This is my favourite part of Solla actually. I did do a post on the music thing already, linking here, but I’m gonna do a speed run so that you don’t have to read all that lmao. In short: a lot of how I described Ragatha and Kinger’s relationship is musical in nature.
They are harmony and melody, first and following bars in a phrase, and so on. The literal, physical through line of their friendship is their little call and response. That tap tap ta-ta tap, tap tap. Shave and a haircut, two bits. It is the crux of this friendship, the first way in which they connect and the signal to each other of… well, I can’t really verbalize it! It’s music! Ragatha may have never come out of her room if he didn’t start up that little knocking routine.
Chapter 1:
He hummed. His fingers tapped.
Dolly, then.
She hummed back. Her fingers tapped the reply.
Which is something that Pomni, after getting her hint in ch1, starts to see as well but regardless of her attempts to connect the dots and for all the information she does gather, this eludes her.
Chapter 2:
Her fingers tapped against his. Ragatha had done that a million times before. It happened almost every adventure. It wasn’t new or unusual or even all that apparent. Pomni didn’t know why she was noticing it now. She didn’t know why it suddenly felt like it mattered.
Music being THE touch-point here was for quite a few reasons! I wanted this relationship to feel as if it had a set rhythm prior to the start of the show. I wanted their interactions to feel embedded and routine, cycling the same song in a way. But I guess the really important thing with music is that it impossible to verbally articulate it. In the same way you cannot just explain your entire history with someone, you cannot just explain music. You can explain the theory and the vibes and the genre, but it will never be the same as just listening to the song. You can explain the events that happened to you and this person, but it isn't ever going to do the real thing justice.
It is something you HAVE to experience, like, you gotta be there for it. Which no one else here was. Other circus members now long gone would have heard this tune, but the current group, no one actually knew what Kinger used to be like, they don’t know they were close at all. Pomni suspects, sure, but she can only see a rythym and no pitch. To her this is still just a static pattern. Which is why Caine calls them "ghost notes" in ch5, which is a musical notation for notes that are present in percussion but have no assigned pitch.
Even the two people playing this song have kind of lost the melody to time, it's an echo of what it used to be. It's why, again, Caine calls "fugues," a type of musical piece where two or more "voices" augement a different melody that layers.
Chapter 5: Those odd little moments with the two of them suddenly weren’t odd at all. Pomni hadn’t been looking at something as it was built, she was looking at ruins. Fossils of a relationship that pre-dated her and everyone else here save for Caine.
They were a melody. The first and second bars of a phrase.
The other thing with music to emphasize is that sometimes it isn’t just listening to the song, it is the context in which you shown it and by who. It changes your relationship to the pieces as well because everyone knows shave and a haircut, its literally the doorknock song, but not everyone formed trust around it.
I’ll put this as an aside here, but Ragatha is so unreliable guys. Don’t believe about half of what she says. It was in the tags but really I cannot stress enough. When she describes someone else as looking annoyed, contemptuous, disgusted, and so on, what she is actually seeing is shock, confusion, or worry. When she stresses about how obvious she is being with her anger and grief, literally no one else has noticed it. While the dialogue in her sections is never altered, the way she interprets sentences and actions are not always accurate. She is just grafting her own thoughts onto them.
Chapter 6: Gangle was half-hiding, fearful or even petrified. Zooble’s eyes were stony, though if it was anger or disgust, she couldn’t say. It was disdainful, though. That much she could glean.
Jax’s face was blank. She could almost feel the smug grin under it, just waiting to crawl forward.
Wrong! Gangle was actually quiet worried, Zooble was upset at Caine, and Jax was shocked by her actually blowing up that he didn't say shit. he thought he could make her mad but, eerrnntt, incorrect. he could annoy her, anger is far different.
I bring this up because Pomni, on the opposite side, is a overconfident narrator. She is a actively looking for reactions from Ragatha and when she sees nothing, tries to write it off. There are a lot of moments she states things as fact, specifically with Kinger and Ragatha, but it’s not actually accurate. It didn’t consider to her until ch4 that Ragatha might have known Queenie, only able to conceptually it as similar to her own experience with Kinger. She doesn’t realize her honesty in ch1 hit Ragatha like a bullet train until ch4 with the open wound/bleeding motif Ragatha has in experiencing her grief.
Chapter 2: Ragatha felt like an open wound. She felt like she was trailing blood all over the halls. Like she’s this messy, wet, ugly thing getting her grief all over the place and ruining it for everyone else. A child with muddy shoes dragging around the house. Ragatha at least had the decency to feel ashamed about it.
Chapter 5: It was only really hitting her now that the choice be honest, back when Ragatha first asked about Kinger, hadn’t just bruised, it drew blood.
And now someone she cared about was bleeding out.
Pomni thinks she knows this situation better than she does. She certainly thinks she knows Ragatha a lot better than she actually does, hence the big misjude in ch6. And also hence her more hypocritical moments where she gets angry at Zooble and Gangle for doing more or less the same things she’s been doing for weeks, thinking she is exempt from it before doubling back on the realization.
Chapter 6: Pomni knew her well enough by now to read the lines on her face, practically penned out in full sentences with how little she was doing to encrypt them.
She looked stunned, frozen in place, expression teetering on the razor edge between shock and relief.
Pomni was positive she was one misplaced heartbeat away from sobbing.
[Insert Ragatha yelling at Kinger here]
She wasn’t sure she’d ever been so immediately and explosively wrong in her whole life.
Because all her measurements here, all the stars shes finding, she still does not know the story behind this constellation, only the shape it is taking. Kinger and Ragatha are talking in a different language, or I mean, they might as well be.
I said it in the other post as well, but there is a line in ch4 that reads as a bit, and it in part is, but it was also related to this whole theme. It’s the first time Pomni touches the idea of music only to backpedal with the fact that she actually has no fucking clue what she’s talking about. Same with how she sees Kinger and Ragatha. She can guess and theorize all she wants but she simply does not know this song. She doesn’t know the tune.
Chapter 4: What the fuck was she talking about? Pomni didn’t know anything about music.
And not to get too lost in the sauce again, but I in my own head imagined them as counterpoint harmony, where the melodies aren’t exactly the same but instead interlocking, in conversation. I had originally wanted to include a secondary motif here about martinet tones but the metaphor got a bit too dense and I didn’t want to be explaining like. Harmonic physics in a fanfic BUT tartini tones are cool as fuck look into them. Anyways counterpoint harmonies are a bit atypical from a melody and harmony, which are often in parallel intervals. They are somewhat dependent on each other, crossing over each other and if I’m getting REALLY specific to me they’re contrary and oblique BUT.
Something you often hear about a counterpoint harmony when you’re learning it is that is makes sense in context. Kinger and Ragatha and the way they interact is a little weird to an outsider (Pomni) but makes sense in context. This is the part of the parallels where Pomni truly is looking in, like, through frosted glass.
Ragatha and Kinger kind of amalgamate all the other things I’ve been babbling on about, and a couple other smaller ideas which… fuck, man, this is already so long. I can’t keep adding to it. BUT they do still amalgamate, which is why I wanted to wait until the end to talk about them specifically. They mirror each other, they echo, they mathematize, and of course they linger in front of doorways. The ongoing motif with the doors in Solla was actually the first thing I’d concretely decided on when thinking about some of the visualizations I wanted to use and it bloomed from there. Almost every time someone is at a doorway in this story, the room they’re standing at is empty. Even Pomni. When she’s finally too antsy to put it off anymore and knocks on Ragatha’s door, she is not there.
Chapter 4: She didn’t hesitate this time, she’d done quite enough of that, thank you very much. Three sharp knocks rang against the wooden texture. Her hands itched a little less.
She waited. No response. Pomni frowned and tried again, a little bit louder, but still. Nothing.
And I do have something specific that the doorways are overall in representation of, but I feel like it might be more useful to leave that to interpretation. Regardless, the thing that Kinger does with Queenie’s door, getting pulling in by a gravity, is the precise exact same thing that Ragatha is doing to his door years and years later. She never calls it gravity because she never sees it happening, it takes a while before it clicks that she’s copying him in that regard but she is. She stands, waiting for someone who is not there; he stand, waiting for someone who is not there.
Chapter 6: Ragatha’s hand hovered above the wood of the door. Her palm flattened just under Queenie’s cheek and tremor rolled through her. Ragatha wondered if this is what it felt like for Kinger too. She wondered, too, if she would feel any differently right now if she was at his door instead.
In Ragatha’s mind, what she is doing here is wound picking. She is visiting a grave, which is how she often describes the crossed out doors in the narration, but the person isn’t gone yet. Some of this is preemptive guilt and preemptive grief for when he is finally gone, and some of it is several years old, mourning a friendship that will never be the way it was.
Chapter 3: Ragatha’s finger’s spread against the portrait. A flat surface.
She was too old for this. Too much time had passed. It was stupid. She was being stupid.
Chapter 4: Ragatha found Kinger in the hallway the next morning. He stood before Queenie’s door with glassy eyes. It was like he was in a trance, hovering a hand close to her scribbled out face, but not quite touching.
The walks Ragatha starts taking at night exist in parallel to Kinger and his wandering in the present, where she will sometimes have to go and find him after muscle memory strands him somewhere in the circus. Another routine, another cycle, and another attempt to solve the issue by applying an action for a reaction. But more than that, Ragatha is paralleling Queenie. Queenie kept getting up in the middle of the night and disappearing, meandering around until she either found soft place to crash, or until she found her way back to her room. Or until:
Chapter 3: “She’s gone again.”Queenie was found waiting outside Ragatha’s door, as if it was her first week all over again. They’d brought her back to her room.
And Ragatha does not realize consciously she’s copying this, but as a subconscious matter, she is trying to figure out why Queenie was doing that. What comfort it might have brought her, if any. And like busting up her room, it only helps in margins. Queenie was not walking around at night to feel better, it was because she was mentally getting cloudy, what is usually called “sun-downing."
And then Kinger, too:
Chapter 6: “Kinger?” She called. She realized, as she got closer, it was her door that he’d been standing before. (…) He milled for a moment, as if trying to recall where he was meant to go next. He’d been waiting for her.
They are orbiting each other still. Paralleling, missing each others paths over and over. The ending section is both of the repeating a core moment: for Ragatha, running to find Queenie, her first perceived failing; for Kinger, running to find Ragatha, his last perceived success.
I truly could probably do another like three posts because I’ve really only touched on some of the motifs and the more hidden themes and not the larger, more obvious ones like the sublimation of anger, the reasons behind Ragatha and Kinger’s secrecy, the micro subplots with Zooble (catching Ragatha up at night), Gangle (the flowers), and Jax (the key theft), and of course the big one, dealing with grief when the person is still there. Ragatha’s combined routinifying of really heavy things and the desire to hang onto the grief as proof that she is still a person, and that they were all people who deserve to be remembered and poured but unfortunately the human mind cannot sustain grief this long. I’m starting to get ramble again here lmao.
Thank you for reading all that if you’ve lasted this long!! Fr it brings me insane amounts of joy to know people care that much about stuff I’ve written. As mentioned above there is still a lot that I’m choosing to leave a bit more to interpretation and/or feel the story was already explicit enough about BUT i would love love to hear yalls thoughts whether they align with what I’ve laid out here or not! Genuinely no wrong answers, or if there’s anything specific you’re curious about my askbox is always open. Ok time to write a oneshot BYEE
I’ve mentioned I’ll occasionally post reviews of gay themed movie here. I just saw “Twinless”, a movie I can recommend.
I first heard about it a few months ago when it played at the Sundance Film Festival. Lead actor Dylan O'Brien got great reviews. During the festival, a controversy occurred when clips and GIFs of O'Brien were leaked (nudity and gay sex scenes). The movie also got strong positive reviews (it currently has a 98% score at Rotten Tonstoes with 83 reviews).
The story is odd. O'Brien plays Roman, a twin whose brother Rocky has died. He feels like he’s lost half of himself and he goes to a self-help group to try to deal with his grief.
Dylan O’Brian is terrific. He plays both the Roman the surviving twin, who is straight, and Rocky who was gay. O’Brian’s scenes as he grieves for his brother are painful to watch. And he created a very different and believable performance of the dead gay twin in flashbacks.
The crux of the story is that, at the therapy group (for twins grieving for a dead twin), Roman meets Dennis, another guy grieving for a lost one. They form a bond which helps Roman deal with his issues.
But Dennis is lying…
It’s difficult to say what I think of actor James Sweeney, who plays Dennis and also directed the movie. As the story progresses, Dennis’ lies get bigger and, if discovered, would be very cruel to Roman, I found myself disliking the Dennis more and more. Sweeney was a largely expressionless face - which is probably good for a character who is lying. His eyes are very dark, and it’s difficult to distinguish the iris from the pupil. This makes it even harder to interpret his expressions. Is all of that good acting? (Since I liked the movie, he must be a good director!)
With most movies, you know exactly how they will end. But as I watched Twinless, I had no idea how it would be resolved. The situation becomes stressful because of how big the lie becomes. When the truth is out, you know there will be anger… but how much? I felt the ending worked.
Earlier I mentioned the leaked sex scene. Some gay sex (2 positions), lots of gay kissing early, and one straight sex scene. (O’Brian as a cute butt.)
Here’s the trailer:
NOTE: A recent review at Variety called the movie a “bromance” which is very strange. The character Dennis is a creepy stalker. Would they have called a movie about a guy stalking a woman, a romance?
I also found a review write after the Sundance screening. It called the movie a black comedy. Wow! I found nothing about the story funny.
So while I liked the movie, my interpretation is certainly different than others.
Watch Trump lie right to your face. What’s amazing is that he does it so effortlessly. It’s like breathing to him. Here, he claims his uncle taught the “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski at MIT. Kaczynski never went to MIT.
(via Kari Lake Claims She Opposes Arizona Abortion Ban She Once Praised)
“I’m incredibly thrilled that we’re going to have a great law that is already in the books,” Lake said in June of 2022. “It will prohibit abortion in Arizona, and I think we’re going to be paving the way and setting course for other states to follow.”
