#my friend will be thrilled about this she's been urging me to listen to p!atd for quite a while

[dylanlila]

Been doing some spring-cleaning on my Amy playlist and driving myself insane thinking about Amy/11 as a sun and moon dynamic (obviously, who's who switches constantly, but always tied together, yet can never permanently be that way), so now I'm dead-set (see: deluding myself) on When The Day Met The Night being an Amy/11 song.

Because, and this is going to be a mini-essay, the song doesn't make it clear who's who between the sun and the moon + she and he, I think it's largely read as he being the moon and she being the moon but it can be read both ways -> Amy and 11 never really fitting neatly into one box.

And the song (and the album as a whole) has very overt fairy tale influences -> like a name in a fairy tale

As a bonus, the album this is on, but not this song sadly, has quite a few references to Rimbaud's A Season In Hell

But onto the song itself:

The links to the many gardens, especially the idea that the gardens are where he comes back to her (S5, the big bang Dr finding her asleep in her garden, S6, Amy finding out that he didn't die while she's in her background, S7, the scene with the convo with Rory where the TARDIS can be heard arriving)

Thinking about how 10's regen to 11 going roughly, collapsing and bleeding energy everywhere, literally just hanging on

But also Amy's "why did you say five minutes" in the garden and the look on her face when she says that -> the idea that she spent a lot of her 12 years barely hanging on to a sense of normality and sanity

Thinking about both of them making promises not to leave the other, textually or implied, and both of them breaking said promises....

To end this insane ramble, I'll leave you with the knowledge that if you queue Little Amy (the murray gold track) before When The Day Met The Night and then set the spotify crossfade to 3secs, the two tracks sync really nicely <3

This is an EXCELLENT match (thank you for the rant :")))) Keeping the reply under the cut because things got messy and deranged :/

Just... thinking about Night/Day imagery in general and how 11 and Amy meet during the night and each one of them thinks of the other as the sun while perceiving themselves as the moon. Considering how 10 felt about regenerating and how that predestined 11 to have his actual identity constantly creep up on him which he isn't  thrilled about because he's preoccupied with holding on to everything 10 was. (INSANE how Ten has to deal with Rose's ghost, the ghost of a living person and eventually ends up as one himself. He lives because Eleven wants to keep him alive, but it's not quite him... never a proper ghost, never a proper person...) it's only at the end of his arc that 11 acknowledges 10's vanity of all things. And then regarding Amy, there's the otherness she experiences in every timeline, even in the one where she remembers the Doctor, her drawings and artworks of him exist in her bedroom still. What a crooked solar system! The Moon chasing The Sun, 11 not allowing 10 to go, Amy waiting for 11.

Back to the Night/Day thing (the stuff above was a prelude, I guess), 11 comes back to Amy during the night (5x01) and leaves her during the day. (The God Complex) Key motif of The Romantic Period!!!! But also reminiscent of Symbolism. (Romanticism and Modernism as Amy's Art Movements Agenda is going strong) Actually your analysis here SCREAMS Verlaine's À La Promenade to me. ("and dying, like a sunshine of a dream" it says + mentions of costumes and vows, but again it's so much better in french dbdjdjjdjdjr modernism is freaky translated, but not the freaky that was originally intended to be portrayed bdjdjdjdjd)

Ooooooh the gardens, it gets even crazier with the gardens. The symbolism is ANCIENT, they are beauty and innocence and life, but are also wilderness and escapism and a ticket to nowhere. But for Amy, each reading of the garden kind of starts to exist with all these qualities exaggerated depending on the narrative moment, to the point of all of it becoming unbearable. She waits for the Doctor as a child and the green enveloping her house is too messy, she marries Rory and her new garden is too neat. Too messy and too perfect constantly being presented as the only two options Amy has, they only two ways in which she's allowed to be perceived. Truly haunted by her own dichotomy-defined presence. (never really fitting neatly into one box!!!!!!) "You could really spend a lifetime in here - not that I'm going to." on one hand she's been spending lifetimes in gardens like the TGWW one. On the other hand the TGWW garden is everything she wants, but Amy won't even consider it because she craves the Big Dramatic Moment, the feeling of having something happen to her even and especially if it's unpleasant ("kind of a good hurt") because she's been stuck in the in-between since forever and she doesn't want her dreams handed to her without the journey, without a sense of achievement. Wish fulfilment isn't appealing to her at all.

AAAAAAAND I wandered off here and this is INSANE and incoherent, but YAY for the Rimbaud cameos in music, I LOVE to see it.