#i have also conquered a major fear (drawing any instrument)

[slydiddledeedee]

sold his soul

Image ID: Jade Curtiss from Tales of the Abyss playing the violin, wearing a black tuxedo and a light blue shirt.  He is concentrating on playing.  The music emanating from him are the first 28 measures of Paganini’s ‘Caprice in A Minor.’

[ckret2]

“You’re so vain” “Give em hell kid” And “I hope you die” I’d love to hear those explanations

Righto! Okay so recap for the people who might have missed it, this is about the radiosnake playlist I mentioned/linked a bit over a week ago, Serpentine & Demonswing. When I posted it I also added an “and if you wanna know why any songs are on the playlist you’re free to ask.” The playlist is a work in progress so some of my answers are gonna be “so here’s the explanation for why it was included but tbh I’m not 100% on keeping it.”

Important things to mention before getting into it: the playlist is build specifically off my headcanons from “Cold Day In Hell,” and so all of the songs act on the assumption that CDIH is “canon.” (tl;dr: they’re exes, because Alastor got scared of emotional intimacy, told Sir Pent he never actually liked him, and ran off after blowing up all his airships.) The first chunk of songs is from Sir Pent’s perspective, the second chunk is from Alastor’s, the third is from them both or about them both, and the last few songs are “I like the vibe but honestly am not sure this fits the playlist.”

Also, y’all are welcome to keep asking me about songs, because this is a lot of fun.

I’m absolutely sure that tumblr is going to delete this read more out of the post but I’m going to put one anyway, maybe it’ll let this one work just to be contrary. If it doesn’t, I apologize for the dash stretcher, that’s just how tumblr do.

So! Explanations:

You’re So Vain (Lyrics)

This one is on the Sir Pentious side, so, although it’s not directly/accurately about Alastor, it is about how Sir Pent sees him in light of their catastrophic breakup.

Verse 1 is less on the nose in its description of Alastor, but you get the impression of someone who is obsessed with how he comes across to other people, and who is far more interested in himself and the image he’s giving off than he is in any of the people he’s trying to impress. A great deal of Alastor’s personality is—or at the very least, comes off as—completely performative. As though to this day he’s still nothing but a radio host performing for a listening audience, even when he’s only talking to one person. The fact that he’s always wearing a fake smile and pointedly providing his own sound effects adds to that impression of a performer who never breaks character.

And the fact that the character in the song is still wholly self-absorbed even when he’s dancing with a partner gives a nice little glimpse into how Sir Pent’s retroactively reinterpreted his last evening with Alastor.

Verse 2 is the stanza that comes closest to completely accurately reflecting what went down between them. First, the alliance between them, the implicit promises that they the were going to conquer Hell and then Heaven as partners in crime—“Well, you said that we made such a pretty pair / And that you would never leave”—and then, the breakup—“But you gave away the things you loved / And one of them was me.” It’s the one line that acknowledges that the character in the song did, indeed, actually love the singer, and wasn’t just performing a role/playing at being in love.

It’s also a line that would ring false to Sir Pentious, because in the aftermath of CDIH, he genuinely doesn’t believe that Alastor ever loved him. He completely buys Alastor’s claim that he was just screwing around with Sir Pent’s emotions for his own entertainment. Words to the effect of “one of [the things you loved] was me” would never come out of Sir Pent’s mouth.

However. Of all the lines in all of the songs in Sir Pent’s portion of the playlist, that one line is the most accurate thing that could be said about Alastor, the blade that would stab into the core of who he is and the role that he played in this story. Because of his vanity—his selfishness, his pride, his obsession with his own independence, his fear of love, his fear of vulnerability, his fear of sharing his life with someone else, etc.—he didn’t just lose what he loved, he did very deliberately and intentionally give it away.

(I’ve always found that line to be the most interesting in the song, for the hint that this vain person did indeed truly feel for someone else, so I’m glad that line fits so well here.)

Verse 3 is just more “what Alastor is like as observed by Sir Pent,” except even more accurately than the first stanza. Constantly running around, constantly moving on from one brief source of entertainment to another (just stuff “threw his support behind the Happy Hotel” somewhere between “gambled on a horse race” and “watched an eclipse”), constantly socializing with dangerous people and people whom he’s going to hurt without caring in the slightest.

Okay so that’s the lyrics.

Making sure the aesthetics/styles/genres of the songs match the character they’re for is one of my high priorities on this fanmix—not to the extent that having the wrong style is an instant dealbreaker, but I’m going to be hesitant to include a song that doesn’t at all match the sound I’m going for. For Sir Pentious, I’m kind of running with two styles.

The first style is “sounds Victorian-ish enough to get a shrug and a nod from anybody who doesn’t actually know/care about Victorian-era music,” so that’s gonna be just about anything orchestral/symphonic that doesn’t clearly fall into a different genre, symphonic metal that sounds symphonic enough to satisfy me, instrumental covers of other songs (string quartets, piano, full orchestra...), things with harpsichords (LISTEN i know that harpsichords are more baroque but they’ve got the right Vibe, you know, they’ve got the Feeling), and things with organ—but like, it’s gotta sound like pipe organ (pipe organ—sounds like a church) and not like Hammond organ (Hammond organ—sounds like a baseball game). Also steampunk, except a lot of “steampunk” genre music sounds swingy/jazzy, so those songs get ruled out because that’s Alastor’s aesthetic. And also, like, actual classical music, but I’m not into a lot of actual classical music, so I don’t think any’s actually made it in yet, lmao.

The second style is based on what the creator herself said about Sir Pent’s music preferences: “Sir Pentious would listen to Blink-182. Pentious would literally listen to stuff like Linkin Park, Green Day, the emo stuff.” So I took "the emo stuff” as “oh okay cool so the stuff I listened to at 15 got it” and ran wild with that. I’ve been most heavily drawing from My Chemical Romance, Panic! At The Disco, and Mindless Self Indulgence to represent that half of Sir Pent’s preferences. (MSI because I feel like that fits an in-your-face and morally jaded villain, P!ATD because their newer stuff fits his flamboyance and exuberance and egotism, and MCR because... because I know them best.) I haven’t yet made much time to carefully comb the discographies of the other bands listed or look into other more traditional emo-associated acts.

Carly Simon’s original “You’re So Vain” matches neither of these styles.

I combed through about 60 different versions of “You’re So Vain” on Spotify looking for ones that meet one of these aesthetics. Like 90% of them were, I’m pretty sure, just various singers adding their vocals directly over a karaoke version of Carly Simon’s original.

In the end, the only one that came close was Marilyn Manson’s cover. He’s a bit outside of the bounds I try to stick in for Sir Pent, but like, okay, he’s industrial metal, but in a particularly goth way, that’s close enough to emo. To my mind, “Sir Pent listens to emo” is like... Sir Pentious’s musical preferences are going to be, 1) counterculture, the kind of stuff that causes conservative Christian moms to go into moral panics, but also 2) mainstream counterculture, the kind of bands that produce huge hits & get featured in major blockbuster movies, but also also 3) slightly dated mainstream counterculture, i.e., at the end of the 2010s he’s listening to the bands that may still be popular but that peaked in the mid 2000s, in keeping with the way he’s trying to keep hip and modern but always seems a little bit behind.

So, in the 2010s, he’s listening to 2000s emo acts. In the 2000s, he was listening to the 1990s’ biggest metal acts (like Marilyn Manson) and possibly grunge acts (things like Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins). In the 1990s, he was listening to the 1980s’ biggest post-punk and new wave acts (like The Cure, Joy Division/New Order, Depeche Mode). Always evolving his stylistic preferences, always trying to keep up, but always a little behind. So that’s how I justify putting Marilyn Manson in lmao.

Although that was the only version of “You’re So Vain” I thought fit well enough, I also found a version by Trash Pour 4, a version by Les Reed Orchestra, and a version by Giant Sand that were all very good. Trash Pour 4 is driving me crazy because I can’t quite figure out what genre they are, I just can’t place them—but they’ve got several other good covers that I’d like to take advantage of at some point.

I also found a song called “You’re So Vain (Christian Dior)” by The Energy Commission that’s not a cover of Carly Simon’s song, just a new song with the same name. I’m lowkey considering including on Alastor’s side of the playlist. It’d serve as a very sharp critique of how image obsessed Sir Pent is, there’s some snappy turns of phrase that seem like they’d appeal to Alastor’s sense of humor (my two favorites are “He went off the deep end ‘cause he’s so shallow” and “He’s got a timepiece on his wrist and it says ‘watch me’”), the fact that it’s a critique specifically of high class materialism fits with the fact that I headcanon Sir Pent as coming from British nobility while Alastor’s ancestry is both racially and socially mixed (including at least one close relative who was a slave, I’m thinking a grandparent but haven’t settled on my headcanons yet), and I love when there are parallels like that in playlists about the relationship between lovers/partners/rivals/siblings/any-combo-of-two-people.

The reason I haven’t added it yet is because, by the end of the song, it’s not just a critique of being a rich shallow image-obsessed douche, but specifically of how that culture ties in to exploitative capitalism that’s wrecking human lives and the world—which, in the context of the characters we’re talking about here, would translate into a criticism of Sir Pentious’s very-imperialist-sounding take-over-the-world villain ambitions. Which isn’t something I think Alastor cares about. He probably should, but like, he just doesn’t. He’s a villain himself. I’m sure he’s got his own morals and standards and hard limits but “take over the world” isn’t on his list of dealbreakers. What’s taking over the world include? Mass murder and subjugation? Yeah, he’s cool with that. So that’s why I’m still on the fence about adding it.

Give ‘Em Hell, Kid (Lyrics)

So remember how I said that My Chemical Romance is one of the bands I’ve drawn from most heavily so far in looking for emo Sir Pent songs? Yeah for about a day there were six different MCR songs sitting in Serpentine & Demonswing as I slowly whittled them down to the ones that I thought fit best. “Give ‘Em Hell, Kid” is one of the last three, and actually one that I’m constantly on the verge of cutting.

Lyrically, it’s an Alastor song. There’s mentions of the singer having come from New Orleans (listen... i am a sucker for songs that mention New Orleans, it automatically earns five points on the imaginary “is this an Alastor song?” rubric in my head). The singer is singing about a love interest who’s gone, and he’s making no moves to pursue/reclaim the love interest, wishing them well (“So go on, live your life”), but he’s a wreck and a lesser person without them (“If you were here, I'd never have a fear,” “Well I'm a total wreck and almost every day”), and it’s just getting worse with time, not better (“But I miss you more than I did yesterday”).

The line “Some might say we are made from the sharpest things you say” although directed toward “you,” i.e. the love interest, i.e. Sir Pentious, in my head actually reflects more on the things Alastor said to Sir Pentious: the cruel things he said to Pent—that he’s weak, ineffective, behind the times, a has-been, never going to conquer hell—ended up a self-fulfilling prophecy, because that’s exactly what Alastor’s rampage made happen. Today, as he is now, Sir Pentious is made from the sharpest things Alastor said.

“Your dreams and your hopeless hair” makes me think of Sir Pent’s wild efforts to conquer hell (and, of course, his ridiculous cobra hood), and “We never wanted it to be this way for all our lives” is a perfect expression of Alastor’s regrets/remorse over what his actions have done to both of their lives, but especially to Sir Pent’s life.

And all the references to violence—murder scenes, firing squads, sharpest things—fit with the fact that both of them chose to live lives soaked in blood.

So it’s a perfect Alastor song. The only problem is, it’s an MCR song, which is sooo far outside of my acceptable genres for him. (I’m not gonna get into Alastor’s genres now bc there are better songs to do that on, just know emo ain’t it.) And not only is it outside of his acceptable genres, it’s in the OTHER character’s acceptable genres, which is very messy. I can vibe with “lovers’ songs borrowing from each other’s aesthetic” a LITTLE bit when it’s used to represent, like, emotional synchronicity or the like (ex: both “Roustabout” and Vernian Process’s “Maple Leaf Rag” are on my “Alastor+Sir Pent style fusion songs” list). But MCR is a big departure from Alastor’s acceptable styles.

Plus, the playlist already has two MCR songs, and do I really need three songs from the same band? Unless there’s a really good reason, I try to avoid having repeats from the same band on one playlist—I feel like a good well-rounded fanmix oughta have a diversity of sources. (With “a really good reason” being something like “I’ve got the playlist divided into five sections detailing five phases of the character’s life and each section is introduced with a different track from the same band” or “I’ve got an instrumental version of the song to kick off the playlist to serve as ‘foreshadowing’ for when the version with lyrics shows up at the most dramatic moment” or something like that.)

If I was going to, like, make it a thing, I could. Justify it like “there’s one MCR song that represents them when they’re together, one MCR song from Sir Pent’s perspective, and one MCR song from Alastor’s perspective, like a little triangle,” but like... if I was going to do that I feel like I’d want to do it with a style that’s either representative of both of them or else independent of both of them, and MCR is so heavily a Sir Pent sound. Basically, having three songs from one band would be okay if it was a band that vibes with the overall tone I’m shooting for in the playlist—but it’s not. So I’m very torn on “Give ‘Em Hell, Kid.”

“El Tango De Roxanne” + “Overture” + “I Hope You Die”

Okay before I can talk about “I Hope You Die” by itself, I kind of have to explain its exact position in the playlist and its relationship with the other two songs I just listed.

While MOST of the playlist is chunked up into the four sections I mentioned earlier (Sir Pent, Alastor, both, undecided), within those sections the songs aren’t really in any particular order. The one exception is the very first three songs on the playlist/the very first three songs in Sir Pent’s section.

These three songs, presented in that order, all as Sir Pent songs, serve as Sir “in war, the side remembered is the side with the most style” Pentious the Super Villain making his big entrance like:

“El Tango De Roxanne” starts slow/quiet, and then (with a couple of brief dips) it gradually builds in volume and pain and intensity, getting faster and more emphatic, switching from mournful longing to nearly-angry anguish, until it ends with a pained scream, steampunkish percussion, howling background singers, and a wailing violin.

And then it pauses, for just a moment.

And then “Overture” hammers you with the most dramatic opening chord you will ever hear on an organ in your life, perfectly matching the energy at the end of “El Tango De Roxanne” and maintaining that level of energy throughout the song.

And then it stops so quickly it’s like someone gasped, holding its breath for a split second—and then some dude yells “You must die! I alone am best!” and the guitars kick in for “I Hope You Die,” leading into a depiction of the most intense, vitriolic, disgusting sort of loathing imaginable.

The build-up from “El Tango De Roxanne” and “Overture” really revs up “I Hope You Die,” the intensity of the organ in “Overture” highlights the intensity of the guitar in “I Hope You Die,” and all together it hypes up what could have been just a dark humor song about hating someone into something that sounds like a very genuine demonstration of hatred.

And taken all together, it makes for a fantastic intro for Sir Pent.

It also serves as a perfect intro to the current state of affairs between him and Alastor—sort of expressing his personal emotional journey on the morning Alastor betrayed him, as his reaction transforms over the course of three songs from grief/despair to fathomless fury.

There’s more I could say individually about “El Tango De Roxanne” and “Overture,” but I won’t, because it’s “I Hope You Die” time.

“I Hope You Die” (Lyrics - warning for a whole stanza dedicated to hoping someone gets raped in prison)

A small handful of the songs in my Hazbin playlists were discovered in and added from existing Hazbin character playlists I found on Spotify before I started making my own. “I Hope You Die” was one of them, found here. Which is why it was added even though it doesn’t fit my strict genre standards, it won me over before I narrowed down the styles I’m working with lmao.

(I feel like “El Tango De Roxanne” was one of those too, but I can’t now find a Spotify playlist containing it that added it before I did. Where did I grab it from? It’s not something I would’ve looked up on my own, something must have inspired me. IDK what though. None of the other songs mentioned in this post were found on other playlists.)

So this song is, obviously, just about how much some dude hates somebody else and wants extremely horrible things to happen to them. It’s sorta... *eyes lyrics uneasily* ... sorta tasteless; but, tasteless in a way that I feel like reflects back on the character singing the song. The feeling I come away from after finishing the song isn’t “the band wants you to think the person they’re singing about deserves this to happen to them,” because it doesn’t even give a reason why the singer hopes this person suffers; but rather, “the band wants you to think that this is the kind of hatred that the character/persona the singer is portraying is capable of, this is the kind of vile stuff that character wants to see done to their enemies, this is representative of the depths of that character’s rage.” Which is why I’m like “yeah... okay, sure, that fits” even though I’m real iffy about the last couple stanzas.

Because for a character who’s in Hell surrounded by people who have stomped on the last dredges of their civility and decency, and a character who’s patterned after a super villain (and, because the series creator dropped the idea that there are heroes/villains in the living world, the only super villain in this setting), and a character who gleefully boasts about being evil, and a character who we know demonstrates very rapid/extreme emotions and expressions of hate/outrage... Yes, I can absolutely see this song as the exact sort of hatred Sir Pentious would level at somebody who’s slighted him. And Alastor blew way the hell past “slighting” him. Alastor, without exaggeration, has ruined his life (afterlife?) and over fifty years later Sir Pent is still unsuccessfully struggling to get back up to the level he was at before he even met Alastor. Right now, Sir Pentious really and truly and deeply despises Alastor.

A song like this—sheer, frothing, unrestrained, vengeful contempt—tells you a whole lot about what kind of emotions Sir Pentious is capable; and it tells you a whole lot about the kind of effect Alastor’s actions have had on him, to inspire this level of reaction from someone who was very close to him for fifteen years and increasingly in love with him for probably a good amount of that time.

Plus, the “You must die! I alone am best!” is such a very, very Sir Pentious sentiment.

So that’s those songs! Again, y’all are free to ask me for my thoughts on more. Yes, most of them will probably be like this, lol.