#not sure if i rbed this before but its still true

[doveofmourning]

i saw u rbed my post and i'm just so intrigued about the thought process behind your lover tracklist/you're losing me being a lover vault track. pls explain.

Yeah absolutely! I was on a break from Taylor when Lover dropped unfortunately after being a day one fan but feeling really burned by LWYMMD, the way it seemed like she was really going to make a hip hop album just to spite a black man (and I never thought Kanye was in the right but it didn't sit right with me for her to go that far) and the way she just refused to address the growing homophobia in her own fanbase, so unfortunately I wasn't there when it came out and a lot of this has been my own research.

I'm pretty sure everyone knows by now that Lover was finished being recorded, mixed and mastered in February of 2019 but London Boy has been proven to have been made in early June of that year. (If I need to explain this too I can make another post for it.)

We also know that the songs All of the Girls You Loved Before and Need/It's A Need were vault tracks. This was essentially confirmed on March 17 of 2023 when she officially released All of the Girls You Loved Before as a vault track.

So here's my thoughts. First of all, You're Losing Me isn't sonically coherent with Midnights. Not with the main album which MANY more qualified people than I have explained (but suffice it to say that the mastering makes the album sound very samey; I LIKE Midnights but this is undeniably true), not with the 3am tracks which have a very Aaron Dessner sound to them. You're Losing Me doesn't fit with the 70's and 80's inspired synth sounds most prominently heard on Lavender Haze, Karma, The Great War and Labrynth. It has incredibly important drums, but unlike the ONLY two drum forwards midnight tracks (Question...? and Anti-Hero) it does not use a drum machine. It also has its bass line mastered in a different way than midnights that feels more natural and less muddied. While I do think Jaxk Antonoff is an amazing producer, he's gotten into a rut and this is NOT the sound of his current production style.

In addition, Taylor uses a sample from Cornelia Street in the bridge. The piano line isn't just similar, I've put them next to each other and they are the EXACT same sound. This is possible but unlikely to be achievable four years after the production of Cornelia Street because while Taylor COULD be more careful than industry standards, many record companies only save the master files, not the DAW workbench, at least long term. This is something that has been changing recently, but I still think it is at least a point in the favor of You're Losing Me being the original Track 11 of Lover.

In addition, You're Losing Me mentions "mending all of her gashes" as well as other references to other knife wounds; it also mentions "We thought a cure would come through in time, now, I fear it won't". This creates a narrative link between Death by a Thousand Cuts and Soon You'll Get Better that just wasn't present in the official release. In addition, DBATC and YLM end and start, respectively, on the same piano note. Similarly, YLM and SYGB end and start, respectively, on the same chords.

Thematically You're Losing Me also mirrors the dramatic shift in the Lover era from bright pastels and pop songs to all black and singing the greatest breakup songs of all time in lounges. It seems like a predictive song that came true.

There are a LOT of people who believe Joe was a fake relationship, and if so a breakup likely happened here, but even assuming Toe was real we now know that they has NUMEROUS breakups over their 6 year relationship. I think one likely happened in the summer of 2019, and Taylor saw it coming, and this was a song about it. It would also explain why Joe was so offended about its release if it wasn't even from this breakup.

Also "I wouldn't marry me either" sure seems a lot more in line with Ms. "I take this magnetic force of a man" "I think he knows he better lock it down" "I'd marry you with paper rings" than Dr. "She would've made such a lovely bride, what a shame she's fucked in the head" "no deal that 1950's shit that want from me" "he wanted a bride I was making my own name". Like obviously she can have conflicting feelings bit it seems way more likely that this was back when she WANTED to marry him.

Moving on though. False God is Taylor's sexiest song and it feels bizarre to abruptly change to YNTCD. Need is also horny but in more of yearning way, and sonically it tranItions from very sultry at the start to very upbeat and airy by the end. This just makes a lot more sense to me. Personally I'd have preferred, given her lack of meaningful queer activism, her to NOT have profited off of a song explicitly about queerness, but this isn't about what I want, it's about what I think was on the Original Track Listing ™️.

Moving on, I think It's Nice To Have A Friend and Daylight are doing two wildly different thing, and AOTGYLB both bridges them nicely and acts as a good end to the story of a young woman in love but afraid she's going to lose it. "Yes, I've been afraid, especially because I'm afraid I can't measure up, but I can see now that I don't have to measure up and your past shaped you into the person why wants me despite my flaws." It allows Daylight to breath as an author's note, and I genuinely think that's where Daylight shines.

Also, just numerically, it feels unlikely that Taylor Swift would look at a 19 song tracklist (18-1 for London Boy+2 for AOTGYLB and Need) and go "yeah no let's cut nothing and also not add one more track to make it are significant or round number." The woman cut Wonderland from the standard 1989 to me the tracklist 13; I don't buy it.

Ultimately because we ojow the tracklist is different in the initial mix vs the actual release we know SOME changes were made. We can't KNOW which changes are 100% correct unless she tells us (and even then she does like to just lie sometimes), but to me this seems like the closest I'm going to get unless new information arises.

Thanks for the ask, and sorry the explanation was so long/took a bit to type up!

[ignitification]

is it that * account? Their takes are terrible😐 i read before that they said that young toya used his trauma as a psychological weapon against natsuo and i was like WHAT and also shit like dku's bullying wasn't a societal issue actually which uh again,What and this lady nagant bashing? It's almost misogynistic. like I get she wasn't referenced before and treated badly by/for the narrative but she absolutely was nuanced and nagant's takes on society weren't perfect but came from a jaded perspective of being used to brutally keep up the system. Which in the same vein, when was hawks referenced in the story before his intro? what has he really provided to the narrative other than being a cog in the system who upholds the system, pushes for the hero ranking system of having a symbol - and this one being a egoistic abuser - and kills for the system and doesn't have any particular remorse for it and believes the perpetrators of the system over its victims?

Hi, anon! To confirm your suspicions, yes. I do find some of their takes problematic and uncomfortable to read but I also used to like some of their stuff and sometimes I did agree with different statement they made. However, this said, the fact that a lot of people have been reducing the character of Lady Nagant to an appearance of nothing, with no personality and just a rebooted female version of Hawks, does not sit right with me. I honestly don’t remember anything about what they said about Touya/Natsuo (I don’t follow, and I just happen to see some posts when they get rbed in the feed or in the tags) nor about Izuku’s bullying so I’d have to take your word for it (I’m sorry, I really do not care enough to go look for any of these takes, I don’t think it’s worth my time). But as for the Lady Nagant thing, yeah I thoroughly agree with you. I think that the entire existence of her character is to give another dimension to the narrative (which other character couldn’t, so the argument of her being shallow really does not stand on its feet) and to have a positive (or negative, for that matter) impact on Izuku’s development as someone who tries to change the tide of things. I have talked in length about how I think Izuku will become the Greatest Hero exactly because of all he has been through and because he did not stop at the surface of the things (however faulty this statement might be, because while I do think Izuku is still far away from the character I’d like him to be, he still is trying to understand, giving a chance to himself to ask whether there is someone more to what his eyes can see, and that’s far more than any of other heroes have ever done). Lady Nagant therefore serves as both a confirmation and another perspective in the story that Izuku is trying to address/correct/understand - which has literally so little to do with Hawks, that I think the comparison is futile. She is a supernova, and she has been shining for a very short time - but brightly enough to actually pull at some strings for Mido. Which is, again, more than every other hero has ever done. No one actually stopped to tell him their story, and the fact that Izuku values heroes so much is only one of the factors why Lady Nagant’s story will have a huge influence on him and will resonate with Izuku. I really like her character, because she is blunt and honest, and to be honest she has (exactly as the other villains) more values than everyone else in the narrative. She has done bad things - and she has been punished for it. She recognised the need that maybe talking to the kid, instead of shooting him dead (like people are trying to assume, putting forward the argument of her career at the HPSC) or trying to weasel or lure him in, would probably be more effective. Also yeah, her view on society might not be perfect and her methods did not work, and she used to kill terrorists-to-be and all that yada yada, but she also wanted desperately out. She was smart enough to know that killing the President of the HPSC meant that her life was over and that anyways that would have not changed anything in terms of cogs of society, but she did something. She did not stand for the status quo anymore, and that’s where the beauty of her character comes in. Like Hawks, she was held in a cage where she could not refuse to be fed and she just went along with it, until she couldn’t and then she entirely decided to throw herself and everything she had worked for hard at the wind, to end up in Tartarus - but free of the Damocle sword that the HPSC and society norms held above her head. This is entirely opposite of how we are introduced to Hawks’ character, Just because he has been longer in the narrative, as you said, it does not hold true that his introduction was not out of nowhere. I was so confused when we hear Tokoyami having his internship with him and it is only then we discover who he is. Is it nowhere better than Lady Nagant, who is instead at least seen once before (chapter 296/297) with the Tartarus escape. I already however talked about all the faults that Hawks has, and the values he upholds (and the abuse he justifies) so I won’t be repeating myself, but that’s the downline of it. He had no active role in the down bringing of the HPSC (for reason I stated here, confuting once again of the posts of this same account, funnily enough), and he is still supportive of Endeavour, notwithstanding his own past and the detailed account of Dabi’s story (on here I also wrote so much lately, just scroll to see), which is still a memento that Hawks is part of the system, and he does not see himself capable of living without that same system (the system being society - and the comfort that the familiarity of Endeavour brings him). It is really pointless to compare the two character, who stand diametrically opposite on one another in the narrative. I also dislike the choice of Horikoshi that lets Hawks have his moments of saving Lady N’s fall, because it once again, shows how Hawks’ double standard heavily influence his own standard of life (which is worth for his identity of hero and spy, his relationship with Endeavour and Dabi, and him killing Twice and looking down on the League, while still talking affectionately about Lady N), and that is exactly why Hawks’ character fails to acknowledge his fault as his own. Since he is part of the system, his actions are part of the system too, no matter whether wrong or right. If the show (system) must go on, then he will make sure it will.