“You missed a key!” -You 🎼🗝️
In the latest series of You Joe had been ambushed by his ex and locked in the glass box that he typically keeps his victims in, an inescapable cage that’s hidden in the basement of his bookstore.
In the process his usual hidden spare key had been removed, leaving him defenceless. But when Kate least expected it Joe revealed that he had planned ahead and anticipated this scenario playing out by burying a key inside his arm.
We’ve seen many examples of glass closets within Taylor’s visuals, especially the glass boxes used on the eras tour.
In the willow music video Taylor appears to be trapped like Joe was, until she reveals that there’s been a Truman-esque escape hole beneath her feet the entire time she was performing.
So what was she waiting for? Her partner needed time to catch up and to prepare ahead of time so that he could join her when she escaped successfully.
Joe’s latest partner in crime called herself Brontë when she was introduced this season and I can’t help but notice how much they have in common with the characters from the ‘all too well’ short film. “She told me that they want me to write our story.” 📕📘
Apart from Madeline Brewer sounding like the female version of William Bowery, she had just received a book publishing deal when Joe got ‘tied up’. ‘Her, later on’ also shares her stories on her own while her partner remains ‘tied up’ outside in the snow.
When Kate returns to the basement and discovers the glass box is empty Joe declares that “you forgot a key!” This reveals that Joe had known he was walking into a trap by tracking her and used that to his advantage to gain the upper hand.
“Dear reader, if it feels like a trap, you’re already in one.”
This sentiment is applicable to many of Taylor’s Easter eggs, especially the ‘hey Stephen’ skit. Taylor purposefully draws our attention to the piece of pizza by pointing out that it’s the only element on the board that isn’t related to Stephen Colbert.
This leaves us feeling like the mood board is a dud with a dead end and that’s because it is if we’re missing a key that unlocks the meaning behind it. And “‘fuck the patriarchy’ key chain on the ground” is the reason why we’re missing such a large piece of the puzzle. ☠️🔚
Credit to @ MyTearsRicoKay for picking up on the connection between Joe’s key being hidden in his arm and the young girl tapping on Taylor’s arm at the VMAs while she’s wearing the shirt covered in her album names.
So many see reputation TV as the key because they’re associating the re-record with karma fire vault tracks, but if “every bait and switch was a work of art” then Taylor Swift TV lines up with both the golden egg on the mood board as well as Joe hiding the key in his right arm.
The arm concealing the key instantly reminded me of the scene in Harry Potter when Barty and Harry compared scars. The dark mark is a magical symbol that links the death eaters with Voldemort and it’s always located on the inner left forearm, but Harry’s cut is on the right side.
This creates an interesting delineation between the good and bad guys, similar to the contrast between the Taylor Swift and reputation albums. “I don’t like your kingdom keys, they once belonged to Me.”
There are so many different directions I would like take this in, but first I’d like to point out the connection between Taylor’s love for scrabble and the letters associated with music notes. See this link for a categorised list of the musical keys used in Taylor’s music. This is outside of my wheelhouse but I find it interesting to see what music key Taylor uses most frequently.
So many of the behind the scenes clips are scripted in a way to intentionally expose the inconsistencies in Taylor’s story, just like the Truman show switches to the director’s POV halfway through the movie. Eg. Taylor Lautner’s “three of them” comment etc.
“So excited! This is the main event!” This initially sounds like Taylor’s excited about filming the video, but it’s actually a reference to Ice Spice and the pearl orbs. Karma is not a lost album, it’s a trail made up of thousands of breadcrumbs… “It’s death by a thousand cuts.”
Alluding to karma being a lost era and then withholding the orange colour in her album eras has lead to Taylor’s infrequent use of it to be associated with fire vault tracks instead of the changes she made to disguise the truth. Eg. two T letters -> two Taylor theory. 🧡=🌈🕳️🐇
Next I’d like to circle back to the ‘all too well’ short film and the red scarf that is seen as a key factor in this song. I’d like to propose the possibility that this might actually be a dud Easter egg with the f in scar-f acting as a red herring for the scar-let letter. 🧡🎁🦋
“We show off our different scarlet letters. Trust me, mine is better.” Leaving a trail of breadcrumbs eliminates the possibility of anyone ruining a big reveal if the truth has been hidden in plain sight the whole time. “You drew stars around my scars but now I’m bleedin’.” ✨🧣
This one ties into my previous post about ‘I can do it with a broken heart’ not being what it seems and the possibility of this performance being an example of Taylor lying to prove a point in order to create lasting change within the music industry. Essentially 🧡 = 🌈 taykarma
I won’t share every example of orange Taylor has used, but this orange mask was worn during the scene about there being a secret encoded message in the funeral scene. Karma = the orange tabby cat from my previous muse post. 🐈🐈⬛
Taylor claimed she used “the wrong key” 🔐 before playing ‘ours’ on the eras tour. And the same had occurred before playing ‘delicate’ on the reputation stadium tour.
This ties into the lyrics “I keep my side of the street clean” and implies that the clean version of Taylor™ is devoid of what precipitated the use of the karma orange Easter eggs. Hence the cleaning cart for the eras tour and the “nothing new” style ending too.
I haven’t done a deep dive into it yet but there seems to be a lot of significance to the vault tracks and the truth they hold in comparison to Taylor’s story. She really put the ‘hem’ into mayhem here by leaving a piece missing from the OGs. “I’ve still got you all over me” 🤍🖤
This one’s from the Miss Americana documentary. The view on the camera shows a circle of orange and blue instead of the rainbow featured in the ‘Me!’ music video. This implies that karma is not revealing who her IRL twin flame and continuing to allude to their presence instead.
This was a conversation Taylor and Brendon had about her adopting Benjamin Button. It ties into the way she talks about her cats being her children and how that plays out with making her music from a narrator POV.
Before I continue I just want to clarify that I don’t disagree or disapprove of others ideas and theories around karma and unsolved Easter eggs. It’s becoming apparent that a lot of big Easter eggs like the man wall were designed to keep us occupied without a key to decipher it.
My muse theory has unlocked a new level of understanding Taylor’s work that has taken me in a complexly opposite direction. And that’s what a cypher key does, it decrypts information and that “you’re missing a key” seems to involve two people influencing the creation of Taylor™.
When Taylor said ‘ours’ was the wrong key it was coming from the perspective of Taylor™. “I will go to secret gardens in my mind. People need a key to get to, the only one is mine.” This creates a choice between the key being mine or ours. And if the devil’s in the details… 😸
The answer can be found in the ‘Me!’ music video when Taylor rejects the flowers and ring but keeps the cat. Which then calls into question Me vs We and me+you=us and so on.
Ed Sheeran is definitely a large part of Taylor’s version of karma and her collaborations with redheads in general. I wouldn’t be surprised if karma the lost album ends up being a collab album full of songs that we already know to reveal just how widespread her story has become.
For example Ice Spice collaborated with Travis Scott (TS) for their ‘oh shhh…’. song. This reveals Ice Spice in a singular glass box surrounded by butterflies and a 112 sign, as the Statue of Liberty as the city burns and TS at the helm surrounded by orange light. 🧡🦋🗽🃏
And there’s even a hallway full of playing card imagery too. I’m starting to think getaway car is a red herring for car-d. ♠️♥️♣️♦️
To finish off I wanted to touch on the forearm tattoos again. Adam Lambert was seen giving Ellen a cruel summer tattoo in the ‘you need to calm down’ music video.
Adam has a ‘musica delenit bestiam feram’ tattoo on his left forearm. This is Latin for ‘music soothes the beast’.
I died dead when I saw what was on his right forearm… 🗝️ a skeleton key! 🫠🤦🏻♀️ In exactly the same spot as Taylor Swift was written on her shirt.
All I’m saying is that this was the OG fictional teenage love triangle. With Taylor as Ron, her muse as Hermione and Taylor™ as Harry. Which leaves us with debutation: Harry dying, the Me! snake destroyed, setting the butterflies free and the OG TS returning from the grave. 🐍🦋
🧡🩷 vs 🩷🩵
What started with ‘our song’ is now ending with the ‘delicate’ facade crumbling down piece by piece. The eras tour was the key to understanding the many pieces of Taylor’s story and now whatever comes next is going to be the key to uncovering how those pieces go together. 🧡💌💙
Taylor claimed that she “brought a knife to a gun fight”, but what they didn’t see coming was the old diaries that she had kept stashed away that enabled her to gain the upper hand by going back in time to retell her story. After all, karma is a cat-alogue. 🎼🗝️
