#is it bad that YLM is my theme song right now

[sparklesmusicnotesandpawprints]

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[lovewithoutresin]

Here’s my take, if you don’t mind my sharing it. It’s not that I’m looking to strip TGW of its original meaning. It’s that when it came out, I was like, “okay. Another song where Taylor is entirely at fault.” That’s not to say it’s a bad song, but that the theme is everywhere - Afterglow, peace, TGW, even Anti-Hero if you think about it all depicted Joe as this perfect figure who had to put up with Taylor’s many problems. It bothered me then and it bothers me now. That’s not to say TGW isn’t telling the truth, but that I wonder if there’s more to the story. A war takes two people. And I do think “maybe it was her” is probably the only time in her discography pre-YLM that she’s ever been like “maybe you did something too” about Joe. The rest of the song is about how he wanted her to trust him, how he was broken and blue, looking at her with honor and truth, and how she nearly lost him because of her poison.

Idk, maybe it’s just because I was never particularly interested in Joe so I found it to be missing some part of the story from the beginning. And we won’t know anything for sure until TTPD. But I don’t think questioning its larger narrative, narrated by someone very much unreliable due to her bias against herself and toward him, especially after Joever, is necessarily rewriting it or an attempt to ruin it.

No this is fair. And I do get how it would be a bit difficult to swallow that Joe was never really considered the villain in any of these songs. Obviously it takes two for a relationship to have friction and she obviously rewrote things in her head to blame herself a lot.

I think my thing is that like. A lot of Taylor's writing abt that relationship has been about her struggle with paranoia. And for a LOT of people (I don't know if you posted abt TGW or anything recently but if so I promise my post wasn't an indirect just ftr) it seems like Joever negates this character trait of hers in some way, because oh! She was right! Something was wrong!

And maybe that is the case, and we won't know more until TTPD, but like... as someone w BPD (here's where the personal bias kicks in), Taylor's openness about her paranoia and flight risk tendencies has been one of the things I've connected to the most over the years. So I guess it's a bit off putting to see some of the suggestions that this is suddenly not something that's genuinely a flaw of hers that she grapples with, and that it was just her lying to herself all along, because it's sort of like... first off painting paranoia/jealousy issues that she portrayed herself as working on getting over as something to demonize, ig? That's a specific tone I've only seen in a couple of posts/other people's asks though, not a broad thing. But then it also feels like it negates the idea that she may have been honest about dealing with this in herself, and it feels like people are just too eager to jump on that train.

I do like what Jaime said sometime in the last 24 hours abt it being something she genuinely dealt with that was then weaponized against her, though. And I think it's possible a more nuanced take is in order where she does deal with this, but it was made to feel like this horrible aspect of her instead of a problem they could face together, or he used it against her to paint her as overreacting when she DID see problems for what they were, or... any number of things, honestly. We can't know for sure yet! I'm just not so quick to jump on the train that she's never been afraid and wrong before, which is the tone I do see a lot of.