is everything run by male fantasies?
a lot of recurring themes from The Despair Code are never going to really have their day...i'm a little sad about that but hopeful that if rnttnzr songs are ever played live, the lyrical content of some of these instrumentals will be fleshed out and used. who knows. i've even thought about fully rerecording Operation Northwoods songs, and they have such a long way to go it would be like a new song anyway. but that's not what i wanted to talk about.
the version of the rnttnzr character (which is you or me and everyone else that wants to be) in The Despair Code is driven entirely by toxic and corrupt motivations. so much so that even happy sounding songs like Bicycle or GENIE are about nostalgic grief and failing someone you love, respectively, rather than childhood memories and running away together...and this self-fulfilling "bad luck" happens to rnttnzr because of perspective.
to fully understand why rnttnzr is so cursed throughout this album, i want to talk about IVY and the title track. the perspectives of these two songs give insight into the motivations of our tragic hero. in The Despair Code (the song), the scene is an ambulance arriving in the middle of a city on fire. at the nucleus of the disaster is the truly beloved of rnttnzr among the debris of an intense wreck. and the perspective rnttnzr takes is "i was too late to save them." IVY is pretty similar, but like the play on words suggests (as IVY is both a character and a reference to needles), it's about an OD - an intimate, choking death without a city on fire in the backdrop. Just a silent hotel room. rnttnzr's first thought is "i should have stopped them." how crazy do you have to be for the first word out of your mouth at the scene of someone's death...to be the word "i"? not that I wouldn't try to save someone i loved. anyone would...but rnttnzr in this and many other ways makes their own self the center of the lives of their loved ones, and everything moves outward from there. you might say rnttnzr may only even have these relationships (if on a subconscious level) in order to play out personality complexes and trauma. so that when rnttnzr wishes to have been able to save a lost one, the motivation isn't "i wish my love didn't die;" it's "i wish i would've been the one to save my love." big big difference. this is without even getting into whether either of these "relationships" in IVY and TDC were actually two-sided. rnttnzr is intentionally gender-neutral because it's a character for the listener to put themselves beside and learn with. you could almost watch yourself making the same mistakes. however, the complex i am ascribing to these songs is extremely rooted in my experience of male savior fantasies, which i had even as a seven year old. to be that crucial person to save someone from the brink of death, and be forever lauded and appreciated etc etc. and adored by them. i did this exclusively toward girls. for many years. jesus.
so even though it is not a gendered phenomenon in the context of the story (rnttnzr could be a girl arriving at the scene of another girl's death, for example), i name it as being inspired by the male fantasy savior complex family. rnttnzr is self-hating though and so feels no shame for this, only the version of suffering rnttnzr needs for this Despair Code side to keep feeding.
so yeah that is one of the crucial things rnttnzr has to unlearn in order to survive into album 3. using other people as strawmen for a hero complex is not anywhere close to friendship or love. it is a very blind and greedy way to see other people. it's no wonder you're too late to save everyone when you're never there unless you need them.
