did she learn from that that this man (and men) didn’t view commitment and family the way she did and that it was something to be toyed with, but she also learned that her value to them among other things was sex. Imagine being an idealistic 20 year old and your boyfriend ten years your senior tells you, “if the sex is anywhere near as good as our dates have been, we’re going to be making babies before you know it,” (e.g. this is relationship is serious) and then he dumps you: does that imply that the sex was not in fact that good? (E.g. that you’re not worthy after all?)

No, obviously from this side of life, it’s because he was a commitment-phobic playboy, even if he did love her, but she couldn’t have known that at 20 and instead internalized that shame. But, it did send her on a path of how she approached sex and love and relationships for over a decade afterwards. And her coming to the realization that that first act of (perhaps unintentional) manipulation is what informed her actions thereafter helped her break the pattern. Her worth to men is not just sex, she has value and her hopes and dreams have value, she doesn’t have to change into a different person to please anyone, because if that is what they want, they won’t ever want her anyway.

It’s been described here on Tumblr by people more eloquent and astute than I as a song that encapsulates the album as this: one did it slow (partner), one did it fast (conman), and one did it first (first love)— and that is haunting. After years of men minimizing her dreams and desires, if not outright using them against her, she’s finally at the point where she can let it all go and move on for good. (There’s a whole other tangent about consent and shame and manipulation, but that’s an entirely different kind of discussion. But it is so devastatingly contrasted with “you said if we had been closer in age maybe it would have been fine, and that made me want to die.”)

THE SUMMATION

This is just my interpretation of it, but in going through the standard album, it feels pretty clear how cohesive the album is about a story of love and loss and grief, then reckoning with what caused it all in the first place that set a person on this path. It’s a formative experience at a young age that was traumatic and led to certain coping mechanisms and a shaping of one’s self-perception, as well as the reaction to external pressures that try to dictate behaviours and influence how one feels one deserves out of love which makes it harder to know when one absolutely deserves more and better. And leaves one struggling to cope with loss when there isn’t anything else to hold onto. Then in light of one’s life blowing up, learning to find oneself in the aftermath all over again.

On another tangent that is somewhat related to the theme of loss, the way she writes about the two main muses on the standard album also ties into how the situations converged to create absolute carnage on her emotional and mental well-being. With one situation, she’s talking about a concrete life that crumbles under the weight of their struggles; with the other, the entire thing is a fantasy that she builds up in her head, and when it comes to fruition it falls far, far short.

If you look at the “microwave” (conman) relationship, you realize that almost everything she writes about it happens before it actually becomes reality, and it’s mostly her imagining how great it’ll be, but with few exceptions, when she writes about what actually occurred, it doesn’t even come close to living up to her expectations. “Fortnight” is an imagined future where she escapes to Florida and his touch finally starts her stalled engine (ahem). “TTPD” is perhaps the most positive retelling of their time together, but even that implies he was better off stoned and when he sobered up he succumbed to his demons all over again, and more importantly she conveys how she also is in extreme distress, barely concealed by the veneer of being infatuated with him. (E.g. saying to that she’ll kill herself if he ever leaves her — the implication is that she is absolutely serious about it when she “felt seen.”) And that the warning bells are going off in her head, but she feels like this person is the only one she can be with (because they’re equally fucked up and the chaos he brings into her life makes her feel alive when she felt so close to death).

“Down Bad” is the most explicit about being in love, but she’s also left completely confused and disoriented by him disappearing, wondering if any of it was real and the seeds of violation creep into her consciousness (“did you really beam me up in a cloud of sparkling dust just to do experiments on?” “Waking up in blood.”). “But Daddy” is her imagining she can tell everyone to fuck off for telling her what to do with her life. “Fresh Out The Slammer” is her fantasizing about this man while feeling trapped in her relationship — but never in the song is she actually reunited with him; she’s using him as the projection of all the things she’ll make right after being wronged by her partner. “Guilty As Sin?” Is very obviously about her fantasizing about sleeping with him, but again it’s such a minefield for her because it hasn’t happened yet; they’ve only just reconnected. “I Can Fix Him” is the only song other than “TTPD” that shows them actually together, and it’s the one where she keeps saying, essentially, “I know he’s gross but I can rehabilitate him into an upstanding person, trust me,” until the mic drop at the end of the song where it finally hits her that no, she can’t, because this is who he is, not the person she’s built him up to be.

“Loml” is when it all comes crashing down, and the song emphasizes everything he did and told her, e.g. that she’s the love of his life, but she doesn’t return the sentiment in the song about their time together. Because now that it’s past tense, she knows it wasn’t actually love. (And says as much in the album epilogue poem.) “Broken Heart” is her reeling in the aftermath, but again, it’s “he said,” not “I loved.” And then there’s “The Smallest Man,” where she eviscerates him: he also pursued an idea of her but didn’t care much for the real her in front of him (who else is gonna know me?), he love bombed her only to hurt her (crushing her dreams), he was constantly stoned (and not just in the funny munchies kind of way), and he wasn’t even a good lover (despite the fantasy she’d created before). That last point is especially striking because she spent albums singing about the importance of and pleasure in (sexual) intimacy in the relationship with her partner (sometimes to both their own detriment) and how it was at times the only way they could connect, but in this case, the idea she hyped up and acted on in her head about this lover never panned out in practice. She spells it out in the epilogue: it wasn’t a love affair, it was a mutual manic phase.

In contrast, there’s a lot more tangible action in the “oven” (partner) parts of the album, showing how hard she tried to make the relationship work in real life instead of just in her head. All of “So Long, London” is her detailing how she tried to break through to him and support him, even when he rejected it and pushed her away, thinking she could carry them both until they ultimately sank, but she did it because she “loved this place for so long.” (The place? Not just the city, but the home and perhaps most importantly, him.) In “Slammer” she stayed with him even as things disintegrated for “one hour of sunshine.” (E.g. holding onto the rarer good times even as they were fewer and further between, hoping things would eventually turn around.) And like in “London,” she held on despite people in her life pleading with her that it was hurting her. (Which is also echoed in “Slammer.”) In “Guilty” her boredom is “bone deep” because the passion that once drove their relationship (and papered over their problems) has finally gone out too, so there’s nothing left to hold onto, leading to her fantasizing about the new suitor, which makes her realize her relationship has passed the point of no return. “Loml” is about the conman on the surface, but the undercurrent of all the things she says about him is that he was co-opting the dreams that she was clinging onto for dear life in the previous relationship, which is why the con is so painful; the field of dreams he sets ablaze isn’t just the fake painting he sold to her, but the original artifact (her life with her partner) too.

All the physical and emotional labour she puts into the relationship with her partner ends up reflected in the fantasizing she does in the one with the conman, which is why it is so confusing in the moment and so lethal when he leaves her without any answers. She wants to get married and start a family with her partner which keeps getting stalled; the conman mock-proposes which makes her think he’s immediately serious (“TTPD,” “loml”). She feels caged by having to hide with her partner and shrink herself; the conman promises he’ll stand by her side publicly and let her shine (“Smallest Man”). She sinks into a deep depression in her loneliness as the relationship with her partner careens off a cliff; the conman convinces her they’re meant for each other in a them-against-the-world way (“Down Bad”). The intimacy (in all senses of the word) in her relationship with her partner fizzles; the conman stokes the fire by sending her secret messages and reigniting passion (“Guilty”). She spent years trying to help her partner to no avail; the conman makes her think she has the power to reform him (“loml”). She feels misunderstood by her partner; the conman acts like he’s the (only) one who truly gets her (“TTPD,” “loml”).

In short: there’s nothing that the conman does or says that isn’t a direct response to what her partner did first, and it’s even worse because the conman knew how much her partner’s actions hurt her and he used that privileged information to paint a picture of what he could give her, but in doing so in some ways aimed at her heart with even deadlier accuracy. (I’ve likened it to him borrowing someone else’s life for his own joyride, until he crashes the rental car and flees the scene.) It’s why in the aftermath, the difference in emotions are so different: she feels nothing but rage and violation towards the conman for getting in her head and using her, whereas her feelings towards her partner are more complicated. There’s anger (at her lost youth and being taken for granted), but there’s also sorrow (at their lost life and future), disappointment (that he never could step up the way he’d promised or she’d needed), even compassion (towards his struggles) and a tiny measure of appreciation (for the good times they did share).

When you look at the bigger picture, the story the album paints is just so painfully normal. You have two people (Taylor and her partner) who once loved each other deeply, and despite warning signs early on telling them they have fundamentally different needs and ways of living their lives they fight like hell to make it work (the epilogue) until those warning signs become grenades that destroy their home (“My Boy,” “London,” “Slammer,” arguably “loml”). Having already been through at least one rough patch/break/breakup that she felt almost destroyed her (harkening back to Midnights on “You’re Losing Me,” “The Great War” and “Hits Different”), the final and fatal downward spiral of the relationship (“YLM,” “London”) and the grief over losing that future sends her into a tailspin, just at the time where a flame from the past (the conman) reenters her life and tells her all the things she’s been longing to hear and feel (“TTPD,” “Down Bad,” “Guilty,” “loml”) and, crucially, missing from the relationship that was once her entire life.

So in her panic, she falls prey to the (empty) promises of the past lover (“loml,” “Smallest Man”) and decides he’s actually what will save her from the free fall, because the alternative (that she will end up in a situation she doesn’t think she can survive) is too painful to bear. When she finally acts on these circumstances (leaves her partner/runs to the conman), she snaps, acting on pure emotion and adrenaline (“But Daddy”), but before she knows it, the new lover abandons her, and she’s left to reckon with the fallout of the episode and process everything that has happened (“Down Bad,” “loml”) — with the conman, with her partner, with the choices made in her adult life personally and professionally which leads her back to the moment she feels set her down that road at the start.

The TL;DR of this unintentionally long essay is that the reason the conman affair was so serious was precisely because it was meant to fulfill the promise of what was her life with her partner. To me, a large part of the story is that she projected that life onto the conman (or he projected her life back to her for his own purposes) because she wasn’t ready to deal with that massive grief and the life raft he offered felt like the only alternative to an even darker end. Whether the conman actually believed what he told her, or he went along with it or encouraged it because it served his purpose, we’ll never know, just like we’ll never know the finer details of what went on (nor should we). But no matter what, the album is just an extreme deep dive into all the ways grief can consume us, and whether it’s a long, drawn-out death or a sudden, inexplicable one, it can turn a person’s life into such a trainwreck that they act in ways unfathomable to even them, let alone the people around them. It can also unleash repressed trauma and mental illness that can crater your sense of self. And when those situations are compounded? It makes for a nearly impossible type of breakdown to unpack. (Which is why you might need a 31 song album to process it.)

[tempfrangit]

saw @pricetagged 's post (to be entirely transparent) and immediately overcome with the idea of hunter!141 x reader who like to do a little hunt to find a partner, and if you happen to be the partner of the person their ex left them for? all the better.

they get close to you, naturally. you bumped into each other in public and kind of just click - they're like an old friend you just met! when they're not busy with work, they're chatting about the book you just read, or the show you just watched, or maybe your work drama, because you don't like to gossip but it's like some people never learn! they even get along with your favorite friends and family.

when you start to realize you have feelings for them, your partner just happens to seem more distant. it's only right to tell you, your partner is kind of a serial cheater, right? you're friends. and when your fears are so neatly confirmed (he claims he has no idea who those messages are from, but you're not blind.)

they're there for you. it'll all be okay. maybe a nice cuppa and your comfort movie? you're the sweetest prize they've ever gotten.