yiangchen

[yiangchen]

that comment about how you should not borrow grief from the future has saved me multiple times from spiraling into an inescapable state of anxiety. like every time i find myself thinking about how something in the future could go wrong i remember that comment and i think to myself: well i never know, it might get better. it might not even happen the way i think it will and if it does happen and it is sad and bad ill be sad about it then, when it happens. and it’s somehow soo freeing

[yiangchen]

bedtime

#stop im CRYING #this is the cutest zutara baby shut UPPPP #zuko #zutara #atla #fanart

[yiangchen]

something i've realized is that ttpd is not necessarily in chronological order of events, but the order that she seems to have processed them. fortnight -> ttpd -> my boy only breaks his favorite toys -> down bad -- this run of songs definitely feels chronological, but then we get to so long london, which is what she's really upset about and why everything happened, so then it's like in order to move forward, she has to go backwards in time to process how she got here (but daddy i love him -> fresh out the slammer -> florida!!!! -> guilty as sin). then, we return to events going forward in time with who's afraid of little old me -> i can fix him (no really i can) -> loml -> i can do it with a broken heart -> the smallest man who ever lived -> the alchemy -> clara bow.

#i just love sequencing!! #taylor swift #ttpd

[yiangchen]

Good night I’m suddenly thinking again about the Lover era and how Taylor was convinced her career would naturally slow down due to her age and the industry and society and how we’ve all talked about how it seemed like she (and Joe…?) was basing her life and career decisions off that and then instead her career ramped up and that clearly those Plans™️ then… stalled. And that it seems like that… stalling was just killing her inside. 😵‍💫 Because everything she wanted may have hinged on the one set of circumstances (withdrawing from public life and who knows what else) and those circumstances may have been held over her head. 😵‍💫

(And also thinking about how someone’s resentment may have played into that stalling ugh.)

#!!!! #taylor swift

[yiangchen]

#love the second half but first half absolutely #taylor swift

[yiangchen]

I hate it here is central to the story because she makes up lunar valleys in her mind, spends all her time there, and ultimately gets ‘saved’ by someone who she actually thinks is like a skylight/alien from another planet. the romanticism doesn’t have to be limited to her inner life anymore! she can express it! she has cosmic love in real life again! until she doesn’t lol.

#taylor swift

[yiangchen]

ending midnights with “is that your key in the door? Is it okay? Is it you? Or have them come to take me away?” and then immediately starting ttpd with “I was supposed to be sent away but they forgot to come and get me” we never stood a chance

#!!!! #taylor swift

[yiangchen]

I Look Through People’s Windows is like “please don’t ever become a stranger whose laugh I could recognize anywhere” come true

#😐 #taylor swift

[yiangchen]

QUICK! what’s your fave ttpd song at this very second (i know it changes fast)!!

#fresh out the slammer #taylor swift

[yiangchen]

i think what makes so high school such a gorgeous love song is the fact that shes using images of immaturity and being carefree to describe the light joyfulness of how she feels with travis. i’ve seen people speaking about how this feels such a contrast with the ever present anxiety in songs about joe, even the happiest ones, but i also think it’s especially beautiful considering the lyrics we get in the manuscript where she’s talking about being ‘wise beyond her years’ and attempting to seem older than she is and just a real focus on maturity that she demanded from herself in order to appeal to these older men. and this is just so different from so high school because she’s allowed to be immature and she’s not trying to be seem older than she is. and then you consider the other lyrics in the manuscript where she says that after that relationship she reverts back to innocent parts of her childhood, like the cereals and sleeping in her mum’s bed and it makes it even more emotional because its like in her relationship with jake she had to hide anything which undermined her so called maturity but with travis she’s just allowed to exist, even if makes her seem ‘young’

#alright i think its time for bed ! #taylor swift

[yiangchen]

the manuscript ending the album on the utter jawdrop moment that neither of the muses of the actual album were the first men to fuck her up with promises of marriage and babies, and that first heartbreak so long ago laid the scene for the woman she would become and the ways she would approach love and how we all watched her life like scenes in a show but she kept coming back to the manuscript of the first torrid affair that ruined her, to bookend an album about two love affairs that destroyed her utterly in almost the exact same way, because all her muses are acquired like bruises........ it's bone-chilling

#i fr had no idea what this song was about and now im LOSING MY MIND #taylor swift

[yiangchen]

The manuscript is about writing all too well ten !!! And the second to last verse is directing the video !! I want to die!! I need my therapist NOW !

#dude..... #taylor swift

[yiangchen]

The analogy of Matty as a “forget him” pill in the Fortnight video and “I took the miracle move on drug, the effects were temporary” is the heart of it I feel. If you had to have an extremely painful surgery and could choose to go medicated or not, what would you pick? She had to end things with Joe but she couldn’t bring herself to do it for years because she knew the pain of actually losing him would be too much to bear, and along comes this person peddling that he can take away all the pain. He sells her a story about how he is the great love of her life, that he’s never forgotten her all this time, that it was supposed to be them all along. He can give her everything she can’t bear to let go of. And who wouldn’t want to believe that, when the alternative is … the love that you thought was forever just ends and there’s nothing and no one? So she does it, she takes the pill, she has the surgery, only to find he was selling not just snake oil but poison that leaves her far worse off than she was in the beginning. She feels all the pain of the surgery and the side effects of the drug in one fell swoop.

#taylor swift #wild.

[yiangchen]

just noticed something...

fresh out the slammer - now we're at the starting line

the black dog - when someone plays "the starting line", and you jump up, but she's too young to know this song

the smallest man who ever lived - you'll slide into inboxes and slip through the bars

the black dog - your location, you forgot to turn it off, and so i watch as you walk into some bar called the black dog

#taylor swift #ttpd #fresh out the slammer #the smallest man who ever lived #the black dog

[yiangchen]

I don’t have enough brain cells to understand who/what fortnight is about… the neighbor and husband references?

okay, so like taylor said, fortnight is sort of a prologue to the entire album. it references a lot of other songs (down bad, florida!!!, peter, guilty as sin?) there are a few different ways that it could be read, and i may not stick to this interpretation, but the below is where i landed.

fortnight sets the scene for the entire album and the events that are about to unfold by telling a story about an alternate reality about the future she was headed to in which she and joe ignore their problems, stay together, and build the life they're planning. she's in need of psychiatric help, she's drinking, she's depressed. but the other guy has re-entered her orbit. they're going to keep crossing paths. she feels insane. he's right there. she is insane. her husband cheats on her; she's enraged at him. the other guy is married to someone great; she's enraged at her too. she feels insane. she is insane, because she's fully consumed with the anger of following the bad path instead of taking the risk.

so at the end of the song, she decides she has to run for it. she has to move to america. she has to go to florida and start over. she has to buy the car and let him touch her instead of just daydreaming about it. because if she doesn't scratch the itch, if she doesn't see what happens, if she doesn't chase the guy that's been her "what else?" then well, how will she ever know? and the rest of the record is her realizing that maybe she wishes she hadn't.

#omg this makes so much sense #taylor swift

[yiangchen]

"My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys is a song I wrote alone, and it's a metaphor of, you know, from the perspective of a child's toy, being somebody's favorite toy, until they break you, and then don't want to play with you anymore, which is, you know, how a lot of us are in relationships, where we are so valued by a person in the beginning, and then all of a sudden, they break us, or they devalue us in their mind, and we're still clinging onto, 'No, no, no, you should've seen them the first time they saw me. They'll come back to that. They'll get back to that.' So it's kind of like, a song about denial, really. So that you can live in this world where there's still hope for a toxic, broken relationship."

— Taylor on My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys

#!!!!! #taylor swift

[yiangchen]

another thing that struck me about the anthology songs is that the first half seems to be mostly chronological: she misses joe, she tries to get him back, she redeems herself in the eyes of those who imprisoned her, she wonders what could’ve been with matty, she leaves joe, she falls for travis. then the rest of the album seems to go back in time through various major events in her life, concluding with two songs about childhood (her own and someone else’s). she ends the album with the manuscript, a song about the transitional time between girlhood and adulthood, the one story that explains why she turned into a tortured poet in the first place… except that story isn’t hers anymore.

#taylor swift