It's A Rock Opera. About Mega Man.

Main: @imperiousphasmid I just really like The Protomen.

[proto-phasmid]

Who are you?

Hi! I'm the #850 top listener of The Protomen globally in 2025 according to Spotify Wrapped. (This is the only way I will ever introduce myself from now on.)

Ok but seriously I'm mostly just an almost 30 year old idiot who likes to think way too hard about the things they love. And then cry about them. You can call me Imp or Pro or Phas or... idk, just about anything else you can figure out works. (They/Them)

And what exactly is it you're doing here?

Besides the thinking and crying? This is my Protomen-centric sideblog, sooooo mostly just that, probably. (Bonus: it acts as a nice container for my Protomen obsession so my friends don't have to deal with it on tumblr lol. They get enough of it as is.)

I've put a lot of time and energy, over the course of few years now, into overanalyzing the lyrical mastery of Acts I & II and daydreaming about how I would transform them into a stage musical. I have very strong opinions about both of these things.

Act III has given me a lot more to analyze and I have finally decided to take baby steps into engaging with the wider fan community. I think the decision to make this blog is partly just a self-preservation tactic against spontaneous combustion from thinking too hard about Mega Man.

And why should I even care?

Uhhh idk man; I have no good answer for that. You probably shouldn't?

Maybe you'll at least find my wild conspiracy theories amusing.

Favorite character?

Really difficult choice. It might depend on the day, but Joe is usually a safe guess. I think Wily is probably my favorite to analyse, though. (Don't @ me.) He's absolutely fascinating to me.

Wait, have you ever even played a Mega Man game?

Yes, actually! The first one. I didn't beat it. And the answer to this question was actually "no" for a long time (until a few months ago) because I only became interested in playing them after falling down the Protomen rabbit hole. Oops.

I DO plan to go through them all some day. And hey, now I can even look forward to picking up Double Override in 2027. :)

[proto-phasmid]

KIND OF SORT OF got my can label preserved. I think I'm going to try and laminate it??

[proto-phasmid]

time loop fic is happening. i'm locking in.

[proto-phasmid]

night three is the night that i actually get to have a good view of the stage i feel it

[proto-phasmid]

update: it was not. but that is ok!

[proto-phasmid]

night three is the night that i actually get to have a good view of the stage i feel it

[pingnova]

Him

[sheggorath]

Okay so I've completely lost my mind about going to Nashville next week and decided to make a shirt for each night, from that night's album. I don't think I'm going to have Act 1 done in time (because I haven't started it yet 😬 ) but here's the other two!

[sheggorath]

Did you know you can basically DIY your own manic phase if you put your mind to it??? Anyway I printed the "stencil" on Thursday and finished painting yesterday so here's Act 1 Shirt 3

[proto-phasmid]

i know i have been SO DEAD on this blog for awhile but i'm still around AND. in one week i will be in Nashville. wowee :)))

[spacey-png-art]

Protos just the character I use to test stuff atp.. uh playing w a new brush pack + playing around w a color pallet

[proto-phasmid]

more and more convinced every single day that wilight is canon actually

[starbuck]

triangular relationships… to me

[proto-phasmid]

going to try and crowdsource an answer to something here. there is pretty much only one (1) lyric in act 3 that i still haven't been able to figure out. double checked my libretto and it's for sure not in there!

so basically. between these two lines Thomas has in No Way Back:

Just come down!

Maybe we'll get out of this alive.

...the Human Chorus sings. something?? that my auditory processing struggles have not allowed me to fully pick up on. I am 89% sure it starts with "If we" ?

anyone who has a proper source on this, if you can point me in the right direction, I would be SO incredibly grateful! the not knowing is driving me up a wall lol

[white-collar-cannibal]

[saintrollercoaster]

would love to have been a fly on the wall at billboard hq when the news that act iii is the #9 top selling album came in. like. who are these guys. ah. megaman you say. in face paint you say.

[protofans]

I have been attending Protomen shows since 2010, and I am thrilled to finally have one (1) recording of Beards Going Nowhere that I'm able to share with the internet

[proto-phasmid]

Thought haunting me today is the fact that Thomas refers to Wily as "a friend" in Light Up the Night.

Well, a friend once told me, 'men, they would follow any man who would turn the wheel.'

A friend. Grammatically, there's no tense at all in a noun phrase, so it's not necessarily present tense, but it's also DEFINITELY NOT past tense. There's nothing in there that would indicate Thomas's intention is to imply the person he's referring to is "an old/former friend."

Syllabically/rhythmically, there are a lot of options for other things that would have fit here instead. It's 2 syllables and the phrase itself is more than flexible:

It could just as easily be, "Well, someone once told me"; or take out "well" and you could have "An old friend once told me." If you're willing to reword a bit more, "Well, a man once told me people, they would follow any man who would turn the wheel." Just... there are a lot of things Thomas could have said instead that would have distanced him more from Albert. I mean... at this point, it would make perfect sense that he would want to try and separate himself from his past and especially from his former partner in as many ways as possible. Like, who would blame him?

But... he doesn't. He calls Wily "a friend" even as he's plotting with Joe to try and knock him from the top of his tower. Maybe it's intentional, or maybe it's more of an unconscious slip of the tongue. (On Thomas's part, I mean; from a meta standpoint, I wholly believe that pretty much everything The Protomen do is Intentional.)

Either way, I think it's really revealing - and what it tells me is that there's at least some part of Thomas that still does consider Wily a friend - or at the very least, someone he cares about. Someone he wants (dare I say hopes?) to save. And that's only after the Act II timeskip; there are other things in Act III which suggest even at that point, however many years later, that perspective hasn't changed. (See, for example: the entirety of No Way Back.) That even at the very end of it all, Thomas still saw Wily first and foremost as his friend.

[captainkawaii666]

“I know what I’ll do, I’ve made my choice! I’ll make my stand! I may not be the hero they need, but god I can still be your man!”