#own analysis

In a way, it makes sense, since they don’t interact together at all but I think they are both built on a similar idea; really competent but detached musicians learning to love their bands. They are both girls that deeply love music and (more or less consciously) search for a place where they belong and can do it with other people. Raana has a more free spirited approach to it while Umiri masks it under a veneer of work for hire professionalism.

But in essence, I think they share a common core, except Raana kind gets the best case scenario and Umiri the worst one, in a way that talk about what we could call the autistic fantasy of “what if I was so good at something that people would accept me even if I’m shit at sociability”.

To keep it short, Raana’s arc pretty much run with the idea. She’s really good with the guitar so the interesting girls let her be a little gremlin and pay her matcha parfait and sure, she have to learn to get a bit less impulsive but Taki go an extra miles to try to integrate her to the band and in the end she get a place to be herself and be a part of team mostly by sticking around and people accommodating her.

Umiri’s arc, meanwhile, is kind of what happens when this kind of thing doesn’t work. Umiri played in about thirty bands at the beginning so she never gets to feel alone and she has a professional attitude that makes her easier to work with than the stray cat. If Raana is a beast of music, full of passion; Umiri feels like a girl that has tuned herself in an instrument, in the hope it makes people want to use her. And it does work until it doesn’t, with Taki’s words and the last concert of Crychic making her realise that; “hey, wait ! She wants that too actually !”. So she tries to open up and help rebuild the band, to prove that she can give a shit, that she’s “trustworthy”… And she’s absolutely cringe doing it. She’s awkward and trying too hard and everyone else is too stuck in their own shit to pay attention.

And while Raana was the one who stuck with Tomori and helped her keep the band afloat, Umiri barely had anything to do with Ave Mujica getting back together. At the end, she is still the one with the least connection, barely involved in the clusterfuck of codependency that has become her band.

you ever imagine being this lonely person. you're utterly bored in life, maybe even with a sense of existential boredom within, and none of your peers understand that. until one day, you finally come in contact with this guy.

from the moment you meet, you know that you are going to have to kill him when the day comes.

yet, for the first time, you find someone who's just like you, or at least you like to think that he's just like you. he enjoys the challenges you bring into his life, because underneath it all, he is also a bored man. you two are soulmates in a certain sense, perhaps, but neither of you will truly realize and accept this until it's too late.

and soon enough for you - and not soon enough for him - it has become too late. he dies before you and you watch the light fade from his eyes. you kill him without a bit of remorse, and you've known that you would be doing this from the very first day. he knew it too. you get him dead, even when you could've spared him. in one version of the story, you ignored him when he -- in his own way -- asked you to consider picking a different road. you kill him.

and so for the years that follow, you wander ahead in your life like some kind of living dead. you try again to find someone like the guy who saved you from boredom. and yet everyone you find is an insufficient substitute, nothing like the one you had. you can find no one like him anymore. do you regret your action now? even if you do, you don't realize that. you still cannot realize anything.

isn't that tragic?

......

oh yeah, and lawlight is tragic too I guess

eye deal with Shinigami: - pros: you get the eyes of a Shinigami, which is useful for Kira. - cons: you get half of your lifespan cut off immediately.

contract with Kyubey: - pros: your wish, no matter what it is, immediately comes true (caveat: the monkey's paw may curl). you gain magic power, a magical girl form, and the ability to fight "evil witches" that spread curses to taint the world. your soul is transferred from your body into your "soul gem" (caveat: some people do not like this at all.), you cannot die from harm done to your body, and your pain tolerance -- when it comes to your body -- increases significantly, you can mute it out (caveat: some people do not like this at all.) - you also now sustain your life on a clean soul gem. - cons: see caveats. aside from that, you now have an extremely high risk job you must fulfil to clean your soul gem (killing Witches), and you may run into conflict with other magical girls over that resource. it's easy to die in such a risky life (you die if the soul gem cracks). oh yes, and of course, you will learn eventually that magical girls die by turning into Witches when their soul gems turn completely black from filth -- the filth is garnered through emotional distress and lack of grief seeds. etc.

(note: you may not know over half of those information when you make the contract, because Kyubey lies by omission -- and only by omission, he doesn't lie otherwise. the info he'll give you at the start is "if you want your wish to come true, make a contract with me and become a magical girl who fight witches that spread curses and evil in the world". then you gradually uncover other stuff. or not, if you die before that)

so. yes. I think Light Yagami WOULD make a contract if it was offered to him, because like:

if he doesn't know about most of the cons -- why wouldn't he? he was offered the opportunity. it's special and it's to rid the world of filth and -- if it's an AU where he has yet to/doesn't gain the Death Note, it is definitely something that seems unusual and exciting enough it may help him rid of his existential boredom -- if he already has the Death Note, the wish thing would definitely help him with his Kira plans. the way Kyubey markets it tends to also push people to agreeing by making it feel like they're being chosen for them, they are the ones with the "potential" to do this, etc.

but wait, considering how Light is, he might also very well ask a lot of questions before he makes the decision. Kyubey doesn't lie aside from omitting things, so it's entirely possible that Light would be able to get a lot more information out of him assuming he's being cautious. it is not impossible to find out about the dangers and possibly even the truth about Witches if he asked enough questions.

even then, I think Light Yagami would ultimately choose to take the deal.

why, though? didn't he refuse to take the eye deal in canon?

there's a difference. in the case of the eye deal, he has to instantly pay a big price. his lifespan would be cut in half and that would be fully certain and determined. he wouldn't be able to scheme, fight, or bargain his way out after that.

on the contrary, the magical girl contract deal is not like that. the only "price" he has to immediately pay to immediately obtain the rewards is to enter a life that is high risk & high return. see the difference here? this one is not set in stone. in fact, with this, it feels more like he is still in control of his lifespan (even though the risk has technically increased, sure).

these days most people (at least most sunday fans) do acknowledge or at least have heard that it's heavily implied / basically shown that sunday was groomed (religious and psychological, as far as we know for certain in canon), but i feel like a lot of people seem to be oddly unfamiliar with what exactly his relationship with gopher wood looked like in canon (especially the end of it) and also (parts of) how the grooming was done in this specific case? and frankly there's a lot more that are often kinda confused about, but anyway here I mainly wanted to say:

(note: I use she/he for sunday. also, if you are confused about one of my unexplained claims below, feel free to ask me and I can elaborate)

one of the things that's imo very notable about sunday's grooming, but seems to be often overlooked, is that it's honestly genuinely very, very gendered in a specific way:

a lot of sunday's grooming and abuse were her being manipulated to embody masculine roles (specifically of the "Father"; paternal roles) and to fulfil a masculine destiny (of the Great Father, or God), along with parentification; he was groomed to be paternal.

it's also arguably implied in their character designs that gopher wood (sunday's adoptive father) projects his own image on her - and we do see that he tried to mould her into taking on the parentified roles of specifically paternal figures again and again as she grew up, while making sunday believe that (the illusion of free will being a recurring theme in penacony) she is the one choosing those things for herself and that she's choosing her own path.

like, when you list it out, there's a very clear pattern: Bronze Melodia (which is a title for the priest on their planet) -> Head of the Oak Family (leader of the "Oak Family", one of the Five Families of The Family, and the head politician of their planet, though he's still subordinate to "Dreammaster" aka gopher wood himself [they also both had degreed of omniscience within the dreamscape]) -> practically, "God".

indeed, a consistent theme exists in the roles imposed by gopher wood on sunday, and it's "fatherhood" (+ "fatherly guidance",). which i do think is quite significant.

I want to go deeper into this in another post but. simply put, sunday's character has a lot to do with the word "father" (see all of the above, and the fact that his entire deal as an antagonist is about paternalism, and something something freudian symbolic patricide, etc).

now I'm really not sure about R2 in this regard (I've seen theories that it may be more about Ivan than it appears but I really haven't made up my mind on whether I agree or disagree), but what I do personally think is that Till's portion of "Cure" in R6 genuinely makes significantly more sense to me, lyrically, if it is -- at least partly -- about Ivan (consciously or subconsciously), than if it is 100% about Mizi and only Mizi from start to end, even though the MV only shows him thinking about Mizi as he sings the part.

let me explain:

Allow me, to the tips of your fingers Allow me, to the ends of your feet Dissolve me in your gaze I don't want to let you go Please, leave me scars Please, hurt me so that Not a single drop of me remains Let me drown in you

... idk, I feel like if this is indeed entirely about Mizi, Till must have made up a lot about their relationship in his mind by that point because it sounds kind of strange to me otherwise. Mainly because while they are sort of friends and have had friendly interactions, it seems that they are not especially close (based on Mizi's words about Till in the artbook), and what Till carries for her is a somewhat distant & idolizing crush sort of thing, which... isn't the sort of energy the lyrics gives?

Like. maybe this is just me, but I can view this portion two ways:

families, fathers, patriarchy. the burdens, restrains/cages and horror thereof.

the shadow of your semi-dead father looms over your shoulder, speaking to you. you have ocd. you are consumed by your tunnel vision and you emotionally isolate yourself from the world.

robin is an ophelia who sings, and robin dies just like her - a corpse lying in water, allegedly very prettily (what we saw was a reconstruction of robin's "death" scene that aventurine asked black swan to help create. in hamlet, what we knew of ophelia's death was only gertrude's words for it) - except robin doesn't actually die.

aventurine is a hamlet.

sunday is laertes. except sunday is also hamlet, and then ultimately is also ophelia. (quentin compson - from the sound and the fury - is basically a retelling of ophelia's story featuring amab ophelia. sunday is similar to quentin in many ways but is, in the end, a sort of an anti-quentin more than anything imo.)

there are two characters who are called "crazy" (or similar words) by others in the story (aventurine and sunday). there are two characters who are called "mad" in hamlet (hamlet and ophelia).

stage/play/theatre metaphors. so many of them.

sparkle puts on a play-within-a-play (dream-within-a-dream) for us that's supposed to serve as some sort of a cautionary tale in reflection of reality.

grief is a major theme.

your cherished family member is dead; murdered, even. yet no one around you but you seems to care, and they want you to focus on the upcoming celebration (wedding vs charmony festival) without bothering yourself with the death. you are alone.