she is a bad bitch made up of magic

thinking about the romantic love as faith thing again and how even in lover and folklore where “this love is my religion” is at its strongest she’s already starting to examine the inherent fallacies there — she knows the relationship could fail and that would mean they’ve been worshiping a false god; the “happy ending” of it all leading her to her lover can help her make sense of 2016 but it can’t save her mom so she tests returning to her faith of origin for that; “alls well that ends well to end up with you” and “chains around my demons”/“now I send their babies presents” falls apart on midnights and through the rerecordings when she realizes that wait, actually the wounds of my past relationships did do lasting damage that this current relationship did not take away. She first tests the idea that writing/performing/her art being the true way she can make sense of her pain in YOYOK and then (as @midnightsslut broke down in her religion post and @cages-boxes-hunters-foxes has talked about too) TTPD as a whole is her trying on salvation through romantic love one more time before wholly deconstructing the concept.

so high school is extra precious because it’s in contrast to songs like the tortured poets department. the latter is like “we work well because we’re both insane and crazy and stupid and miserable” but then so high school is like “you make me feel so normal. you make me feel like we’re high school sweethearts, which is so normal” it feels healing

‘and sometimes it gets me when crossing your jet stream, we both did the best we could do underneath the same moon in different galaxies’ is so fucking devastating bc not only does it allude to call it what you want, but also all of the references across her work implying that what they had was fate, sent to her by the universe, divine intervention. all the imagery of ‘starry eyes sparkling up my darkest night’ and ‘once upon a time the planets and the fates and all the stars aligned’ and ‘he’s passing by rare as the glimmer of a comet in the sky’ come crashing down into the reality that they were always just outside of each other’s orbit

am I allowed to cry?

[if you’d like to support my art, please consider donating via ko-fi! I also got a ton a free printables over there! you can also get this at redbubble! all of the proceeds go towards paying for my late dog's vet bill <3]

the prophecy is like evil invisible string

its like... at the time i thought that invisible string was ~the~ song that she had been waiting her entire career to be able to write. the answer to why have i spent my whole life trying to put it into words. that all the pain and heartbreak was worth it for that love that felt like it was fated for her. but two heartbreaks later and now she thinks that she's fated to not have that love. that its written by the gods that she will never have it.

and what i love so much about the prophecy is that even though she feels that way from time to time that she will never have that love she can't bring herself to ~actually~ believe it because she always has been and always will be a romantic at heart. a lesser woman would've lost hope, a greater woman wouldn't beg, but i looked to the sky and said please..... its just soooo swiftian

A hothouse flower to my outdoorsman is sooooooooooooooooo good 🤯. (from How did it end?)

Things grown in hothouses (greenhouses) thrive in greenhouses but struggle when they go outside them because they are not used to dealing with all the elements - all they’ve known is a controlled climate lifestyle and the chaos of the weather changes of the outside world does them in to the point of rotting, or wilting. They’re just not evolved to handle those conditions. From what we know, that’s joe!

And Taylor is the outdoorsman; the person who thrives going on adventures all over the place, open to new experiences and places and people and generally weathering all kinds of weather, in fact, inclement weather only teaches outdoorsmen lessons and makes them stronger for the future, not wiltier! totally the opposite!!

It really is a perfect metaphor to describe their innate personality differences

Anyway. Sorry to be an English major on main but yes all stories have meanings and say things

religion is one of the most prominent recurring themes on the album, and it has been present in some capacity for quite a few records now. taylor previously compared love to religion: her saving grace, her belief system, and a fated divine intervention (false god, cornelia street, and cruel summer are the best examples of this). ‘sacred new beginnings that became my religion’ and ‘we’d still worship this love even if it’s a false god’ are two of the defining statements about her philosophy on the lover album.

taylor doesn’t want to leave all of that behind on ttpd, at least not at the beginning. the first supernatural force she mentions is the spaceship on down bad, which she compares to a skylight of freedom in the epilogue. *something* has finally come to save her from her life of suffering. she doesn’t care if it’s a force of good at first; if anything, she’s just fine being taken away by aliens. she views this man as her destiny. it isn’t until guilty as sin? that taylor starts to ponder the moral implications of what she’s doing. is she guilty as sin for wanting to leave her previous religion and relationship behind? she comes to the conclusion that, even if she rolls the stone away and gets resurrected/redeemed, she cannot avoid the fallout. she is okay with the thought of having to wait, as long as both lovers vow to be together forever, just as she once did with someone else in false god. ‘I choose you and me religiously’ finishes the bridge of the song in a direct callback to cornelia street.

the next mention of religion has murkier imagery. she claims that she does not need the Lord’s help to save this man. she sees the halo that he has, and she can fix him herself. now that she feels free of her prior cage, she isn’t looking for divine intervention anymore. she wants control. she is their route to salvation.

when the relationship falls apart, she retreats back into the position of a believer rather than a divine figure. she compares him to a Holy Ghost who promised to save her and take her to heaven. instead, she is in hell in every sense of the word: she’s down bad and feels guilty for digging up the grave. he was a jehovah’s witness who promised that she could break free of the cage imposed by love without changing her religion altogether; she would’ve just had to switch denominations. she could still have a marriage and kids! she could still have a blue tortured poet! the man was different, but not the dreams they had together. the story of the first part of the album ends here. her faith has been broken, and she has only found any semblance of sanity by refusing to mention these belief systems altogether.

side b/the anthology blends the christian imagery of side a with goddesses, sorcerers, and prophecies. she bargains with these powers to let her have the future she wants (the prophecy). she doesn’t sound like someone believing in salvation. if anything, she feels cursed. she decides that the concept of divinely ordained timing will never work in certain relationships (‘the goddess of timing once found us beguiling / she said she was trying / peter, was she lying?’). this disdain extends onto her perception of other people’s faith (‘bet they never spared a prayer for my soul’). she does position herself as a prophet in cassandra, but even then, she admits that the role has hurt her. perhaps the pain in thank you aimee was meant to be, or perhaps she was just strong enough to build a legacy in spite of it, boulder by boulder. is she a martyr? does she want to be? or did she save herself?

the only real love song on this half of the album makes no mention of fate or any divine forces. it wasn’t meant to be. it’s not a supernatural invisible string or lightning in a bottle. she is just in love.

the album ends with the manuscript, which revisits an old story of a defining, formative heartbreak. as she sings ‘at last, she knew what the agony had been for’ while describing the legacy of her writing, she seems to revert to thinking about the purpose of trauma. the only exception is that, in this case, she is the one who found meaning in her pain by turning it into a manuscript. writing is her belief system now, and she proselytizes by telling her stories and thus giving up the manuscript.

ultimately, her belief in destiny has chewed her up and spat her out. she so desperately clung to her existing belief systems that she was fooled by a conman, which left her feeling cursed. religion is supposed to be with someone even in their darkest moments, but the album explains that taylor often felt abandoned. the only constant in her life was, well, herself. she’ll be okay, but her pen will be her saving grace.

i love the…. almost horror aspects of this album. all the references to ghosts and death…. and sonically, the unexpected shrieking in WAOLOM and the banging and screaming during “old habits die screaming” and even the way the tension subtly builds across the sixteen tracks and by the end you’re so stressed and shaken it’s like! losing your sense of self and feeling like you’ve become a monster is horror. and i’m sooooo glad she leaned into it

levitating down the street!!! being abducted by aliens and then spit back out!!! feeling like she was being watched and hunted!!!!! this shit is fucking SCARY!!!!!!!!! because losing yourself is SCARY. it IS a horror story.

GUTS world tour!

[if you’d like to support my art, please consider donating via ko-fi! I also got a ton a free printables over there! you can also get this at redbubble! all of the proceeds go towards paying for my late dog’s vet bill <3]

RENEE RAPP AS REGINA GEORGE

MEAN GIRLS (2024) dir. SAMANTHA JAYNE, ARTURO PEREZ JR.

Astrology + music: Olivia Rodrigo ♓ Sun in Pisces ♓ (for @silversmists)

{Listen on Spotify}

My brain is on fire same I can’t sleep and am thinking of this:

The way she writes about marriage/family/commitment through these different situations across the album is soooooooooo interesting.

You have a very intense first experience of it in “The Manuscript,” where it is first dangled in front of her/the narrator’s young, impressionable self as shorthand for real love in a situation that ended up being smoke and mirrors. She’s being told everything she wants to hear by someone who basically thinks it’s just foreplay. In the end, when it’s clear that the other person has no intention of actually making a life with her, it makes her feel used, but she forces herself to recalibrate and become the girl she thinks he and all the other hes want her to be. Easy breezy cool. But there’s a sense of loss in realizing those hopes were merely banter to the other.

You have the “grown up” version of it alluded to in “So Long, London” and “How Did It End?”, the years of putting in work to save a relationship and the “deflation of our dreaming leaving [her] bereft and reeling” leading to them “calling it all off.” The implication is clearly that they built a home together with plans for next steps at a point in time, but the commitment is shattered. (Obviously to me it sounds like marriage.) She’s bitter at spending her “prime” years with someone who ultimately didn’t want to be there, even if he couldn’t or wouldn’t admit it himself.

She felt like she did everything she was supposed to, but they were learning the right steps to different dances at as it were. Those dreams were at one point shared, but in the end they weren’t right for each other and she admits that, though bitterly (“I founded the club she’s heard great things about” eg the years she put in for him to help him grow up will end up benefiting his new lover, “but I’m not the one,” “you’ll find someone,” etc.). Mixed in with all this of her resentment of him wasting her youth (sacrificing herself at the altar), and his resentment of her for reasons less defined, and insinuations of betrayal in the shadows. The fantasy of the whole package disappears into the ether, yet she still has no answers as to how they got there.

Then in comes the wolf in sheep’s clothing in many of the rest of the songs, the one who promises her all those things she’s dreamed of since she was a kid instantly. After years of moulding herself to other men’s desires, someone comes in and tells her exactly what she wants to hear at the most vulnerable time of her life, as though the universe is answering her prayers, like some sort of cosmic payback for all she’s suffered, and it’s the most intoxicating drug of all. She’s gone from her wish for a family life feeling like she’s in a way being used for her body, to it being used as a chain to a relationship gone sour, to having someone put a metaphorical ring on her finger and tell her he wants to have babies with her, fuck those other guys.

In her grief and stupor, it’s too good to be true, which is exactly why she falls for it. But of course, it’s all an illusion, because this wolf is an amalgamation of the worst of all the men who came before him. He tells her everything she wants to hear not to make her dreams come true, but to make his. He takes the worst parts of these scenarios to make his move: he’ll stand by her, he’ll commit, he’ll do it out in the open under the spotlight’s glare (all things desperately lacking in her last relationship), but after he beds her he stabs her in the back in private and leaves her. He got what he wanted at the expense of her losing everything she wanted, this time as her world caved in seemingly for good. She feels like she gave up everything she thought she might have had for a chance that this is where the universe has been point her all along, only to be left broken for good (you represent the loss of my life as I knew it).

Then there are two sort of codas to this. In “But Daddy I Love Him” we get a sassier reimagining of “Love Story,” where the girl with the scarlet letter is mouthy and crass and tells everyone to go fuck themselves for cursing her in the first place, choosing her love above all else. And no, those haters can’t come to her wedding. Her daddy may have come around, but they sure can’t. Finally it seems someone is choosing her and will someday give her these things, and she’ll be able to show all the naysayers. (Also interestingly one of the more fictionally-veiled songs which ends happily vs the diaristic ones that don’t.)

Then of course there’s “So High School,” our first glimpse into what the future holds. Probably the only unabashedly happy (nay… electric?) song on the album, it’s all about reclaiming the buzz of youth (which is a whole other post) with a new lover. “Are you gonna marry, kiss or kill me? It’s just a game but really, I’m betting on all three for us two.” It’s, er, a direct nod to a certain now-infamous interview, but again, she’s staking her claim on her future, if not certain then at least hopeful again. This time the prospect doesn’t come with a “but.” It’s not, we’ll be pushing strollers but actually you’re too young. It’s not, we had these dreams for our future but actually I can’t move forward. It’s not, I’m going to promise you a ring and a baby but only until my needs are met and then I’m out. It’s, I know what I wanted and I’m not leaving, and thanks to that now she stays too.

The album dealt with the theme not at all in the way I expected, but is absolutely fascinating.