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1. sadie is put in a situation where she has lost control of the things that give her control (or more specifically, she has nothing to ease her compulsions to control things). these two are a.) her environment, because she lives in a desert, not giving her the comforting familiarity she gets from wood/trees (her sneaking out as a child to feel sawdust, her grandfather playing her songs with wooden instruments when she feels sad), b.) jasmine, which i will expound on in the next point

2. while not directly confirmed i am suspect to believe she had a toxic relationship with jasmine due to her compulsions. there's something so sickening about sadie's unconscious obsession with jasmine + her inability to recognize that she bears fault for her breakup. when sadie claims her "heart broke" in the song haze, i'd like to believe that she means it in a sense that her heart's capacity to love is also broken.

if sadie's entire problem is about compulsive control, we can perceive jasmine as someone sadie unconsciously controls too. i think about sadie's first lines about "liking puzzles" and her psychoanalyzing jasmine through her spotify playlist — she does not see jasmine as an equal person. even when she sings about her yearning, she talks about what she (sadie) wants. she never once expressed concern about jasmine without making it about herself. the other half that she's "missing" is not jasmine alone but rather the comfort she gets in supposedly knowing jasmine thoroughly, the clicking in her head with gameifying her own relationship with jasmine

3. i'm sure it's pretty easy to understand how sadie uses her game to feel like she has some control over her life, so i guess i'll just point out some tiny details wherein the musical emphasizes this point. her description of the game is quite interesting, that it's a game about sorcery before a time magic is question. she also describes the game to have an endlessly customizable database. both of these combined with the fact that zippy was Very into exercising feeds into sadie's mentality that playing the game = progress, because she's doing so much different and "endless" things.

4. really love the description in the beginning where sadie describes the mountains to be like god looking into the deserts, because it goes with the theme of compulsions feeling like religious inclinations. not the same thing of course, but it reminds me of when sadie's grandfather says the wood controls him more than vice versa. sadie is ingrained to believe in doing things that her brain tells her because it feels like something is controlling her, as if, well, god is watching her in the desert

5. the game itself is a visualization of sadie's compulsions — it requests of her things to do that don't actually provide her much benefit except the sense of accomplishment upon finishing the task. mr lupus, as the wolf, hints at sadie's true fears, which she constantly ignores.

what nags at me is the karaoke scene, because it's the first time where we see the villagers appalled by sadie. if we believe the villagers to be so zoned in on sadie delivering her tasks (aka give into her compulsions/need for control), then they were appalled by the fact that sadie began to yearn more than what she's supposed to do in the game. the villagers are mad that sadie is digging deeper into her fears. that she's doing something out of routine/schedule. mr lupus even calls out that sadie didn't pay the coin fee, that it wasn't her turn. the villagers are disgusted by her loss of control

6. there's an extreme focus on time throughout sadie's storyline. about how many hours a day she spends on games, the time spent putting in quarters, the months spent in taos — she constantly counts the amount of time she "wastes" that she wishes to gain control of. the irony of it is she keeps wanting to skip mr lupus' cutscenes calling out this exact problem she has