#god Daz has so many depressing shit in his playlist

[infinitethree]

Hooo boy. Daz has a LOT of songs. His full playlist is currently 772 songs. Obviously, I trimmed that down considerably when I ported it! The Youtube version is at 274.

I might be insane and detail-obsessed, but not to THAT extent.

Explanations and major songs behind the cut!

Reasons for yeeting songs include but are not limited to:

Not in English

Only kinda fits

Other version already on the list

Can't fuckin' find it again

Kinda weird/romantic overtones (it's not MY fault all the 'fuck you' songs are about romantic relationships that went sour!! The angry energy works perfectly otherwise and AHHH)

Okay, and now the actual songs. There are a few artists that pop up a fair bit. Adam Jensen is by far the biggest one; even on this version of the playlist, he has TWENTY ONE songs. He is the primary Daz artist. References to drugs and sex are, in this context, metaphors for his unhealthy habits & coping mechanisms.

The Crane Wives, UPSAHL, and Seether are some of the others.

Trouble- Adam Jensen

It was hard to narrow down which one of Adam Jensen's songs is the MOST fitting. I think this one wins because pretty much every line suits him perfectly. Like-- it's pitch-perfect. "Is it living or dying that makes me afraid?/Or is it that I know my soul can't be saved?"; "There's trouble in my daydreams/It's all I've ever known/The day that I was born, trouble won't leave me alone/It's flowing in my bloodstream/And running through my veins/And when I lose my mind, it's the trouble that remains" Honestly, just pick any line. It works perfectly for Daz no matter which one it is.

Enchante- Dirt Poor Robins

First of all; I found this song via this Mandela Catalogue animatic. Spoilers up through Volume 4, but if that/themes of the series in general don't bother you then you GOTTA watch it. I remain obsessed with this MONTHS later. (Catch me in the comments frothing at the mouth over it, lmao) Back to Daz, tho. Surprise! It's an extended metaphor for Blood & Gold! "For grounded men were jealous of/the angel's flight, the angel's flight" is New L'manburg's snubs against Dream & Tommy, and then of course their attempt to take the server from them by force; "Alas, the virtues through their glasses/drifting away as only madness/drowning in the sin/of our animal skins"; Dream's ideals and morals gradually eroded and then vanished. By the end, he was halfway out of his mind of from loud his admin instincts were. Those same instincts had been what damned him to the same miserable fate that he had been so desperate to avoid. and ofc the chorus; "Enchanté, enchanté, enchanté, enchanté/Greet your beast and let 'em streak/Into the fray/It's okay, it's okay, it's okay/If we can't raise the dead/We're gonna raise, we're gonna raise/We're gonna raise hell instead" Especially the end of the chorus. If we can't raise the dead, we're gonna raise hell instead. At first, it's Dream and Tommy about Eret and Connor. Then it's Dream and Tommy about the death of their (Dream's) ideal server. Then it's Tommy and Innit about Tubbo-- and that refrain has become mocking. You won't be able to bring us back, they're saying. Just like we can't bring Tubbo back. And through our death, we will avenge him.

Flu Game- Fall Out Boy

Aaay a one from both Dream and Daz! Dream is the one with the first part of the chorus-- "Last night I dreamt I still knew you/You/I carved out a place in this world for two/But it's empty without you" He tried to build a paradise for the two of them. He failed. In some ways, he still doesn't understand what went wrong. (He can't. Not when he's still clinging to the past-- when he's still being warped by something be could never have realized was a problem.) Daz is the second part-- "I've got all this love I've got to keep to myself/All this effort to make it look effortless/All this love I've got to keep to myself/All this effort to make it look effortless" See, one of the secrets about Daz is that he's NOT a sociopath. He DOES care. He just believes that he's cursed and broken; anyone who gets too close to him is damned to suffer. If he shows too much open affection, then his loved ones will be targeted and used against him. To love him is to suffer, but to be loved by him is a death sentence. So, even when he's with the Council, he's just donning a different mask. He's not capable of love, and maybe he never was. Thus, he can't love his friends. Because if he can't love them, then his love can't become a noose around their throat. It can't become a knife in their heart. It can't become something precious wielded as a weapon. (And, maybe, if he's lucky, they'll believe it enough that they wouldn't let him kill them.)

Daffodil- Florence + The Machine

Part of this one is the vibes. The slightly dark/ominous tone, and phrasing of someone who has reached the end of their patience, suits him so well. But, also...it's about Dream again. "I couldn't help it, yes, I let it get in/The helpless optimism of spring/Worn out and tired and my heart never tired/And the world bent double from weeping/And yet, the birds begin to sing" (The world very literally wept over him. Dream's distress summons rain, after all, and every mob in the server inherently understands what their admins want. They want to help. Some of those efforts work better than others.) "English sun, she has come/To kiss my face and tell me I'm that chosen one" Like...Dream pretty much directly called him the chosen one. Daz was special because he's capable of being an admin. Dream, to his knowledge, had never met another person like him. Daz could be like a god, Dream tells him early on. He could hold so much power in the palm of his hand-- and more than that, to be viewed as an equal to Dream himself. The two of them, side by side, co-admins. The gilded cage he was trapped in was to be transformed into a paradise.

Dramaturgy- Jubyphonic (cover)

It's literally about lying/pretending to be someone you're not. That's Daz's whole MO. The most painful part is easily; "The world that I locked out is nowhere to find/The people who mocked me are gone from my sight/Emotions and feelings are useless to keep/The tears that had fallen were not mine to weep" A part of him won't LET him fully grieve for Tubbo; he doesn't deserve that luxury. He's the reason Tubbo is dead, after all.

My Ordinary Life- The Living Tombstone

and in a VERY different change of pace; a song about success and also arrogance and suffering so maybe not THAT big of a change lmao "Can you heal me? Have I gained too much?/When you become untouchable you're unable to touch/Is there a real me? Pop the champagne/It hurts me just to think and I don't do pain" Is there a real Daz, under the gold leaf? Maybe he doesn't want there to be. It would be so much easier if he COULD let himself stop thinking.

How To Be Me- Ren

God, all of Daz's songs are so fucking depressing. The meaning of this one is pretty obvious; between him hiding parts of himself from Dream, his public life in Sanctuary, and all his secrets...he's lost who he really is, behind all those masks. I think the opening and closing verses are especially fitting. "I don′t feel safe in this bed/There are voices in my head/I've been talking to the dead/And the fear baptized me"; "When he gave up the fight/A quick decision late in the night/That stayed with me for all of my life/I miss you so" Innit and Tubbo references! :)

Night Is Faint- Trickle (cover)

It's Dream again. The chorus especially, with "wishing on a star for saving/under the sky, a boy who's heart is aching". "A secret that I've had for centuries…/There's a darkness that I hide when smiling/On my life, I swear, I didn't want to meet this side of me/… Didn't want this And I wish my bleeding, beating heart from back before was warm/enough to/Melt away the frozen veins that pulse with pain and eating me away" He wants to go back to when he believed he'd been granted a miracle. He wants to go back to when he was offered the world, and he believed he could have it without a steep cost.

People I Don't Like- UPSAHL

A core song, and yes I DID find it from that one c!Schlatt animatic lmao. One of my first "ohhh my god I need this song, actually" moments! This one is pretty simple. He's pretty jaded/critical of others, and he's just pretending to be a good person-- "Everybody in this party's fucking fake/I really wish that I could say it to your face/But I won't"

Chimera- Will Stetson (cover)

It's about a performance, pretending to be something you're not. Again...that's just what Daz does, 24/7. And he's pretending not to still be carrying a lot of pain and suffering from his past. He's notoriously tight lipped about a lot of what happened to him; the Council knows the broad strokes, yes, but a lot of the particulars are at best an educated guess. Daz is desperate to not dwell on what happened. If he starts unraveling that thread, he might not be able to let things slip that he can't let slip. Like Innit. None of the Council would understand that he made the only choice he could. By the end of Fool's Gold, there are only two options; side fully with Innit (and thus accept that Lee would be directly killed), or go all-in on Lee (and thus keep Innit trapped). There's no wiggle room. There still isn't-- he made his choice, and he knows that Innit will never forgive him for it. That's why he's currently so scared.

Core/important songs:

As a reminder, core songs are songs that are really important to the foundation for a character. Sometimes they don't fit as well now, but they still REALLY had an impact on their development. Innit and Mystery are both new enough that there hasn't been a ton of shift from their initial conception to now.

Not so for Daz! He's gotten a lot of development over the year and a half or so he's been around. <3

A bunch of these won't have suuuper deep detail, because some are more about the VIBES and what they inspired than actual lyric analysis.

wanting, getting wanting- DEMONDICE

This one, in my mind, is either Daz and Innit somehow talking to past Tommy...or various Daz branches doing the same. "What is a man to a king/And a king to a god?/What is a god to a devil putting up a facade?" I'm not kidding when I say this line is SO fitting. There's two main ways of reading it; there's man= player, king= Eret/Wilbur, god= Dream, devil= Tommy then there's man= player, king=mod, god= admin, and devil= mainline/"canon" Daz. Which, yes-- in...pretty much every other timeline, he becomes an admin. There's really only one exception. Maybe. I haven't decided for sure either way.

Additional Memory- JubyPhonic (cover)

This is a song about suicide! :D It's also one of the songs that I really, REALLY heavily associate with Blood & Gold. Once I decided that Tommy would try to kill himself in retaliation for being forced to kill Tubbo, this song pretty naturally slotted into that. It's said to Tubbo, to Dream, to the hopes and plans he had made of a paradise that was never meant to be. I have a very vivid mental image of what an animatic would look like for this one. Or even just an abstract of relevant scenes.

Honey Honey- Larkin Poe

I don't know what to call the vibes of this song. Almost villain-esque, with the bass(?) and what I think of as a snake-like rhythm. Something creeping up, something waiting to strike. Something dangerous. The "American as apple pie" line was part of why Daz was turned into someone so beneficial to the rest of the server. He's wholesome and warm! He wants to help everyone! And he's always there to greet new people, and lend a hand or his ear, and help however he can. Everyone knows Daz. Everyone trusts Daz. Without Daz, the server would grind to a screeching halt. He's secured himself a guarenteed checkmate. If he's ever exposed to the rest of the server, then not only would he be stripped of his power (and possibly ability to remain in the server), but nobody could ever trust anyone again. If Daz, of all people, is actually a mastermind genius-- and able to conceal his true self from Lucid, San, Day, Vio, etc...who knows what anyone else might be hiding?

DICTATOR- Rei Ami

Another animatic song that had a huge impact on Daz's development. It's not in the playlist, because, I mean...like. Listen to the lyrics. Super sus/weird, y'know? But the idea of him having an "I wasn't asking you, I was telling you" mentality went on to be a pretty big part of Blood & Gold. Even now, he might pretend to be nice or offer an option...but a lot of the time? That's a lie. There is Daz's way, or there is a lot of pain in some form He ain't a benevolent ruler; he's an iron-fisted dictator, and by god will you learn to bow your head to him.

Lady Jesus- UPSAHL

UPSAHL again! You'd think, with the order they were added in the full playlist, that it'd be "People I Don't Like" here and "Lady Jesus" in the main 10. Nope! This one fits less, actually, despite being a pretty important song for Daz's meta growth. The idea of a rebirth after suicide & how he's become a quiet powerhouse of influence within the server is a pretty obvious through-line. He killed the person he used to be, in several ways. Now he's come back stronger than ever, with assurances that mean he CAN'T be ousted from power easily.

Aaaand that's it! Now I can move onto a less insane playlist. Alternately, I can move on to Day, who is the only character to beat out Daz's song count! He has 778 songs, a whole SIX more!

God. you can tell they're my two favorites. The next highest is Aver at 720...but mostly because he's got a lot of c!Tommy-esque background and I have SO MANY depressing songs.

Then the rest of the top 5 are Lucid at 569, Aster at 520. After that (and excluding Blood & Gold/AU specific variants) it drops below 500.

I have so many fuckin' songs, y'all.