Sooooo I’m listening to Logan’s playlist rn for the first time in like 2 years and I totally forgot about the crazy tonal shift from White and Nerdy to Algorithm and the immediate dark turn into Fitter Happier—
i don’t know if anything will beat the feeling i had during april 2020. i was heavily hyperfixated on tss and especially the creativitwins, and then thomas dropped the roman playlist. to this day 3 years later i still think about it
second song on that playlist was wonderboy by tenacious d and i was immediately like ‘haha that sounds like that’s about remus. cool how they team up in the end’ but oh well, i didn’t think that much about it in that moment. the song can easily be about virgil too
i’m vibing to the rest of the songs and then humility by gorillaz comes on and. did the song straight up say twin??? bro that fucking song is about remus. that song is about remus there is no way around it.
i’m not smart enough to directly analyze the songs (plenty of people have already done so. here’s my favorite one) but all i can say is holy fuck yippie doodle this shit still makes me ballistic.
i mean in the series all roman seems to show is hate for remus!! looking at remus is like looking into a funhouse mirror, he’s literally his biggest insecurity, his biggest fear. and yet, (correct me if i’m wrong) i don’t even think there’s a song on there that even implies his hatred of remus. the playlist is all about how he wants to be free of his morality restrictions..
idek man. if the day comes in 2050 when the creativitwins reconcile i will be there in the first row.
oh and also. fun fact about the wonderboy song (and also the entire roman playlist)? thomas and joan purposefully made roman’s playlist into 5 sections: i want songs, character establishment, rising action, climax, and falling action. they didn’t specify how exactly these sections were split up* but that doesn’t even matter. wonderboy is the SECOND song in the playlist, meaning it’s definitely an I Want song. do with this information what you will
*ok if you want my opinion, theres 20 songs, and 5 sections. the math would show that each section would consist of 4 songs, and i think this definitely holds up with the vibes of the songs, too.
conclusion: ieirjrwndijekwfowhhdeh idk. roman and remus are the twins ever and the only main reason i still care about sanders sides after all this time.
So I decided I wanted to look up the lyrics to Black Hole Sun, and I found part of an interview here with the man who wrote the song. The most interesting part of me was his explanation of the lyric "Times are gone for honest man", which he explains:
"It's really difficult for a person to create their own life and their own freedom. It's going to become more and more difficult, and it's going to create more and more disillusioned people who become dishonest and angry and are willing to fuck the next guy to get what they want. There's so much stepping on the backs of other people in our profession. We've been so lucky that we've never had to do that. Part of it was because of our own tenacity, and part of it was because we were lucky."
Now let's talk about why this is interesting. Janus is referred to by Patton as "an inner coach that acts with the the one intention of self-preservation" (he also says this is the "simply put" version of who Janus is, just throwing that out there.)
Later Janus himself suggests "compiling a list of people we need to nudge...down a flight of stairs till they hold another round of call backs", and on two separate occasions tried to get Thomas to turn his back to some degree on his friends for his own benefit, I'd even be willing to argue that it might have been Janus encouraging Roman to get Thomas to stay hanging out with the "charming fellow" rather than going to Joan's reading.
Janus whole playlist is so very carefully selected for his jazzy, lying aesthetic that it can be easily accepted at face value. "This song mentions snakes and lying, it's perfect for Janus." But if we look at the meaning behind some of these, like with Black Hole Sun, I'd wager we'd learn a bit more about our favorite snake boi.
We sat in an empty theater and we kissed
I asked ya please to cross me off your list
My head tells me it's time to make a change
But my heart is telling me I love ya but you're strange
Imagine, if you will, the bad end to Side Order: Overlorder wins, everyone is pulled into the Memverse and loses their free will, and what was once a therapeutic VR space becomes an existential prison, grinding down countless souls into passionless sludge.
What ‘PUNISHMENT’ awaits the protagonist now…?
Oddly enough, they remain themselves-- Agent 8’s rebellious spirit must be definitively crushed before they are allowed into the normal workings of the World of Order. So they are locked in the Spire and given a task: complete all 30,000 floors without dying once (no hacks, after all) and they will be “freed”. Of course, each time they fail, they must start over from 1F.
The overwhelming challenge comes with a greatly expanded palette, but even as it becomes more saturated, the strength of their enemies increases in turn, far past the limits of the laws of physics, or even the laws of time and space. The further they go, the harder it becomes to even comprehend what’s going on around them, let alone react quickly enough to win.
But Agent 8 is nothing if not determined. The hope of being freed, and at least being able to learn what happened to Marina, Pearl, Acht, and the rest of the world, is all they have left.
For now they are totally isolated, with only a standard-issue drone and the cries of the Jelletons for company. As far as they know, they are the only sentient being within the Spire…