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wavesoutbeingtossed · 25 days ago

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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.)

#What if i told you I’m back lol #Time for me to finally just post the thing after it’s been sitting in my drafts for so long so I can rid myself of it lol #Writing letters addressed to the fire #the tortured poets department #Consider this a treat before Eras comes back for its swan song leg idk #Would you believe that as long as this is #i deleted quite a few chunks of it from the original draft i sent to a friend(s) in the interest of ~propriety~#Because they were a little too rambly and um— ~speculative~/personal/etc and we are flying too close to the sun #And i tried to be as tactful and more or less stick to things we can point to in the music and such #So hope people catch my drift lmao but also iykyk i guess #I have so many other themes I want to talk about but I never have any time #I have so much more i want to say and yet #wavesoutbeingtossed: The Anthology #Also if things get weird i will turn off reblogs/delete the post tbd #This is not an invitation to get into muse ranting or debate in my inbox and I ask that you please respect my boundaries :)#Midnights #lover #folklore #evermore

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starry-bi-sky · 2 days ago

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Okay so this is almost a direct copy-paste of my earlier reblog but only the Xin Yuan parts, because its long enough to be its own post and i want to share it! It deserves it's own post <3 typical starry stuff to write a 2k word long reblog, unfortunately.

I say almost because I went through to proof read and ended up adding more stuff.

I've been cooking on this idea for the last two days since I saw the Xin Mo!Shen Yuan post but??? I can't find anything on Xin Mo's backstory or how it came to be -- which means that's free fucking plot right there baby. That's a sandbox and im making LIFE SIZED CASTLES. I'm so excited.

The idea of Shen Yuan transmigrating centuries before the events of PIDW as Xin Mo -- but when he wakes up, he's not the sword. He wakes up in the body of a young boy named Xin Yuan. Now it makes sense for this boy to be a demon, but the drama, the intrigue, the spice of Xin Yuan being a human child.

SY wakes up as a boy below the age of ten, and the System tells him where he is, and SY is excited to meet his favorite protagonist -- only to gradually realize that he's like, a thousand years or so before the events of the novel. The rant he gives the system is legendary.

Bc what's the point of getting dropped into PIDW if he's never going to meet his favorite character??? This is a scam! BUT he settles into his new life, he's like, some orphan street rat or some other tragic airplane-esq backstory.

The system gives Shen Yuan his first mandatory quest: become a righteous cultivator. Which was like, kinda his plan/hopes anyways, except! There's like?? No official cultivator sects anywhere? The Cang Qiong Mountain Sect hasn't even been established yet, and there are pockets of cultivators running around, maybe some groups or schools popping up and then sinking back down, but nothing's really taken root!

If he asks someone how to become a cultivator, there's no straight answer. No "oh you can go to X to do that". He's pissed! How can he become a cultivator if there aren't any schools around to teach him? Deus ex machina, that's how.

Out of sheer luck, SY manages to help save a rogue cultivator, and promptly gets adopted by said rogue cultivator, who gives SY the name 'Xin Yuan'. He is ecstatic. And you know what? It's actually pretty fun!

He's getting to travel the world of PIDW in its early stages, and gets to see the building blocks for the eventual main story. He's discovering all this local flora and fauna that are foreign to his old world and unmentioned in the book, and he's learning cultivation! Granted, its unsafe, newly(ish) discovered cultivation, but it counts!

Wistfully, he thinks about perhaps he'll do something grand and get his name carved into legend. Something that would eventually help the protagonist later down the line in his quest for revenge.

The system remains silent to his thoughts.

But Xin Yuan doesn't take much stock in that daydream anyways. It's nothing more than fantasy to him; wish-fulfillment. He does discover however, that he is positively brimming with spiritual energy. Overwhelmingly so.

It's both a blessing and a curse, as it puts a strain on his meridians if he's not careful, and leaves him prone to qi deviations for the exact same reasons. He already has a heart demon or two from a few traumatic experiences in the past.

(bc hey! angst a day keeps the writer sadism at bay, and all that)

I'll say he's about... eight when he gets picked up by the rogue cultivator, who I'm calling Lin Kai bc he deserves a name. They travel around PIDW up until Xin Yuan is twelve, where he goes through a traumatic experience that results in a heart demon.

It's after that that Lin Kai decides to put a stop to his wandering, and find a place to settle down to raise Xin Yuan in. Coincidentally! They settle down in a nice mountain region that's thriving with spiritual energy. The mountains at the time were called something different, but they will be eventually known as the Cang Qiong Mountain Sect

Coincidentally, the mountain Lin Kai and Xin Yuan end up on is Qing Jing Peak. XY does not realize that the mountain he's on is Qing Jing. The System does not tell him. But he likes it there, more than he was expecting. And as much as he's traveled around, he really does enjoy being in one place.

He has a tendency to go down the mountain and help the village setting up down there, and when he's a teenager he starts venturing out more and more.

Xin Yuan forgets sometimes that he's in a novel, especially after settling down on Qing Jing peak. The system becomes remarkably quiet since there's no quests for him to do and not a ton of opportunities to get B-Points. He cultivates with Lin Kai, helps tend to the garden they're growing, goes down to the village to play with the other kids.

There's one boy he's best friends with, a boy whose not all that good with words, named Liu Zhihao. He's got potential for cultivation though, so Xin Yuan drags him up the mountain when he can so that Liu Zhihao can sit in on lessons with Lin Kai. He drags him all over the forest at the foot of the mountain to go look at bugs and animals.

(One time, when they're fourteen and Liu Zhihao has been learning cultivation for a few years now, Xin Yuan drags him out of bed late one night to go look at the stars. Xin Yuan tells Liu Zhihao about ascension -- something that still feels like a far off dream to many in this time -- that night, while they're sitting on the wet grass.)

("We should ascend together." Xin Yuan tells Liu Zhihao, jade eyes gleaming. Never let it be said that Xin Yuan doesn't love deeply, no matter what kind of love it is. He was always so lonely as Shen Yuan, Liu Zhihao is his best friend. "We'll become immortals, and then we won't ascend until the other is able to.")

(Liu Zhihao stares at him silently, his face unreadable. Then, quietly, he asks; "Promise?")

("Promise.")

When he starts adventuring outwards, further away from the mountain and the village, Liu Zhihao sticks to him like rice. Not that Xin Yuan's complaining, that's his best friend after all, and Liu Zhihao has become a formidable cultivator. He deserves to show off his skills.

He starts making something of a name for himself by the time he's, like, 18 -- although that name is in its baby steps, along with Liu Zhihao. They're slowly growing renown.

Perhaps XY uses his knowledge of PIDW and cultivation in general to help make advancements in the cultivation field. Although the system prevents him from sharing too much, it doesn't mean he can't practice it himself. Perhaps he's one of the first cultivators to develop a golden core. One of the first known immortal cultivators. One of the first to have a spirit sword.

(Although I don't know the logistics of any of this since my knowledge on xanxia/cultivation stuff in general is all still pretty new and google wasn't all that helpful lol.)

Either way, its my excuse to eventually make Xin Yuan come across as ethereal to other people. Peerless beauty SY for the win. Hs wifebeam is too strong, Xin Yuan has a line of suitors following after him and he's completely unaware of it. The rest of history is not.

Demon realm stuff has been stirring up since Xin Yuan was a kid, but at the time it was rare and in the beginning stages. Its been steadily ramping up and the system is sending him on more and more treacherous quests -- some of them mandatory, some optional. SY doesn't often take the optional ones unless it comes with a sufficient B-point reward.

for all intents and purposes though, he's a wandering rogue cultivator with Liu Zhihao, going from place to place to either help a town or village, or to discover more creatures or artifacts (although there aren't that many). Just all around living his life. He participates in a few major quest lines that are sure to get him mentioned in legend, even if it's a background character way.

(Unbeknownst to him, rather than being a side character in these legends, he's named directly. You can't become one of the first immortal cultivators and NOT get name dropped for clout.)

He has a spirit sword named Shā Mó, (杀 shā - to kill/weaken/counteract/reduce) (魔 mó - evil spirit, demon, possession). He routinely goes back to QJP to see Lin Kai, or to rest when traveling has worn down on him and he wants nothing more than to sleep somewhere he knows he'll be safe in. It becomes more frequent as Xin Yuan becomes more famous. Liu Zhihao often comes with him.

it all comes to a head though when the rifts between the demonic realm and the human realm become too great, and the balance between both realms becomes unstable. A demonic emperor's influence, wanting to merge the two realms so he could conquer both to satiate his own greed.

Typical evil king stuff. This comes to a climatic head in a great battle between every cultivator available and the demon emperor's army. Xin Yuan was one of the many who helped lead the charge.

In the end, it was Xin Yuan who ends up defeating the demonic emperor, but the rift that the emperor used to cross between worlds is destabilizing as well. Except instead of trying to close, it's getting bigger and bigger, threatening to swallow the heavens and earth and demonic realm whole.

You know how Yue Qingyuan's soul is bonded to his sword due to a qi deviation? Let's take it a step further >:)

Xin Yuan uses himself and Shā Mó to close the rift. However, it takes all of his spiritual energy to do so, as well as him filtering the demonic qi into his body to redirect it back to the demon realm.

In the end, Xin Yuan and his beloved sword Shā Mó fuse. Xin Yuan's soul becomes trapped in the sword. His physical body is unable to handle the immense amount of power it takes to close the rift, and is destroyed. He is immortalized in legend by his grieving cultivators.

(Liu Zhihao ends up ascending alone. He ascends with the hope that one day he'll see Xin Yuan again, even if it's in the face of someone else. Lin Kai does not ascend, too weighed down by the grief of losing his son.)

Xin Yuan, now Xin Mo, falls into a stasis. He's very confused and disorientated when he regains 'consciousness'. The system has been silent for most of his life, only popping up to give him mandatory quests, hints, points, or to answer any questions.

But once he wakes up, it cheerfully pops up again, congratulating him on completing the origin story of Xin Mo. SY freaks the fuck out. he'd shake the system screen if he could, but he doesn't have arms. or legs. or eyes for that matter.

He can sense his surroundings, but its all like imprints to him. He can sense the energies, but he can't see anything. It's all very disorientating and horrifying after years of being human. Like a sensory deprivation chamber.

The closing of the rift and the cycling demonic qi tainted both Sha Mo and Xin Yuan irreparably, and it did some kind of damage that resulted in SY needing to feed in order to use the spiritual powers. Kinda like how Xuan Su uses YQY's life force for it's spiritual energy, but instead of feeding on his own lifeforce, Xin Mo feeds on others.

The rest is history. Xin Mo is originally tied to the story of Xin Yuan -- believed to be all that remained of the man after he sacrificed himself to keep the realms separate. It's believed that the force of the realms closing permanently infused Sha Mo with demonic energy, turning it into Xin Mo.

But, like many stories do when faced against the tide of time, things get lost; chipped off; changed. Xin Mo is steadily separated from Xin Yuan, especially once it becomes clear how parasitic the sword really is, until they are all but separate entities themselves and the origin of Xin Mo's creation all but forgotten.

The years blur together when Xin Mo is not being wielded, and at first Xin Yuan was agonized by the fact that he stole the lives of all his wielders. He knows it's only a novel, but his decades spent in this life have softened him, and he's grown attached to the world around him.

But time erodes the mind like water erodes stone, and he becomes numb to it, then eventually anticipating of it. He forces himself to remember what he knows of PIDW's plot, and kinda fixates back on his old obsession on Luo Binghe. But while PIDW stays in his mind, his memories as Xin Yuan fall to the wayside.

Not forgotten, per se, but... tucked away. The system prevents him from forgetting fully.

Xin Mo isn't fully a demonic sword either i think, but instead harbors an ugly cocktail of both spiritual and demonic qi. Special circumstances and all that. Everyone just assumes he's a fully demonic sword because that's usually at the forefront, his spiritual qi weakened from the initial fusion and from years of not being fed spiritual qi. It's part of the reason his wielders always end up destroyed by him, other than the whole, yk, 'overwhelming qi' thing.

Nobody would recognize Xin Mo's human form as Xin Yuan other than some truly ancient demons. Of which Meng Mo might. But even that's iffy because there's a lack of surviving paintings of Xin Yuan, but also because of XM's demonic appearance and supposed lack of connection to XY.

Xin Mo has never spoken to his wielders before, not in the same way he does Luo Binghe. He tells Luo Binghe this, and he also tells Luo Binghe down the line that he is both spiritual and demonic -- something he also never told his wielders because there was no point to it.

okay okay i've got to end it here because its already gotten ridiculously long -- of which im both apologetic and unapologetic for -- but i DO think the Shang Qinghua and Shen Yuan meeting (and reveal) would be fucking hilarious. Especially if SY has learned how to pop between sword form and human form by then -- although i guess it doesnt matter either way because SQH's reaction is still the same.

And that reaction is internally screaming and going "hey what the FUCK?? WHY DOES XIN MO HAVE A HUMAN FORM??? WHAT IS THIS??? SYSTEM??? EXPLAIN???"

meanwhile from his place on the sword hilt xin mo is squinting at Shang Qinghua in bewilderment and going "aren't you supposed to be dead" but doesn't pay too much mind to it because its not like its going to change anything.

...up until he catches shang qinghua going "WTF" silently from his little corner while all eyes are off him. One moment SQH is standing beside his king, and the next he's been tackled to the ground by one wild-eyed, human-shaped Xin Mo.

everyone, including SQH, thinks Xin Mo is going to kill him. It is a surprise to everyone when he does not, and instead dissolves into deranged, uncontrollable laughter after spitting out some phrase in some ancient tongue and watching SQH's eyes grow wide in recognition.