poptart-cat-78 - Tumblr blog

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realizing things about i can do it with a broken heart

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I hate when people say ohhhh your pets only love you because you feed them. as if that wasn't the first form of love any of us felt. get real.

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mentally i’m here

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The only character who got the chance to meet all the important Olympian deities.

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Captain Swan + Improv

Bandage scene- Colin improved using his teeth, Jennifer didn’t know nor      expected it. 

Bed scene- Jennifer improved them falling on the bed. They were not    supposed to fall on the bed and Colin had no idea.

Goodbye scene- Colin improved the heartbreaking hand kissing, it was not in the script. (x)

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Captain Swan + Helping complete strangers, despite being in trouble themselves

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I've seen some people express some confusion about what Fortnight is about, why it opens the album, what's happening in the video, etc, so here's my attempt at an analysis. For the most part I'll be referring to the characters in the video with the names of the people playing them (Taylor and Post) but at times I'm going to be making direct reference to the events of Taylor's personal life and referring to the muses by their names (Joe and Matty) for the sake of clarity and simplicity.

The song itself uses the suburbia conceit as an extended metaphor for the beginning of her relationship with Matty (he's the neighbor she runs away to Florida with, Joe is the cheating husband.) For more eloquent and detailed thoughts on the narrative of the song you can check out Jaime @cages-boxes-hunters-foxes's post here.

The video is really dense, and I'm not 100% confident in every aspect of my interpretation, but I feel pretty sure that it's making extensive use of visual metaphor in order to tell roughly the same story as the song, just in a different setting. To start, Taylor wakes up chained to a bed in a white dress.

To me this suggests that she's been driven mad by being left at the altar, and is now trapped, surveilled and controlled, in a type of asylum. This represents the end of her relationship with Joe--waiting for a marriage that never came, feeling trapped, mentally unwell etc.

She then takes 'forget him' pills which reveal Post's tattoos on her face when she looks in the mirror.

This represents Matty (the "miracle move-on drug") and shows that he made a mark on her while she was still in the asylum--that is, still in her relationship with Joe. Additionally, in the wide shot where we see the mirror, its size and shape are very reminiscent of a one-way mirror, often seen in interrogation rooms and psychological experiments, further reinforcing the idea that Taylor is imprisoned here.

She then is able to go to the typewriter room and do her work, creating art about how she's feeling, shown by her repeatedly typing "I love you, it's ruining my life" on the typewriter. She's still in pain and feeling trapped. While there, she encounters Post and they create art together, which creates beauty and color in her life. The blue and gold obviously reference her writing about Joe, but the fact that her work is gold and Post's is blue may be a deliberate choice to draw parallels between Matty and Joe, as she does on numerous songs throughout TTPD.

The next scene, where Taylor's hair is down and she and Post are wearing the same black coat and pants, takes place inside her head (symbolized by the shape of the papers they're laying on.) She is dreaming about them being free and creating art together, represented by the papers surrounding them and book she's holding, which has the word "us" written on the cover. She's writing their story before it's begun.

She then reaches for his hand in her fantasy, accepting and asking for this relationship

Then we see that she's being studied and experimented on--the results of the lie detector test read "I love you, it's ruining my life." Her pain is an object of fascination.

Interestingly, Post is part of the group experimenting on her, but when the experiments begin to cause her pain, he liberates her.

This inspires Taylor to destroy the place where she's been trapped, which we see through her opening the filing cabinets that cover the walls and destroying the mirror. I also find the shot of her standing still while papers burn around her interesting and significant; I interpret this as Taylor destroying her own work about Joe. By choosing to leave, she is metaphorically burning--rejecting--the story she wrote about them.

Finally, Taylor and Post enter the dangerous outside world together; the rain echoes the lyric "I chose this cyclone with you" on the album's title track. While I do feel the meaning of Post being in the phone booth is somewhat ambiguous, the framing and the accompanying lyric--"I've been calling ya but you won't pick up" suggest that he's attempting to communicate with her but can't reach her. They are free of her prison, but still separated.

Then, he hangs up the phone and reaches for her hand, and she takes it. The final shot of the video is a close up on their linked hands, presenting us with a cautiously optimistic ending--they are lost and vulnerable in the middle of a storm, but they have each other.

I feel this is a somewhat less sinister, for lack of a better word, portrayal of the start of Matty and Taylor's relationship than is suggested elsewhere on the record, though I believe Post's character being part of the group experimenting on her is significant and the editing creates some ambiguity about exactly when and why she decides to break free. But I hope this clarifies how the video sets up the beginning of this story, the fallout of which is then chronicled over the course of the rest of TTPD.

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“Who uses typewriters anyway?” taylor is 100% someone who would use a typewriter

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TTPD + Themes: Marriage

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people always question taylor’s use of school metaphors in her music, and aside from the fact that it’s soooo present in all forms of media and widely understood/relatable, it’s interesting to remember that high school was the last time taylor felt normal before being catapulted to unprecedented levels of fame. it’s kind of her biggest crutch for comparisons because that was the last time she felt like she was just a girl, just having normal connections with other people.

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there are the same number of albums between folklore and TTPD as there are between speak now and reputation lmao

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a greater woman stays cool but i howl like a wolf at the moon and i look unstable gathered with a coven round a sorceress' table

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At some point in your life, you were taught that being slightly annoying is an unforgivable sin. Maybe it was by your parents or a teacher or a friend or a bully or an older sibling. But someone taught you that being slightly annoying is a crime punishable by death.

You must unlearn this.

You must accept that all people will be annoying at some point or another in their lives, maybe all of their lives, and that this is okay. It is okay for strangers on the bus, it is okay for children in the grocery store, it is okay for people on social media, and it is okay for you.

If you ever want to truly love your fellow humans, if you ever want to truly love yourself, you must have forgiveness for being annoying.

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i think something that people are missing about this album is how she's playing with expectation vs reality. so much of her obsession with matty had to do with this idea of she had of him in her head but when they actually got together it was just disappointing. neither of them lived up to their expectations of each other and the entire illusion collapsed. it just took her longer to realize it and he wasn't mature enough to end it with her so he ran

this is what you get in the contrast (lyrical/emotional but also sonic!!!) between tracks 6-9, which are floaty and joyful and fast and exciting and new, and tracks 10-14, which are dark and grim and brutal and painful

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Taylor Swift is an amazing songwriter wbk but she also has these little idiosyncrasies that are so *her* like the intentional whisper of ‘old habits die screaming’ and how she cuts off ‘how dare you say that it’s -‘, and how ‘so long London’ mimics the chime of Big Ben, and this goes back, mind you. the lyric ‘my stolen lullabies’ trails off like she was choked saying the last word (that lyric deserves it’s own essay but I digress), and she begins Last Kiss with 27 seconds of instrumentals for -reasons- and just. She’s not just a songwriter, she really is just incredibly talented and creative on all fronts, we just got lucky that she chose music as her baby.