#I guess I haven’t actually verified Fox’s significance in the new fixation on them but it seems obvious to me

[sivavakkiyar]

why ARE people so into leitmotifs now? I know you say it because of Toby Fox but they’ve been around forever and it’s like a particular fixation for a lot now

so I’ve got two ideas about this—-the first might sound dismissive but I don’t mean it that way, and the second might be wishful thinking which I don’t mind in reasonable doses. The kind of general assumption if we’re thinking about the same stuff here is that of course leitmotifs have been employed forever, but as they’re kind of demanded or expected nowadays they are almost verbatim reappearances of direct melody: I don’t think most people are thinking of like a Berg leitmotif, where it’s a direct reappearance but might not be immediately recognizable w/o the score.

1) Leitmotifs are an aspect of composed music that can most easily be ‘read’ in a way analogous to narrative reading, which is what’s popular in fandom (hence, generally). A leitmotif can be associated with a character, a place, sometimes a theme, and one can primarily understand and read their appearance as indicative of a direct message or as a call to reflect on various interrelations. Music is otherwise difficult to ‘read’, and many people believe that ‘reading’ is either inappropriate to music or requires intense theoretical knowledge.

2) this is the romantic one, which springboards off the latter…despite the widespread belief in pure primacy, I think more people actually *enjoy* engaging with music structurally, ‘intellectually’, ‘the craft’ etc than maybe many people might admit or want to. A leitmotif in this form immediately viscerally draws one’s attention to this things, and doesn’t require high amounts of theoretical knowledge: everyone knows by experience that you can’t just sing two melodies at once and have it magically work out, that it requires planning, presentation, etc. Hence a leitmotif is a kind of flex for composers, and is a kind of mark of that investment that you can kind of trust people ‘untrained in music’ to either notice or at least *appreciate* when it’s pointed out. As usual, there’s a kind of intimacy there that’s appealing and desired in a lot of musical relationships