#this could be banger lore if interpreted differently

[verylast]

I'm so used to the distant blur of unreadable text and faces that seeing too much makes me a little nervous. The silhouettes and forms; the voices and the sound of routine is enough to reassure me that I am not alone and that I still exist.

But once I put on my glasses, I see too much and feel too much. Not only about of what they think of me, but of what I think of them. And this isn't just about other people, it's everything. Everything feels noisy once I can see.

[wavesoutbeingtossed]

I was wondering, what's your interpretation of tTPD as a whole?. I know a lot of people think it's a 31 album dedicated to one main muse minus 2 songs for his ex long term relationship but i was curious about your thoughts.

Also, some theorists are talking about a potential 10 years situationship between taylor and one muse and it makes me feel... weird. Because she was committed to someone else and i don't know how to feel knowing the other muse could be in some of my fave albums... sorry for the long rant

So there’s a lot going on here and it’s nuanced.

I don’t think it’s as simple as “it’s all about one person minus two songs.” There are several muses woven in both the text and subtext of the songs. And what happened with one muse in many cases was only possible because what happened with another. There are some songs that are explicitly about specific people’s actions, but overall things get muddy because situations are muddy.

This is a cop out answer, but ultimately to me the album is about Taylor. It’s about her pain and grief and trauma and also healing and recovery and joy. To reduce it to a man in particular discounts that she is the main character of her own life and story.

I do not think the story she put down in TTPD is one of a decade long situationship. As I said yesterday, I will gladly change my mind if new information comes to light. The story I picked up in TTPD is one where someone entered her life at a very vulnerable time, exploited their shared history to sow the seeds of this fantasy life to her that she was desperately grieving in her very real current life, which caused her to play revisionist history with her memories because she needed to make it “real” to herself as an escape hatch.

But even if that isn’t the case, and if it turns out that yes, she was pining for this person for ten years… it doesn’t take away from the fact that her past music is excellent, regardless of the inspiration. IMO fans would be better served to not always recall the muses when listening to music for their enjoyment. I know Taylor’s music is different because her life is so well documented and she used to be so open about who she was writing about, but very few artists do that and their music still hits. I don’t think at all about the artists’ lives when listening to any other band; hell, even in well-known messy situations like Fleetwood Mac, I’m not thinking about Stevie and Mick, I’m thinking that Landslide is beautiful and Rhiannon is a banger or whatever. If you think too much about the artists’ personal lives, you’re gonna get twisted in knots and may find there are few people you can listen to, because humans are fallible and messy and make mistakes. Like Taylor says, once the songs are out in the world, they’re not hers anymore, and you need to ascribe your own meaning to them.

Which is not to say I wasn’t surprised when I first figured out who she was writing about when I listened to TTPD, and yes the first few listens of the album made my head spin a bit for the lore of it all, but i truly listen to it like any other album now. It’s good music plain and simple.

What I’m trying to say is that you have to set your own boundaries I guess. If it really bothers you then you don’t have to listen to or engage with it. But personally I’m also not going to moralize Taylor’s or anyone else’s music because she’s human just like any of us and we all make choices in our lives. She was just brave enough to share the mess. It’s not a condoning of her actions because she doesn’t need my or anyone else’s approval for her choices. She’s recording a moment of time in her life and turned it into art, and now it takes on new meaning for listeners.

(Also if people are moralizing her choices because of the “commitment” thing well… I think they weren’t picking up on other parts of the album but. Well.)

Also my pet peeve is that I hate the word “theory” when applied to real people. They’re humans with lives, not characters in a TV show. This isn’t directed at you anon, just a general sentiment.

[akuma-homura]

I’m conflicted with Project Sekai because I DO really enjoy what I enjoy out of it— I’m hugely invested in nightcord, Rui is legit one of my top fave characters alongside Mizuki…

There’s absolutely BANGER songs that had been commissioned and created thanks to this game that likely wouldn’t exist without it (A world without Jackpot Sad Girl???? A world without Lower??? A WORLD WITHOUT SAMSA????????)

The cards and art for them are really cool too, both for the original characters and the Vocaloids— the meanings and symbolism they tend to put in a number of them is really great, and their consistent usage of flower language is one of my favorite things!

I love how they’ve gone about the Vocaloids, different Sekai having their own versions of them, mirroring how everyone interprets the Vocaloids differently! Even if there’s some similarities, everyone has their own unique takes! Along with mirroring people’s feelings about Vocaloid!

And the Sekai lore itself, about the Sekai, the weird implications of the Virtual Singers, are all absolutely FASCINATING to me and I swear one day I’m going to just write down a whole damn paper on it and my own theories/head canon fill in the blanks / AU changes for it because it’s great

Nightcord KAITO exists and is the best thing ever, especially with the latest event (he does care!!! He is supportive!!! He’s just also really ducking intense and came of incredibly strongly bc he felt that anger for Mafuyu’s situation so hard— but it wasn’t a completely bad thing either, because his words did stick with her!)

But I admit, I don’t like some of the fandom that has come of it— not all, obviously, but a lot is personally rather grating. Though, there’s a lot of kids too, so that’s probably part of why. (which isn’t a bad thing in and of itself ignoring the faces gambling and twitter mentality stuff, I just don’t have the energy to deal with kids online fndbddv)

I also dislike when I see some Sekai fans downplay the Virtual Singers a lot… like I still think to when people were theorizing the Samsa cards, and it was so cool to se, but they didn’t do KAITO’s card, waved off KAITO’s card, or… straight up called it unimportant and said it didn’t have a meaning??????? Which is bullshit??????

There’s also the fact that it IS a Gacha game, and seeing peoples manga-like takes of scenes from the recent event really did have me wishing more creative liberties and more drawn out scenes were a thing for events to hammer emotions home…

Also, the fact it’s still pushing NT for the Crypton vocals kind of hurts. Like, recent event leak of its song… Luka’s Vocaloid voicebanks would have worked so much better. Her NT is awful. Like actually awful. How could they massacre my girl. WHICH ALSO SUCKS BC THE SONG ITSELF IS REALLY GOOD

Which also leads me to— it almost feels like the voice banks are stagnating with Sekai…? Like, the focus on NT despite it very much not being even to their old voicebank qualities, the fact we haven’t heard much in that regard… I don’t know, admittedly this has even less basis, it just feels weird

[cryo-delta]

Ok, I feel like I have to talk about it.

So, some of you may know that I've been actively playing HSR for now exactly 30 days (got the achievement today lmao) and as my first gacha game and community experience I discovered something that really saddens me.

After playing for 20 days I was finished with most of the story and stuff so the content was slowing starting to run dry (thank god Simulated Universe is a banger or I would only play 30 minutes a day).

But today there was an official broadcast announcing the 1.1 update and its content:

3 new characters over 2 different banners.

7-day-long daily rewards for a total of 10 warps

4 to 6 events with award and goals to do

4 character hangout quest

1 free light cone

1 free personalized relic

And there could be more but the stream was in Chinese

So as a normal human being, as a clueless gamer, I was feeling like that was gonna be a lot of content and thus a lot of fun 'cause the game itself is cool as fuck!

But I made one critical mistake: I looked up how the content creators and community interpreted the informations and omg they were not happy about it.

Apparently, the content only being events related with not that enough rewards (for them) and the banners not looking too great (in their opinion once again) was kind of letdown and they are disappointed.

Why is the community obsessed with the gacha?

Put that into context: a company annouced that they were adding a bunch of fun things to do in their fun free game for free and the reaction of the mass is to shit on the content, what the fuck is wrong with these people?!

HSR is advertised as a space comedy game, focus on adventure and story. The game has good turn by turn combat, lore, character design and humour. Yet what they are focusing on is the way to obtain facultative character by a pure luck based system.

Me personally, I'll be having a blast on the events spread out along the duration of the patch and the hangout quest have been really good in the past so i'm betting that these four will be just as insane.

But I still find sad that people can't enjoy the god tier work that the artists, writers, programmers, designers and more at Hoyoverse are doing because they are blinded by a fucking optional part of a game.

I'll end with a good note by saying that, even tho I am talking about "the community", "the majority", there are still people like me or Tectone (that I discovered one week ago and whom is an absolute based streamer) that just enjoy what life offers them.