I did something silly….. I made QL guess who!
About a year and a half ago I had the idea for a custom ql guess who game but I had no one to play it with so I just put it to the side until I (hopefully) would. Fortunately that day came this weekend when @pondphuwin and I got to play a few rounds (they beat me 4:5 actually lmao)!
Some of the questions we asked were stuff like “is it from gmmtv,” “does your show have a branded pair,” “is there a love triangle,” “is there a debate over whether your show is a bl or not,” and more personal ones like “am I crazy over one of the main actors,” “do we have beef with the way this bl went,” “did we watch this live together,” and so on. Rlly fun stuff!
Since this is a custom guess who I had to make all the pieces manually. At first it seems fine and easy bc there’s already official posters right? But the difficulty is that almost every poster is a different size. So I figured out how to get the proper guess who face piece measurements and manually resized each poster to fit, with a slight gradient in the background where the remaining space isn’t covered by the poster. You can see those gradient bars on the top and bottom in the closeup of the last twilight piece, for example. Also it’s just really funny to hold mini posters of qls lmao (using my hand as a reference)
There’s 190 ql poster pieces in total (based on approx. how many I’d seen as of the time of printing) (yes I will add more as time goes on) and they were all put on one big google doc that covered about 10 pages and looked like this!
After I had them all set I printed them out on cardstock so they were thicker & more sturdy and then I did a lot of cutting. And since both players need the same posters I had to cut it all twice
Are there easier ways to do this? Maybe. I’m not sure. Honestly I just did whatever like this is my own gay little art project lol
Once I had them all cut and held them in my hand I felt quite proud of my work and now that I’ve actually played it I really do
Here’s just like a pic I took when we were playing a round. Since there were so many, after every round we took out the two qls we just selected and replaced them with new ones and we never ran out lmao. It took quite a bit of effort but it was totally worth it hehe
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I know you don't like discussing the muses but i love your takes and perspectives and i had to ask you about this. after listening to ttpd, did you have the impression that she really loved matty more than any of her exes/previous relationships?. And listening to the whole album as a whole would you call it the ''matty album'' or do you think there are more prominent themes in there than their period together?. (hope this doesn't bother you, feel free to delete if you don't feel like answering it)
hey anon! You're right, I don't really like to get into the muses as I don't really think there's anything to add to the conversation at this point, and ultimately I don't think it matters.
That being said, and with the caveat that I am not Taylor and I do not know Taylor so I cannot speak to her thoughts and can only make relatively educated guesses based on being an avid consumer of her work and a student of the human condition (lol), no I do not think Taylor loved Matty more than anyone else. I think there was maybe a brief period in the thick of things where she *thought* she did because she was not thinking clearly and was in full-on denial, but to me the message that is loud and clear in the album (and more or less explicitly stated in the epilogue) is that it was not any kind of real love affair. It was certainly infatuation and lust and the promise of something more, and there may have been some love as well, but he was in no way the love of her life by any measure.
I would call it a "Matty album" insofar as they're about events in which he was present, sure. But I feel it much more as a Taylor album, if that makes sense, even though I know that's a cop out because every album is to a degree. I can't explain it well, but I don't see TTPD as a Matty (or Joe) album in the way that I would maybe say Red is a "Jake" album or 1989 may be a "Harry" album or even Lover being a "Joe" album whatever, because even if they don't figure in all the songs, that kind of heartbreak permeates so much of the material.
The thing about TTPD and the Matty situation is that the Matty situation is really a Joe situation (which in some ways is actually partially a Jake situation). I always say I hate treating Taylor like a character so I hate speaking about her and her work in this way, but you don't get the Matty situation without the Joe situation precipitating it. It's @taylortruther's now-infamous donut vs. hole analogy. The reason Taylor makes the choices she does with Matty is directly tied to what happened with Joe that made her feel she needed to. Which is not to say Taylor isn't responsible for her own actions or doesn't have agency in her own life, but I mean it in that the situation in which she found herself with Joe, and the pain it caused, is what made the alternative so comforting and perhaps even necessary in her mind. It's why it makes it so hard to "paternity test" the album, because the stories are inherently intertwined and you don't get the former without the latter.
The major "theme" of the album to me is the loss of a very specific, very personal dream, and the way in which she lost it, and the way in which grieving that loss drove her to make the choices she did. We're all talking very delicately about it because it's a sensitive topic, but it's late on Friday and few people are going to see this, so I'm going to say it: it's the give you my wild, give you a child of it all. The yearning she expresses both overtly and sub-textually for having a family in the album is palpable in a very iykyk kind of way, and it's the realization that those plans are not going to come to fruition in the way she had once imagined that drives a lot of the pain she experiences, and makes her jump at the chance to find that again with someone else.
I started a draft post about the theme of womanhood and motherhood on TTPD three months ago that I never finished because I ran out of time and ran out of steam, but it was the most striking thing to me on the album, not because I didn't know that she wanted those things because that's been obvious for years (definitely since Lover, and again, peace put it all on the table), but because the vulnerability she expressed about it on the album is incredibly moving, and it's so generous of her to trust listeners with those feelings and experiences.
Again, it's the thirtysomething of it all.
She is in relationship A which she at one point believes is forever, one which she at one point believes is going to lead to marriage and children. She is so committed to that dream that she either ignores or tries to fix serious issues that may otherwise lead others to think the two people in the relationship are incompatible, both because she loves the person deeply and because she feels that this is meant to be the way she achieves that dream. She gives it her everything, and it still dies a slow, painful, onerous death, and she feels like it may take her along with it. The dream of getting married and presumably having a family gets taken off the table: how we don't know and will likely never know because that is private between the parties involved. All that matters in the context of the album is that those plans never come to fruition and never would.
Then you have relationship B, an old flame who knows just enough buttons to push both to trigger and to flatter. A person who she presumably trusts with very sensitive, personal information as her life slowly crumbles, and this person is telling her all the things she wants to hear because he knows about what is happening in relationship A because she's told him. Person in relationship B doesn't get an "in" with her and sell her this dream unless what happens in relationship A precedes it. It's not a grand love affair for the ages, it's not a mutual decision on building their own dream together. It's Person B learning about what is happening with Person A and saying "I can do that!" even if he can't or doesn't. The dream he sells her is a rental car; it's not his own, he's just borrowing it from someone else and selling it back to her.
And the reason she falls for it is because it is what she aches for the most in her personal life, and she is grappling with it disintegrating, so she (unfortunately for her) falls for the easy way out, and in turn sells herself a story about how this must be fated, and this must be meant to be, because this person wants all the same things she does and she didn't even have to bargain for it! Well, yes, because she fed him the dream in the first place. (Like a mark falling for a sleeper cell spy.) It's too good to be true because it isn't true. IMO Person B doesn't come running out of the gate with the marriage/baby/dream life promises unless he knows that is what she most desires. But what's left unsaid out of all of it is that: those dreams were her dreams because they were her dreams with Person A. It was a whole life they had together, and a whole life they had planned for in some fashion, and a whole life that has to be dismantled in the aftermath.
So all this to say, yes, on the surface, Matty is a "main character" on the album, but truly he's a side character to Taylor as the narrator and person experiencing it and Joe as the ghost bit-player-who-haunts-every-scene. (Again, I hate referring to real people as characters, it gives me the absolute ick, but in this case it's the only way to answer the question.) I jokingly call it the Matty album for shorthand or when I want to say something out of pocket, but really, it's a disservice to the album to say that because it's not a muse album as in it's about the romance (like, say, Red often is), it's about a soul-crushing heartbreak that goes beyond it. The romance is the symptom, not the cause.
The loss of youth is tied in with all this: she's not 22 anymore. She isn't even 32 anymore. She had a very specific idea of what her life was going to look like at this point and had planned for that life, and it goes up in smoke. But again, to bring the womanhood into it all: there is, unfortunately, a deadline for these things. You're with someone for over half a decade you think is going to be your life partner and father of your children and and then he's not. You spent half a decade building this relationship for it to crumble, but now you're in your mid-30s and you don't necessarily have another half-decade to build that trust and faith in someone else before being ready to start a family. And maybe you're scared that anyone else who may become your partner will need that much time to build that trust and faith, because that's kind of all you've ever know in relationships. But lo and behold, someone comes into your life you once had feelings for and maybe now do again and is offering you everything you want and thought you'd have by this point in your life right now. It feels like an elixir that as we find out is actually poison.
That youth is not just the chance for motherhood, but it's also the hopes and idealism and belief in the future that often gradually erodes as we age. But for Taylor as well, it's also tied into the trauma of what she went through particularly in 2016, which kicks off a lot of things on the album as well (her retreat, her relationship with Joe, the pivoting in her career, etc.). That event caused a pretty clear before/after in her life (like a few other events, I suspect), and another major theme in the album is her finally grappling with the full weight of that. They're all different branches of the same tree of the story of TTPD and her life.
I could talk about this stuff forever, but I'm going to stop here because it's long enough and I should save stuff for one of the dozens of drafts I have half-baked lol. But this is just something I needed to get off my chest perhaps.
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stan twins the canon cptsd brothers i will always think about all your unaddressed issues that would make perfect plot fuel for your spinoff
and also the whole 'stan getting that poem by bill via a website which contrasts with bill getting one from the axolotl via a website' foreshadowing thing
like idk i would love something like su future but like more optimistic, aka not an accumulated breakdown that has to be mostly resolved off screen at the end :/// but something thats being kinda addressed throughout? (although would love to see one of them turn into a monster thats always fun lol)
stan having severe issues from his dad and those years of being homeless that we keep on getting more info on but never really getting confronted on (the drifter catalogue and tijuana incident...), him being completely alone for like twenty years when running the shack before soos comes along to the point that 1998 is noted as his low point, and him not really learning about bill+what he did to ford until ages after he killed him if he ever did get the full context
while i think amnesia and everyone seeing him as a hero actually helped with stan's 'i'm a worse version of my brother' thing its still a lingering issue too and we now got him being insecure over his own hands
ford being immediately thrown from 'being tortured by bill' to 'being stuck in the multiverse and being chased by bounty hunters constantly', him fully expecting himself to die when destroying bill, and him only now being safe for the first time in 30 years ....relatively safe, he's still in constant danger because of course he is
idk in the end the series wants them to be happy and they deserve it, its why i wasn't too worried about the book being like 'ooh bill is back!! and the book is haunting ford' thing cos i knew they'll be ok
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