#i think the key is once you get that babushkai actually = hollywood starlet then the pieces start to make sense but its still not clear

[sanstropfremir]

did you like kai's rover? i personally like this song out of all his solo work but visuals vise, his first ep/mmmh is the best for me.

i did! i have mixed but opposite feelings about it than i did with peaches (eventually i will finish that ask lmao), where i didn't like the song but the design was gorgeous. with rover i love the song but i think the aesthetics lack a clarity that makes the theme discernable, unlike his other two cbs. i spent a bit of time trying to parse what i thought the concept of the cb is supposed to be and what i've come up with is that it's meant to be a comment on the changing of character and persona through the lens of old hollywood, acting, and conmen. there's the obvious catch me if you can references, but the use of the ballerinas + theatre adjacent spaces (backstage hallways, green/dressing rooms, grand lobbies) are all places where you are in the process of changing personas + altering your behaviour in order to achieve specific goals, at the core basis of which are almost always fooling other parties. kai has also talked about how the 'rover' persona is one that is opposite to his own actual personality (he's famously very introverted), so that dovetails into the types of promotion that he's doing (like a MILLION tiktoks with every single group on the face of the planet, even the ones that aren't promoting atm), where he's being very outgoing/charming/schmoozy. personally i think it's not totally successfully executed in the design, where there's a bit too many contemporary-isms; they could have streamlined some of the stylization a bit more so that the hollywood and acting themes were more clear, and i think they REALLY dropped the ball on the music show styling. this was the PERFECT opportunity to have him do every stage in a different 'persona' with a totally different costume/all the different professions from cmiyc, and find ways to tie those back into the aesthetic glam of the rest of the design. but instead they've just been kinda meh? like he looks good, but what does a tshirt and jeans say about the theme??