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thefirstknife · 11 months

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New article with more details (from Jason Schreier who first broke the story). If you can't see it, I'll copy the whole text under read more.

About 100 employees were laid off in total (8%) and one of the main reasons listed is "underperformance," "sharp drop in popularity" and "poor reception of Lightfall."

So you know when for the last year and a half content creators have been shitting and pissing on the game as a full-time job and the amount of negativity and ragebait content became the only thing to make content about for them? Well they certainly won't take the blame, but I will let it be known. These people either don't understand the influence they have or they do and they're doing it on purpose, and I don't know which of these two options is worse, but I am 100% confident that their campaign of rage and hate contributed to this.

You don't base your entire community around constantly hating everything about the only game you play (despite clearly not enjoying it anymore) and somehow avoid galvanising thousands and thousands of people into perceiving the game negatively. Imagine being employees who have barely worked there for 2 years and the only community reception they've seen is 24/7 hate train for their work and then they get fired because of "poor reception" and "drop in popularity." How can they not take that personally? I am absolutely devastated for these people who delievered a banger product and who were met with an unrelenting barrage of toxic gamer children which ended up having more sway over their boss than them.

Which brings me to the next bit and that's FUCK THE CEO. He is now my mortal enemy #1. I am projecting psychic blasts directly into his brain. What an absolute spineless coward who is more willing to bow down to fucking gamers than to protect his own employees. This is absolutely rage inducing because this has happened before. From the article from 2021 about the toxic culture at Bungie:

Reading this shit from the new article absolutely fucking sent me into blind rage because I immediately remembered this. Another instance of employees suffering because of comments on reddit. And because of toxic players. And proof that leadership is not protecting employees and is instead siding with players.

Match made in heaven. Asshole gamer content creators and asshole CEOs, all of whom sit at home on piles of money made from someone else's labour. I hope they all explode. None of the people that worked on this game deserve this.

Another article with an infuriating comment from the CEO:

In an internal town hall meeting addressing a Monday round of layoffs that impacted multiple departments, Bungie CEO Pete Parsons allegedly told remaining employees that the company had kept “the right people” to continue work on Destiny 2.

"Kept the right people." Really. Veteran composers weren't the right people? Die!

Bloomberg article in full:

Bungie’s decision to cut an estimated 100 jobs from its staff of about 1,200 followed dire management warnings earlier this month of a sharp drop in the popularity of its flagship video game Destiny 2. Just two weeks ago, executives at the Sony-owned game developer told employees that revenue was running 45% below projections for the year, according to people who attended the meeting. Chief Executive Officer Pete Parsons pinned the big miss on weak player retention for Destiny 2, which has faced a poor reception since the release of its latest expansion, Lightfall. The next expansion, The Final Shape, was getting good — not great feedback — and management told those present that they planned to push back the release to June 2024 from February, according the people, who asked not to be identified because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly. The additional time would give developers a chance to improve the product. In the meantime, Parsons told staff Bungie would be cutting costs, such as for travel, as well as implementing salary and hiring freezes, the people said. Everyone would have to work together to weather the storm, he said, leaving employees feeling determined to do whatever was needed to get revenue back up. But on Monday morning the news got worse: Dozens of staffers woke up to mysterious 15-minute meetings that had been placed on their calendars, which they soon learned were part of a mass layoff. Bungie laid off around 8% of its employees, according to documentation reviewed by Bloomberg. Bungie didn’t respond to requests for comment. Employees who were let go will receive at least three months of severance and three months of Bungie-paid COBRA health insurance, although other benefits, such as expense reimbursements, ended Monday, sending some staff racing to submit their receipts. Laid-off staffers will also receive prorated bonuses, although those who were on a vesting schedule following Sony Group Corp.’s acquisition of Bungie in January 2022 will lose any shares that weren’t vested as of next month. The layoffs are part of a larger money-saving initiative at Sony’s PlayStation unit, which has also cut employees at studios such as Naughty Dog, Media Molecule and its San Mateo office. TD Cowen analyst Doug Creutz wrote in a report Monday that “events over the last few days lead us to believe that PlayStation is undergoing a restructuring.” PlayStation president Jim Ryan announced last month that he plans to resign. Many of the layoffs at Bungie affected the company’s support departments, such as community management and publishing. Remaining Bungie staff were informed that some of those areas will be outsourced moving forward.

#destiny 2 #bungie #long post #and like i don't care what's anyone's opinion on lightfall. it doesn't matter #the expansion is fine. there's some bad shit in there as there is in every expansion #literally nothing on this earth was so bad to deserve the amount of vitriol that lightfall got #it was purely motivated by hate and rage from people who have clearly lost their interest in the game a long time ago #no one else normal enough would respond even to a weaker expansion this way. and lightfall wasn't even weaker #literally nothing ever released in destiny deserves to have comments bad enough to end up affecting employees #there's been some bad expansions/dlcs/seasons. whatever. none of them were like... gollum level. not even close #people genuinely treated lightfall like it personally killed their dog. it was insane. the reaction to it was insane.#it stemmed from people who should have stopped playing a long time ago and stopped being content creators for one game #i can't even properly explain just how long and tireless the ragebait content campaign for destiny has been #opening youtube and seeing 10 videos in a row of just complaining and bitching #opening twitter and seeing thousands upon thousands of posts and comments dedicated solely to hating the game #imagine being an employee trying to maintain some communication with the community #hippy was relentlessly bullied by people I've seen suddenly lamenting that she was fired. you caused this #they will never accept even a miniscule portion of the blame for this ofc. they will just keep claiming they don't have that influence #but they do. it's been proven years ago. in the same way #community comments DO reach devs and community comments DO influence what happens to them and the game #'the event is bad' 'meta is bad' 'pvp is bad' 'raid is bad' 'story is bad' stop playing. no longer asking.#it's a video game. if you hate it stop playing. you don't have to justify it to hundreds of thousands of people and take them with you #especially when it leads to employees taking the fall #so to all content creators who are appalled and baffled after spending 2 years hating the game: you did this.#and to the ceo even more: explode into dust and be forgotten

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wavesoutbeingtossed · 8 months

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Screaming from the crypt (or how the past haunts the present on Midnights)

I know it's been discussed so much since Midnights came out but just.

I love how there is such a clear narrative throughout the album (and perhaps especially on the 3am/Vault tracks). About questioning and regret and choices and coming to terms with all of it. It is one long story about how we're all a mosaic of the choices we make, each one taking something from us and leaving something else in its place.

(And now a disclaimer: I'm looking at this mostly through a narrator/subject lens, and trying not to dive too deeply into real-life events or speculation except for in a general sense. For this purpose I like to look at the body of work as art, like literature, because I find it makes it easier to see the common threads in the different songs and cohesion in the narrative.)

In looking at the 3am+ tracks in particular, it's fascinating how some turns of phrases or themes repeat themselves in different songs, in different contexts. (I'm only focusing on the non-standard tracks because there are too many songs and I'd be here all day but I bet I could do a part two lol.) I know many people have pointed out the parallels throughout her discography already and I’m not saying anything groundbreaking by writing this, but I love how these parallels run through in the same album, because it makes it seem like it's one long story, or at least, one long rumination on many different stories that are coalescing into a single narrative.

Battle (let’s go)

For instance, the one that jumped out at me when I started writing this post the other week was, "Tore your banners down, took the battle underground," in The Great War and "If clarity's in death, then why won't this die? Years of tearing down our banners, you and I," in Would've, Could've Should've. It's a story about staying stuck in the same cycle of reliving trauma and coping mechanisms and bad habits over and over again and fantasizing about how taking the “antagonist” out and gaining the upper hand for good would bring closure (WCS), but the truth is that nothing ever will. All that cycle does, though, is repeat itself in other situations, and in this case pushes someone away the narrator cares for (TGW). The difference is that the imagined battle in WCS is a two-way street in her mind (that is ultimately unwinnable because it was never a fair fight), but in TGW it's one-sided -- she's the one fighting dirty, taking shots, the way she'd been doing in her imagination (or nightmares) all these years. But the person in front of her isn't fighting back the way the person in her mind in WCS would, because their intentions are honourable instead of exploitative.

And that's paralleled in another pair of lyrics from the two songs, "And maybe it's the past talking, screaming from the crypt, telling me to punish you for things you never did," (in TGW) and "The tomb won't close, I fight with you in my sleep," (in WCS). In both cases, the funeral imagery makes it seem like this past event should be dead and buried in WCS, but it keeps rising from the dead, haunting her no matter what she does and in TGW, another (or perhaps the same?) tomb that won't close keeps unleashing new ways to hurt her and in turn the new person in her life. In other words, the trauma from the past continues to bleed into the present.

(Again from a literary point of view, I'm not saying the events of the two songs are linked IRL, but they're fascinating textual parallels on the album as a string of chapters, which is why Dear Reader is so compelling, but that's a whole other essay.)

To keep the battle motif going, there’s yet another parallel, this time between TGW’s "[You were a] soldier down on that icy ground, looked up at me with honor and truth," and You’re Losing Me’s "All I did was bleed as I tried to be the bravest soldier, fighting in only your army.” In the former, the subject is laying down his armour in the war she’s projecting onto him, waving the white flag, and she realizes that she’s about to destroy something if she doesn’t put her sword down too. By the time we get to YLM, the roles are almost reversed; at the very least they’re supposed to be on the same team, but in this case she’s doing all the heavy lifting, fighting for their relationship in contrast to his apathy killing it. It’s also pretty interesting (if not outright intentional) that one of the 3am+ editions of the albums starts with The Great War, where they find themselves in conflict (even if it’s in her head) that ends in a truce, and ends with You’re Losing Me signalling the end of the relationship, evidence that the resolution in the first song wasn’t an ending but merely a ceasefire before the last battle.

Putting the rest under a cut because this is waaaaay too long now ⤵️

(There’s also another metaphor there in The Great War with its battle imagery: World War I, aka The Great War, was supposed to be the war to end all wars, because loss on its scale was never seen before and when it ended, most thought never again would the world embroil itself in such battle, the horrors and implications were so devastating. Two decades later, the world found itself in WWII, with an even larger scope and more horrific consequences, the intervening time between the two a period of festering conflicts and resentment leading to some of the worst acts the world would see. Bringing real life into it for a second, there’s something a little poetic, though sad, about The Great War the song being about a fight that could have ended the relationship that they ultimately resolved and was meant to be evidence of the strength of their love, but so too did it end up being a period of détente, the greater battle coming for them years later. But that is not the point of this post.)

If one thing had been different

Another major theme in these editions is pondering the "what ifs?" of life, but I think it takes on even more significance in the broader context of the album in the lyrics of "I'm never gonna meet what could've been, would've been, should've been you," in Bigger than the Whole Sky and the repetition of would've/could've in Would've, Could've, Should've (I would've looked away at the first glance, I would've stayed on my knees, I would've gone along with the righteous, I could've gone on as I was, would've could've should've if I'd only played it safe, etc.) In both songs, the narrator is mourning an alternate course their life could have taken* and questioning what they could have done differently, in the aftermath of trauma and loss, and the regret that comes with that loss, and with the loss of agency in the situation because ultimately it was never in their hands. In an album full of questions, wondering about the path not taken, or the forks in the road that have led to a different version of your life, it's digging deeper into the contrast of choice vs. fate, action vs. reaction, dwelling on the past vs. moving on. When you're supposed to let go of the past, what do you do when it is holding your future hostage?

(*I know there are different interpretations/speculation about BTTWS which I am not getting into on main. I'm just saying that whatever the song is about, it's grieving something that never came to be. The literal origin of the song is less important to the album than the sense of loss it portrays. Whatever the inspiration is, it's crafted to tell part of the story of Midnights of ruminating over how, to borrow from her previous work, if one thing had been different, would everything be different?)

(Also I was today years old when I realized that the words are inverted in the two songs. Apparently I've been hearing BTTWS wrong this whole time.)

There's also an interesting tangent in the role of faith in both songs: in WCS, the events of the story cause her to lose her faith (e.g. "All I used to do was pray," "you're a crisis of my faith,") and question all the things she felt had been unquestionable until that point in her life (e.g. "I could have gone along with the righteous"), whereas in BTTWS, she questions whether that very lack of faith is to blame for the loss in that song ("did some force take you because I didn't pray? [...] It's not meant to be, so I'll say words I don't believe"). It's like pinpointing the moment her life changed and upended her beliefs (WCS), but as a result then leaving her unmoored in times of crisis because ultimately there's no explanation or comfort to be taken from what she used to hold true before that (BTTWS). The words she once relied upon to guide her have long since lost their meaning, but in times of trouble it leaves her wondering if that faith she once held then lost could have prevented this pain.

(Shoutout to WCS for being Catholic guilt personified lol.)

To keep on with the vaguely faith-y notions, an obvious parallel is the line in Would’ve Could’ve Should’ve about, “I damn sure never would've danced with the devil at nineteen,” and, "When you aim at the devil, make sure you don't miss," in Dear Reader. All of WCS is about her fighting with an antagonist who haunts her, with whom she wholly regrets ever becoming involved. DR could be seen as a reflection on that fall from grace, warning the audience that if you choose to go after the person (or thing) haunting you, make sure you do so clearheaded enough to be decisive. Again, these “devils” may not be related in real life: the IRL devil in DR could be speaking about her naysayers, or Kim*ye, or Scott & Scooter B, etc., meaning not to cross your enemies until you know you can win. But taking real life out of it and looking at it textually, I am intrigued by the link between WCS and DR, so that’s what I’m going with here. And perhaps that’s even the point in a wider sense; there will be multiple “devils” in your life, or threats to your well-being. If you’re going to commit to taking them down — whether it’s an actual person, or the demons inside you that refuse to let you go — make sure you have the right ammo so that they can no longer hurt you. (Of course, one lesson from these experiences is that sometimes you can’t win, and you have to live with the fallout.)

(Sidebar: I know that “dancing with the devil” is a turn of phrase that means being led into temptation and engaging in risky behaviour, as opposed to describing the actual person. Given the religious metaphors in the song, that could very well be/is the intention, particularly when it’s preceded by, “I would have stayed on my knees” as in she would have continued to follow her faith — in whatever sense that means — had she never met this person, which could also be a more eloquent way of saying she would have continued to be live her life in a way that was righteous (even naive) and seen the world in black and white. Either way, it’s a force she wholly rejects. Like I said, multiple devils, same fight.)

Regret comes up too: in WCS, she says, "I regret you all the time," obviously directed at the person who manipulated her and led to her perceived downfall, citing him as the one impulse she wished she'd never followed, because it won't leave her no matter how hard she’s tried. In High Infidelity, she tells the person to, "put on your records and regret me," and on the surface, it’s like she’s turning the tables, painting herself as the one now causing the regret in someone else, the one inflicting the pain this time. Yet the verse preceding it and the lines following it in the chorus depict a partner who is also emotionally manipulative and vindictive like in WCS (“you said I was freeloading, I didn’t know you were keeping count,” “put on your headphones and burn my city,”). It’s not so much that she’s intentionally harming the person (the way the person in WCS does to her), but rather that the venom in the subject’s feelings towards her seeps through; she’s imagining the way he’s going to feel about her when she leaves, hating her just for by being who she is. (There could be another tangent about how in both songs she’s there to be a “token” in a game for both of the men, who play her for their own purposes.) The regret is dripping with disdain. It’s as though she’s picturing how the person is going to hate her for doing what she’s thinking of doing the way she hates the person who first hurt her.

Sadness, unsurprisingly, shows up in a few lyrics. In BTTWS, “Everything I touch becomes sick with sadness,” sets the scene of a person so overcome with grief that it permeates everything around them; they cannot see their way out of it and feel like the fog will never lift. In Hits Different, it’s, “My sadness is contagious,” the result of a breakup where the person’s grief again touches everything and everyone around them, pushing them further in their despair and loneliness. The reason behind the grief in either case may vary, but regardless of the source, the feeling is overpowering and isolating. They may be different chapters in the story, but the devastation is hauntingly familiar. (As is a recurring theme in Midnights as a whole: there are situations and feelings that present themselves at different points in her journey and colour in the lines in different ways along the road. Like revisiting an old vice and realizing the hit isn’t quite the same as it was in the past.)

Death by a thousand cuts

She also writes about wounds on this album, which isn't surprising I suppose given that the whole conceit is that these are things that have kept her up at night over the years. WCS is perhaps the driving narrative on this never ending hurt when she sings, “The wound won't close, I keep on waiting for a sign, I regret you all the time,” suggesting that no matter what she does, the pain of this experience has permeated everything she’s done afterwards. (Not unlike the overwhelming grief in BTTWS, for instance.) Elsewhere, in High Infidelity she sings, "Lock broken, slur spoken, wound open, game token," and in Hits Different, "Make it make some sense why the wound is still bleeding.” Again I'm not suggesting they're about the same events; the line in HI is about a situation where a partner crosses a boundary, hits below the belt, picks at an insecurity (or creates a new one) and treats the relationship like it's transactional, opening the floodgates in turn. In HD, the wound seems to be more self-inflicted, where she's pushed the person away. (Over a situation real or imagined she feels she needs distance from.) But again, something has picked at her like a raw nerve, and just like in the past, she's hurting, even in a different time and place and person. Almost like the wounds of the past break open over and over again to create new scars. If one were to extrapolate further, it wouldn’t be the biggest leap to wonder if the wound open in WCS, then torn apart in HI makes the one in HD hurt even more.

(I once wrote a post about how I think as time goes on, WCS is going to turn into one of those songs that will be found to drive so much of her work, because it’s just… kind of the unsaid thesis statement of so much of her songwriting.)

Another repeated theme is that of the empty home and loneliness. In High Infidelity, she sings, "At the house lonely, good money I'd pay if you just know me, seemed like the right thing at the time," painting a picture of someone who may have everything they'd want to the outside world, but in reality feels metaphorically trapped in their home (or at least alone amidst abundance), a symbol of a relationship gone sour and a failure to build connection. She just wants someone to understand her, want her for her, but as she's written earlier in the song, she's just a pawn in the game, a trophy from the hunt. Home, in this case, is lonely, isolated, an emblem of her fears. In Dear Reader, she continues this thread, then singing, "You wouldn't take my word for it if you knew who was talking, if you knew where I was walking, to a house not a home, all alone 'cause nobody's there, where I pace in my pen and my friends found friends who care, no one sees you lose when you're playing solitaire." It's the same idea, admitting to listeners that the gilded cage she lived in kept her distanced from her loved ones and real connection, keeping her struggles close to the vest but feeling desperately lonely amidst her crowning success. She's pushed people away and it may have felt like the right thing at the time, but in the end maybe felt like she was trapped. And when you push people away, eventually they take you at your word and stop pushing back; you’re a victim of your own success at isolating yourself. What starts out of self-preservation then further perpetuates the underlying problems.

(There's another interesting link about "home" also feeling unsafe with HI's "Your picket fence is sharp as knives," which further leads into the theme of marriage/domesticity feeling dangerous, which is a whole other thing I won't get into here because it's another discussion and may derail this already gargantuan word salad.)

In a slightly similar vein, we have the metaphor of bad weather for a rocky road or unstable relationship, in High Infidelity again with, "Storm coming, good husband, bad omen, dragged my feet right down the aisle" and You’re Losing Me’s "every morning I glared at you with storms in my eyes.” They aren’t speaking of the same situation or even same kind of breakdown, but it is pretty interesting how the idea of clouds/storms/floods/etc. play such a role in Taylor’s music to signal depression, apprehension, fear, uncertainty, etc. In HI, I think the “storm” coming is the looming threat of commitment to a partner who makes the narrator uneasy (if not fearful). In this case, the idea of making a life with this person is not one that incites joy or comfort, but instead makes the narrator feel that dark times are ahead if she continues down this path. Perhaps in some way, the “storms” in YLM have made good on the threat in HI in a different way; it’s a different home, a different relationship, but the clouds have settled in regardless, and some of her fears have come to fruition in ways she did not expect. The person she once trusted no longer sees her or her struggles (or worse, doesn’t care), and the resentment and pain build with each passing day.

Coming back to heartbreak, one of the obvious "full circle" moments is the beginning of a relationship in Paris, where she says that, "I'm so in love that I might stop breathing," clearly enthralled in a new love that allows her to shut the world out and grow in private, capturing the all-encompassing nature of the relationship. This infatuation has consumed her in the most wonderful way (in contrast to the sorrow of some of the previous songs), and it feels like a life-altering (or even life-sustaining?) force that is so strong she may forget what it’s like to breathe. (Metaphorically speaking, of course.) By the end of the album, though, in You're Losing Me, that heart-stopping love has become a threat: "my heart won't start anymore for you." In the former, her racing heart is full of excitement, but by the latter, her heart has given out completely under the weight of the pain she bears. (YLM is full of death/illness imagery which I already wrote about awhile ago so I won't hear, but needless to say that song deserves its own essay for so many reasons.) She's gone from the unbridled joy of the beginnings of a relationship to the unrelenting sorrow of its end, two sides of the same coin.

Love as death appears elsewhere in the music too, for instance, in High Infidelity’s, “You know there's many different ways that you can kill the one you love, the slowest way is never loving them enough" and You’re Losing Me’s “How can you say that you love someone you can't tell is dying? […] My face was gray, but you wouldn't admit that we were sick.” Though not completely analogous situations, they both tell the tale of one partner’s apathy (or at least denial) destroying the other. In the former, the partner’s actions (or inaction) are more insidious, if not sinister; in the latter, the lack of momentum (or admission of a problem) is passive. In both cases, the end result is the narrator’s demise; it’s a drawn out affair that chips away at her morale and her health and her sense of self. (Breaking my own rule about bringing in alleged actual events into the discussion, but the idea that the relationship in High Infidelity, which was obviously fraught with unease and even fear, ended in a similarly excruciatingly slow and hurtful death by a thousand cuts as the relationship in You’re Losing Me almost did at that time must have been so painful. It almost feels like YLM is wondering why what used to be a source of light in her life was mirroring a situation that caused her such pain in the past.)

From the same little breaks in your soul

I said early on that part of what is so compelling about Midnights is that it feels like an album about ruminating — on choices, on events, on people — and the two final “bonus” tracks of the album depict that as well. In Hits Different, she sings that, “they say if it’s right, you know,” an ode to the confusion of a breakup and struggling with the aftermath of calling it quits. It’s a line that has always intrigued me, because the typical use of the phrase is in the sense of, “you’ll know when you meet the one,” but here it seems to have a double meaning, a reassurance perhaps from the friends (who later on tell her that "love is a lie") that she’ll know if she’s made the right decision in calling it off, but could also be her wondering if the relationship is right, she’ll know, and want to reconcile. In the final bonus track, You’re Losing Me, she sings, “now I just sit in the dark and wonder if it’s time,” this time leaving no doubt about the dilemma she faces, though it’s no less fraught. She’s wondering, perhaps for the last time, if now is finally the moment to end the relationship for good. They say that if it’s right she’ll know, and now she’s wondering if that feeling inside her (that once told her her partner was the one, which is why it hit differently), is telling her that it’s time to go for good. Wait Alexa play “It’s Time To Go.” These are not only the things that keep her up at night, but the things that play over in her mind like a film reel in her waking hours.

Midnights as a whole is a deeply personal album, as is most of Taylor's work, but the 3am+ edition tracks seem to dig even deeper to a lot of the issues raised on the standard album. Almost like the standard tracks are the things she wonders about on sleepless nights, but the bonus tracks are the things that haunt her in the aftermath. The regret, anger, sadness, grief, relief, even joy— they’re the price she pays for the memories she keeps reliving. Midnights might be the most cohesive narrative of all her albums, and really does feel like we’re watching someone work through her journal over time, stopping short of outright naming those giant fears and intrusive thoughts (except for when she does) but making them plain as day when you connect the songs together, and perhaps never more clearly than in the expanded album. It’s incredible how the songs stand on their own to relay a specific moment in time, but that they are also self-referential to each other (whether thematically or overtly) to weave a larger web over the entire work. We’re so lucky as fans to have these stories and to keep peeling back these layers as time passes. (And my literature-analysis-loving ass loves her even more for it.)

This is obviously by no means an exhaustive list, and I know there are more parallels and probably even stronger links (particularly when you add the standard version into the mix), but these were the ones that particularly struck me and I’m just glad I’ve had a chance to sit with this and think it through. ❤️

#writing letters addressed to the fire #me thinking too hard about taylor lyrics #taylor swift #midnights #long post #lyrics analysis #song parallels #Gabby this one is for you friend <3 #here goes nothing #Happy Friday or something idk!#(also i know i said there are things i wouldn’t discuss on main but my dms are open lol)#this is not as structured or well plotted out as I wanted it to be #and turned out to be more stream of consciousness than legit essay #but whatever at least i got my thoughts out there and it can release some plot of land in my brain for other stuff to think over lol #If anyone ever reads this thank you! And I’m sorry?#The best compliment i ever got in school #was when we were doing an analysis of a poem in English lit in college #And i brought something up casually #and my prof went ‘I’ve been teaching this class for eight years and that’s the first time anyone’s ever brought it up like that’#’and that just blew my mind’#and i was like ‘who me?’#so that’s all you need to know about me lol #Midnights: The Great War #Bigger than the whole sky #bttws #Midnights: Paris #Midnights: high infidelity #would’ve could’ve should’ve #Midnights: dear reader #midnights: bigger than the whole sky

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