#dollgram

i mentioned this in my general jun post but i really need to emphasize this:

first off i dont remember if i mentioned this but i keep on thinking about this all the time: in my original jun post i theorized that this scene is school graduation but like a few months after writing this i realized its a beauty contest. her mother didn't come to it because she treated jun as a replacement/extension of herself and got mad that jun's beauty got acknowledged outside of her

after this we get a sequence of jun having suggestive photos (in contrast to having cute and lighthearted photos at the beginning). i think her mother definitely stopped producing her career after this but i'm not sure if she gave her away to some other producer/agency or if jun became an independent model (really scary to think jun might have canonically had an onlyfans)

jun very much doesn't feel good about being a "grown-up" i think a lot of it is because her mother stopped caring for her but...

i'm thinking about her having loose hair and torn clothes and not wearing shoes at the end, which symbolizes a loss of innocence/purity generally connected to her becoming an "adult", but the combination of torn clothes and no shoes reads as sexual abuse

model/idol/actor/etc. industry being sexual abuse torment labyrinth in general is no news, a part of it is how much it boils women down to their bodies and specifically the attractiveness of their bodies

i think she might have experienced it as a child as well because i would be surprised if not but it's this specific sequence of events that she becomes a suggestive model after her mother abandoning her, before that she could have at least had an illusion of her mother possibly protecting her. she's left alone with the outside world and finds out that people don't think she's an actor, she's no more than a body to be exploited

Miss Death's Idol

@dollgram i like jun and i like this song ^^ timelapse under cut !!

S: ... Hey... I've been having weird dreams since I woke up here. 🐰: You've mentioned. S: I don't want to sleep for that long. 🐰: ... [sigh]... Did I not say it before? Your role as warden is to find out what the prisoner's crimes are. That means all of you. S: ... Ugh. You're so mean...

This part is interesting because it implies that it's no longer a secret that S is one of the prisoners, and figuring out her own crime that led to her losing her memories and becoming the Warden (so, basically, in-prison crime and not pre-prison crime; I assume) is a part of her job as the current Warden. Moreover, Jackie has no control over prisoners' memories. From the way she talks about it, someone else working in DOLLGRAM is in control of it, and caused S to lose her memory.

🐰: Haah... I thought losing your memories would get rid of this problem, but it seems to have only gotten worse...

DOLLGRAM will do the memory extracting part.

Alternatively, S' amnesia happened on its own and is not a result of someone's work at all:

🐰: Right. Seems like he's managed to completely clear whatever happened between them from his mind. That must have taken some work. S: You mean he's been repressing it for a while? 🐰: I think he's been repressing a lot of things. If you don't understand what his involvement was, why did you think he was unforgivable? S: Like I said– he just gets on my nerves. I can't stand his attitude. He won't even accept responsibility for whatever he did. It's annoying. 🐰: Ha. That's funny.

S has been restoring the memories through dreams.

S: Just... Just stay away from that place. Nothing good happens there.

Jackie has no way to stop the restoration of memories or erase them again, so when S mentions the dreams, she becomes straightforward about S being ex-prisoner.

🐰: Sleep until the next trial. You know this already, don't you?

Jackie has never hidden the fact that S's amnesia is something that happened on purpose and that she knows S' backstory, and she's also never hidden the fact that she frankly doesn't care whether S remembers anything or not.

You don't remember anything, right? Or if you do, at least pretend you don't.

As much as it shows that Jackie dgaf as long as she (Jackie) is just doing her job, it is interesting because it implies that Jackie has no intention of lying to S. The reason why the original MILGRAM prevents wardens from remembering anything is that it's easier for a "blank state" to make a logical judgement, otherwise their emotional biases would interfere too much, so that would mean keeping up the amnesiac state for as long as possible. Jackie, however, doesn't care about it, despite repeatedly getting angry at S for being too slow or emotional instead of just doing what she has to do.

Jackie also implied that she's not interested in her own job in general,

S: I just wasn't expecting an actually helpful suggestion from you. 🐰: I have to do my job sometimes, whether I like it or not.

And I wonder if despite appearing unempathetic to S, she wants S to embrace her feeling of free will out of compassion,

[x] Sapere aude is the Latin phrase meaning "Dare to know"; and also is loosely translated as "Have courage to use your own reason", "Dare to know things through reason". <...> "Don't rely so much on authority, especially on mine, which is null. There is also that saying from Horace: 'Dare to be wise!', so that fear may not subdue you more than reason does."

Funnily I think out of everyone who's working for DOLLGRAM (S who's in charge of the prisoners, Jackie who's in charge of S, and everyone above them) Jackie might have the least power. She's just a puppet who's navigating S but can't control anything, even her, and she doesn't seem to be too happy about it.

We know that S became the warden because of her own verdict,

“Haah... I guess it's a fair judgment.”

And her current job is to find out her own crime, implying that in the end she will be judged again, together with everyone.

All of this makes me wonder what "amnesia" really means for DOLLGRAM. If in the original MILGRAM it's used to create a "blank state" that can assumingly make the most logical judgement & it's actively inflicted and maintained by the prison itself, what causes it in DOLLGRAM and what is the purpose of inflicting it (if it's inflicted by someone)? Perhaps to distance the warden from their own crime in a way that it could be re-judged?

i was rewatching all mvs in order because i got interested how much they show the environment around the character

jun's shows some objects (tv, spotlights, seats in the audience, etc...), but not to the extent of an environment, they are merely hinting at what the locations are. there are actual locations shown on little photos with jun. i also find it interesting that despite being #popular her mv doesn't show any kind of crowds of people. she doesn't give any importance to her "fans" at all, i guess because she was always motivated by getting approval from her mom rather than anything... and maybe she wasn't as popular as she portrays it

tadashi's has a lot of actual environments, not just hinting at them with objects. there are rooms, streets, etc. it generally feels more "down-to-earth" compared to others, who portray their feelings in metaphorical or abstract way. tadashi rather just portrays her actions without much of a "feeling" attachment to it i think... more abstract depictions of what's happening seem to only appear when tadashi sees herself as "a murderer" (like seeing herself covered in blood in the mirror when she just got out of shower, or her father's corpse being replaced with a goat skull)

nobui's shows very little environment before the crime scene appears, and it's a distorted version of what was happening in reality (when they appear having a tea party, they probably were indeed hanging out but not fairy tale style. when nobui is watching out a window it is also stylized as a fairy tale window). the distortion of her view is supported by constant spiral and ferris wheel in the background. the only actual environment appears when we see the crime scene, but it quickly disappears as the murder itself happens

yuuhiko's shows some objects similarly to jun, but also everything except for his boycrush is blended with the one-color background to highlight that the only thing he gives mental importance to is his boycrush. there's also no variety in locations, only the school

jun and tadashi both killed their parents who they viewed as their role models, and they view themselves as extension of them (they split their personalities and one of these personalities is, in a sense, literally their parent). jun admired her mother and tadashi hated her father

nobui and yuuhiko both killed their close friends and view themselves as bad copies, who can never come close to resembling the originals, but also the only copies that were left [alive] (taking their place in a way). they both were involved with friend groups and did what they did for the friend group's comfort/convenience. but, i think yuuhiko regrets that he prioritized the group, and nobui, as much as she appears regretful, still prioritizes the group over her victim

jun and nobui loved their victims "purely", and tadashi and yuuhiko loved them in a hateful way [not that its necessarily the objective truth but i think how they see it]

fanart for @dollgram !!

thank you for these amazing characters, it was so lovely to draw them (Jun's is probably my favorite drawing I've ever made) and I hope I was able to translate them well to my style 😁