Seamless Blend Of Dreaminess, Experience, & Genius

Oh to be a teenage boy during the blitz whos slowly dying of tuberculosis

Octet the Musical is such an interesting show to me, because listening through it once makes you feel like it's kind of just beating you over the head with "get off your damn phones." What the support group talks about is just the ugliest parts of the internet; harassment, exploitation, doomscrolling, loneliness and misogyny, conspiricism, and whatever the hell Marvin has going on. And you basically end up feeling like, yeah, it sucks. But then, Velma hits you with "Beautiful", which is just basically saying "blaming the internet for all of your problems won't actually fix anything!". Because so much of the support groups music is dedicated to the dichotomy of The Monster and The Forest. The Forest (the real world) is beautiful, pure and perfect, while the Monster (the internet) is explicitly modern, disgusting and corrosive. The show is built around these splits but we can see that it's not just the Internet- Jessica's belief that the Internet has made people cruel, Henry's struggle with over-stimulation and passive suicidal ideation, Paula's growing distance from her husband, Karly and Ed's desire for some kind of love, Toby's nihilism and turn to conspiracies and Marvin's loss of wonder - all of these problems stem from these people and their lives, and are exacerbated on the Internet. It's telling that the ideal outcome for the support group is to drug everyone's tea so they can "return to their pure, pre-technological state". And it's also telling that Velma, the youngest, the only one of the group to have made a genuine connection on the internet and the one who seems to be most aware that the "real world" isn't a heavenly paradise - she sings about "the forest of dead trees". The life on the Internet is not a different life to the The conclusion Octet comes to isn't "those damn phones", it's "everything and nothing might be real"

There’s something so heartbreaking about ‘still’. It sounds so soft and innocent,, it’s one of the slower songs in the soundtrack almost like the song is taking in a moment despite Alfred actively trying to break out of the moment to push forward the narrative before he dies. Alice being in such denial that she’s simply just talking about staying in this moment in this story and Alfred is all too aware that he doesn’t have the time to do that. He almost gets sucked into it.. he almost gets to believe he can. But he knows time isn’t on his side. They sing together so harmonious because for one brief moment it feels like maybe, just maybe, he could stay and they could be together and happy. But alas time doesn’t pause for love. Alice playfully trying to hold him there with her because she’s so scared that a story starting means it’ll have to end, and the more the story unfolds the closer to death he gets. It’s so innocently playful and so devastating human. The line that keeps making me miserable is ‘run and play with me still, on this page with me still. Stay. Stay with me still.’ Because it just feels so childlike and you remember that they’re only 15 facing the realities of war, mortality and all that they’ve lost. All Alice has is Alfred, she has nothing else. She wants to stay in this moment forever playing with him in green grass, blue skies and flowers blooming and living in a fantasy where things are peaceful and she can simply just be with him. She’s okay with time pausing and staying on the same page forever if it means staying with him, but he knows the story has to move along and so does she, without him.

Angel and devil on your shoulder except it’s Terry Pratchett saying writer’s block is fake and Douglas Adams being locked in a hotel room by his publisher so he’d actually work on his manuscript.

Having finally seen mincemeat on stage I have to conclude that I relate to Monty specifically when he crashes out over them looking through his briefcase like I too would crash out over my coworkers discovering my self-insert ao3 fanfic and reading it aloud at the office. He was valid for this. I mean there were a lot of other things he wasn't valid for but this one, yeah, I see you Monty.

merry christmas to the two canon mincemeat ships hevan and *checks notes (the new instagram reel)* fleming and masterman???