BBBlue - Olivver the Kid - Nothing Has Changed Song Analysis
on "BBBlue" by Olivver the Kid, and what it does to Jake Sully
(no plot spoilers below — only the premise and Jake's interior. nothing past what's already on the page.)
I heard this song over the weekend and had to sit down. If you read Nothing Has Changed, this is the song. Let me show you why.
The warning he cannot give
"BBBlue" is structured around a narrator who has already walked through the thing his beloved is now walking toward, and who refuses, line by line, to be the one who corrupts her.
"I thought that I warned you about the woods / The pain they caused me, the life it took / Here you are, centered and stark / Sun shines through, lights you up."
That's the line my whole story can't quite speak aloud. Jake has been warned. The warning cost him the first life. He doesn't pass it to her — not the foreknowledge, not the bullet, not the woods. So when the song speaks the warning out loud, it does the same thing the prologue does for the reader: it puts a knowing in the air that the character isn't allowed to share.
"I'm green just like the woods / You're blue just like the ocean / Your colors drown mine out in one fluid motion."
The colour logic of this song fits the chromatic facts of Pandora so cleanly it almost reads like it was written for the story. Green corrupter, blue beloved. The narrator believes he is the woods, and that his beloved is being drained by being near him.
That fear lives in my Jake. He carries it from the moment he opens his eyes in the young body and sees her again, alive and untouched by anything he has brought back with him.
"It claimed another, first it was my friends, now it's my lover"
This is the line I sat with longest. On the surface, it would mean I lost her before, and now it's happening again. That isn't the story I'm writing. There is one Neytiri. Not two to grieve in series.
But read with my Jake in the chair, the another isn't another beloved. The another is another version of him. The young man he was. The marine who walked into the forest the first time and met her. The younge man he handed her, that did not survive losing her. The woods didn't only take his friends and his lover. The woods took him first — the boy he was when she chose him, the man who didn't yet know what loving her would cost.
That boy died the night she did, in his arms, on the wrong end of a bullet that came from a direction he wasn't watching.
And then Eywa returned him to that boy's body. He is wearing the husk of the thing he gave her. He is being asked to walk into the woods a second time, in the same skin, knowing what it does.
That is the song's interior, the way my Jake holds it.
The butterfly in the palm
Picture this: every moment Neytiri is smiling, loving her world, loving her people. He is watching her, never anything else, loving her. Holding her in his palm like a butterfly he is terrified will be caught in the wind or crushed by his fingers.
Two terrors in one hand. The wind is everything outside his control. The fingers are him as the corruption — the song's whole thesis. The hand stays open and unmoving because closing it is one fear and opening it is the other. He cannot touch her, and he cannot stop watching her, and she does not know she is in a hand at all, because she is busy loving her world.
That is the shape of him, right now, in every scene you've read.
The verb that runs the song's whole emotional engine is "I guess." Not I know. Not I was told.I guess. The narrator is interpreting himself into a role. Making meaning out of an unbearable situation, because standing still inside it isn't survivable.
That is my Jake's posture exactly. Eywa never told him why she sent him back. No voice in the wind. No instruction at the rite-fire. No verdict given. He wakes in the young body and he is left to decide what that means. He can only guess. And whatever he chooses to make of it, he is choosing — because the version where it means nothing isn't a version he can live inside.
That's faith. Not certainty.
It's also, I think, what the song is really about: a person who has been handed a situation they weren't given a reason for, and who has to choose what meaning to act on.
The song says it in three and a half minutes. My novel is taking a bit longer.
Pin "BBBlue" to the spine of Nothing Has Changed. It's the unsayable interior, said.
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