#*cages

[taylortruther]

so much of taylor's discography is expressing the idea that love is so powerful that she's defenseless against it... and that's where we get all of the metaphors about fate, forces of nature like avalanches and gravity and ivy or wisteria, the cosmos, but it's also where we get all the metaphors about cages, prisons, jails... needing to break down walls, needing to escape...

[taylortruther]

my town was a wasteland, full of cages, full of fences, pageant queens and big pretenders... fell behind all my classmates and i ended up here... growin' up precocious sometimes means not growin' up at all... little did you know your home's really only the town you'll get arrested... you see i was a debutant in another life but now i seem to be scared to go outside... each new enemy turns to steel, they become the bars that confine you in your own little golden prison cell... there's a lot of people in town that i bestow upon my fakest smiles... this cage was once just fine...

[taylortruther]

A theme/concept I really like is what I've come to think of as the 'fictional American town'. It's where Betty, James, and August live. It's where Dorothea grew up and comes home to in the holidays. It's where the narrator of Fortnight feels trapped in her marriage and later escapes to Florida from. It's where the protagonist of But Daddy I Love Him elopes from. (I know the ttpd songs are about Taylor but to me they also give as strong an impression of a character protagonist as the folkmore songs do). I guess I would love to see Taylor continue writing character songs set in the same location with some crossovers and references, and through that lens do an examination of life in an American town. That would be a cool concept for an album or a playlist

and it's the one-screen town in timt, and the same old town with the field in down bad, the wasteland in midnight rain, and the "small town fears" in i hate it here! (at least, that's my head-canon.)

i totally want more of that, it's so compelling!

[taylortruther]

It's very humanizing to me well known Bolter Taylor Swift, a person who has a history of dumping people in ways which made society worried, also got trapped somewhere she didn't belong or didn't feel entirely happy too. I've been there and sometimes only figured out how much of a bad fit it was after it had ended. I hope her current situation is better.

it's funny because imo this is similar to how taylor swift, mastermind, is also obsessed with fate. she wants to be in control, but she is controlled by her own emotions and her own belief in the universe, sometimes to her detriment (all the cages come to mind.) she bolts sometimes, but she also yearns and runs after love and has made love her religion. just an interesting tension, and interesting for me personally to see how she frames her choices to leave - was it a choice, did she feel pushed, did she find a way to make the choice feel less awful (getaway cars), etc.

[taylortruther]

tbh i do wonder if maybe a better way to understand the cages in midnights is to see them as patterns. like she's stuck in these loops of thinking or behaving and feels trapped because she can't find an out. idk, is this anything?

[taylortruther]

I think I probably wrote my question in a confusing way, maybe because it’s a confuse thought in my head too!

I kinda meant, she admitted that she ghosted and “swindled” partners in the past and she had her reasons of her course, but that’s the same thing she accuses Matty of, but in his case she tells him that he is what he’s done, in her case it’s glossed over as a “clever” and “girlboss-y” (not my words, I read them used here and on twitter). Isn’t it a bit hypocritical, for lack of a better adjective, to condemn this type of behaviour when she admitted that she did it in the past?

so just to be clear (because i know i'd get a sassy anon otherwise), i don't think leaving a relationship by way of getaway car is "girl bossy" djdksjs i don't think empowerment in relationships means not caring about hurting people. it means knowing when to leave and how to look out for yourself. but taylor (just like any of us) is just trying to leave her life, she's not dating and breaking up AS an icon of feminism or whatever. like, she's a person. her actions will not always be logical or pure or even good.

so that said, i don't think it's very productive to say "you did this once, you're not allowed to feel hurt when the tables are turned." i think we can look forward to ts12+ and see what she says about those patterns, though! i mean, i for one have said a few times i'd love even more songs about her motivations, or what parts of herself lead her to engage in these specific patterns (getaway cars, people pleasing, and so on.)

like, in the bolter, she reiterated how she skips town on men and it feels freeing. but she's also written many songs about how she thinks she must've been better as an idea, because men leave her in the dust. so which is it? was she in control or was she not? these are questions she asks herself in her last few albums: the archer comes to mind, where she's saying she knows she has an issue with bolting and hurting people close to her - she wants to change. in wcs, she asserts she wasn't poison, she was young and naive, but then why can't she let it go? is it because she enjoyed some of it? in mastermind, she says she's driven by a need to be loved and implies she doesn't deserve it unless she tries tries tries, it's now part of who she is. and in the manuscript, she says she was young, and this guy who was older and so much more mature (as she knows now, given she's in her 30s now too) thinks he did nothing wrong. and maybe it wasn't wrong (or was it?)... but it set her on a path she didn't choose, and she had to find meaning in it to move on and regain control over it. and ttpd is a reflection of that lesson: how you can be led by emotion and superstition and constructs like luck or fate, but these are also traps, because you can use them to escape reality and construct a fantasy that can burn down your whole life.

and taylor has said she's hurt people, switched out men, ghosted. maybe she hasn't sung enough about it to your liking besides quippy one liners, but i also think the explanation for that behavior is clearly described. she's afraid people will leave her and betray her so she searches for reasons to bolt! think of that EVERYONE WILL BETRAY YOU sign in the anti hero mv, and "this is how the world works: you gotta leave before you get left" in idsb, and the reputation poem about caging herself in with her own extreme sense of justice; think about how she sings she "shoots to kill when she's mad," "why do i break what i love so much?" "help me hold onto you" and "my reputations never been worse so you must like me for me" and he "loves her like she's brand new" and how essential that would be for someone who NEEDS to be liked in the midst of a massive public cancellation. how easily that turns into handcuffing yourself to a spell, to the idea that this is the only person she can be with. like, this is a very similar story to say, calvin, but the stakes were lower. but she was still trying to choose the right relationship in the most of a lot of public bullshit.

and then think about how, if you handcuffed yourself to an idea of love, if that love stops being enough, you might struggle to figure out how to end it. i mean, anyone who's ever had to initiate a breakup in a ltr can tell you how you don't break up the first time it occurs to you. you pick fights, resentment builds up, you have doubts you'll find someone else, you go on breaks, you try to make it work, you go into denial.

and ultimately, choosing yourself and your own happiness is so rarely a clean decision. people WILL get hurt in the process, sometimes in avoidable ways. it's just life. ghosting or ending things badly is often a result of not wanting to hurt someone or have a confrontation. which isn't always the best way to handle things, but, well, that doesn't mean you can't be hurt later lmao.

anyway, she wanted to tell a specific story (three stories, really) in ttpd and maybe later she'll talk about her own so-called hypocrisy. or not.

[taylortruther]

something that stuck out with me yesterday was not the "locked inside for six years" comment but the "we are proud of each other comment" like thinking about taylor for the past few years possibly feeling that the love of her life is not proud of her makes me feel sick especially considering how intertwined in her art he is

it has been said by blogs more insightful than me, but in 2016, taylor was so wounded - the world was telling her she didn't deserve her career anymore, she didn't know who to trust, she was pushing people away; for someone who dealt with self-loathing and trust issues and fear she'd lose it all for one misstep, this was a true nightmare scenario. the idea that joe loved her for her, who didn't judge her or see her as damaged goods, was so healing. the thing is, i think taylor was fearful of being Taylor Swift, Superstar - she was actively rejecting it for a time, imo, because she blamed it for her downfall in a way, but also because she knew that's not the her that joe knew or loved.

i don't know if taylor meant she regretted her time with joe. i don't think that's what she meant, i think it was more about how she wished she hadn't lived in fear for so long. we see now that she thinks the chaos when she goes to dinner or a game might be over the top, and she was actively avoiding those situations before - now she's just living her life, come what may. so imo it's more regret about letting fear dictate her decisions than anything. but her relationship with joe coincided with that time in her life. so if she partly regrets sticking around - in that mentality, in that relationship - well... that makes sense to me too.

also, again, the daylight outro, not wanting to be defined by fear, precedes taylor going back into the public eye (on her own and with joe) in 2019... and then the pandemic happened and pushed them back inside again. that's telling!