My full piece for the Le Blanc zine, a Chat Blanc Miraculous Ladybug zine hosted over at @leblanczine! I had a lot of fun working on this piece, playing with the shadows and saturations. Everyone's work looks amazing and it all came together so well!

The leftover sale runs through May 4, 2024 so make sure you grab what's available :)

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hey man I found a piece of your soul stuck in the text messages of old friends you don’t speak to anymore. do you want it back

Take the glory, give everything Promise to be dazzling.

I keep coming back to how much Taylor did not need to release this record and how much courage it shows that she did. These lyrics touch on it:

The scandal was contained

The bullet had just grazed

At all costs keep your good name

Because things ended with MH and people generally stopped talking about it and she kept just winning. The general public saw her as at the top of her game and America’s Sweetheart dating the football star. The Brads, Dads, and Chads had something to say but she actually seemed to have more defenders than ever before. Like this is the most recent image the general public has of her

And she chose to put out this one.

She wasn’t on trial anymore, the scandal was contained, so she didn’t need to put in a plea, but she does actually want people to know and understand her

I want to snarl and show you just how disturbed this has made me

She’s trusting us with her feelings when she absolutely didn’t have to and we should appreciate it for the gift it is

don't you worry, folks. we took out all her teeth. - who's afraid of little old me?

‘and sometimes it gets me when crossing your jet stream, we both did the best we could do underneath the same moon in different galaxies’ is so fucking devastating bc not only does it allude to call it what you want, but also all of the references across her work implying that what they had was fate, sent to her by the universe, divine intervention. all the imagery of ‘starry eyes sparkling up my darkest night’ and ‘once upon a time the planets and the fates and all the stars aligned’ and ‘he’s passing by rare as the glimmer of a comet in the sky’ come crashing down into the reality that they were always just outside of each other’s orbit

team give mari cute outfits

religion is one of the most prominent recurring themes on the album, and it has been present in some capacity for quite a few records now. taylor previously compared love to religion: her saving grace, her belief system, and a fated divine intervention (false god, cornelia street, and cruel summer are the best examples of this). ‘sacred new beginnings that became my religion’ and ‘we’d still worship this love even if it’s a false god’ are two of the defining statements about her philosophy on the lover album.

taylor doesn’t want to leave all of that behind on ttpd, at least not at the beginning. the first supernatural force she mentions is the spaceship on down bad, which she compares to a skylight of freedom in the epilogue. *something* has finally come to save her from her life of suffering. she doesn’t care if it’s a force of good at first; if anything, she’s just fine being taken away by aliens. she views this man as her destiny. it isn’t until guilty as sin? that taylor starts to ponder the moral implications of what she’s doing. is she guilty as sin for wanting to leave her previous religion and relationship behind? she comes to the conclusion that, even if she rolls the stone away and gets resurrected/redeemed, she cannot avoid the fallout. she is okay with the thought of having to wait, as long as both lovers vow to be together forever, just as she once did with someone else in false god. ‘I choose you and me religiously’ finishes the bridge of the song in a direct callback to cornelia street.

the next mention of religion has murkier imagery. she claims that she does not need the Lord’s help to save this man. she sees the halo that he has, and she can fix him herself. now that she feels free of her prior cage, she isn’t looking for divine intervention anymore. she wants control. she is their route to salvation.

when the relationship falls apart, she retreats back into the position of a believer rather than a divine figure. she compares him to a Holy Ghost who promised to save her and take her to heaven. instead, she is in hell in every sense of the word: she’s down bad and feels guilty for digging up the grave. he was a jehovah’s witness who promised that she could break free of the cage imposed by love without changing her religion altogether; she would’ve just had to switch denominations. she could still have a marriage and kids! she could still have a blue tortured poet! the man was different, but not the dreams they had together. the story of the first part of the album ends here. her faith has been broken, and she has only found any semblance of sanity by refusing to mention these belief systems altogether.

side b/the anthology blends the christian imagery of side a with goddesses, sorcerers, and prophecies. she bargains with these powers to let her have the future she wants (the prophecy). she doesn’t sound like someone believing in salvation. if anything, she feels cursed. she decides that the concept of divinely ordained timing will never work in certain relationships (‘the goddess of timing once found us beguiling / she said she was trying / peter, was she lying?’). this disdain extends onto her perception of other people’s faith (‘bet they never spared a prayer for my soul’). she does position herself as a prophet in cassandra, but even then, she admits that the role has hurt her. perhaps the pain in thank you aimee was meant to be, or perhaps she was just strong enough to build a legacy in spite of it, boulder by boulder. is she a martyr? does she want to be? or did she save herself?

the only real love song on this half of the album makes no mention of fate or any divine forces. it wasn’t meant to be. it’s not a supernatural invisible string or lightning in a bottle. she is just in love.

the album ends with the manuscript, which revisits an old story of a defining, formative heartbreak. as she sings ‘at last, she knew what the agony had been for’ while describing the legacy of her writing, she seems to revert to thinking about the purpose of trauma. the only exception is that, in this case, she is the one who found meaning in her pain by turning it into a manuscript. writing is her belief system now, and she proselytizes by telling her stories and thus giving up the manuscript.

ultimately, her belief in destiny has chewed her up and spat her out. she so desperately clung to her existing belief systems that she was fooled by a conman, which left her feeling cursed. religion is supposed to be with someone even in their darkest moments, but the album explains that taylor often felt abandoned. the only constant in her life was, well, herself. she’ll be okay, but her pen will be her saving grace.

My brain is like — IIIIIII’m having his baaaaby, no I’m not but you should see your faces …. FLOR I DA…. You don’t. Get to. Tell me. About. Sad….. my boy only breaks his favorite toys toys oOOooh OOOohh…. Pleeeease I’ve been on my kneeeeees….. I’m working late! Cause I’m a singer!… you know how to ball, I know Aristotle….another fortnight lost in ameeeeerica…..I’M SO DEPRESSED I ACT LIKE IT’S MY BIRTHDAY….i founded the club she’s heard great things about….

ttpd + text posts/ tweets

"IM MISERABLE AND NOBODY EVEN KNOWS! TRY AND COME FOR MY JOB!" SHE IS SO UNSERIOUS FJFHDKFLSDFf

I love it so so much how Taylor chooses to tell the stories of women that have long been forgotten by history, if they ever made it. Who had ever heard of Rebelah Harkness before tlgad? Who remembered Clara Bow before the song? I’m sure they’re both not entirely forgotten but I have never ever heard anyone in the general public talk about them the way people like Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe were talked about, and there’s also her grandmother Marjorie. I sincerely hope she will continue to use her storytelling for this.

7-year-old Annabeth refusing to go to bed during her first month in the Athena cabin. Annabeth sitting up in bed, holding a pillow to her chest, as her eyes fill with tears because she's terrified that if she closes them, something will get her. Begging through her tears, asking her new siblings check under the bed to make sure there’s nothing there. Older campers keep trying to reassure her and checking, but she keeps insisting they're doing it wrong. A group of tired Athena campers sneaking out in the dead of night to drag Luke from the Hermes Cabin so he can get her to sleep. 7-year-old Annabeth flinging herself into his arms as she sobs because she's already lost so much, and now she doesn't even have her big brother watching over her.