I'm analyzing this album as if Michael Emerson wrote it, and I'm posting a "teaser" of my analysis of this song while I work on the rest of the album! analysis under the cut because it's very long, also I would love to hear feedback and additional thoughts from you guys
“What have we done with innocence?/It disappeared with time, it never made much sense/Adolescent resident/Wasting another night on planning my revenge”
This applies to musical!Michael as his childhood innocence was seemingly non-existent because of his father. Seeing other children, and his own brother Sam, not having to suffer through what he did would not have felt fair or made sense to him. Teenaged Michael likely did spend time thinking about revenge on his father.
“Don't want to be your monkey wrench/One more indecent accident/I'd rather leave than suffer this/I'll never be your monkey wrench”
“Monkey Wrench” in this refers to the american phrase “Throw a monkey wrench in the gears” which means to come across an unexpected problem that is usually severe. This could mean that Michael wasn't wanted by his father or that his father was disappointed in the kind of person Michael was, I personally read this as hatred of Michael being queer. An “Indecent accident” would be a polite way of putting the fact that people often saw Michael injured and suspected that he was facing possible abuse and did not intervene. If Michael runs away he would not have to take the abuse of his father and could no longer be a disappointment if he was not around.
“Temper/Temper/Temper”
Michael worries that there is a monster inside of him that he will become one day. Michael would be conscious of controlling his temper so as to not attract abuse from his father and to make sure he does not become his father by lashing out and getting angry at his family.
“All this time to make amends/What do you do when all your enemies are friends?/Now and then I'll try to bend/Under pressure, wind up snapping in the end”
The Emersons left Phoenix when Michael was an older teenager, this was a long time he faced abuse and nobody ever tried to protect him and his childhood. He left an abusive father, someone who is supposed to love you unconditionally, and found friends in the lost boys, only to find out that they would perpetuate the cycle of abuse and turn him into a literal monster. Michael is implied to have taken the worst of his fathers abuse to protect Lucy and Sam, he accepted the abuse but knows one day he will likely snap, evidenced by him going after the hallucination of his father with a baseball bat.
“One last thing before I quit/I never wanted any more than I could fit/Into my head/I still remember every single word you said/And all the shit that somehow came along with it/Still there's one thing that comforts me/Since I was always caged and now I'm free”
This is an outlet of Michael’s rage, his last cathartic words to his father. Michael remembers all of the abusive things his father said to him and all of the physical abuse that accompanied it. He now has the comfort of knowing he has broken the cycle of abuse and is free of the shadow of his father.
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the fact that we only have “herculean task” and “sisyphean task” feels so limiting. so here’s a few more tasks for your repertoire
icarian task: when you have a task you know you’re going to fail at anyways, so why not have some fun with it before it all comes crashing down
cassandrean task: when you have to deal with people you KNOW won’t listen to you, despite having accurate information, and having to watch them fumble about when you told them the solution from the start (most often witnessed in customer service)
feel free to chime in i ran out of ideas much faster than i anticipated
Promethean task: opposite of a Cassandraean task. You have the right information, and SOMEONE has to share it. But it's all in the delivery and if you're the person to identify the problem you WILL be hated forever.
Oedipal Task: (1) Attempting to avoid an unspeakably awful outcome and in doing so creating the circumstances that will bring it about.
(2) Trying to solve an problem and discovering that you are in fact the problem you are trying to solve.
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man imagine going 73 years thinking that blond bitch is going to come out any minute and expose your marriage built on lies only for your one-that-got-awaytionship from 50 years ago to return in leveled up gilf form and do it instead
im so sorry to everyone who has to see this but also no im not. miku binder david. and to anyone who hasn’t seen my art before i promise i make serious and normal art the rest of the time please you have to believe me 😭😭
and shout out to @pansywithacrossbow for making an off handed joke to me about miku binder david unfortunately i had to commit to the bit
i started keeping track of all the lore details ali louis bourzgui drops for david. i now release it unto the world for your reading pleasure:
obviously this is non-exhaustive and i will do my best to update it if/when more tidbits come out + feel free to comment/rb with anything i missed!
ali has said he has a very extensive backstory written down but probably will never release the bulk of it bc so much of david's appeal is his Mysterious Vibes </3
BUT ANYWAY. info organized to the best of my ability!
THIS DOC CONTAINS THE MOST UP TO DATE LIST!
AESTHETICS:
HAIR: “I think David is hiding behind his hair. Deep inside, he's a hurt individual who is running from himself, so his extravagant costume and glam-rock look is actually him hiding his true nature, even from himself.” Broadway.com
NECKLACES: “I like to think that David keeps the keys from all the places he's lived during his many years on Earth. He likes to pretend he doesn't hold on to the past, like he's moving forward, but he's very sentimental and he just refuses to look at that. If he did then I think everything would be fixed.” Tony’s Instagram Takeover
CLOTHES: His top/end of show jacket has 2 gold chevrons on it reflecting the fact that Ali imagines David served about a year in the military during WW1 (1917-1918). + David used to have a black vest bedazzled/embroidered with stars (🥲) that he wore during Brother, but it was cut even before the previews began. Tony’s Instagram Takeover
MUSIC: His favorite type of music is classical from the 1910s because he was around for it (again, sentimental). + Cello music specifically is reflective of “the inner world of David's mind: stuck in the past, but deeply longing for a future that's fixed.” (Ali talks a little more about cello music helping get into the David mindset here) + His favorite Resident Lightweight (Ali’s band) song would be Nostalgia. Tony’s Instagram Takeover
VOICE: “I worked on figuring out a combo of [Kiefer’s] voice, my voice, and different rockstar voices to create a different sound. I wanted him to feel like he's actually a 97 year old inside of a 20-something year old body.” It Takes Two
MISC: David was born in 1890, making him 97 during the story in 1987.
RELATIONSHIPS:
SEXUALITY: “I think that even in his human life he was queer- personally- and then when he becomes a vampire, you reach a certain level of immortality where it doesn't even matter. You could call it pansexuality or, like, ‘yeah, everything's attractive to me now, I've lived for so long I don't even need labels’.”
“It’s not even always about sexuality… he finds Michael and Star both attractive, but he also sees them as siblings, and he also kinda wants to be their leader or their father figure. It's this crazy combination of him just wanting to be everything to them– it's multiple facets of attraction, so I think it's better to not pin down 100% his feelings as this thing, because I don't even think he's 100% sure”
“I also think he grew up in the 1920s, so I'm not sure he ever fully admitted anything to himself or discovered that about himself. Now that it's the 80s, he's starting to hear labels, but he's so far into this vampire realm that do labels even matter? I don't know. But he's definitely attracted to both Star and Michael from my point of view."
^ All from The Contending interview
MICHAEL: “David has gotten to the point where he's searching for anything he finds beautiful, and he sees himself in Michael, this wounded individual who instead of taking power into his hands is letting the world kick him around.” Broadway.com (+ “David spent a lot of his life that way, too, but he became a power-hungry individual who kicks the world back.”)
"[My Heart With You] one of the very few moments where David is just being brutally honest and actually opening up that he is so insanely lonely. He's telling Michael, 'you can join us, and we will be honest with you from here on out,' which we know is not true." BuzzFeed
STAR: “Star is the only character that gets to see the human inside of David.” The Contending
From Maria: “She was in a bad way and David was there for her, so she feels like she owes a lot to him.” PIX News
Star is his “favorite of them* all” (*the people he's turned) Tony’s Instagram Takeover
THE BOYS: Marko was the first one turned, then Dwayne, the Paul (“we needed a drummer really bad and this guy was really cool and good at it”). Tony’s Instagram Takeover
PERSONALITY
“He's patient because he's immortal. Every moment is not that big of a deal to him, so there's this boredom about him that is kind of passive-suave. And when something excites him, it really excites him. So he'll go from this numbness to being really intense and not blinking and locked onto something, like a predator.” WWD.com
“At his core, he's a really broken person who used to be really good. His whole thing is that he wants to fix people, which he doesn't realize is him running away from himself. It's empathy that's been tainted. He cares so much about looking for people that he sees himself in and he wants to give them this gift so they can free themselves from whatever situation they're going through.” It Takes Two
Everything beautiful and special in human life is made so by the context of it having to end- so to vampires nothing is special and everything is boring. Survival Jobs (paraphrased)
“There's a really hurt boy in there. He is the lost boy. There's something he's running from that he's making everyone else's problem. And I don't think he realizes what he really needs is to let go.” Survival Jobs
“It's been fun to find how [humanity] slips out of him and how much he chooses to let people see, and how much he's hiding from himself. A lot of it was leaning into the vulnerability, the hurt– David is the lost boy of them all, he's so lost in 90 years of running from himself.” The Contending
David was human “like 90 years ago”, has some major trauma from his human life that he thought turning into a vampire would fix, but years later he's still running from it and is convinced that by making other vampires he can fix them. He's so preoccupied with fixing others and he's never looking inward. Survival Jobs (paraphrased)
“He’s looking for this sense of family and he's gonna do anything he can to force this idea of family and surround himself with love in kinda a violent way.” PIX News
“I think he's been trapped in America his whole life, personally. That's why he is the way he is.” The Contending
"David thinks he's saving people from their mortal fate." The Roundtable
“There's a confidence to David where he has this mischievous thing that he's so bored with life after having lived so long that he kinda looks for ways to mess with the mundane. If something is super regular or built in as a human thing, he's just trying to mess with that stuff.” It Takes Two
*"In many ways, David represents the people of the world who promise you a place to belong and take advantage of the loneliness in our culture right now. ... David also represents the oppressors of the world and the people that want to take away your spark or individualism. He's a warning that if you're going to make a chosen family and you're going to find a place to belong, make sure that place accepts you for exactly who you are." BuzzFeed
"At the same time, he's a victim of this. He's so lonely — he also wants a family and to belong to someone. He has so much trauma, and instead of allowing himself to be loved, he's gonna manipulate people and force an idea of family around him, until he realizes that isn't possible. I feel for the guy, but he is a psychopath and a murderer, so you can't give him too much forgiveness." BuzzFeed
i'm sure he's phrasing everything in such a personal manner in order to be respectful to the actors that came before/will come after him but sometimes when he's talking about His Thoughts on david it reminds me of:
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Do you have a favorite constellation or star? If so, why?
despite being a Real Life Spacecraft (officially), confessedly my opinions on stars are. not enlightened (heh). i have a fondness for Orion because i could see it from my room as a kid..... and not much else because i live in a place with Terrible light pollution lmao. i've been in a dark sky zone Once and it's a very dear memory
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