#shoka

"There's a cactuar at the crossing..."

i cannot stop thinking about vivarium and shoka. like, they hit that sweet spot of teenage angst. it resonates with me so much.

“I don't know anything, so here I am singing” (shoka) i think singing kind of feels like her one redeemable quality for her. i mean, it was even to the point where her father, her own parental figure, would only value her for the profit she made from singing. also, realistically, people who hear about ado hear about her because of her singing. and earlier in the song, ado looks back on her past mistakes and how she couldn’t do anything about them now. it’s not like singing will magically fix them—but they distract her. (“Repeating self-pleasure to cover up my wounds”)

because she is praised and valued so much for her voice, ado relies more and more on her career as her singer. views and likes skyrocket, tickets sell out, producers email her, etc. her ego gets inflated and she’s self-aware. (“I end up singing about my arrogant ego”) she knows that using this fame as a “coping mechanism” is wrong. (“This voice I've built up is a wrong answer for this world”/“Is this hoarse voice righteousness?”)but as long as the audience likes it, she will continue to sing, as it grants some sort of gratification. i really don’t blame ado for this by the way. i think we would all be the same and i think the underlying guilty hurts a lot.

to my interpretation, vivarium feels like a continuation of extension of shoka. (“How long has it been since that day?/My muffled way of speaking remains unchanged”) feels like a direct reference to shoka. in shoka, she talks about “not knowing anything,” and now here she sings, “Not even knowing how to heal the wounds after falling/Nor without knowing the repent for the mistakes I made.”

this endless feeling of “not knowing” makes ado decide to create some sort of fake facade in which she is “ Inside this dim vivariu and “was endlessly dreaming of myself.” and again, she is self aware as she says that “the "You" in the closet/Is still crying.” this “you” likely refers to the version of herself that “doesn’t know anything.” it then becomes a question of what version of herself is the “real” version. (“"Voices of me and aren't me")

i think the closet in the music video holds a lot of metaphorical significance. the version of ado that is vulnerable and ostracized (“Ostracized by someone's words, left all alone”) hides inside this “dim vivarium” that she has created in her mind.

(I really like Shoka and Crime and Punishment mainly because of the guitar parts)

oooh i LOVE Shoka, Kitto Coaster, and Episode X