#they're tragically relatable for being so fundamentally alien

[vespertin-y]

Songs From A Dead World Pt. 1: Analyzing Scalene's Lullaby

We'll do the national anthem next time - let's start with the shorter one first!

Inputting the code JUST FIT IN will give you a video of a family playing Perfection. (If you never played Perfection as a child, good for you. You have to fit a bunch of shapes into their proper places while the Loudest Timer In The World whirrs at you, and if you fail to get them all in in time they explode violently outward with a BANG that makes babies cry. This thing is why I have anxiety now, goddamnit). The color code for the lullaby flashes quickly on screen, and at the end of the video a backwards message saying YOU KNOW WHAT YOU NEED is played.

...Yikes. We haven't even gotten to the translation yet and there's already Implications. Just let all those uncomfortable layers marinate in your brain while we get into the actual lyrics.

ROCKABYE BILLY, PLEASE DON'T YOU CRY

Obviously, this lullaby is based on the classic Rockabye Baby. Everybody knows that. What I haven't seen anyone mention is that they didn't just replace 'baby' with 'Billy' - 'please don't you cry' isn't the original opening lyric, either! I think that points to this being less a generic line and more an actual response to Bill being upset about something.

IT'S NOT YOUR FAULT YOU HAVE THAT STRANGE EYE

Well, I suppose now we know what he was upset about.

...PLEASE don't ever say something like this to a strange child, guys. Oh my god. It's clearly meant as comfort but. Jesus. If your kid is upset about being weird you tell them that it's alright; you do not tell them that they're not to blame, because the existence of fault implies their weirdness is inherently negative and that's going to do crazy things to their self esteem. (Unless it's Bill. Bill is fine! Source: Bill).

STAY SAFE WITH MOMMY, YOU'LL NEVER FALL

...But...

...But they can't...

...I mean I guess they could experience a similar feeling if a strong wind blew them South or something but why would they call it...

Okay. Two options. One, the more likely, is that Alex Hirsch just forgot how 2D works. Again. Two, much less likely and significantly more evil, is that Scalene never actually sung this and Bill is just trying to create a nicer reality again.

Either way, the narrative purpose is clearly a miserable irony - Bill did fall, reaching upwards for the stars, losing the middle ground of Euclydia, and plummeting downwards into Dimension 0. (Insert bit about Lucipher/The Fallen Angle here. You get it, you're smart).

AND WE'LL ALWAYS LOVE YOU, SHARP ANGLES AND ALL

Hey, that 'we' is probably our first mention of Euclid! Fun. Anyway, there's not really that much to dig into here. It's just sweet. Slightly haunting to wonder whether it's true, or if he got too 'sharp' for even his mom to love, though. (But mostly I'm just thinking about other fun shape-themed sayings and metaphors).

[jimmyandthegiraffes]

randall and hopkirk deceased as an extended metaphor for reactions to severe trauma

i think theres a lot to be said about martys death as like. a metaphor or symbolic of severe trauma. its a life altering event that fundamentally alters everyone involved. marty obviously. because hes dead. but what if we think about it in a less literal, more abstract way? i dont know. there are a few experiences for the characters in this show which regardless of how they were intended, resonate a lot. for the sake of argument im avoiding referring to the event as 'martys death' in order to generalise the experiences and make them less specific. martys death for the sake of this post is an event. any event. that changes the lives of the people it touches both subtly and tangibly

its a traumatic event which means that marty can no longer relate to or interact with other people . hes isolated and ostracised and numbed, literally. he's derealised and dissociated, hes out-of-body. the traumatic event has left him unable to engage physically with anyone or anything around him. the only physically 'real' thing to marty is himself - which we can see when he says to bugsy "you're solid!": he doesnt recognise them as both being incorporeal. to marty, it's the rest of the world that doesn't exist anymore, and him and bugsy (someone with shared trauma) are all that's left. he is Such an isolated character, as a direct result of the traumatic event. it's left him with the ability to detect 'bad vibes' (hypervigilance). and it's not something that can be reversed - now that it's happened, that's it, but even tho he is often unhappy and hypervigilant and anxious and wishes he could go back to how he was before, he still does find moments to be silly and have fun, and eventually also to find excitement and empowerment in his new state of being. because hes still a person, even if most people dont treat him as such. his trauma means that other people no longer recognise him as a person, and that's not their fault. the living arent deliberately ostracising marty: it's his trauma which has distinctly separated him from everyone else. it's left him silent and invisible and almost completely alienated. no matter how much he yells to people to warn that they're going to be murdered, or yells for help, nobody is paying attention to him.

for jeff, his best friend is dead. yea. but jeff stops grieving this loss. in a very parallel way to marty being frozen in time and unable to continue his life, jeff is also trapped.when jeff comes home after the funeral, we see the beginnings of his journey with grief, and its a grieving process that has been interrupted; a healing process gone wrong. now he can't move on; marty is a constant reminder to him. its no wonder jeff gets angry with marty, occasionally wants marty to leave. and while jeff might feel trapped by marty, and marty feel hurt by jeff not recognising how tragic death was for marty, neither of them are to blame. its a terrible situation - and the evil isnt in either of them or their reactions to it. marty might have trouble with boundaries and jeff might occasionally be callous. but theyre just two traumatised people. the evil is that marty was killed at all.

jeff knows that things can't ever be the same; he has the dual struggle of mourning the loss of a normal life and a normal friendship, and accepting the fact that this is normality for them now. marty is who he is, the traumatic event happened and can't be undone, and marty is still here and suffering and so so deserving of compassion. sometimes when marty is silly jeff smiles a little bit and he loves him so much and he remembers that he does; because a lot of the time, the struggle in the aftermath of that traumatic event makes him too wrung out and stressed and tired to remember that that's his best friend, his best friend is right there and needs jeff as much as jeff needs him, if not more so

jeff ALSO now can't relate normally to the people around him. in the second ever episode jeannie, one of his best friends, tricks him into a hold in a psychiatric clinic, based on nothing but a few instances of jeff behaving a little strangely, right after having been bereaved. jeff has to act normal at all times under difficult or even impossible circumstances; he has to maintain the illusion of normality even more than marty does, even while marty is yelling directly into his ear. while marty might perform and mimic a 'living' existence (sitting on furniture, which we know he doesnt need to do; speaking to people he knows cant hear him; not allowing jeff to touch him so that they can both maintain the fantasy of normality after trauma) but for Jeff the illusion is crucial to his safety

jeannie is the one we might think is ironically spared some of this, even though she and marty were married. shes not involved in marty's continued existence post-trauma in the same way jeff and marty are. they deliberately keep it from her to preserve her wellbeing and, in jeff's case at least, to ensure that her ability to move on with her life isn’t curtailed the way Jeffs and Martys have been. and jeannie is trying; but it's not the case - not yet. caught up in his own life, and marty caught up in his death, jeff sometimes forgets that jeannie lost her husband, recently. him saying "i thought you got over marty ages ago" when it's been less than a year seems like an absolutely deranged thing to say to a widow when you hear it out of context. but it has to be a moment for jeff to remember: he and marty have sacrificed the healing of the grieving process in favour of what they have now, in favour of continuing their friendship and being there for each other. but jeannie hasnt. jeannie is still going through it in all of its agony. jeannie is consistently vulnerable when it comes to marty; over and over again she is manipulated by people who take advantage of her grief. and it's easy to say well she's being silly or naive, but thats because the audience follow the show primarily through jeff and marty's eyes, not jeannies. The only person Jeannie could talk to about marty seems so altered by his grief that she doesnt feel she can even bring Marty up in conversation

we also see that jeannie has been isolated from other people because of the traumatic event. Jenny comes down to see her shortly afterwards; but crucially when we see jeannie among her friends of whom we see, she has many! She is alone in a crowd, just as Jeff and Marty are. At parties she is on her own. She’s in the corner, changed by her experience of finding her husband dead just outside their house. The people around her are amiable and friendly but they don’t understand. They don’t approach her; and they don’t listen when she expresses reluctance at being asked to join in an activity she finds deeply uncomfortable.

All three characters love each other so much; and as a direct result of the traumatic event, they still sometimes harm each other inadvertently. Jeff harms Jeannie by forgetting that she is still grieving; perhaps he even harms her by keeping huge secrets from her even if he does so under oath and the best of intentions. Jeff harms Marty by not telling him ahead of time that Jeannie is an alibi when they’re in bed together; he harms him by being insensitive to Marty’s limitations; he harms him by dismissing his fears and anxieties out of hand; he harms him by rejecting him and telling him to leave. Marty harms Jeff and Jeannie both, tragically, by his inability to let them go. He harms Jeff by neglecting to observe Jeff’s boundaries appropriately. He harms Jeannie, albeit without her knowledge, in his jealous urge to keep her from moving on and finding someone else, even if he doesn’t act on it. He does Jeannie a disservice occasionally by underestimating her, and so does Jeff. Jeannie harms Jeff by not trusting him, by tricking him and having him confined without ever speaking to him about her concerns. She harms Marty without meaning to when she half believes that sheldon is Marty, and by agreeing to help cecil exorcise Marty.

None of these things are deliberate; and I think all three characters can overcome this. They love each other enough. But they’re just people. They’re trying to navigate a life that has become strange to them.

i dont know. its 4am. i have many thoughts and this isnt nearly as clean or comprehensive as i would want it to be. Jeannie, Jeff and Marty are all traumatised and are muddling their way through the aftermath as best they can and they all need each other’s understanding and compassion.

[bittrlys]

The thing about TDP is that it is a fundamentally broken narrative and this makes it hard to take their moralizing seriously. They also burden their heroes with cowardly + hypocritical writing choices that do them or the narrative no favours (Ezran wants to preserve life until he doesn't; Rayla lost her hand but don't worry actually it's back; Callum is the first human to really want magic and luckily that one time he tried Dark magic* it backfired so horribly he won't do that again!)

They open up with a narrative about humans being forcibly exiled from the lands, failing to mention how widespread a problem their magic use was (not that that justifies it, but the way they abruptly introduce this stuff in supplementary material makes it seem like they realized humans were too sympathetic and needed to be brought down a peg) and thoroughly enshrining dragons + elves as charming little ethnic cleansers:

We don't see cackling Dark mages* fighting for conquest. We see normal people in tears as they're forcibly emigrated with what seems like only a small bag of their belongings. Charming! And interesting -- humans rarely take the position of the oppressed in fantasy.

You know how we watch alien movies and they always have aliens wanting to harvest out planet and it's OUR INDEPENDENCE DAY!!! so we strike back and throw off the yoke of potential oppression? That is about as close to humans-are-oppressed that we get in popular media, which otherwise enjoys humans as your relatable (white) protagonists, Average Joes who may not have super strength or magic or whatever, but possess a great spirit that allows them to hold their own, bringing about the "Age of Man", fulfilling our destiny as rightful inheritors and claimants of a world around us.

TDP said "Wow, check it out, humans are a conquered people who were forcibly exiled!" and you're like "Neat!" and then it slowly turns around and says "Isn't it crazy how humans represent an imperialist, white default and thus everything they do against the dragons + elves is the act of a colonizer?" And you go HUH?

What this show does is meta write. It establishes one thing in its lore, but then writes from an outside perspective that is influenced by our general understanding of humans-as-default that totally contradicts itself. It breaks its own narrative immediately and unless you interpret humans as colonizers and Xadians as innocent, nothing in this show makes sense.

Take my favourite bizarre, hypocritical parallel:

Dragon crosses border with ill intent. Does fly bys over a human town unrelated to the conflict to terrorize them. Someone fires what is effectively a warning shot (that would probably not seriously damage her in the first place.) Her response is to start incinerating people until she's forcibly stopped.

Viren crosses border with ill intent. Parks his army outside but walks in, alone and visibly not a threat, and they respond by grabbing him, stripping him, and trying to 'purify' him which may not leave all of him in tact. His (Aaravos's) response is to kill a few people, destroy the Sunforge, and leave.

The show's framing? Ezran rushes to the dragon's side, taking her side against evil humans that want to harvest/kill her. Her immediate 180 proves him right about "humans can fix this if they're just more accommodating." Returns later as an ally. Viren (+ Aaravos)? Evil Dark magic* while sympathetic characters look on in horror. Sunfire elves are forced out of their home tragically (imagine being forced out of your home!) and become allies to our heroes while Viren is our big bad. Even a half-hearted attempt to show the Sunfire elves as bigoted + aggressive (convenient for our black elves, but that's a whole other thing) is countered by the overall sympathetic treatment they receive.

So. Is crossing the border with ill intent an act of war worthy of being responded to with aggression or no? The only way this makes sense is if you think the response to Viren was justified and the response to the dragon was not, and that only makes sense if Viren is a colonizer who has no place in his people's ancestral lands. It's just bizarre!

Another example of the show writing based on our own preconceived notions that do not mesh with the actual narrative is how they rely on our feelings about environmentalism. Dragons/elves/Xadia = natural, good. Humans = industrial, unnatural, bad. Yet I know I'm not the only person wondering how many of these heroes are vegetarians (Rayla's people seem to be but other elves? Dragons?) and like, until they revealed (retconned) the Great Unicorn Massacre there was no indication that Dark magic* was non-sustainable. While obviously we shouldn't kill sentients the show cares less about sentience as they do about magical beings, and beyond that it hits us with classics like "Sure you can be veg and eat worms whatever who cares about gross ugly bugs" and "VIREN KILLED ANOTHER BEAUTIFUL BUTTERFLY :(" and Claudia kills a deer of all things and that's so tragic. Like? Hello? People eat meat? They kill animals for hide and fur? And this is not an industry because everything in this world is pre-industry!

At this point they need to establish all their heroes as vegetarians and show Viren enjoying a big, juicy steak. He deserves it.

(I mean good ol' Harrow had a hunting lodge with an animal head mounted in it but let's just ignore that. It was probably a birthday gift from Viren.)

Put it this way: If Dark mages* treated harvesting specimens as a small, controlled, industry, would that be okay? So long as they didn't hunt sentients and kept population levels stable, no biggie, right? Many reagents they want (feathers, snot, whatever) can be collected non-lethally or even traded for. Yet somehow I think the show would care to disagree, as it is obvious that Dark magic* is fundamentally evil, no matter how ethical your consumption may be.

I emphasize the show's preferential treatment for magical beings because every mistreatment the humans experience and the show ultimately expects us to agree with is because they are non-magical -- it wants us to think humans are naturally predisposed to evil the way other races are not. Sure they were mistreated for being non-magical and starved and suffered for it, but the unicorns were wrong to give them magic (as shown by how it backfires on them) and even with that humans preferred Dark magic* the hardest/easiest magic around. Trying to have magic they shouldn't is why Viren and Claudia are framed as villainous before they even do anything. Everything that makes them sympathetic is unrelated to their ambition.

The writers thus have to break their narrative in half to make Callum worthy of 'true' magic just because of what a nasty little corner they painted themselves into (assuming that this natural magical state will always be superior to anything a non-magical being can do) and so we understand that humans are second-class citizens who should not have ambition and accept their lot in life, and if they are good enough, fully submissive to the 'natural order' like Callum, then they may be granted true magic. As a treat. But that, frankly, does not uplift humans as a whole. Tying into what lazy, stupid worldbuilding it is for humans to not be capable of magic in the first place (are they aliens to this world or something??) if I were writing this show I would have it revealed that dragons did something to take magic from humans and it can be given back to them, which would entirely fit the lore, but never match the overall Xadia Good, Actually narrative they want us to believe in.

Ultimately, I will never get behind a narrative that wants me to root for Team Ethnic Cleansing and thinks that a race of people are inherently unworthy in some way. It's beyond twisted. But that's the problem with the show. Nothing in this series makes sense. Not its magic system, not its politics, and not its lore, and instead of trying to make something cohesive, they write from a biased perspective based on other narratives that are not their own and create never-ended dissonance in their story. It's bad writing, folks!

*I hate the term 'Dark magic' in basically everything and clearly even in this world there's an association of dark/black = evil. (And if you want to argue that the dark = evil association doesn't actually exist in this world and it's a neutral statement, then that's just the writers once again writing from our world's perspective that does not match their lore.) It's framing for the sake of framing and don't get me wrong, I get why people against it would use the term, but why TF do Viren and Claudia call it Dark magic anyways? 'Sacrificial magic' or 'human magic' or 'life magic' are all things that make sense and don't have the weirdly loaded connotations. "Jeez we were exiled from our homelands for practising this form of magic. It was called dark because it's so naturally evil. We do not consider ourselves evil, just doing what we can to empower ourselves + humanity. Obviously we will keep using the term Dark magic. Obviously." It's so lazy.