🔊🔊 END STAGE DISCOURSE!! END STAGE DISCOURSE!! WE HAVE ARRIVED AT "FICTIONAL SEX IS COERCIVE BECAUSE CHARACTERS ARE BEING FORCED TO DO THINGS BY THE AUTHOR"!!!! 🔊🔊
My favorite professor, shout out Glenn, would interrupt students who were saying "Well XYZ clearly felt--" and go "No, backtrack, scratch that. They are a character. Not a person. They don't have any thoughts other than what the writer clearly specifies on paper they have. Don't give agency to nonliving things, they are not real, they never were real, and it is dangerous to lose that line."
He was a sweet man and raised in the Midwest so interrupting people hurt his very soul, that's how dangerous he felt the idea of losing the line of fiction was.
He notably also taught a course called Bible in Lit which I took and those lines came back a lot.
Analysing Ego Renegade Boy by Flavor Foley for 4k words because I'm transmasc and obsessed
hi new flavor foley song go check it. I'm not providing timestamps or else i would've died for real but i AM following the video in order more or less.
Which is to say I've gone through the video real slow to talk about the MV and lyrics.
First off, design. Len's wearing a tie, that we later see is actually a repurposed version of the ribbon Rin has around her neck. Len's big ol sweater both invokes the classic dysphoria hoodie and is fuckoff orange with that 02 printed on it to invoke a prisoner's uniform to tie in with the whole crime theme in the song.
I also generally appreciate how wide eyed and wild Len looks lmao.
On that note, the diamond pattern used on Rin's ribbon is the exact same as the links on Len's cuffs. This will come up repeatedly
Let's look at the video okay.
We start ofc with no hoodie Len, he hasn't been caught for his "crime" yet, which we see happening with the ribbon and mirror flying away from him. This frame gets paralleled later, but it's the moment the "crime" happens. He's already wearing a tie here, which is fun, and also already has the band-aid on. He's frowning first, but as soon as the ribbon and mirror fly away, accompanied by the blood splatter suggesting violence, he's smiling. Immediate sign that this "murder" is a delight.
Next we see him in jail, now with the big prisoner hoodie, hands cuffed. He also looks pissed as hell. This suggests he got "caught" by some authority figure when indulding in his new presentation, which leads us right to the crime scene outline.
For this one, I want to especially note that the blood splatter is at the exact right height to match an uterus. This is also the same spot that Rin's portrait is placed later in the video, which I think is highly intentional with the transgender text.
It starts with Len "sympathizing" with the family of the "victim". "Oh your poor daughter!" is, you know, in second person. He's talking to his own family like a stranger. It's also only on "daughter" that Len enters the frame again, now as a prisoner, as people around him react with shock. It's a walk of shame while the lyrics suggest his own funeral.
"But what a disgrace, we're mourning while her killer freely walks" <- obviously Len can't be arrested for murder because there's no actual crime, even if everybody feels like it. Zooming in on Len's face on "killer" is also fun. His expression here looks a bit tired, obviously worn down from the treatment he's receiving, but with what could be a faint smile.
On "Jury's out" we cut to focus on Len's cuffed hands. There's blood on his hands, which ties into the immediately following lyrics. But it's also again a suggestion of brute violence, as was the start of the video. "The blood is on your hands!" in both the lyrics and the video. Only when the lyrics shift back to "I" do we see Len's face again, making it clear the "jury" is only focused on Len's perceived crime, while not caring about him as a person. "As if I’m not the one that has to live with red under nails that won’t wash out no matter how it ends." No matter how this circus ends, Len's the one who is stuck forever with not having murdered Rin, but with having been Rin. It's not a past he can truly just kill and leave behind. And obviously "blood under your nails" is a very often used metaphor for guilt. There's always going to be some lingering guilt for having "killed" Rin, in part due to all the fuss being made about it.
As he says that, Rin is shown as a shadowed, smiling silhouette. It's not Rin as a person, whom we only see later, but the perfect smiling image of the ideal daughter, who never really existed. The text distorts behind her like a mirage, and the white lines plus orange background match the mirror seen in the first shot and used later. She's just a reflection, a fiction. The real person the jury doesn't look at is Len standing right here, shown in full color immediately after.
The grey background I think is neat because it seems to occur when Len's faced with direct opposition and isn't listened to. We come back to the "crime scene", Rin dead on the ground with the artifacts of Being A Girl scattered around her as Len looks away in contemplation. Rin in the crime scene is just an outline, a suggestion. Again, something that isn't real. I like that the lyrics here take more of a theatrical slant. "'pon the boundary of loss and dream / Irony put to sleep" makes me think it's referring either to the tension between the "loss" of Rin and the dream of who Len wants to be, or the irony of mourning the loss of a dream (Rin). It's on that note with "set the scene" that we again have the shadowed version of Rin, the mirage, set into the outline of the body. It's a repeated emphasis that the crime isn't real and what "died" isn't a real person.
During this segment, Rin and Len are also never in full color at the same time. It's the start of "her or me", with only one of them existing at the same time.
"To lead a lie, or watch your daughter die" starts us into the chorus, and it is fantastic, thumbs up. First of, the music got quiter just a bit beforehand on "It's her or me, so who's it gonna be?" where we also have our first instance of Rin backing vocals to sell the point. Anyways, the music is quiter so we can have a much more bombastic start into the chorus. Beforehand, Len was faking sympathy for his family ("Oh, your poor daughter!"), and accepting his "crime", being locked in prison, but this is the start of his grand defiance, which of course kicks off with Len breaking his chains. He still has the cuffs around his arms, he's still forever tied to his past, but the links are broken and he can move freely. The small smile transforms into a triumphant grin.
"To lead a lie" would be to continue being Rin, and "or watch your daughter die" is to be himself. Again, centering his family in the discussions instead of himself, but instead of being the fake sympathy, it's rubbing things in their faces. It's, "So you think I killed your daughter? Sure I did!"
Again noting that the links on the cuffs have the same diamond shape as the pattern on Rin's ribbon and the sweater they both wear.
"I forced the issue, what a waste of time!" He's taken control of the situation, and discussing his guilt, the crime, the blood on his hands, is just totally pointless. "It's wrong, it's right, and god, I'm so alive" reiterates that. It doesn't matter how his family feels, it matters how HE feels, and this makes him feel alive.
"So leave her behind, an eye for an eye!" continuing with the previous lines, speaking to his family still implies they've wronged him with "an eye for an eye" being The Revenge Saying. Which, you know, they have, by treating him like a criminal. So as their repentance, they need to leave Rin behind and move on.
The listing of execution methods is interesting to me. The images onscreen don't actually depict Rin, but a still smug looking Len. Even being executed like this wouldn't put much of a damper on things. Actually, the only one of the three he looks nervous on is "electric chair", which makes sense considering what conversion therapy looks like. However, in the end, all these executions are shown by Len on the TV. They're all also fiction, asking "Is this what you want to do to me?" It's mockery, inviting guilt for fantasizing about killing him.
"It'd all be so simple, oh if only I weren't there!" is the lyric we see our real Len on, mocking the viewer. I really like this lyric, cuz it digs into the meat of something those types of parents don't want to admit: sometimes instead of transitioning, your kid kills themself. And it'd be easier, in a sense. Because if your kid is just dead, you don't need to deal with the freak who replaced them. Everyone could keep imagining Rin as the perfect daughter and marvel at her life cut short and her tragedy, but no, here's Len to rub it in their faces. "I'll slip the noose they tied / The fell boy's guilty as tried / her life for mine!"
I love the wanted posters, honestly. Rin's poster is black and white, smiling, innocent. Len shows him glaring during his mugshot. The sweet innocent girl killed by the violent boy. Fantastic. And the lyrics pick up that either/or scenario. Both of them can't exist at the same time. Either you have Len, or you "tie the noose", you keep forcing him to be Rin, which is eventually just going to lead to his suicide, as made explicit later in the song. It's fun that Len is the one throwing his own wanted poster into the air. It's a jubilant acceptance of guilt, "The fell boy's guilty as tried". If this means being himself, he'll accept any blame that comes his way.
Again, it's just… soooo common to talk about transition as loss. Something something "the transgender craze seducing our daughters". That they've been led astray and made into deviants. So the way for Len to be happy is to just accept this image. The song's title is "Ego Renegade Boy". The Boy/Girl last world is common for Rin/Len songs, be it Plus Boy or Telecaster B-Boy or whatever, but it's "ego renegade". An egoistic deviant. Honestly using the Boy naming scheme is just all the more on the nose and claiming it as a transgender song. Yeah he's a boy watcha gonna do about it.
And then "Her life for mine!" having the words be inside the tape outline of Rin's "body". Brilliant. One more on the road for rubbing it in.
Oh god I am one minute into the song.
We exit the chorus with Len back in "jail", everything is orange again. The other person speaking is presented as larger than Len, towering over him with a hand raised to lecture. The "jury" is back to bring him to trial, this time adding the crime of slipping his chains. Same as before, when the jury is speaking, Len's face is unseen, the focus is soly on his "crime". The chorus was him admitting it, now read as "a guilty conscious".
Len's first text is presented in something akin to a textbox or name badge. Len is once more appeasing and playing along with the courtroom facade by pleading to "Your Honor!" and trying to explain himself with "It's such a noble cause!" However, the jury continues to not listen to him. Len's textbox just shatters, visually representing how his words fall on deaf ears.
It's interesting to note at this point that whenever anybody speaks, when anybody accuses Len, their speech is just part of the lyrics and regular typography. Only Len's self-defense in this segment is shown "externally" in textbox and speech bubbles, where the other argument is omnipresent in the typography. It's an uphill battle to make himself heard.
This makes "It's not like your victim's here to see your jaded justice done" seem like an inside thought. Len just thought that to himself but didn't say it, when it's the truth. There is no victim, and this is no justice. There's no point in any of this, as we had before in the chorus. "It's a waste of time!"
"Did you know her?" is an interesting segment. Feels like Len's realized that appeasing others isn't going to work, because his words are drowned out anyways. So of course here comes mockery. A smug, yet tense expression. The speech bubbles separate what Len says aloud and what he keeps to himself:
"Did you know her? Her dreams, her aspirations?" is said, but "One single sentence, address the rest, so tell me how you knew her?" is not. Len is placing a quiet expectation for himself. Just one single sentence, and he'll believe it. But it doesn't come, so he says "Embellish your relation, pain that you feign for a stranger, cuz you'd rather see me gone."
It's addressing another common thread in trans stories. That "this isn't like you", that "this isn't what she used to be like". The thought that you as the parent of course know your child so well to know they'd never do this! They're seduced, corrupted, replaced! But this cuts through the bullshit, saying, no, you didn't know your kid. And by extension saying, "you don't know me." The second person has been addressed with "your daughter". This is likely someone in Len's family, maybe even their actual parents, and he is calling himself a stranger to this person. "Pain that you feign for a stranger".
And again, that this person doesn't love him, they just want this freak gone, want him, as the chorus paints it, dead in place of the innocent Rin.
We exit our orange prison with a contrasting green background. The green entirely puts Len into focus, matching to the lyric of "Don't look away from the boy whose smile sparks a flame". The artifacts of Rin, the evidence of her murder, are deliberately blurred and too far in the back- or foreground as to not detract any focus from Len.
He's inviting this observer to watch him, watch him smile, watch his spark. His new drive and zeal for life and living, his "flame", his happiness.
The pattern appearing in the background on "Reclaim" is that of Rin's ribbon and Len's chains, as mentioned before. Very fitting for reclaiming his life. That this person can't see Len's passion is now reduced to "a crying shame" that can just be written off instead of something to be appeased.
On this same lyric, we also switch back to the orange background, which symbolizes the prison. At the same time, Len is being papered over by photos of Rin, showing how the person in question is refusing to look at him and mentally replacing him with Rin's dead image.
It's this being papered over that has Len sinking into a dark void. Air bubbles flow up, suggesting that he's drowning in the dark.
"'pon the boundary of sight unseen" would be to me that he's on the boundary of fully claiming himself, and that the "sight unseen" is what lies beyond transitioning. At the top of this murky ocean he's stuck in. "Irony lives and breathes / in rest / in grief / it's her or me / baby who's it gonna be?"
Previously irony was put to sleep, but now it lives and breathes. The irony is in rest and grief, the irony is in putting to rest and grieving a person who is still alive, who is now being crushed by these expectations and the crime forced on him. The solid orange silhouette was the same Len had in the previous bridge's (is it a bridge. I don't know music) segment circling around the crime scene. Len reaches up to the evidence of Rin on "it's her or me", showing that one of them will have to sink to the bottom of this sunless sea, and it's either Len, a person, or Rin, just some items left behind.
"Baby, who's it gonna be?" shows us a funeral portrait with a bright question mark (using pink, used for Rin's blood throughout the video). Who is dead? Well.
The second chorus is lyrically the same as the first, but I find it of note that Len looks muuuch more frantic instead of smug here. Seems like the darker segment shows that all the shit being slung at him is getting to him. He's even holding his hands close together as if he's still chained. In the last chorus, the silhouette in his eye on "an eye for an eye" was Rin, and now it's himself, which also feels to me like the pressure is on.
On this next "I'll slip the noose they tied", Len's wanted poster is x-ed out, as though the poster is no longer needed. It's at this point the video pulls Len and Rin together to make it even more abundantly clear that they're the same person, as shown by Len lying inside the body's outline on "Her life for mine!"
He can't convince others that it was justice, so now he's showing them that it's him, and has always been him, so the x-ed out poster could mean that this is being recognized. We circle back to "I forced the issue, a waste of time!"
Additionally, Rin's own poster is now bloodstained and not smiling anymore, instead with a small surprised o-mouth. As Len makes it more evident that he is Rin (or rather, Rin has always been Len) we run into the issue of "It'd all be so simple if only I was gone!" that the mirage of the perfect daughter Rin is forcefully crumbling, being killed all over again.
On the repetition of "Did you know her?" it's the first time the video shows Rin in full color, the "real" Rin, and she's crying into her hands. "Did you know that heavy heart? / Did you now her? / A fragile ego adorned in scars". Instead of just asking whether the other person knows, he's laying it bare in rhetorical questions.
Notably, Rin is framed inside a mirror for the entire scene. Now that we see her face proper, we also see that she's injured in the same place that Len has his bandage, highlighted by the next shot of Len standing opposite Rin as his reflection. Rin is hurting, injured, and Len is bandaged, healing. It was in the shadowy silhouette of the perfect girl that no one was able to see Rin's injury. Len's expression here is nigh identical to the one in the walk of shame on "mourning her while her killer freely walks", but it looks softer, more pitying. As he's talking about Rin, he's talking about his own past self, and he's extending compassion toward her. "Did you know the nights spent crying in a voice drawn low?"
Nobody knew Rin because she didn't let any of it show, didn't let anybody hear her cry. And if anybody had known, "If you knew, you'd know I had to let her go."
Rin's crying face is in focus. She's haloed in pink, the color of her blood, alongside the pink text. Like it's rushing toward her, the inevitability that she had to "die".
So we have one more shot for Len to ram it home that they're the same, they're mirror images. I wanna draw attention here to the "About the vocalist" section on the page for this song.
"His last name translates to "Mirror Sound", and it's said that he "shares a single soul" with his female counterpart, Rin."
Extremely great use of this with the mirror imagery. The Kagamines aren't twins. They're two versions of the same person. I love how the song uses this concept. So the mirror shatters, and the truth is made clear. Rin was the sad reflection. Her shattered image is intermingled with Len's wide smile.
The next iteration of the chorus is performed wholly by Rin, upstaging Len from the backup vocals. We have again the funeral portrait of Rin, but this time filled out with her silhouetted version, with the fake mirage of the daughter. As I alluded to before, this portrait is placed right on the bloodsplatter of the body's outline, right at the uterus.
"To lead a lie or watch your daughter die / As if the choice could end with me alive". The illusion of Rin has been so thoroughly shattered by Len's effort that even the mirage is saying it how it is, bringing back my previous point. "Rin" wasn't going to live either way. Either she becomes Len and lives his life, or he kills himself. "The noose they tied". There is no third option.
I draw attention to: the second part of the "About the vocalist" section.
"The Kagamine ACT1 voicebank is permanently discontinued, while the Kagamine V4X voicebank is still currently used."
Len is using V4X, and Rin is using ACT1. The newest, best version of Len is used as compared to the oldest, shittiest version of Rin. It's a deliberate choice to make Rin's vocals grittier, "lower quality", unrefined. It's a sound from the past that has been replaced by something newer and better, making Len's vocals all the smoother by comparison.
"It's wrong, it's right, but god, if only I" only on the first contemplation of change do we see Rin ever smile genuienly.
Something to be said as well how pink is associated with blood and death, but this scene is in stark vibrant blue. Additionally, the scene is framed by the ribbon/chain pattern, boxing Rin in like teeth.
"Could give up a life I can hardly call mine" has 'the innocent Rin' put herself in the place of the body, her eyes under the same censor bars we very briefly see Len with right before the very first "Did you know her?". The color change from blue to red is again abrupt, and transitions to our prison orange for the main section of this chorus.
"Ring of the knell / the eulogy / the loss of heir / it'd all be so simple, oh if only I weren't there" This new close up shows us Rin's injury again which wasn't visible in the portrait. This section parallels Len's listing of execution methods, which is fitting for a listing of how this developments troubles others. The ring of the death knell, the eulogy at her funeral, the loss of the heir, of the daughter, are all restrictions imposed by her decision. It'd all be so much easier if she just killed herself.
"Give it one last try, if I could-" I find it interesting to note that this lyric is written in red. Rin is giving it one last shot before she actually offs herself.
"Leave it behind for the renegade life" then throws away the Rin closing her eyes in the face of death, because that's of course not what happened. Love the contrast in expressions, Rin smiling sweetly as she sheds a single tear, Len just. Smiling while he's chewing on the ribbon. There's an additional contrast created by drawing Rin's pupils as white and Len's as black. It makes his gaze look harsher in the transition, I feel. And biting down on the ribbon as he crashes through Rin's line is just another In Your Face moment to assert himself over pitiful Rin. Like, it's very "story time is over fuckhead". You heard the sob story, you got to know Rin and her woes, now here's the result of that, as the prison orange background is replaced by the familiar bloodstain, as though Len had killed Rin by stealing the line.
On our last chorus, the same as the first, Len isn't distressed anymore like the second, or smug like the first. He's just happy. He's just smiling brightly, hands in the air without anything to bind him. (It almost looks like he's about to do the caramelldansen.)
"It's wrong, it's right, and god, I'm so alive! So leave her behind, it's an eye for an eye!" There's no more silhouettes of any sorts in Len's eye, just his own gaze staring dead ahead with a satisfied grin. After his tale of woe, there's no looking away anymore, there's no denial anymore of who he used to be and who he is now. The background flashes erratic pink, fragrantly mocking the notion of murder.
The rest of the chorus with our familiar execution methods is bloodied posters of Rin falling from the sky around Len's outstretched hand. As though he'd gathered them all up and thrown them into the air, declaring to the world that Rin is dead.
On "Guilty as tried, her life for mine!" He's leisurely got his hands behind his back. He's entirely satisfied with what he's doing, no more doubt whatsoever. "An ego set alight", he has, in simple terms, achieved becoming a smug bastard. A dream for us all. Vanity is good for the soul, I promise.
"A stray boy justified, this life is mine!"
And so, we close out on the wanted poster. Len declares himself justified, and being on the wanted poster, accepts his own "crime" as justice without doubt. This life is his, without any mention of "her life" anymore. Also, in this shot, the bandage is peeling off, revealing the scratch underneath. To me, it reads as though this injury is the closing argument confirming that they're the same person, and he's all that remains. This entire time, he was "covering up" this wound, and only by confronting his own past could he assert this control over it. It's a final mockery, even. A "how can you deny this?" as he gets to walk away, a free but wanted man, with his own life in his pockets.
Anyways, I fucking love this song, holy shit. I love how gracefully it deals with the transphobia faced by many, but particularly the "our poor innocent daughters!" treatment faced by afab trans people. Something something, "the transgender craze seducing our daughters". It's not exclusive to transmasculine people, of course, you see the "my poor child was taken from me" rhetoric with many transphobic parents for people of all sorts of genders, but. I still like seeing it in how it applies to Me. Okay. It's not just a trans song it's a transmasc song specifically. It invokes emotions in me. I need to cut my hair again oh god it's getting so long.
It's so elegant in how the song addresses the self harm and suicide inherent to repressing yourself, framing it as a true ultimatum of life or death. It doesn't say it outright yet somehow says this with it's whole chest.
Your daughter's not been taken, or killed. Either your son was going to transition, or die. Deal with it and eat shit. If you wanta killer, a criminal, then that's what you'll get! And all you'll have left behind for your "concern" and "justice" and "doing what's right" is just one final picture of someone happier without you. I love it dearly already thank you for my life Flavor Foley.
dededos
blakekathryn
areudirty
janainaart
snowghoul
baratheonpilled
kaledo-art
vaporwave
