Fun Gang and Musical Identity
This is a topic I've wanted to talk about for a while, but one of the most interesting things about the gang (mainly Ralsei, but I wanna talk abt Kris and Susie too) is how they manage musical identity.
Let's start with Chapter 1 Susie. She has two themes, both of them heavy on whiny electrical guitar. "Susie" for the hallway confrontation with Kris, and the much more energetic "Vs. Susie" for the Lancer fight in the basement. They're in-your-face songs... and they don't show up again after this chapter outside a couple Tenna soundbites. The original Susie themes are centered on her identity as the unsalvageable mean girl; by the time she's in the stock hero role in Chapter 2, that stuff is behind her, and though it informs her character, she's not that way anymore, so those themes are discarded. We'll come back to Susie later.
Ralsei, meanwhile, does have a more consistent musical identity, but it's very subtle. To simplify a bit, consider how the Prophecy's motif is formatted every time it shows up. In The Legend, it's 4/4; powerful, but controlled. He's telling a watered-down and friendly version of the story. Then, in the first two Castle Town themes, the Dark World over which Ralsei presides, it's in 3/4; flowing, waltzy, pleasant, which are pretty solid descriptors of who Ralsei is as a person. There's a lot of weird stuff going on with Ralsei's musical influence with Chaos King and Castle Funk, where his time signature changes get overwritten, but I'm truncating things here. Where things get funky is in the Sanctuaries, where when the real Prophecy shows up, the eighth note gets the beat instead of the quarter note. While Ralsei's breaking panels and keeping Kris and Susie away from the truth, we're in 6/8 for the Prophecy motif, keeping a similar pattern of note lengths: everything Ralsei performs has ratios of 2s and 1s, with a 3 bridging the two halves the motif. A couple 1/2s for flourish. Keep an eye on those, because everything goes haywire when he's no longer there. 2nd and 3rd Sanctuaries show a Prophecy which Ralsei can no longer hide, and it's in 10/8. When we get to the Third, the note lengths get weird; there's ones, twos, threes, and a five to bridge the gap. Ralsei's been approximating something way out of his control.
Ralsei is a very talented musician on the whole, but he doesn't know exactly how to make something original. Take the Raise Up Your Bat sequence, where he can change the lyrics on the fly and maintain the rhyme scheme in sacrifice of all sensical meaning. But he doesn't change Lost Girl. Once again, take note.
Back to Susie on the subject of the music games: for RUYB the first time, she's just doing whatever the hell she feels like and assuming she's doing fine. She... wasn't, but in future minigames, she makes an earnest effort, and when she does, it goes well. What's characteristic of her here is that she starts by doing something entirely her own thing.
But here's where her musical identity gets downright awesome in my eyes: in the 2nd Sanctuary, she unintentionally takes a page out of Ralsei's book, and messes with the Prophecy motif. In the story, she unintentionally rearranges some panels (the Heroes stuff), but in its song, she also reduces down the note lengths to be more simple. 1s everywhere with a couple 2s. It's the most regular version of the Prophecy motif yet, but to me, it's significant that she steps into Ralsei's territory musically, because she's wanting the Prophecy to turn out good, too.
On the note of Lost Girl: that theme is tied to 4 characters now (Noelle, Dess, Susie, and Ralsei, though Ralsei's connection is actually entirely optional to see... for some reason). It's the one point of obvious musical coherency within the cast... and it's most notably tied to Noelle via her own theme, Girl Next Door. That itself is a whole can of worms, but for now...
It's Kris's time in the spotlight. To put it simply, we don't really know what Kris's musical identity is outside of playing the piano, and they will not let us perform for them. The Sanctuary pianos are so basic they don't care. The music minigame guitar isn't something they're known for, so they don't care. They even don't engage directly with the Lost Girl part! But piano performance? That's theirs, and theirs alone. We can't see Kris's emotions, or dialogue, or anything, and it's only when it's time to play the massive piano in the first Sanctuary, with encouragement by Susie, they play without our influence, and it's beautiful. They're disconnected from everything else, but they're starting to express a musical identity of their own... and it's ironically more concrete than the others', which are mired in uncertainty and subtlety in rhythms and garnishments.
Keep in mind that this is all truncated analysis, and there's so much deeper stuff to get across here. But while the three of them don't present obvious or consistent musical identities now, I strongly suspect we'll get fully concrete musical identities for all three members.