#it’s not her fault u don’t understand metaphors and symbolism

[jentlemahae]

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[serialkillerinthemaking]

below the cut is my insanely long analysis of sa and its metaphors its bad but i did in an hour with a headache so it is what it is

analyzing sa even though it's been said so much it's redundant I just need a place to collect it all ya know

note: none of this is chronological to the story and its probably just going to be the song lyrics

there are many run-on sentences and grammar problems sorry. I'm writing this off the idea that everyone has a decent understanding of sa and its plot.

obviously, mama who bore is about Wendla’s mom not telling her about sex. mwbmr is the same thing except it shows none of the girl's mom tells them about sex.

all that's known starts with the boys robotically repeating Virgil's Aeneid before Melchior breaks out and starts singing. He explains that science and facts are pushed aside in favor of religion and his parents wanting him to fall in line and not question what is taught. that's the general theme of the song. he is determined not to become part of the hivemind and question what is taught. he wants to find and see and experience more than what they know of and are teaching in terms of the world and he himself.

He mentions the stars and them being sort of all-knowing. stars are brought up again in those you've known sort of being a metaphor for society and the children of his generation and the ones to come. In those youve known, he vows to read Moritz and Wendla's dreams to the stars because they are dead and can really communicate with him and therefore rely on him to spread the word of their thoughts and ideas and stories. this being a cautionary tale, those stories must be told.

he mentions the repression of free thought. children are naturally curious of the world around them but as they grow up the adults push them not to be and only to accept what we know now. he doesn't want to lose this and stop eternally searching for more. this is sort of put into the term "purple summer". meaning the story, the cause, the prevention, and the tragic beauty of the story. we'll come back to the meaning of purple summer itself.

he says one day all will know generally meaning what is happening beneath the surface and societies refusal to talk about it and explore it. in purple summer this comes back more concrete. instead of one day, more like a distant hope, he says all shall know. they will know now, soon, not one day in the distant future. In the end, his journey is complete and it goes from one day all will know to all shall know. 

tbol and my junk are pretty straight forward you guys don't need me for those.

touch me is basically about the yearning for sex and to know what is. there are some metaphors but they are pretty self-contained within the song itself and don't really have enough grasp on them to go too deep. either that or they're really not actually that deep lol.

woyb is basically about Melchior and Wendla wanting to be with each other and trying to resist the temptation because of oppression

The dark I know well is about the rape and sexual assault of Martha and Ilse at the hands of her father and artist friends, respectively. Again the song uses one central self-contained metaphor that is never brought up again in the context of the show and is pretty easy to understand. 

and then there were none has frau Gabor intermittently reading a letter she wrote in response to Moritz asking for money to escape. Moritz jumps in and sings his thoughts as he reads the letter and basically watches his last hope fall through. he feels she tries to sugarcoat the point of the letter. he is mad for saying things in an attempt to make him feel better and to try her best to help, such as writing a letter to his parents. she tells him she still cares for him but can't help him. he feels he has no other option left after failing his tests. you all know the plot you don't need me to explain it.

mirror blue night Melchior is horny blah blah blah I hate this song moving on

I believe while they disobey the church and its a church song irony yeah

(it's so late I'm sorry)

don't do sadness blue wind ohoho lets goooo

Moritz wishes to be a butterfly, no longer having to deal with life, and happily flying. he says he doesn't do sadness because he just can't handle it anymore. the failing the test hurt him and frau Gabor refusing to help was the straw that broke the camel's back. he can't take it anymore. Ilse comes in and sees he's sad. it's cold and dark outside symbolizing his current mood so she sings about the happiness of spring and summer to cheer him up. fall and winter are analogies for sadness and pessimism, spring and summer are happiness and optimism, hence spring awakening, the happiness coming back after the sad times. purple summer also references that but that's for later. she talks about when they were kids happily playing in the sun. wind, a cold sad month thing always comes back but it always goes away. happiness will always come and sadness will always go just like the seasons. Moritz is only living in fall and autumn, not seeing the spring and summer ahead. Ilse gets through her life through optimism relying on the blue wind never taking when it creeps up and always going away once again. and then it just kinda repeats you get the rest.

left behind. he never got to grow up and be an adult and its his parent's (mostly his dad's) fault. metaphor once again fully in the song not really brought up again.

you guys got the rest (more than sufficient critical conjecture on woybr) until WHISPERING whooo

she hears the ghosts because throughout she alive and dead. sort of. everyone is sad. she describes her family's grief at her funeral. the preacher uses her as a cautionary tale and warns others of her fate. they say she did bad things and this how she ended up. such a shame, such a sin. she feels powerless, like she didn't have a voice and only could do what was told of her. she didn't know any better despite her best efforts. she mentions summer longing in the wind. happiness being swept up by sadness was pretty much her whole "relationship" with Melchior.

👏those👏you've👏known

there is so much I'm just gonna analyze it line by line (i consider this the pinnacle of metaphors in theatre considering the buildup)

MORITZ

Those you’ve known

And lost, still walk behind you

All alone

They linger till they find you

self explanatory pretty much

Without them

The world grows dark around you

And nothing is the same until you know that they have found you

Melchior's world has crumbled, he feels like it never going to be the same without them, but he found them.

WENDLA

Those you’ve pained

May carry that still with them

All the same

They whisper: “All forgiven.”

He hurt her, and she's still hurting but she forgives him because there is love in heaven, all will be forgiven.

Still your heart says

The shadows bring the starlight

And everything you’ve ever been is still there in the dark night

everything she was was left behind, but she still finds it here.

WENDLA

When the northern wind blows

The sorrows your heart holds

There are those who still know –

They’re still home

We’re still home

he's still hurting, they're still there.

MORITZ (Sung In Counterpart)

Though you know

You’ve left them far behind

You walk on by yourself, and not with them –

Still you know

They will fill your heart and mind

When they say there’s a way through this

he's living and must continue without them but they are still there in his heart.

MELCHIOR, MORITZ AND WENDLA

Those you’ve known

And lost, still walk behind you

All alone

Their song still seems to find you

They call you

As if you knew their longing –

They whistle through the lonely wind, the long blue shadows falling

they are still there! 

MELCHIOR

All alone

But still I hear their yearning

Through the dark, the moon, alone there, burning

The stars too

They tell of spring returning –

And summer with another wind that no one yet has known

The stars are back! they are all knowing and tell of the sadness passing, the happiness returning, with something new.

(MORITZ and WENDLA Join with Counterparts)

They call me –

Through all things –

Night’s falling

But somehow I go on

You watch me

Just watch me –

I’m calling

From longing

a call back to all thats known

WENDLA (Sung in Counterpart)

When the northern wind blows

The sorrows your heart’s known –

I believe…

she still believes in forgiveness.

MORITZ (Sung in Counterpart)

Still you known

There’s so much more to find –

Another dream, another love you’ll hold

he doesn't have to be stuck on them and they are giving him permission to move on and find happiness again.

Still you know

To trust your own true mind

On your way – you are not alone

There are those who still know

a call back to all that's known, 

MELCHIOR (Sung Alone)

Now they’ll walk on my arm through the distant night

And I won’t let them stray from my heart

Through the wind, through the dark, through the winter light

I will read all their dreams to the stars

i dissected this line back in all thats known but STARS! they back

I'll walk now with them

I’ll call on their names

I’ll see their thoughts are known

they know now! all will know he knows and know they know! their story will be told!

WENDLA

Not gone –

Not gone –

they are still there!

MELCHIOR

They walk with my heart –

And I'll never let them go

they are still there!

I’ll never let them go

I’ll never let them go

You watch me

Just watch me

I’m calling

I’m calling –

And one day all will know

ALL👏WILL👏KNOW👏

P U R P L E  S U M M E R

purple has historically represented freedom, the kids now have freedom and summer here means happiness. so now they have both. purple summer is just yeah knowledge and freedom of oppression and the hivemind because this Germany 1890 bad (its a john Mulaney reference I'm so sorry im losing my mind)

And all shall know the wonder

I will sing the song of purple summer

All thats known, all will know all shall know. They will know because we will tell them.

And still, I wait

The swallow brings

A song of what's to follow -

The glory of the spring

The happiness! The knowledge! The freedom! Its coming! It waking it up! SPRING IS AWAKENING! ahhhhhhhhhh

[charismastaticarchive]

ok here’s a BRIEF. brief meta about sephiroth vs ardyn izunia representing how the queercoding in final fantasy has changed between ff7 and ff15 and how the remake could ACTUALLY fix some problematic themeatic elements of sephiroth (markedly, anti-semitism and transphobia thru symbols like jenova & the death of aerith)

this is discourse. this is solely discourse. some people may read this and think i am reaching. this is genuinely what i believe tho. i do not hate anybody that disagrees with me. i do not hate anybody who likes ff7. i also like ff7. this is just how i feel given my understanding of cultural and themeatic analysis. please do not read this if u are going to yell at me or hate me lol. this is my blog tho and i’m going to put my opinions out there....

note: i dont actually go into the anti-semitism too much that’s not my area of expertise i’m more knowledgeable about queercoding.

okay to start with. sephiroth is literally the same character as psycho’s norman bates. an obsession with their mother (a being that the rest of the game refers to as non-gendered whose genitals are notably covered in a flex that is admittedly problematic all on its own), that culminates with his mother ‘taking over’ their mind & body and sephiroth trying become a god and MURDER a ‘cis woman’ who has become the most iconic symbol of final fantasy church girl prayer-hands purity and innocence. even more damningly, this biohacked false god / false woman sephiroth has the audacity to go against the lifestream / the symbol of womanhood and NATURE by ‘transitioning’ into a new body. and of course, they want to blow up the world in the process to appease their mother. basically this game is a very reactionary fear to the concept of ‘biohacking’. the only thing worse than the government experimenting on human beings? trans women transitioning---in the narrative of the game’s eyes, ‘experimenting on themselves and going against nature.’ by making sephiroth the big bad of the game instead of shinra, they say that the ultimate evil of unethical technology and a cyberpunk dystopia, is basically trans people.

add TO THAT that even just the name sephiroth is from jewish kabbala and sephiroth is portrayed as a manmade god that u are supposed to destroy instead of a true god... like it just. it’s not great. it’s not a great look.

in their defense. the original game came out in 1992.

the last numbered final fantasy game to come out (not including kingdom hearts which has its own brand of racism and queercoding that it has to work out lmfao) was final fantasy xv.

for all final fantasy xv’s faults, it ALSO had a queercoded villain dripping in religious symbolism. (they all do. its final fantasy lol.) but THIS time, despite ardyn still looking just as if not moreso predatory than sephiroth. ardyn is given a FULL DLC BACKSTORY.

the difference between sephiroth and ardyn is basically that. ardyn in the dlc, where he is meant to be portrayed sympathetically, starts out as a queercoded character. he has basically the same design, except his hair is now in a ponytail, and he wears all white. he starts out as a healer---not a stereotypically masculine role, like a soldier. his hair is still fuckin pink. he wants to heal the whole world, and he absorbs the plague. he thinks he is healing people---instead he is just taking on their illness. (and i have done whole metas about how the plague was viewed as a punishment against humanity for going against god and how that could ALSO be a metaphor for queerness. there’s also a queerness to taking on other people’s disease in my opinion that reads like a metaphor for penetration.) in his inability to actually heal the world (or his failure in a traditionally female role) and his inability to take a decision and excute people with the plague like his more masculine, violent short-haired armor-wearing brother, he is chosen by the gods to be the bearer of the plague, spread it all over the world, and renew the world when the plague dies with him when the chosen male heir of his brother’s long line of heterosexuals kills ardyn. ardyn is rejected from heterosexual maleness by the gods in his own minds if he tries to go against this fate, his girlfriend literally pushing him out of heaven.

but he’s viewed as sympathetic. tortured. unlike sephiroth, who is portrayed as mostly just insane, ardyn is coded not just as monstrous, violent and predatory, but because of the plague metaphor, he is basically explicitly deemed ‘sick.’ and ardyn gets time shown where he is ‘holy’. notably, the game uses christian imagery to describe a kind of ‘sacrifice’ of his brother trying to imprison him in a tomb because he cannot die, and then ardyn waking up from the cusp of death to. technically bring salvation to the people of eos (by first infecting them with plague and bringing about eternal night, but hey, the rapture only comes after the world is destroyed, right).

there is something to be said about the sympathetic christian imagery and ‘holiness’ / ‘goodness’ of ardyn’s sacrifice and pain vs the antisemitism of sephiroth as a false god. but ardyn’s queercoding starts at the very beginning of his story. meanwhile---we don’t really get to SEE the beginning of sephiroth’s story. we get to see cloud’s story. and zack’s. and we kind of get like a whole story about like lol vincent for some reason lmfao

but we never get to see sephiroth experience signs of lgbt-ness at The Start Of His Story, where he is still viewed as sympathetic and wholly good and wholly tragic at the same time.

this is where the remake comes in.

i believe the remake can make sephiroth more than a predatory trans/queer coded character. i think they can fix this by making sure 1) sephiroth doesn’t kill aerith, thereby eliminating the trans woman vs nature AND trans woman vs poor defenseless cis girl narrative (i play aerith as trans and jewish but thats not technically canon even tho it should be lol) 

2) instead of sephiroth having an UNHEALTHY relationship with womanhood through an alien creature representing inhumanity, sephiroth has a healthy relationship with a jewish-coded goddess-like human woman that they COULD’VE GROWN UP WITH AND BEEN FRIENDS WITH AS A CHILD WHILE THEY WERE BOTH CAPTURED BY SHINRA, and through their friendship and relationship with her both as someone they experience the same trauma AND as someone who seems to understand time travel the same way as, we see their backstory and bond grow and sephiroth stops being obsessed with a canonly cishet man (cloud) and starts having a healthy loving relationship with their planet-protecting peers where sephiroth can start to represent a holy relationship with loving themself and the planet the same way aerith does. and it can be very jewish for bonus points bc i cannot get over the way that sephiroth is considered a false god / only a half angel and happens to be named that. that’s fucked up.

ok thanks for coming to my ted talk sorry for the discourse on main

[starsailorstories]

 @genderlessspacerock replied to your post

“Hey it’s nanowrimo eve and I really wanna talk about my book but can’t...”

4 and 5 asks the astronomer

@lando778 also asked for #5!

So here they are, finally:

4. Cosmologies:

To understand the mainstream view of the universe in the Cosmonist religion (and the older faiths that were eventually subsumed into it) you have to understand some stuff about astraea species and what they have in common:

All of their conscious mental processes AND “genetic”1 information are contained in the lights on their heads, which operate like mini-stars and follow stars’ life cycles

Before they had spoken language, they communicated by manipulating the beams of their lights, like a projector, and it’s still used by many species to indicate tone/expression rather than having a lot of auditory tone variation in their languages

Although it’s not super prominent in actual cosmonist teaching and practice anymore, the ancient equation of the stars and suns in the sky with the tiny “stars” that power astraea consciousness and biology is really important culturally, and light=life-force or light=spirit is an almost pan-galactic motif.

Because of all that, the light you emanate, your personal starshine as it were, is–both metaphorically and kinda literally–what you put out to the world while you’re in it. This is your praefulgeria–the effect of your soul on your current lifetime, which will be judged at your death.

Enter the Cosmic Prism.

A person’s praefulgeria is usually represented by a light beam. The universe is represented as a prism that scatters the light beam. The various points of the prism separate people into different species/positions/experiences based on the characteristics of their souls.

Prior to scientific advancements made about a generation before the story takes place, it was widely thought that the Andromeda galaxy lay in the center of the prism, and that the creator-goddess Orellistia had her home in the center of the galaxy. There are still those that cling to this idea but mainstream thinking has mostly shifted away from it (there’s no official word on the debate from the Aula so for now it’s free to shift where it may). Intergalactic sailors have been superstitiously honoring the Great Attractor as the locus of gravitational force (which is seen as the goddess’s will) for centuries, so eventually that may be accepted as the new “center”. But that really only matters if you’re, like, making an illuminated scripture anyhow.

The prism has five points in total: Excelsia, Limina, Ladiu, Longitu, and Altiu (those u’s are pronounced like schwas with tighter lips, think French).

Excelsia is the topmost point, and ideally your light bounces upward through your cycle of death and rebirth, presumably being freed from the cycle at the top--or at least, that’s the popular concept. The Levinoxian temples, when they existed, generally held that there’s no way to actually reach it before the reunion of the goddesses at the death of the universe, or else that the upward spiral is literally eternal--there’s always more to learn (although most believe some things are learned in other realms/dimensions after an enlightened-ish soul/praefulgeria has incarnated for the last time).

The lowermost point, Limina, is what it sounds like--a kind of limbo where souls that have fallen from grace with the cosmic order are judged and either healed or released to oblivion if they refuse to be. It’s not a place of punishment exactly, just sort of a...like...astral airport lobby where you’ve got nothing to do but think your shit out for an unimaginably long time. People with an agenda are fond of implying that ALL empty space in the universe is a part of Limina, and that as little as griping about your boss behind her back can land you there, but most folks who aren’t indoctrinated young dismiss that as utter raving b.s.--if not because they see the convenience of literally deifying the status quo, then because it’s just like, then what are all the other myriad possibilities for reincarnation for?

The other three points, as you might guess from their names, correspond to the axes of three dimensional space (now might be a good time to say that the “uppermost” and “lowermost” positioning of the first two is understood as not literal) and are places souls pass through to receive knowledge on their way to the next incarnation. It’s common in stories and myths for living characters to journey there too, in order to learn truths beyond normal understanding or confront something with effects beyond the current lifetime.

This isn’t the only traditional perception of the universe--the Caesurans, who settled on their planet very early (and being blue stars are shorter-lived than most astraeas), have depicted the universe as a circle centered around their solar system for thousands of generations. The Ashtivans, who just lived in space for most of their prehistory as a species, have pretty much always had a pretty accurate picture of at least the galaxy. They too regard the unknowns of empty vacuum and dark matter as the home of the unclaimed dead, though they tend to do absolutely everything they believe will keep their own dead from winding up there.2 But because of the reach of the Basillan attempt to unify all of Andromeda’s different religions, their cosmology is the most widespread.

5. Spacefarer Superstitions:

Obviously there’s a lot of them and they’re very diverse, but here’s a few that are mentioned in the book:

Tracing the positions of the Seven Suns (or the stars in whatever constellation most often guides you home--for central andromedans that’s usually Aviana’s Bow) with your finger over the airlocks when you close them is a ward for safe passage.

Luxmotes, which are little jellyfish-like creatures with a Light on them in a similar way to astraeas (and most animals in andromeda) that live in the vacuum, clustering around a ship are a good omen--they show the goddess of gravity’s favor on a mission.

That’s the one exemption to this controversial but extremely perennial one: it’s bad luck to bring any symbols of Orellistia or gravity into interstellar space. The reasoning is that it isn’t her domain, things float around willy nilly, if she wanted her stuff on her wife’s side of the material plane she’d have put some stars or planets there. As Levinoxia has become more of an oppositional/trickster figure it’s also said that symbols of gravity offend her and will cause her to play havoc with your ship’s systems, get you lost, and generally ruin your mission. This is a BIG problem for pious destigravitational cosmonists as symbols of gravity are kind of Their Thing, it’s like if you told a ship full of catholics it was bad luck to wear crosses. But most experienced sailors, especially older ones, swear by it. When artificial gravity systems started to be introduced it was common to overhear grizzled grey-haired captains, pilots, and boatswains, who’d come into their own in the solar-sailing days, in the public houses swearing up and down that they would NEVER contract to sail a ship with that newfangled fake-your-own-planet tech, it’s just ASKING for an instrument malfunction in black hole territory

Dark stars and neutron stars and their systems are dead, but still inhabited by the spirits of their solar goddesses and all the life that might once have been in that system in attendance to them. If a crew doesn’t maintain respectful silence while passing through, their ship might become uncontrollably trapped in the dead sun’s pull.

Signals that are transmitted too far out in the vacuum to reach a receiver are received directly by Levinoxia, goddess of the void and protector of sailors and travelers. At the midpoint between the last lighthouse on the Andromedan coast and the first on the Milky Way’s, pilots both religious and not so much have a tradition of praying the Dodecacet, a series of twelve short hymns to her, into their radios. For many working-class folks who were practically raised “at sea”, it’s the only prayer they know.

If any of your crewmates died while in space, you have to jettison everything they brought aboard personally--clothes, possessions, all of it. If not your bad luck is your fault.

Cadrian ingots stuck into the outside of your gravity ballast tank draw in treasure if that’s what you’re lookin’ for. Or something. Truthfully it’s just fun to drop them into the grooves they fit perfectly

Different planets have different beliefs about what kind of animals it’s lucky to have on board and this can become quite the debate among interstellar or intergalactic missions whose rates have only sailed between planets before because 90% of boatswains are going to be like “we can bring ONE”

1They actually still use the term “genetic” even though they don’t have genes--from their perspective, it comes from the Orellistian epithet “Genetris”. 

2They don’t have the reincarnation cycle concept that tends to be consistent closer to the dome--they think the spirits of their ancestors stay with their families, just beyond the veil. Ashtivans, like their sun, are small, slow-burning stars, and death tends to be a much more peaceful transition for them rather than a jarring nova, so it makes sense that they don’t have as much of a sense of separation.