“beautiful” from octet is a highly physical song. the narrator evokes online self-harm communities, immediately questioning the relationship of the online world to the physical, before describing her love for a fat woman she has met online, with whom she has never made physical contact due to the distance of their bodies from each other. she fantasizes about kissing the woman’s wrist, demonstrating on her own body; the body of this woman, in its absence, becomes her own body. she describes physical reactions to acts isolated from physicality (“how i tremble when she types out my name,” “[she] speaks to me in whispering emoji”), mirroring an earlier line from this character: “when we say in real life / this is a lie to protect us / it is all real / it is all real life.” the singer beats her chest as she sings, using the percussion of her body to emphasize her words. this is all, explicitly, tied to her relationship with body image; in kuhoo verma’s performance, she audibly struggles to describe the woman as “chunky;” except for her early assessment of her self-image, “fat” is never used, but in a song that seems to reside in the body, fatness is crucial. the woman tells the narrator that her body holds joy, light, a star, and god within it, and these are vast things. it’s not thematically insignificant that the character with such extensive ties to the physical world made apparent in her solo is written as a fat woman. with that in mind—rachel zegler?

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