Located in CA
I took my 9 yr old lab Ivy to the vet for an emergency visit in the beginning of March. Our regular vet couldn’t take her so we had to go to the 24/7 animal hospital. They are excellent and I was willing to pay for whatever they needed to do to help ivy.
She had been very obviously sick and in pain, puking, diarrhea, not wanting to eat. They did an ultrasound, blood panel, urinalysis, fluids, meds. They found elevated liver enzymes and ketones in her urine. She was so sick they wanted to hospitalize her overnight. I asked what they would be doing and they said monitoring. I asked if I could just monitor her myself at home and bring her back right away if she gets worse? They gave me a couple prescriptions and sent us home. -$1729
I didn’t realize until the next day they didn’t give us any pain meds or anything to help Ivy’s eating (I’d tried seriously all the bland diet options, she didn’t want any of it) I went back to get her pain meds and prescription food, and the girl says they forgot to charge me for something else so she added that on too. -$150
Ivy was getting better slowly but still not her normal happy self at all. Sad, droopy eyes, wanting to sit curled up in my lap like a baby 😭 I kept doing everything they said and I took her back about a month later to check her levels again. We saw the vet, then went back out to the busy lobby to wait until someone came out to tell me the results or medications or whatever. So I sat in the lobby and waited, I asked a few times for updates bc I needed to get back to work. After 3 hours I asked if they could check and see what was going on.
There was another dog named Ivy there that morning and the receptionist closed out MY Ivy’s account (and charged the other lady’s card -$566 of my charges). I was annoyed and paid my bill (non-itemized invoice bc she couldn’t find mine) and Ivy and I went straight to work. Ivy is my service dog and sleeps under my desk.
They said the liver enzymes and urine ketone levels were both back to a normal level which was great news. They still couldn’t really give me a clear answer as to what could’ve caused all of this, sometimes they eat things, or just get sick, whatever. She said a slow recovery was normal bc livepancreas stuff is unpredictable, painful, and can take a while to heal.
The hospital’s office called me the next day to apologize for making me wait so long and reimbursed $316 (the liver panel, I think, I don’t have an itemized invoice). They offered this without me asking which I really appreciated.
Ivy has still been sick, but definitely better than when I first took her in. She was still acting sad, no interest in her favorite things. I knew she was in pain and brought her to a different vet last week.
Dr.S had been Ivy’s vet most of her life at our regular vet’s office - we love him. He left and started his own practice,and I just found his new location is 15 minutes away from my house!! It was kind of secretive when he left the other place, I think out of respect for the owners and not take half the clients with him. Anyway, I was really happy to find him again, I fully trust him. He was Ivy’s vet at her 8-week old visit, did her spay, all of it. Ivy is scared of men she doesn’t know and she loves Dr. S.
He took a look in her mouth and was like Whoa! Found it! He saw one badly rotten and cracked tooth in the back and wanted to get scheduled for removal right away. I bought the senior wellness plan for -$998. I was quoted $1200-1600 for surgery. (He was also going to remove a large benign mass from her side since she’d be under anesthesia already, I’d been wanting to do this for a few years so this is something I wanted him to do also)
This Tuesday was surgery day. He ended up removing 3 teeth, a molar on each side, and a front tooth that was cracked and broken off (I knew about this, I’d been told it wasn’t anything to be concerned about).
He said one of the molars and the front tooth both had exposed roots, the back one had an abscess and the root was touching the bone. He asked if I wanted the pictures bc it was really interesting and you don’t usually see it so advanced 😞 He said this is definitely what has been hurting her and making it hard to eat. He said they must have not looked in Ivy's mouth at all if they didn’t notice it- twice??
He didn’t have enough time to remove the mass. He said he wasn’t comfortable keeping her under any longer due to her age and blood pressure levels. Unless it grows rapidly we’re leaving it for now.
-$350 for everything this day, including surgery time & anesthesia, full dental cleaning & sealant,office visit, sedated nail trim, medications, canned soft food, heart worm testing, some other stuff included with the senior wellness package.
It’s been two days since she got her teeth out and she’s already smiling again. She was jumping around and trying to play with her brother (cat) and she only does that when she’s really excited!! Ivy is the best dog I could ever ask for. Seeing her in pain has been so hard, because I couldn’t help her!! I was trying everything but it wasn’t working. I’m so glad we found it and I think she will be able to get better now. I wasn’t so sure for awhile there.
I called the hospital place and told them what I found out and asked what happened. How could they have missed this- TWICE? The girl was really nice and agreed this was a “very valid concern” and asked me to explain everything to her and she would talk to the medical director, try to get some answers for me, and get back to me. She asked what I wanted the resolution to be. I said I thought it would be appropriate to ask for all of my charges to be refunded in relation to this event over the past couple months including Dr. S’s charges.
She called me back when I was at dinner so I missed her call.
Is this right? I don’t know what I’m looking for, feedback, reassurance, guidance? This is malpractice, right??
I talked to Dr.S’s receptionist today, she’s going to send me the photos and a breakdown of charges between the wellness plan and what I had done, try to make sense of what would be appropriate to ask them to refund. I kinda also want to ask them for $200 flat to reimburse the food/groceries spent trying to get her to eat, literally anything I could try on her bland diet, I tried! I don’t have receipts but I know I spent a shit ton of money as Ivy’s short order cook the last couple months. (Today she scarfed down her regular food for the first time in forever, I cried). Is this pushing it too far? Should I just take whatever they offer me?
What about the fact Ivy spent 2 1/2 months in pain & suffering from the time I brought her in to the day Dr. S did her surgery? She has lost weight, and has been pretty obviously miserable the whole time.
Thanks for reading.

First/Previous
Gemma was right about the sky’s open night, and I could sympathize with her recollection of the beauty, but for me it must’ve been a greater tragedy—the young woman had only ever enjoyed the stars in the pits of Golgotha; I could, long before, drink in the sky at leisure. Cruel memories.
The night the Rednecks died was one of viscera, but before that it was coolness on the breeze, a warmth by the fires while John played his guitar and we had only just taken two dozen kegs of lager (personal reserves) from the Atlanta despot—the man that kept his subjects as slaves and not a person among the camp was left without budding intoxication. No matter the age, everyone was invited to be merry; if it was that children too faced the plight of a bad world, then so too should they reap the moments of plenty—or so the camp figured.
John had taken a group by the fires where wagons were drawn in interlocking semicircles for cover and Jackson sat beside the picker. Jackson was a man which normally preferred quiet reflection over boisterous singing and nearly never wore the band on his throat, and yet there he was belting out the chorus at the top of his lungs, tankard in hand, red cloth blazed around his neck—it was a contagion and those drunk enough for easier embarrassment sang proudly along:
“There is power, there is power in a band of working folk!
When we stand hand in hand,
That’s a power, that’s the power,
That must rule in every land!”
I’d taken to the outlying shadows with my back pressed against the gas-powered caleche, my own tankard in hand. I loved the warmth of that great big family, truly, but even in those days—and maybe it was that queer youthfulness which longed for individualism that made me that way then—I remained as distanced as possible when I could. I sipped the lager, it was a fine drink and my brother Billy, nearly as old as I was when I’d first taken up in the infantry, swaggered to stand beside me just as quiet for minutes and we looked at the stars and he asked me what it was like to kill a man.
“Is it hard?” he asked.
I nodded, “Sometimes.”
“Killing monsters ain’t so bad. Don’t know if I could do it to a person.”
“You could if they meant to kill you; or if they meant to do it to someone you cared about,” I promised him. In those days, spry, energized, I held no time for staring into abysses; though I still wasn’t a man fully, I pretended as one. It was about family, and it was about doing what was right—what’s right seemed to change, or I changed. The world felt stark with good and evil and even later I’d feel that sentiment well up in me, but if that’s true, I know I stand more on the latter and so I intentionally obfuscated it—this I know. If not, it might be too much to bear. I was required to lie to myself and even in knowing I lied, it was better.
Billy tugged on the red kerchief around his throat and asked me how it looked on him.
“Looks good,” I said.
“Don’t think I look stupid at all?”
I smiled over my drink, “You always look stupid.” I sipped. “The neckwear’s fine.”
“Give me a break,” said Billy; he investigated his own cup, gave it a swish with his wrist, watching its contents swirl. “Aren’t you ever afraid you’ll die?”
“Sometimes—nights like this—I wouldn’t mind it.”
“Really?” my brother asked.
“There’s always a chance of it. Every moment, I guess.”
He smiled. “I wish I had that confidence.”
“You’ll get it,” I returned his smile; it was true that he would gain the fighting spirit. It came to us all with time and reminiscing on the early days, I recall the grit and the hatred—there was learning there too though. Besides, I’d seen the squalors of a stationary man. The stagnation of a place, an unmoving home.
John put his guitar away and laughter erupted from the crowd from something said and Sibylle, cowboy hat cocked funny, traipsed across the camp to the open keg for a refill; the man there, tending the cylinders, was a man named Tandy (a foreigner and one unknown besides the way he smoked a skunk pipe and told wild stories). My mother leaned over while Tandy opened the spigot mouth on the keg, and she froze there, and I could see her there cut out forever against the light of the fires; I watched, and it came so suddenly that I couldn’t be sure what’d happened at all. It was so sudden that I couldn’t find my weapon and I couldn’t find even the courage to fight because in those moments it wasn’t courage I needed, it was grounds to understand.
Sibylle came apart in two pieces immediately, torn completely through and dust erupted as her legs struck the ground while her torso spun through the air like a top, a trail of liquid trailed after, caught in the blue of night so it shone as black; she couldn’t scream. Tandy was a statue. Before anyone could react, more flesh, other bodies, went up and there was all manner of limbs which filled the ground, and it is astounding how quickly a red mist forms across the ground during a massacre. Perhaps the wails of my comrades started before, perhaps others fell before Sibylle, but I could not comprehend the goings-on till I saw her drop the way she did.
Frail human screams rose on the night; I slammed to the ground, tankard gone away and hands scrambling in the dirt; I reached up blindly and yanked Billy to my level and his expression was one of innocence, panic, tears even. Glancing around, I saw the demons bolt from the pitch-black darkness on the edges of camp, mutants taking the fore while greater creatures lurked further back, some hurled whips of gliding metal which writhed over their heads when they stretched them out for a strike—alien—and they sliced directly through soft human bodies. Not even a cry escaped me, but Billy let go with it and I slapped my cupped hand over his mouth hard to hold the screams. His voice would not have been alone anyway, not alongside that startling cacophony. Amidst the cries of people, there were the cries of horses, of our hounds.
We rolled across the ground, slipped beneath the raised body of the gas-powered caleche, remained quiet in the dark, peeked out between the wheels.
“What’s happening?” Billy whispered through my fingers; I removed my hand from him and caught a glimpse of him framed in a square of firelight through the wheels—we lay there on our bellies and the left side of his face was glazed with dirt where I’d pulled him down.
“Shh,” I told him, “Shh, please. Please.” Not another word came while I pleaded with him, pleaded with the world to make this all a nightmare.
Through the haze and the running silhouettes painted black, I saw what might have been Jackson; he stumbled and in the moment that it took me to gasp, his head was gone from his body, his torso slid on as he collapsed, came to rest mere feet from the motor wagon. I told myself that it wasn’t him, but it probably was.
Some mutants lumbered through the camp like animated corpses, some leapt with wild energy or sprayed noxious fumes which lingered in the air; others still were amalgams of humanlike limbs themselves—fiends—exhausting terrible sounds, producing smells of sulfur, glistening with whatever liquids excreted from their oblong alien orifices. Demons ran amok, chanted in devil tongued languages, laughed madly at the destruction—others still, those which displayed some greater intelligence, broke into a song I could never hope or want to replicate; it seemed a unified damnation.
“Please,” I repeated in a whimper and Billy hushed me this time and I realized we were holding hands, squeezing for dear life as figures walked the camp, speared those half-alive, elected others for twisted carnality.
In darkness, in fright plainly, we scuttled from the recess of our hiding place, kept quiet, held to each other, and went into the wasteland where nothing was—every shadow was a potential threat, every second could’ve been the last. We were holding hands; then we weren’t.
Only a glance—that’s all I afforded my brother and nothing more—what a joke of a person I am! What a coward I was. Always.
Something got him in the dark and instead of dying alongside those I cared about, I went on, heartbeat driving me till it was all that I heard in my ears and my muscles ached and my chest heaved and sweat covered me, chilled me in the breeze of the night—it was only once I’d accepted the dark completely, crawled into a hollowed space of rocks along a squat ridge that I watched the demolished camp; it seemed no larger than a spark, but the creatures, fiends and others continued their war cries; never before had I witnessed demons participate in such an attack.
I watched till the sun came, till the fires became smoke, then I watched the band of hell creatures disband. The smell of sulfur remained in the air—copper too—and I stumbled back to the camp in a dreamlike daze, totally unbelieving of the things I saw. Among those dead on the ground, I could recognize none; among those piked from rear to shoulder, standing like morbid scarecrows where they’d been steadied against the ground, I could not want to recognize.
Many of the wagons were overturned, including the gas-powered caleche and I went to it; the metal of its body was warped but I fell to the ground by it and pushed my back against the exposed undercarriage, remained frozen there while examining the bodies, the terrible strips of skin which rested places like wet sheets of paper, the piles of bones removed and smashed and piled.
I cried so deeply that oxygen became a memory, and the shakes couldn’t be contained.
It was like that for so long, knees pulled up, face pushed between, and the wails came unafraid of whatever attention they might garner; there was no rationale, but I imagine if there had been, I would’ve welcomed death in that misery. It was a deep wound that not even my own cowardice would overcome for the sake of survival.
Unaware of my surroundings, not wanting to look up from the ground between my legs, the noise which had started out as imaginary became real and I raised my head then to listen better and wipe my sore eyes; it was the sound of clip-clop horse hooves and I mildly wondered if any of the animals had been spared. I stood and pivoted around the dead camp and there it was, a man on a painted horse with golden hair; he leisurely drove the mount through the place, maneuvering around pools of blood, clumps of body parts and upon seeing me, he smiled and offered a languid wave, keeping one of his gloved hands on the reins.
The man wore white and swished his hair back upon arriving directly in front of me. Ahoy, he offered kindly, Did you happen to see the other riders?
I shook my head, feeling numb.
Ah, he said, I could have sworn four other riders, at least, passed me on my way. His gray eyes examined the carnage. Shame. He shook his head. You are?
“H-harlan.”
He nodded and nearly offered an expression of genuine condolence before descending from the horse; the animal gave a gentle grunt and wandered away from its master to inspect a nearby group of the dead. The man offered his hand, and I took it in a shake. Mephisto, said the man. He flashed a smile again before his face grew serious. I’ve come to you to deal.
I shot him a questioning look, one of bafflement.
I heard your calls from far off. He nodded, removed a white handkerchief from his breast pocket and swiped it down his face. Hot out. He shrugged then replaced the cloth in his pocket. This, he motioned to the disarray of vehicles, of bodies, I can’t fix all this—it’s too much—but there’s a person you love, I know. I could bring them back.
“Doctor?” In retrospect it was such a naïve question.
He shook his head.
“Angel?”
He grinned and nodded, Sure.
“Demon?”
Undoubtedly. His eyes—pits of gray in that radiant face—nearly expressed solemness; he daintily shook the hair from his face and looked at his steed which sniffed a corpse. What’s the word, Harlan? There are others calling and I must be on my way soon—I can’t dally. There was a sharpness to the words. Can’t dally. We must convene soon, or I’ll mosey on.
I snorted back the clog in my nose from the tears and wiped my eyes with my sleeves. “Okay.”
Deal?
I nodded, “Deal.”
Sleep tonight, said Mephisto, Sleep and you’ll be rewarded in the morning.
“You said it’s a deal.”
He nodded and scanned the carnage before we matched gazes and then he said, Yes?
“What is it you want from me?”
Nothing you need now. He called the horse, and it came, and he swept his feet quickly from the ground and settled into position atop the animal. Sleep, Harlan. You won’t be bothered. There are worse things still over the horizon.
I watched him go till he disappeared and once he was gone, I couldn’t cry anymore and instead rummaged through the wagons for what I might carry; along the way I found John, face twisted but corpse intact. The body from the previous night that I’d guessed was Jackson couldn’t be determined but I found him nowhere else. I slid Sibylle’s holster from her hips, fell hard onto the ground and found that I could sob more. I took her cowboy hat, placed it on my head and held her pistol in one hand and the belt holster dangled from the other while I searched the other bodies; there were so many, but I could not find Billy.
Waiting for darkness, I took the spot where I rested, back against the caleche’s undercarriage, watched the sky and felt the gun in my hand; it was heavy. I put it to my head, closed my eyes, and whispered affirmations to myself then I put the pistol between my splayed legs, watched it still in the dirt, and pulled the hat down over my eyes but it did little for the smell. Though the brim of the hat cut the sky out, I watched the ground and saw circling shadows form overhead and heard calls of turkey vultures; they came to pick over the bodies. I withdrew my knees to my chest there again and laid my forearm across them and bit into my arm while closing my eyes. I had thought I was a man and for a time, maybe I was, but there in that miserable pit of despair I became a child again and if I’d become more delirious, I’m sure I might’ve called out for Jackson like it was a bad dream.
Into a fading stupor of sleep in the sun I went and when I awoke again it was dark and chilly and I was tired and hungry but too sick to eat and hardly strong enough to move; I looked at the gun and put it into its holster and left it there by the caleche. In the light of the moon and stars, I moved to gather a bolt of canvas; I unfurled the fabric and created a leaning shelter against the overturned vehicle and crawled into it. There was a hole in the canvas, and I peeked out at the stars.
Weeping came again, but not so uproarious; I was stuck there letting go of whimpers, lying on my back, feeling the tears trace in lines from the outer corners of my eyes to collect along my earlobes. In time, I fell to sleep again on the hard ground because the mourning had taken all else from me.
A pinpoint of sunlight broke my eyelids and I jerked awake and reached for the holster, but it was gone. So was the hat. I crawled from the leaning shelter and there he was.
Billy stood plainly among the dried, congealed blood-soaked field and he looked on to the horizon and all shadows were long in the midday sun which hung up there in a soft blue sky. Whether it be a dream or a spell, I couldn’t care—I charged to him and spun him so he faced me and though his face was plain and expressionless, I wrapped him into a forceful hug. He placed his hands on my back and gave a gentle squeeze; when I pulled from him, my hands on his shoulders, I saw he held Sibylle’s hat in his left hand, pinched by the brim; he’d already tugged her holster belt around his hips—he could have it all. I shook while holding him then let go to wipe my face.
“You’re alive,” I nodded.
He nodded without speaking then looked at the hat in his hand and placed it on his head and firmly pressed it down.
“Billy! Hell, you’re alive!”
The corners of his mouth twitched upward for a moment then he nodded again. “Yeah.” His eyes curiously searched our surroundings like he meant to take each detail in forever.
I slapped him on the shoulder and almost squealed. “Goddammit.” I wiped my eyes again and could do little to keep the excitement from exploding from me. “Oh, we should go. We should go on and get somewhere safe.”
He nodded toward the horizon, “’Lanta?”
“Sure.”
We packed and it was a like an ethereal phantom remained among us beside the quiet dead; turkey vultures cawed to break the silence, pecked where they pleased on the bodies, and I couldn’t want to fight them. I kept sidelong eyes on Billy with the ever-present worry that he’d vanish. Perhaps he was the phantom.
From the rear of the caleche, I removed a few sentimental books Jackson liked, essential cookware, and sparse rations for the trek. The last thing I grabbed was my shotgun and a bit of ammo.
As we set from the dead place, the terrible silhouettes that were cut from there on the horizon behind us grew in my mind with every backward glance—I wanted to fall to pieces, but I saw Billy walk alongside me and although contented is not the right word, it is the nearest. The steps of our boots were all that was heard because I could not fathom to pierce the space between us with words for fear that it would all end. It was a dream, surely. I’d lost my mind. With my hands thumbed into the straps of my pack, I saw I my hands still shook, and they would shake a lot longer—years and with memories too. The crunch of earth underfoot became a rhythm and instead of looking at my brother, I watched his shadow on the ground.
“Everyone’s dead?” He asked.
“Yeah.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yeah,” I repeated.
“How ain’t I? How ain’t you?”
To say that it was luck would’ve been too morbid. Instead of saying anything, I shrugged, kicked a loose stone, watched my feet some more, and felt a queasiness come over me. For the moment, the immeasurable deaths of those I’d left behind were forgotten in the company of my brother and a sickness welled up inside of me so suddenly that I felt that I’d fall to pieces at the slightest provocation. Finally, I did speak again, but only after steeling myself to the troubles, “Yeah, how are you alive?”
Billy shrugged at me then stumbled up a hill which overlooked trash wood wilderness where sticks lay twisted and bare and further on the sight of Atlanta was visible and I cupped a hand across my brow and Billy did the same and we looked on at the shadows of the place out there where strings of smoke rose from the skyline as a signature for the desolation of the city; it was dead. I felt it in my bones.
My hands were light while my head was heavy, my throat was dry, and the entire world seized in moments of stillness or perhaps it was my own vision which construed the world in that way; I took to the small hill which Billy had climbed and sat there and stared at the place between my feet to steady myself.
“Fire,” said Billy.
I nodded and nearly choked.
Leviathan—till then I had no belief in dragons—glided over the broken city, its winged shadow little seen but its voice was deep across the scene, letting go of roars which shook the ground. We hid among the trash wood and moved down the hill and watched the creature thrash in the air as if it was angry for its abominable life. Whatever millennia it spent in the pits of hell seemingly thrust upon it a love of destruction and pain.
My brother moved with a more assured stride and kept a cool distance and upon fleeing from the wreckage, from the outlying area of Atlanta and the place we’d left our family, he spoke little and watched me strangely whenever I took to melancholic fatiguing. We lit no fires for fear of what it could draw from the night so in the dark I’d see him watching some far-off place, maybe seeing through the reality which surrounded us, and he’d snap from it, catch my eye, and disappear for minutes to scan the perimeter of whatever place we stayed. Being alongside my resurrected brother was lonelier than I could bear, and I hoped he’d disappear for good or that I could work up the courage to end my own life. It was like purgatory explained in books and for a time, it felt endless; upon witnessing the destruction of Atlanta, we pushed to Marrietta, and it was much the same. As was Chatanooga, Nashville, Knoxville, Louisville, Charlotte. The ocean had risen so that Fayetville was gone underwater, and the Florida leg disappeared completely as far as I’m aware. I understood later that Memphis was overlooked and more places further west were alive too, but when we’d exhausted the south, we moved north and found strongholds of families or traders or even small groupings of civilization, but by and large we found nothing much in the two years that we hoofed it from place to place; it was my doing mostly—I wanted to find a place untouched by the mayhem in the area my family had once patrolled.
In retrospect, I am certain that Billy only stayed by my side for convenience; there wasn’t any of my brother left in the man that was my travelling companion for that time. He was a ghost of a person and Mephisto had preyed upon my desire in the worst moment of weakness in my life. There were nights—maybe we’d taken up in a natural alcove for shelter or we’d locked ourselves in some ancient structure for sleep—I’d watch Billy lay where he was, Sibylle’s hat and holster lying beside him, and I’d think of putting him down but he’d stir and in a brief shadow I’d see my brother as he’d been and withdraw to bury my face in fake sleep to be met with images of the night the demons attacked where I’d shake, sweat, and bite my lips so hard I’d drink blood.
Two years we marched around the Appalachians and in that time, I felt myself wither and disconnect.
Upon moving further north we met Indianapolis—that’s what it was called back then—and it was run by an older woman called Lady Lazarus; I reckon her father, affluent and dead, was a fan of Plath. Indianapolis was fortified more than most with its high walls, and its wall men, and its underground facilities which produced substantial ammunition. We—me and Billy’s revenant—were travelling with a group of traders we’d taken up with from out west; they called themselves wizards and although they seemed of the occult, their spirits discounted whatever suspicions I might’ve had of them.
I remember first pushing through that big gate; the town kept with it an indisputable malaise and though we were greeted at the gate by the leader Lady Lazarus—her brothers came along with her—and her jovial demeanor carried a certain infectious quality, I could not help but notice that the regular denizens maintained a healthy distance from their leader (the guards which followed the Lady everywhere probably had something to do with this).
Lady Lazarus touched each of our hands in greeting with enthusiasm and I could not help but notice how soft they were, how vibrant her eyes were, how much she smiled, and how beautiful she was given her age; already her head was fully gray.
Upon meeting each of us, going through the wizard traders first, she came to me, and Billy and she shook my hand then pivoted to Billy.
“Welcome. You can call me Lady.”
Billy caught her hand in his, held it longer than she’d intended so that they held eye contact, and he smiled broadly, tipped the cowboy hat on his head back to expose his smooth forehead and said, “And you can call me Maron, mam. You are quite a sight for a tired man.”
Though Maron—as he’d named himself—was more boy than man, Lady took a disturbed liking to him immediately and we prolonged our stay in Indianapolis after the wizards departed to head west.
Under the rule of Lady, Indianapolis was a theocracy, with her addressing the huddled masses at the steps of her grand abode, she’d preach for hours on sin and strife and quote her favorite passages; though reminiscent of my time with the Rednecks, I never found any truth or sincerity or freedom in her teaching—hers was more trouble, brimstone, fire and I’d had enough of that for a lifetime. Public execution was common. As was torture.
Maron distanced himself further from me, but I remained to keep an eye on him—it was not sentimentality but rather I existed without purpose and conjured some from watching my brother.
Often, Lady invited Maron to her private rooms and though the rumors and speculation ran the full spectrum of perverse speculation, every denizen feigned ignorance at her pregnancy.
Upon giving birth, the infant was malformed with two heads—her brothers took this as an omen and killed the child, put their leader in the stocks for months, and stripped her of dignity while the denizens did to her what they pleased.
Maron rose through the wall men while Lady’s brothers assumed control of Indianapolis and called themselves Bosses; in the time since Lady’s reign, the place was renamed to Golgotha for its closeness to a messiah.
I went west but always found myself drawn back to Golgotha because of some emptiness in me. It was only with Suzanne that I wanted something more and knowing them, I almost believed in a world like the one that children dream about. The world that Gemma and Andrew chased after when they left home, like the one Aggie talked about in her mother’s books. There’s a hopelessness in me that I’ll never be rid of. In the interim between our initial arrival to Golgotha and that flight from that terrible city, I cannot know how many people I sacrificed in convening with demons because I refuse to know because the number would destroy me. That is the worst of it; I do not even have courage enough to face myself or the actions of my past in any substantive way.
Mephisto tainted me so that I could speak with his kind as a dealmaker and the disease grew.
Billy or Maron or whatever he is should have been reaped long ago or better, I should never have brought that abomination alive. Such a cruel world where a deep longing like that can be inverted, weaponized. Me and him should both die; me and him should have died a long time ago.
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Hey everyone. I'm sixteen years old and have been living with my legal guardian for five, almost six years now. I believe over the course of this, our relationship has deteriorated substantially, along with her ability to parent me. I'll be organising the most notable facts in a list, for my ease.

1. Just today she forced me to rid objects out of my room, saying that they were "a gateway for demons" to enter the home. Forceful religious ideals have been a constant throughout my time here. Said objects included two transgender flags. I'm holding out with some civil disobedience currently until she forces me to rid of other things. This isn't the first time this has happened. Two years ago, she made us clean out everything she deemed as demonic and proceeded to burn them in our back yard. Harry Potter books, my statuettes and drawings of dragons, D&D themed playing cards, just miscellany she labelled as witchcraft that was influencing and possessing me. Today, though, that trans flag definitely pushed me over the edge. That has been a part of my identity for more than half of the time I've lived with her, and now she decides to make me discard it. It broke my heart to try to defend and fight for the significance it held for me to keep it. In the end the only thing I could do was fold it similar to the way you fold American flags for disposal. At least the poor thing went out just as respectfully as Old Glory should.
   
2. Various levels of education and opportunity limits, along with 'privelage' limits. Recently got onto a track to graduate early, perhaps December of this year. I expressed this goal and trajectory to her, to which she barely even gave me a scoff. She doesn't believe that I can make it, and expressed the idea that I was lying and bullshitting her to waste her time. I just wanted an "I'm proud of you," not insults. I also lead several school organised groups, to which she shut down after one of my mental breakdowns (related to her parenting), saying that I don't deserve that privilege anymore. Mind you, privileges to her are reasonable, but hung over my head in such a way that, instead of being motivational to be better, they only fuel my desire to give up said privelage. Quoting from memory, “Good parenting teaches a child to be better; bad parenting teaches a child how to lie more effectively.” Instead of working to gain my devices back, for example (they've been gone well over three months now, with no sign of her wanting to return them to me despite the fact I had bought both of them with my own earned money), I've resorted to utilising various secretive devices behind her back. I don't feel safe without one on my person whenever I go somewhere, yet she still feels the need to "punish" me for using the WiFi when I shouldn't have, way back in January. She also considers naps a privilege, and I am currently not allowed to sleep unless it is 10pm. I am made to wake up at 7:30am, and when I fail to meet this, she sprays me with vinegar-water like I'm some sort of fucking animal.
   
3. Multiple occasions where she would berate, mock, and insult me for menial things, and compare my work ethic from when I was actively sexually abused to my laid back ethic I have now. I remember vividly all the times she's called me retarded for not waking up on time or keeping secrets from her. I remember vividly the time she's slapped me, especially the time it busted my lip. I remember vividly every single time she's called me a bitch, especially a dumb one. These hurt me every day, and she acts like a half-assed apology will fix those names that I feel like have been engraved into my memory. I identify as transgender, and have made no decisions to physically alter my appearance or body, except cut my hair short on one occasion (she's since banned me from doing so). Every mistake I make is apparently deliberate according to her, and a direct stem from my 'gender confusion'. She also believes I'm schizophrenic for being trans, and unable to care for myself. I am extremely self-sustaining. I have been most of my life because of the fact that early on, I was forced into an adult role. She doesn't see this.
   
4. Sabotaging of relationships. Throughout most, if not all, of the years I have been here, she has put it upon herself to micro-manage my friendships. It used to be understandable. Now, she's actively telling me that I don't deserve to have a best friend and I essentially should lose them because I'm a horrible person. I like to think that I'm not, but due to the frequency of her berating, I'm starting to believe it. Self-esteem has always been an issue for me, and whenever it's especially low, she gets angry.
   
5. This is where we delve into the topic that I've marked this as NSFW for. I've been suicidal in multiple occasions, all of which, instead of actively reassuring or helping me, she said that it was my fault and that I was wasting her time. Again. It's painfully clear that I'm an extreme disappointment to her, especially when compared to her biological sons. I desire to be equally treated as they are, but she's always expressed that it's not possible given my 'delinquency' (for lack of a better term). I've expressed feelings multiple times where I felt like I don't belong here, they would be happier without me, they should put me back into foster care, and that I constantly ruin everything for the family. At the end of that discussion, my legal guardian and her two sons all agreed that I was attention-seeking and lazy, and that I should just change my personality to be easier for them to deal with. I almost attempted the same night, though she still doesn't know about that.
   

There is SO much more I'm leaving out here; considering the post is already getting really long, I think I've made a few main points. I want to know in the replies: am I really experiencing abuse, or am I overreacting like they say I am?

Introduction: The Mysterious Double Album
I’ll always remember 2 AM on April 19th 2024. I was in my pjs, alone, on my balcony, fresh off my first listen to Taylor Swift’s album The Tortured Poet’s Department. After sufficiently enjoying my solitary experience, I took to the internet to see what the masses were saying…when Swift dropped a whole second album: The Tortured Poets Department Anthology. Swift, a master of both Easter egging surprises for her fandom and practicing the number one rule of business (give the people what they want!), had been hinting at something “double” for months. Most significantly, while accepting her Grammy for Best Pop Vocal Album, she flashed a “peace sign.” That damn peace sign haunted the fandom for months. Swift’s corporate social media account, u/TaylorNation, used peace sign emojis and called attention to the number two whenever possible (ie teasing the album 22 days out etc.). There were also many “2”s present in in the promotional “experiences” leading up to the album release date—including statues of peace signs at the TTPD interactive experience at The Grove in LA. As usual, some Swifties went bonkers with their theories (or “clowning” as outlandish theorizing is referred to in the community). I myself couldn’t help but believe some concept of doubling would be significant in TTPD, but I couldn’t have guessed a full DOUBLE album (Swift’s capitalization). What an absolute treat. Mother was, as they say, mothering.
…Only the two mania didn’t seem to end post-drop. If anything, the two mania heightened. The albums were not just surprises in themselves, they were full of mystery. They seemed to reference multiple relationships, cryptic narratives, allusions to Swift’s previous songs, allusions to iconic poets, and very often, twins. The sleuthing type of Swiftie (full disclosure, moi) dove in deep. We gathered where we do—on Twitter, on TikTok, on Reddit (my preferred sandlot). And as we obsessed over every lyric, literary allusion, and video clip, Swift, our self-appointed “chairman” seemed to encourage us. Swift added a TTPD set to her Eras tour in Paris. Afterward, she posted a collection of photos to Instagram. The second photo of the post is Swift onstage, in a sparkling showman’s outfit, flashing two fingers.
Initial Tortured Poets and Sylvia Plath Connections
Swift has always been an incredible poet, but that’s not necessarily how the world saw hesees her. Swift is a pop star, specifically, Swift was a young girly pop star, most known for her tabloid romances and dramas, which she would (allegedly) write about in her music. Swift’s work has been labeled as “confessional” since her first album, which included songs she openly said were about boys at her high school. I offer this context (or, lore) to explain why I began seeing connections to TTPD in Sylvia Plath’s “confessional” work.
Of course, the theme of TTPD is tortured poets, so many avid literary Swifties have enjoyed seeking connections between Swift’s new songs and iconic poetry. No connections are overt, but some seem to be more likely than others. Namely, there’s been much discussion of Virginia Woolf thanks to the song “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?”(perhaps a riff on the Edward Albee play title). Other Swifties have found possible lyrical links to Mary Shelley and Charlotte Bronte. Swift herself references Patti Smith and Dylan Thomas in the album’s title track.
I remembered a third poet in relation to Smith and Thomas: Sylvia Plath, obviously an all timer of a tortured poet. I remember hearing an anecdote that she had been obsessed with Thomas and stalked him outside the Chelsea Hotel (also named in the TTPD title track). I did a quick skim of Plath’s Wikipedia to confirm and then started noticing many possible connections to TTPD and Plath’s life.
In the “Fortnight” music video, Swift acts out being institutionalized for insanity and getting electric shock treatment—two significant experiences in Plath’s life. Plath was also coupled with a deeply problematic man, Ted Hughes. Plath fell in love with Hughes for his artistic talent before he revealed himself to be an unsupportive parter, ultimately cheating on Plath with a younger woman. The narrative is not too dissimilar to the narrative about Swift’s alleged ex Matty Healy, as seemingly told in TTPD. (Of course, we don’t know the true subjects of Swift’s songs—if they’re even actually confessional—but some key hints point to Healy. Whether those hints provide actual context to Swift’s life or to the story Swift is telling of her life, one cannot know.) Finally, several of TTPD songs reference a latent desire for suicide (“I might as well die / it would make no difference” etc.). Okay, post-“finally,” these are stretches, but, I’ll note anyway: one of Plath’s most famous collections of poems is titled Ariel, but an alternate title was Daddy. There are connections to both words in TTPD via the song “But Daddy I Love Him.” The title is a line from the Disney movie The Little Mermaid (which features the main character Ariel, a mermaid, caught between two worlds). Extra clowning: some people (hi, I'm people) believe Swift’s 1989 costume for her first Paris concert was an allusion to Ariel: a pink crop top and a seafoam skirt.
As I dug into Plath's life, I couldn’t help but also see similarities to Swift's life. Both women were prolific writers from a very young age. Also, although possibly obscured through artistic license, both women were/are known to write about their own lives. (Plath was apparently encouraged by her professors Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton to write from her experience. I cannot help but tie in Swift’s “The Manuscript” lyric “the Professor said to write what you know.”) Both Plath and Swift expressed/express their depression via their writing, but if you only knew them from their public personas, you’d never guess the depths of their struggles. It seems both Plath and Swift lived/live double lives. Plath was actually fascinated by the concept of doubles. In fact, the concept of doubling was the topic of Plath’s college thesis paper “The Magic Mirror.”
The Magic Mirror and TTPD
Plath’s college paper is sadly not available to the general public. (It had a limited print run in, you guessed it, 1989.) But! I was able to read a few texts about the thesis, and the amount of possible TTPD references is astounding.
Since we can’t directly analyze Swift’s work via Plath’s directly, I’d like to share several key quotes from the most telling article I could find about the “The Magic Mirror”: “Sylvia Plath’s Magic Mirror” by Kelly Coyne (May 2018, The Los Angeles Review of Books). (To be noted, Coyne has also written about Swift, in her article “Growing Up In Taylor Swift’s America” in December 2023 on Literary Hub—a fabulous read!)
Early in her article, Coyne sets the scene for Plath's thesis:
“Her undergraduate thesis, which she wrote as a senior at Smith College...is titled “The Magic Mirror: A Study of the Double in Two of Dostoevsky’s Novels.” “The Magic Mirror” explores literary doubles made up of a character’s repressed traits, and, as the double grows in power, it heralds the protagonist’s death. Citing Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as well as Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Plath argued that the choice to create a double works to “reveal hitherto concealed character traits in a radical manner” and simultaneously exposes the driving conflicts of the novel housing that character. Her thesis claims that both Ivan, of The Brothers Karamazov, and Golyadkin, of The Double, have attempted to repress troubling aspects of their personalities, resulting in the double.”
Immediately, I imagine the two versions of Swift from the “Anti-Hero” music video. One Swift is real, true, sensible. The other is a pot-stirring, self-esteem destroying, alcoholic. During Eras, the huge Swift (monster on a hill) screams and stomps around in the background while the real, true Swift smiles and dances in a sparkle dress onstage. The fandom seems to be referring to these two Swifts as Taylor Swift and TAYLOR SWIFT (TM). Folks have theorized Post-Malone in the Fortnight music video is not necessarily a lover, but a twin, or double, of Swift. This theory is enhances by the Eras visuals during that song, specifically two dancers walking away to the back of the stage, but then becoming one.
More Coyne: “Plath, quoting Dostoyevsky in her thesis, noted that Ivan’s double, Smerdyakov, is “wrinkled” and “yellow.” The distinct differences in appearance between originator and double, she continued, are meant to reflect the protagonist’s mental state and cultural status.”
First of all, yellow. In the Gaylor community, folks have often theorized yellow symbolizes being closeted—a reading based on the symbolic coloring in the 1999 film …But I’m a Cheerleader. However, one need not be a Gaylor to consider the importance of yellow to Swift’s storytelling. Most recently, Swift performed “my tears ricochet” at Eras in a bright yellow dress, as her dancers were dressed for a funeral. Following Coyne’s analysis of Plath's analysis of Dostoyevsky, one could guess Swift is teasing a death of some version of herself.
Coyne discusses how Plath clearly used a “double” of herself to write The Bell Jar. Plath herself spent a summer in New York interning for Mademoiselle. The protagonist in TBJ, Esther, spends a summer in New York interning at a magazine too. To go even further down the rabbit hole, Esther also doubles herself, frequently expressing normalcy on the outside and despair on the inside. On the book's first page, Esther tells her audience, “I was supposed to be having the time of my life.” (Again, I cannot help but hear a Swift echo of, “I can read your mind / she’s having the time of her life” from “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” about smiling through her depression.) Coyne makes many more references to mirrors and concealing in The Bell Jar, Ether’s split (and sadness) gets worse and worse the more she hides who she is from others. Notably, at a low point, Esther hides under her mother’s bed. (And Swift sings of a post-heartbreak depression, “Afterwards she only ate kids' cereal / And couldn't sleep unless it was in her mother's bed.”)
Coyne writes about the “imprisoned” aspect of doubles: “The wound from which Esther tries, and fails, to hide chimes with the inescapable, colonizing double, and Plath’s language again illustrates its penal nature: it is inside Esther, but it traps her like a jail cell.” (Again, I cannot help but see references to “Fresh Out the Slammer”, “The Smaller Man Who Ever Lived,” and the TTPD Eras visuals of cages and cell lighting.)
Coyne, on Plath’s doubles’ names, something Swift has not ever used (or so we think): “From her conception of The Bell Jar all the way to its final revisions, Plath suffered an exhausting amount of anxiety over its heroine’s name.” Plath wrote to a friend, “‘I’ll have to publish it under a pseudonym, if I ever get it accepted, because it’s so chock full of real people I’d be sued to death’...Indeed, this wasn’t mere paranoia; she did have to change her protagonist’s name at the instruction of her editor for legal reasons.”
Coyne continues, “Most novelists likely have concerns about being associated with the characters to whom they give life, especially the ugly ones, and especially when the character resembles its author. Yet what is unique about Plath’s case is her knowledge of the theoretical underpinnings and implications of her choice to push Esther away, and the hold this knowledge assumed on Plath’s work and life. Another look at The Bell Jar with a consideration of Esther as Plath’s double tangles the issue even further, and Plath drops clues for this kind of reading throughout the novel. Esther, for example, sits down to write her own novel and recounts, “My heroine would be myself, only in disguise. She would be called Elaine. Elaine. I counted the letters on my fingers. There were six letters in Esther, too. It seemed a lucky thing.” Not coincidentally, Plath’s first name has six letters as well.” Again, Plath was in a bizarre double infinity loop (like the loop on the Eras stage in “Down Bad”?). Plath was concealing her double, the protagonist in her novel, who was concealing her double, the protagonist in her novel.
Coyne wraps up her findings: “In her thesis, written nearly a decade earlier, as she turned 22 — the year after her first documented suicide attempt — Plath claimed, quoting Otto Rank:
In such situations, where the Double symbolizes the evil or repressed elements in man’s nature, the apparition of the Double “becomes a persecution by it, the repressed material returns in the form of that which represses.” Man’s instinct to avoid or ignore the unpleasant aspects of his character turns into an active terror when he is faced by his Double, which resurrects those very parts of his personality which he sought to escape. The confrontation of the Double in these instances usually results in a duel which ends in insanity or death for the original hero.”
Coyne seems to argue Plath believed an artist's double has the power to become bigger than the artist herself, ultimately killing her. Is TTPD Swift's predetermination of, hopefully, her her double's death instead of her own?
In Conclusion: Plath to her Mentor, Dessner on Swift
Who knows what TTPD is really truly about, and who knows if we ever will.
The biggest Easter egg, hiding in plain sight, is that the album is titled THE TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT. There’s no apostrophe after “poet.” Nor is there an apostrophe after the “s” in “poets.” The department does not belong to a poet or to a collection of poets. It is a department OF tortured poets, perhaps two, to be exact. …or perhaps the album indicates the departure of the tortured poet...and her double.
I’ll sign off with two final quotes from my research:
According to Coyne, three months before Plath died by suicide, she had written a mentor about her second (obviously unfinished) book. Plath wrote, “It is to be called “Doubletake”, meaning that the second look you take at something reveals a deeper, double meaning […] it is semi-autobiographical about a wife whose husband turns out to be a deserter and philanderer although she had thought he was wonderful & perfect.”
According to Aaron Dessner’s TTPD release Instagram post: ”Keep searching and you'll find some new detail, layer or sliver of meaning with each listen.”
SUBREDDIT PS! Shout out to Expensive_Succotash5 for noting the TTPD intro poem's reference to being out of the oven, could be an allusion to Plath's death. Also shout-out to Good-Amphibian-7993 for this connection to a photo of Plath with a rose, not unlike Swift's album rose art.

Let’s talk about Dan Humphrey shall we! (Season one only)
First of all he is the most insufferable wanna be over privileged hipster brat. He is the worst boyfriend to Serena, constantly treating her as if she’s a prize to be won but also constantly putting her down to make himself feel better.
Dan was so quick to befriend “Sarah” aka Georgina and happy to run into her arms as soon as he assumed Serena had cheated on him in season 1. Even if Serena confirmed it he never gave her a chance to actually talk through it.
Dan and Serena season one had their problems, but is it not an emotional affair to divulge all of that to different women that you are “friends” with? I put friends in air quotes because Dan and Vanessa previously had feelings for each other and i don’t care early season one Dan definitely over stepped boundaries and had them competing even if he wasn’t outwardly encouraging it.
Dan would constantly assume things about Serena and the men in her life and judge her for being around her life long friends (Blair, Chuck, and Nate) when he wished he could be just like them. But if Serena had a problem and addressed it regarding Dan’s friends (namely Georgina) he pushed it off and chose them over her every time. THE COFFEE SHOP SCENE!?! Your girlfriend says she’s uncomfortable with a friendship you JUST made and you have the nerve to get angry at her and choose someone you just met????
THEN HE KISSED HER THE SAME NIGHT HE AND SERENA BROKE UP SO HE REALLY DIDN’T GAF ABOUT SERENA OMG
Not him sleeping with Georgina and then guilt tripping Serena into apologizing !?
In conclusion I hate Dan Humphrey he sucks

I've recently been reflecting on my efforts at being more productive and started writing some longer form content to help structure my thoughts.
I wrote up the below in the past few days and wanted to share. Perhaps some of you have also found yourself hindered by an ongoing search for the ideal life path vs. just enjoy the journey.
Hope you find this helpful!
Despite your inflated sense of yourself, you are not, amongst all other humans, impervious to being brainwashed. This is a hardwired feature of your mind and a circuit that is operating at all times, if you allow it to do so. You aren’t being brainwashed in the cartoonish mode of being made to act like a chicken or empty your wallet. However, you are being brainwashed nonetheless.
Replace the word “brainwashed” with “influenced” and you may start to see my point. If you read me, you are not a fan of the influencers for stupid people (a la Andrew Tate) but perhaps you have more refined taste (Huberman, Attia, Ferriss, Jocko, Peterson, Newport). If there are any such personalities you are a fan of, I assure you that in your efforts to live a more productive, successful, disciplined life… you have been brainwashed.
I want to focus on how quickly the messages that you hear from these sources transition into “shoulds” that run in the background of your daily self-talk. These sources are an unending stream of great ideas for how you should wake up, how you should work, how you should eat, how you should exercise, how you should have sex, how you should meditate, how you should partake in leisure and so on. Notice that they don’t always come in the form of a statement that says “you should do x.” They may come in the form of “my typical daily routine looks like y”. Either way, your mind is primed and ready to sponge it all up.
If you were but a simple peasant farming in Ye Olde England six hundred years ago, your life was governed by a very rigid set of “shoulds”. There was the Bible, there were social norms, the rules of the king, and so. However, these were still a relatively manageable list of rules that one could live by, and it was not unreasonable to assume that you could mostly stay on the Righteous Path. Fast forward to the algo-influencer age and all bets are off. Open up any platform and within minutes, you’ll be bombarded with more “shoulds” than you can possibly keep in mind at once. This observation comes with no value judgment on the quality of what we are being told, I am only commenting on the volume.
You are wrong if you tell me that you are effective at curating the good stuff that will improve your life from the algo-influencer-Youtube-podcast-x regime. I know you think you are because, as we noted, you are a fan of the high class, refined content. The good stuff. The science backed stuff. Here’s the thing, once a source of information finds some sort of “resonance” with your subconscious, you are going to suck it all right up. All the great stuff you hear will immediately seep into your subconscious and become a constant quiet voice in the back of your mind berating you with a litany of “shoulds.”
Alas, you object - it’s all good stuff. Huberman has me locked onto managing my dopamine levels, Attia has me optimizing my diet, Dr. Zoidberg has me keeping limber, and Cal Newport is showing me how to live a deep life. I want to point out three problems with what is going on here.
Problem #1 - Your mind is not actually asking what end purpose is being served by adopting the idea that you “should” be doing a given thing.
Let’s cue Jocko Willink on this one. I am someone who, for many years, felt it was important to wake up at 4:30am because of… discipline. Why? Well, I must get up early to be up before the enemy and for freedom. I note that discipline is the ultimate meta-”should”. Discipline means getting yourself to do all the “shoulds” on your list. Can anyone tell me what outcome I’m missing out on by not partaking in a daily cold plunge, heat plunge, ice bath, or looking at the sun within 15 minutes of waking up?
Problem #2 - Even if you have a desired end goal, your mind is not doing a rigorous job of assessing whether or not a given “should” will get you there.
Most of us would like more control of our daily schedule in order to have more freedom and flexibility. The grindset types on Youtube, or on X have a common solution for us. I am not likely taking a huge leap in that one “should” you have picked up is something to do with entrepreneurship. Ok, have you really considered whether starting your own business will give you more freedom? Maybe it will… I just suspect you picked up this idea without really looking at the pros and cons.
Problem #3 - Even if you’ve been bequeathed a fantastic, grade A, “should” from someone… you’ve got more than you can handle already.
If a “should” that you heard on Youtube or read in a book resonates for some reason, your mind will take it up and start beaming you subconscious messages to do that thing. Your mind will also happily send you 10 of these at once. Are they contradictory? Who cares? I “should” wake up at 4:30, and I should sleep at least 8 hours with no alarm clock. I should also consider being a night owl creative type, and stay up late to grind if life demands it. Some “shoulds” probably aren’t even really defined to any precision. I should be more driven, more mindful, more dynamic. I genuinely feel all those impulses and can’t even begin to tell you what it would like to actually do them. Mr. Brain has no problem with cognitive dissonance, and will dutifully tell me to live up to all of these.
Let’s now talk about Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden (as an aside, yes I also feel a “should” to be more religious, spiritual, and penitent). Well, really I want to talk about The Promised Land. I know you… you are the hard driving, disciplined type. You like to punish yourself for not living up to your expectations. Alas, you are on the verge of getting there. If you could just get a few days in a row where you nail all your “shoulds,” it will all fall into place. One perfect day will lead to the next and the next. Then, I’ll have made it. I’ll be in the land of enlightenment (and oh so productive). Fellow pilgrim, I’m right there with you on the Righteous Path.
Wait a second, something feels off. Did I say above that our mind will happily adopt any set of “shoulds” no matter how contradictory or ill-defined they may be? And, did I also say that I’m striving to get to The Promised Land by doing “All the Shoulds”? If The Righteous Path is the road that leads to The Promised Land, I’ve got some bad news for you. You are permanently off The Righteous Path. This, my friend, is why you constantly feel like you are not living up to your expectations. They are impossible - you never had a chance. It’s ok though - Jesus died for your sins and there is still a path to salvation.
Oh, but, I’m not ready for salvation, I want to rock on. Here’s what we’d all prefer to do when faced with that sensation of being off the Path. It’s time to hunker down, and go to war, and GRIND. Don’t tell me I can’t do it all. When fate whispers, “You cannot Withstand The Storm,” the Warrior Whispers, “I am the Storm.” I’m feeling chills (no really, it’s a great quote). That’s how we roll. We man up and get that shit done. Well, I hate to be the one to break it to you, but if that worked you wouldn’t still be in the market for motivational content. You are still lost… no Youtube video is going to get out of the bottomless deep of the “should.”
Back to Jesus (gasp - you didn’t warn me this would be a borderline sacrilegious article). It’s okay, Jesus is fair game in the algo-world. This is that obnoxious pause point in a self help book where there’s a worksheet page and you are asked to write stuff down. Take 10 minutes and make yourself a list of all the “shoulds” that you are feeling at this point about your life. I’ll help you get going with some prompts: businesses to start, podcasts to create, books to read, daily rituals to adopt, food to eat/not eat, workout routine to start, races to run, people to call, projects to do. You get the idea.
More work for you. Now imagine your perfect day. I mean a day that checks all the boxes. I despise rap, but seek inspiration in imagining the productivity version of the Ice Cube hit, “It was a Good Day.” How would you spend your time? Think about it hour by hour, minute by minute. When do you wake up? What do you do after waking up? How much time do you spend working? What sort of work? What else do you do? Map it all out. Imagine this as a day where you fully control your schedule.
Are you still with me? Probably not. This is too many words for the internet and I’m asking too much of your lazy ass. You should be less lazy. See what I did there? Ok, next step. Map your perfect day onto reality. Take any of the days from the past week where you had real life commitments such as work meetings, errands, childcare and ask yourself how you would map this perfect day onto that reality. Where would the three hours of Cal Newport Deep Work fit? How would you wake up at 4:30am after being up late because your kid was sick or your friend from out of town was visiting?
My point is, of course, obvious. However, don’t underestimate what I am saying. I am not saying that you can’t always have your perfect day. I am saying you can never have the perfect day. You are imposing unrealistic expectations upon reality. This conflict has always existed and you had two choices: 1) Dig deeper and muscle through because you are failing as a person to be sufficiently disciplined, or 2) Accept that your “shoulds” were always impossible to fully satisfy, and try something different.
Here’s the last thing I want you to do for now. Go back to your “should” list from the first step and take a critical eye. I give you permission to cross out as many as you’d like. If you are unsure before you cross it out, ask yourself: Where did this idea come from? Does it help me lead a happier life? Do I even agree with the premise? When in doubt, cross it out and feel the freedom.
I’ll leave you with one last message - you are probably doing just fine. Are there improvements you can make in your life? Sure, we all can. However, you aren’t failing, you aren’t straying from The Righteous Path, and there is no Promised Land. There’s just the lower case p path, and that is alright.

I (25f - have Bpd and I struggle with boundaries and kind communication as well as black/white thinking) have a work friend (31f) we have worked together on the same team for a few years now and right off the bat we were drawn to each other and chatted and hung out because we had interests in common.
Over the course of the last few years, this friend has tried creating a new persona for themselves. I am all for reinventing yourself or finding more confidence or trying out different interests - and I try to be as supportive as possible when my friends are growing or changing. However, this persona put on by this friend is only ever presented to me. Often referred to her as her “villain era” etc., constantly sending me quotes and images of memes about her being this sort of aggressive, femme fatale Maneater, etc. Which I would be fully in support of, if it didn’t seem so contradictory to how she presents herself to me face-to-face, or to the rest of the world.
She also constantly refer to herself as a girls girl, but will gossip about other women behind their backs, has no other female friends and will backhandedly rubs things that bother me in my face on a regular basis, but in such minor ways, it’s hard to call her out for them. I have a disability and there’s certain things I can’t do and I’ve been asked to not be sent certain content when she is doing those things, she can post whatever she wants, but I don’t want it sent to me directly. And she will continuously do so despite me resetting that boundary over and over again.
For some context here: she comes from a relatively conservative family (as in strict parents) and is a little bit overweight and has always been very self-conscious about those things. SHe has never been in a relationship or anything like that. It’s a little difficult for us to understand each other in certain ways because I am the total opposite and I’m not in the dating world. I married the first person I ever dated and still am married. I try to be fully supportive of her dating life and her experiences while she rags on marriage and shits on it all the time. Whenever she tells me stories about her dating life or life is exaggerated to the 10th°. About how she sleeping with peoples husbands or the all these men are chasing her or she’s so promiscuous and so evil that she just could never fathom settling down, or she went to the prestigious university that I know she did not actually attend etc. etc. all of these stories either seem fictitious or extremely embellished because I know for a fact her life is not actually like this on a regular basis because we live next-door to each other.
And this is become every single day - day and day out and I am always trying to be kind and supportive so I’m always just like “oh that’s great or cool” but I have only so much emotional bandwith left for some thing that I know isn’t true and she was asked directly about a certain experience - she will not keep her story the same when we are around other people. She only presents this sort of person to me and it feels a very emotionally draining and I don’t know how to approach it. Especially because some of the things like backhanded comments about marriage or embellished date stories seem so minor It feels frustrating to try to call them out because they are always brushed off.
Another thing she does is continually tries to push a persona on me that I do not feel is my truth. We have a lot of things in common, which is initially why we became friends, but she does not like anyone being similar to her, and if I like anything that similar to her, she will try to “win” very passive aggressively - she likes XY or Z better than I do, or sending me tons of content, saying that this is how she views me or this reminded her of me when it is the opposite of what my personality and interests are like and even my husband said “it seems like she doesn’t want you to be like her at all and she’s trying to turn you into who she wants you to be”
I struggle a little bit with social cues and approaching things directly or too much of a people pleaser away. Should I even address this with her? I cannot end this friendship because I really need this job and we have to work in the same place and she is very very very sensitive to rejection. But she contacts me on almost every platform every single day, and any slight change in my tone is perceived as rejection by her.
TLDR: I have a friend who is also a coworker that is pretty insecure and is creating false narratives about her own life to get validation through me because I will only be kind and things are so minor that I feel struggle calling her out for them. Not to mention it could severely fuck up my work life. But the passive aggression and lack of genuineness at all is emotionally draining me.

Work friend uses me for validation constantly
I (25f) have a work friend (31f) we have worked together on the same team for a few years now and right off the bat we were drawn to each other and chatted and hung out because we had interests in common.
Over the course of the last few years, this friend has tried creating a new persona for themselves. I am all for reinventing yourself or finding more confidence or trying out different interests - and I try to be as supportive as possible when my friends are growing or changing. However, this persona put on by this friend is only ever presented to me. Often referred to her as her “villain era” etc., constantly sending me quotes and images of memes about her being this sort of aggressive, femme fatale Maneater, etc. Which I would be fully in support of, if it didn’t seem so contradictory to how she presents herself to me face-to-face, or to the rest of the world.
She also constantly refer to herself as a girls girl, but will gossip about other women behind their backs, has no other female friends and will backhandedly rubs things that bother me in my face on a regular basis, but in such minor ways, it’s hard to call her out for them. I have a disability and there’s certain things I can’t do and I’ve been asked to not be sent certain content when she is doing those things, she can post whatever she wants, but I don’t want it sent to me directly. And she will continuously do so despite me resetting that boundary over and over again.
For some context here: she comes from a relatively conservative family (as in strict parents) and is a little bit overweight and has always been very self-conscious about those things. SHe has never been in a relationship or anything like that. It’s a little difficult for us to understand each other in certain ways because I am the total opposite and I’m not in the dating world. I married the first person I ever dated and still am married. I try to be fully supportive of her dating life and her experiences while she rags on marriage and shits on it all the time. Whenever she tells me stories about her dating life or life is exaggerated to the 10th°. About how she sleeping with peoples husbands or the all these men are chasing her or she’s so promiscuous and so evil that she just could never fathom settling down, or she went to the prestigious university that I know she did not actually attend etc. etc. all of these stories either seem fictitious or extremely embellished because I know for a fact her life is not actually like this on a regular basis because we live next-door to each other.
And this is become every single day - day and day out and I am always trying to be kind and supportive so I’m always just like “oh that’s great or cool” but I have only so much emotional bandwith left for some thing that I know isn’t true and she was asked directly about a certain experience - she will not keep her story the same when we are around other people. She only presents this sort of person to me and it feels a very emotionally draining and I don’t know how to approach it. Especially because some of the things like backhanded comments about marriage or embellished date stories seem so minor It feels frustrating to try to call them out because they are always brushed off.
Another thing she does is continually tries to push a persona on me that I do not feel is my truth. We have a lot of things in common, which is initially why we became friends, but she does not like anyone being similar to her, and if I like anything that similar to her, she will try to “win” very passive aggressively - she likes XY or Z better than I do, or sending me tons of content, saying that this is how she views me or this reminded her of me when it is the opposite of what my personality and interests are like and even my husband said “it seems like she doesn’t want you to be like her at all and she’s trying to turn you into who she wants you to be”
I struggle a little bit with social cues and approaching things directly or too much of a people pleaser away. Should I even address this with her? I cannot end this friendship because I really need this job and we have to work in the same place and she is very very very sensitive to rejection. But she contacts me on almost every platform every single day, and any slight change in my tone is perceived as rejection by her.
TLDR: I have a friend who is also a coworker that is pretty insecure and is creating false narratives about her own life to get validation through me because I will only be kind and things are so minor that I feel struggle calling her out for them. Not to mention it could severely fuck up my work life. But the passive aggression and lack of genuineness at all is emotionally draining me.

I (25f) have a work friend (31f) we have worked together on the same team for a few years now and right off the bat we were drawn to each other and chatted and hung out because we had interests in common.
Over the course of the last few years, this friend has tried creating a new persona for themselves. I am all for reinventing yourself or finding more confidence or trying out different interests - and I try to be as supportive as possible when my friends are growing or changing. However, this persona put on by this friend is only ever presented to me. Often referred to her as her “villain era” etc., constantly sending me quotes and images of memes about her being this sort of aggressive, femme fatale Maneater, etc. Which I would be fully in support of, if it didn’t seem so contradictory to how she presents herself to me face-to-face, or to the rest of the world.
She also constantly refer to herself as a girls girl, but will gossip about other women behind their backs, has no other female friends and will backhandedly rubs things that bother me in my face on a regular basis, but in such minor ways, it’s hard to call her out for them. I have a disability and there’s certain things I can’t do and I’ve been asked to not be sent certain content when she is doing those things, she can post whatever she wants, but I don’t want it sent to me directly. And she will continuously do so despite me resetting that boundary over and over again.
For some context here: she comes from a relatively conservative family (as in strict parents) and is a little bit overweight and has always been very self-conscious about those things. SHe has never been in a relationship or anything like that. It’s a little difficult for us to understand each other in certain ways because I am the total opposite and I’m not in the dating world. I married the first person I ever dated and still am married. I try to be fully supportive of her dating life and her experiences while she rags on marriage and shits on it all the time. Whenever she tells me stories about her dating life or life is exaggerated to the 10th°. About how she sleeping with peoples husbands or the all these men are chasing her or she’s so promiscuous and so evil that she just could never fathom settling down, or she went to the prestigious university that I know she did not actually attend etc. etc. all of these stories either seem fictitious or extremely embellished because I know for a fact her life is not actually like this on a regular basis because we live next-door to each other.
And this is become every single day - day and day out and I am always trying to be kind and supportive so I’m always just like “oh that’s great or cool” but I have only so much emotional bandwith left for some thing that I know isn’t true and she was asked directly about a certain experience - she will not keep her story the same when we are around other people. She only presents this sort of person to me and it feels a very emotionally draining and I don’t know how to approach it. Especially because some of the things like backhanded comments about marriage or embellished date stories seem so minor It feels frustrating to try to call them out because they are always brushed off.
Another thing she does is continually tries to push a persona on me that I do not feel is my truth. We have a lot of things in common, which is initially why we became friends, but she does not like anyone being similar to her, and if I like anything that similar to her, she will try to “win” very passive aggressively - she likes XY or Z better than I do, or sending me tons of content, saying that this is how she views me or this reminded her of me when it is the opposite of what my personality and interests are like and even my husband said “it seems like she doesn’t want you to be like her at all and she’s trying to turn you into who she wants you to be”
I struggle a little bit with social cues and approaching things directly or too much of a people pleaser away. Should I even address this with her? I cannot end this friendship because I really need this job and we have to work in the same place and she is very very very sensitive to rejection. But she contacts me on almost every platform every single day, and any slight change in my tone is perceived as rejection by her.
TLDR: I have a friend who is also a coworker that is pretty insecure and is creating false narratives about her own life to get validation through me because I will only be kind and things are so minor that I feel struggle calling her out for them. Not to mention it could severely fuck up my work life. But the passive aggression and lack of genuineness at all is emotionally draining me.

My boyfriend and I have been dating and living together for six years! We've been good friends since middle school! (If you're into zodiacs, I'm a march Aries and he's a January Aquarius) I feel like everything was going great until I stopped working to go to cosmetology school. Going into cosmo school I knew this was going to be a slow process to start making my own money so I had a plan on at least working overnights or part-time and then going to school full-time, luckily my boyfriend offered to give me a $500 allowance every two weeks and told me just to focus on school and he'll help me financially.For context we live with my parents and siblings, he really doesn't pay bills here unless my parents asks him to help with electricity but other than that, all he has is his phone bill and car insurance,No chores or anything as well. NGL I have a bad spending habit, l was used to buying everything myself (Hair, nails and makeup I bought that all myself) so $500 went away pretty fast nothing too bad but my account would go in the negatives, maybe like -$10 at the most but I would ask him if he could just send me at least $12 so my account will not be in the negatives(and avoid overdraft fees) , this was turned into a big deal with him. He stop talking to me for about 2 1/2 weeks(this happened about three times.) His way of ignoring me was getting home from work and he would just stay in his car until 1 am(off of work at 10:30pm and was home by 10:45pm) when he would come inside he would sit in the living room in the dark and anytime l'd walk by He would turn his phone off, so I wouldn't see him . I was the one who had to ask him what was wrong and his reason for ignoring me. His reason was because I was stressing him out cause my account went into the negatives, it really pissed me off since we live together at my parents house and just felt childish of him ignoring me.After I had a "talk" with him (really it was just me asking him what's wrong and if he's OK, kind of felt like I was babying him) he got over it the next day, but the third time he ignored me I told Him that "This is very childish of you and why do you not want to talk things out? If you do this one more time l'm done" he hasn't done it since.
Another point is our sex life is gone. Again, I live with my parents and three siblings so it's a little hard to get intimate, especially in a Mexican household, someone is always home, but when we do have alone time he would rather play Fortnite, sleep all day or work on his car. I feel like I'm also to blame since I did let myself go so that could be another reason why we're not intimate. what I also mean by intimate is him not even wanting to hang out with me on his days off. He's heavily into Godzilla, anime,cars and video games, so of course, anytime he wanted to do some thing or go to an event that he's interested in and I'm not, l would still go because I wanted to be with him and have a good time but when it comes to things that I want to do he acts like it's the worst thing ever, also feels forced. So majority of the time l'm going to the movies or going to a restaurant I'm just doing it by myself because he doesn't want to go. I've also been home alone more lately in order for me to save money. I just stopped getting my hair and nails done and I just stopped going out in general. Unfortunately I did pick up a smoking habit Since all I do is watch him play Fortnite or his other interests, I decided I'll at least make it fun and get high while watching. He says that he doesn't mind me smoking, but there are times where he acts like he's better than me because he smoked when he was younger and not now as an adult. He's also been working a lot lately, He works at a warehouse so 10 hour shifts four days straight and he has three days off, but he's been working six days out of the week now and only has Saturdays off, but on his days off, he sleeps all day and then stays up all night playing video games. I try not to get mad at him because I understand he's tired, but if he has plans with his friends he is up early in the morning and is with them all day and I do get a little jealous of it. At this point, I really feel we're both using each other. He gives me an allowance and he lives in a house rent free. I still love him, but I just feel nothing back. He says he still loves me and I quote " well I still give you money and fix your car so that should mean something right?!" I don't need a pity party. I just need other peoples opinions. This is only a very small portion of my relationship that I am posting here, but from what l have written on here (can provide more stories/info if needed) I just need to know your thoughts and what would you do in my situation.

its like 9 am for me rn woke up at 6, got a healhy 4 hours of sleep. anyways i kinda just wanted to talk about something rq about i pretty much have lost most of my friends over the past years since i got out of highschool. they had it coming, snake ass mfs wanted to ditch one of our friends dispute him being there for us through thick and thin. anyways i kinda used to be a incel? i guess i wasnt like a neo nazi or anything i was just a loser playing hoi4 and minecraft all day. in november i got into the gym which is nice, spend less time now at home speaking of which is often. I cant find a job anywere, and im going to have to likely go to work with my dad in the summer which isnt bad just alot of work but also a alot of money. i have dreams, most of which are going into the financial sector, as you can see my grammer and spelling is just really fucking bad, no idea why im 18m btw and it looks like a 9 year old. i saw this quote a few days ago saying "live your life like your father was dead" on real note this hits 2 cords the first one being a kinda love it, and i wouldnt wanna face him after i failed at something he told me not to do. one the 2nd cord being that he one day may die, he drinks like 4 beers a day used to be way more, his brother died at like 60ish? idk that was when i was in 6th grade, on top of that he has told me many times he is going to die. i feel like hes depressed since im not doing well in life. my mom is kinda diffrent, i will always respect her but shes kinda just stupid, and with that cant see that shes wrong. as i have got older i have realized every "bad" thing shes done she was just acting out of anger or just didnt understand. my sisters one doesnt matter, i will never talk to her again, the other is wonderful, good future she helps me out alot with school stuff and i really wish she does well for me and she wishs well for me aswell. shes not around much anymore as shes busy with school i cant blame her shes not my mom anyways. in the way of friends i mostly just chill with my true og ill call t, t was the one i talked about before, i also chill quite alot with one of my cousins. to make it worse canada kinda been in a economic rut since 2020, house prices have skyrocked over the last 10 year in this area from what was 500k for one to 1.4 million over the last 15 years or so. girls are kinda weird to me, i dont really like them per say, i have never had a crush on one in my entire life, from what im guessing some have had a crush on me, im not really unattractive anymore. im built alot better and am fairly tall at like 6'1, i just dont form a crush. i think i might also post this on trueoffmychest

Hi! I'm about to buy my first car but got pretty discouraged by the insurance costs. I thought you guys may be able to give me some advice.
I'm 28F, moved to the UK for uni in 2015. Got my driving licence in Poland in 2015. Since then, I have been using various cars semi-regularly - initially my mum's car whenever I was back home, then I signed up for Co-wheels and used it regularly since 2021. Additionally, I was a driver for my uni's mountaineering club and drove various rental cars, MPVs and even minibuses. Also rented cars regularly on holidays abroad. Suffice to say I'm experienced - various roads, countries and vehicles. Does that matter at all when applying for insurance? So far after filling the quote forms it looks like I've never driven a car before - is there any way to use that for my advantage?
I've been collecting all the tricks to lower the insurance, exchanged my EU licence for UK one, potentially gonna add my cousin as a second driver etc. Just discovered that the job titles may be tinkered with slightly too.
I'm not looking for any specific car, but I'd like it to be big enough to sleep in it or at least fit a bike in the boot easily (like Fabia Estate or something similar). Was considering Citroen Berlingo too, but not sure about its size yet. I'll take any recommendations for how to choose a car that's not gonna kill me insurance-wise in the first years. Thanks!

Please discuss and if you would like rate out of 10.
The Boho Dance by Joni Mitchell
LYRICS
Down in the cellar in the Boho zone I went looking for some sweet inspiration, oh well Just another hard time band With Negro affectations I was a hopeful in rooms like this When I was working cheap It's an old romance the Boho dance It hasn't gone to sleep
But even on the scuffle The cleaner's press was in my jeans And any eye for detail Caught a little lace along the seams
And you were in the parking lot Subterranean by your own design The virtue of your style inscribed On your contempt for mine Jesus was a beggar, he was rich in grace And Solomon kept his head in all his glory It's just that some steps outside the Boho dance * Have a fascination for me
A camera pans the cocktail hour Behind a blind of potted palms And finds a lady in a Paris dress With runs in her nylons
You read those books where luxury Comes as a guest to take a slave Books where artists in noble poverty Go like virgins to the grave Don't you get sensitive on me 'Cause I know you're just too proud You couldn't step outside the Boho dance now Even if good fortune allowed
Like a priest with a pornographic watch Looking and longing on the sly Sure it's stricken from your uniform But you can't get it out of your eyes
Nothing is capsulized in me On either side of town The streets were never really mine Not mine these glamour gowns
FOOTNOTES
Boho Dance" [submitted by Debra Shea] Joni's Boho Dance is a personal story (it does seem to me she's talking to a particular person as well as thinking about where she fits in) and goes beyond Tom Wolfe's discussion of the art world, but it does start with it. The Painted Word was published in June 1975, the same year as HOSL, so the subject may have been talked about in Larry Poons's NY loft, along with Don't Interrupt the Sorrow (since LP is mentioned in the book, he probably knew about it before it was published).
And it's not so much about artists and critics, as about the relationship between artists and the people buying their art (with critics often(?) determining what those people are buying and the buyers purchasing not only art but the feeling that they, because of their relationship with the artist, are also bohemians -- at least briefly). It's Wolfe's premise that the visual arts are the only art form in which relatively few wealthy people decide what everyone else will see.
Not that knowing any of this is important to appreciating Joni's work, but I do like placing Joni in context, as opposed to her seeming to create in a vacuum. So now when rereading The Painted Word with Joni's Boho Dance in mind, some quotes jump out at me:
"...the [art mating] ritual has two phases: (1) The Boho Dance, in which the artist shows his stuff within the circles, coteries, movements, isms, of the home neighborhood, bohemia itself, as if he doesn't care about anything else; as if, in fact, he has a knife in his teeth against the fashionable world uptown.
(2) The Consummation, in which culterati from that very same world, le monde, scout the various new movements and new artists of bohemia, select those who seem the most exciting, original, important, by whatever standards -- and shower them with all the rewards of celebrity."
Wolfe then describes Picasso as an artist who excelled at this art mating ritual, compared to Picasso's friend Georges Braque, who is really the one who came up with Cubism:
"...here we have the classic demonstration of the artist who knows how to double-track his way from the Boho Dance to the Consummation as opposed to the artist who gets stuck forever in the Boho Dance. This is an ever-present hazard of the art mating ritual. Truly successful double-tracking requires the artist to be a sincere and committed performer in both roles.
Many artists become so dedicated to bohemian values, internalize their antibourgeois feelings so profoundly, that they are unable to cut loose, let go ... and submit gracefully to good fortune; the sort of artist, and his name is Legion, who always comes to the black-tie openings at the Museum of Modern Art wearing a dinner jacket and paint-spattered Levis's . . . I'm still a virgin!"
One verse especially seems to come from this paragraph, although Joni's words are so much richer. Joni's conclusion is that she's not involved in this art mating ritual at all: "The streets were never really mine. Not mine these glamour gowns." Is that because she was making music, instead of showing her artwork? At first I thought this song went beyond the art world and was about anyone getting stuck in a certain lifestyle, even if it's hurtful. But maybe she WAS just talking about the visual arts.
Most of the song is criticizing someone else. It does seem like she's aloof and separate from the Boho Dance, not that she's learned how to do it comfortably herself. Hmmm, is this actually a song about Joni's relationship to the art world?

I’m so confused at the moment, my partner and I seemed to be really happy and communicating well, and seeing eachother a lot and being intimate and planning for the future. We’ve been together for 2 and a half years.
We don’t live together we both still live with our parents so we’re saving up to eventually buy a house in the next couple of years, we also have a couple of holidays booked that we’re looking forward to. He has always been a good and loyal man to me as far as I’m aware. I have noticed lately he’s been sleeping for a long time throughout the day but he does work night shifts so I guess his body clock is out of whack in that regard.
This weekend I’ve gone abroad alone to meet my friend whose working in Italy currently, as I was just looking at my emails I noticed one in the ‘junk’ folder from booking dot com, promoting a destination relatively near to my partners workplace and saying that it was searched for for 1 night for 2 adults this weekend, I’m not sure exactly the dates that were searched because it quotes two different ones either the Friday to the Saturday (when I’m away) or the sunday to the Monday (when I’m back and we’ve already agreed to hang out). It could be a coincidence and my account has been compromised, or it could be him looking and not realising it’s logged into my account. He could’ve looked it up for a colleague or someone else? But I’m very worried as if he is looking it up for himself and another girl he’s obviously cheating.
He’s currently sleeping through the day as he’s on a night shift so I can’t ask him yet, but even if I do he could easily lie about it and I’m still none the wiser. I really didn’t actually believe that he would be up to no good, we felt so solid and happy. What can I do with this now?

(continuation of part 3)
Since Fatal Calling is all about Cloud facing his past and his origins, Tifa’s musical theme is most appropriate for the ending cutscene. For all of these reasons, Tifa’s theme is absolutely appropriate for the conclusion of Fatal Calling. It makes a lot of sense then that once Cloud has finished revisiting the past and vanishes with the crystal to find his Promised Land, Tifa’s theme stops and Aerith’s theme begins.
There’s a lot to be said about Sephiroth in Fatal Calling. Sephiroth feeds off of despair, and deems Palamecia’s suffering inadequate: he seeks a much greater source of power than this realm. He states that Palamecia isn’t “the world that was promised to [him]”, referencing his desire to become the god of his core world of FFVII:

“Sephiroth: Melding with the planet, I will cease to exist as I am now only to be reborn as a ‘god’ to rule over every soul” (FFVII OG, disk 1, chapter 25).

Sephiroth’s line “Now, let us return [Cloud]. Back to the Promised Land” reveals he wants to return to their shared core world of FFVII, like we established in our review of the Remake timelines theory (see section “I. a) vii.”). Sephiroth wants to go back to FFVII and modify the OG timeline to achieve his evil goals. This is his ideal scenario, his place of complete happiness: his desired Promised Land. Fatal Calling is setting up Sephiroth’s plans for Remake. In fact, the after-credits scene wherein Sephiroth stands in Nibelheim as it burns confirms his return to the FFVII OG timeline.
However, he isn’t the only one returning. Now that Cloud has revisited his past in Fatal Calling, he’s ready to reach his Promised Land. After Sephiroth’s after-credits scene, the OG FFVII title and logo turn into the FFVII Remake title and logo, indicating a shift: we are now officially in the Remakeera or world. Cloud and Sephiroth disappeared at the end of Fatal Calling, and now the game is telling us where they’ve gone. Combined with Hamaguchi’s recommendation that players complete the collaboration event before playing Remake, I think this is a solid indication that the Cloud and Sephiroth we see in this collaboration event are those we encounter in the Remake world. Once the switch to Remake occurs, Aerith’s theme returns. This communicates that she is indeed —as we’ve proven countless times already— Cloud’s Promised Land. But it also conveys her importance to the story of Remake. Scenario writer Nojima confirmed this:

“Aerith's the most important character in the remake so we paid special attention to her lines” (FFVII Remake Ultimania, section 08 “Secrets”, “Development Staff Interviews, Part 2: Tetsuya Nomura, Yoshinori Kitase, Kazushige Nojima”, page 744).

Aerith was already important to OG, so what could’ve motivated Nojima to state her importance to Remake? Could it be that she’s even more important in the latter than she was in the former? In what way?
That was the collaboration! Before we move on from MFF x FFVII Remake entirely though, let’s glean some more relevant information from some of the collaboration’s promotional material and special features.
III. e) iii. Promotional Material and Special Features
Two particular pieces of promotional material for this collaboration stick out to me as extremely relevant. The first is a promotion for a new summons batch in the Mobius FF game, created in honor of the collaboration.
MFF x FFVII Remake Summons Batch Cloud Promo
The summons batch contains three FFVII Remake-themed cards, including a Cloud card. As you can see, this promo reads “Who awaits in the Promised Land?” under Cloud’s picture.
The second is a promotion of an Aerith and summons and an Aerith Job Card (in MFF, Job Cards allow a character to embody an archetype or another character, giving them certain physical traits, clothing, weapons and abilities):
MFF x FFVII Remake Aerith Summons and Job Card Promo
I couldn’t find this picture in English, but the text relevant to us translates to:

“Midgar's Flower Vendor Summons
‘I'm searching for you. I want to meet… you.’
The witch protects the planet, imbues it with power, and leads to the Promised Land.”

A few things here. First, Aerith is referenced by name, and we see a picture of her in her famous praying pose. Secondly, both Cloud and Aerith’s images are attached to the notion of the Promised Land. Cloud’s card asks who awaits there, and Aerith’s evokes a guiding role, as though in response. Thirdly, both Cloud and Aerith are attached to the notion of searching: Cloud searches for the Promised Land and whomever awaits there, and Aerith searches for Cloud’s true self. Speaking of which, the promo also includes parts of Aerith’s famous gondola date quote from OG:

“Aeris: I'm searching for you.
Cloud: …?
Aeris: I want to meet you.
Cloud: But I'm right here.
Aeris: I know, I know... what I mean is... I want to meet... you” (disk 1 chapter 24).

In case you’re wondering about the lady in Aerith’s clothes on the left-hand side, that’s Meia, a character in MFF. She is the “witch” being referred to in the promotional material. She’s often called the Azure Witch. Meia is wearing Aerith’s clothes because a Meia-type Job Card called “Flower Girl of Midgar” was created in honor of the MFF x FFVII Remake collaboration:
MFF x FFVII Remake \"Flower Girl of Midgar\" Job Card
There’s even an Aerith outfit you can have Echo wear, and it appears with Wol’s Cloud outfit in the promotional picture:
MFF x FFVII Remake Echo's Aerith Outfit and Wol's Cloud Outfit
To be fair, Tifa also appears in one of these summons promos. However, unlike Aerith’s, her appearance doesn’t reference the Promised Land or her version of the gondola date. She is not presented in connection to Cloud at all. On top of that, while the Aerith and Cloud outfits are promoted together, Tifa is paired with Vincent in the promotional image:
MFF x FFVII Remake Summons Promo Tifa and Vincent
This is hardly indicative of Cloti content in the event collaboration or in Remake.
III. e) iv. Cloud’s Promised Land
All in all, the collaboration tells the story of Cloud searching for his Promised Land, just as post-OG Cloud has been shown doing for years and years of canon SE content. Cloud is searching for Aerith in the MFF x FFVII Remake collaboration, just like he was in FFT and DFF, and just like he was shown doing in the 30th FF Anniversary Exposition. This is nothing new. However, the collaboration informs us that this mission to be reunited with Aerith is what leads Cloud to enter the world of Remake.
Echo noted that people obtain the Promised Land they deserve rather than the one they want. What does Cloud deserve? I believe the answer is: another chance at saving Aerith.
Cloud needs to start over, from the top. He needs to go back to the very moment he and Avalanche arrived at mako reactor 1 to bomb it. He needs to return to the beginning of the OG game. He needs a redo, a fix-it, another shot at happiness; a remake.

IV. The Hidden Plot Point: Mission Theory

a) Thesis
Here lies the heart of my theory. My dear Cleriths, Sephiroth isn’t the only one who travelled back in time to undo destiny and create a reality where things go his way: Remake is also —I would even say primarily— Cloud’s chance to free Aerith from her fate, save her life and secure his shot at happiness with her. That’s why he experiences MOTFs in Remake: he’s done FFVII before and now he’s back, although with only fragments of his memories from OG, to save Aerith. That’s why his triggers all involve Aerith: he doesn’t consciously remember anything from OG, but his grief over Aerith is so strong that it rises from his subconsciousness at the slightest trigger.
In Remake, Cloud remembers some but not all elements of the OG timeline (MOTFs), and it appears he only remembers the most important things: all his MOTFs revolve around Aerith and her fate. Our theory explains why Aerith triggers Cloud’s MOTFs in Remake quite perfectly: he traveled back in time to prevent Aerith’s death from happening. Remake Cloud remembers Aerith because, well, he knows her from OG. Post-OG Cloud has returned to the past to save Aerith, resulting in Remake. This is why seeing her in Remake triggers visions and memories of things that haven’t happened yet in Remake, but have already happened to post-OG Cloud. He recognizes her face on Loveless in Remake because seeing her face again is the whole reason he entered Remake in the first place. His visions of her death when they meet once more at the church, the spike of anxiety and grief as he watches her walk away from him, the constriction in his chest when she talks about doing everything in her power to help the planet… all of it, it’s all his memories of OG being jogged by things related to her death. What he’s forgotten from the OG timeline emerges in flashes of pain, images, memory and emotion. Remember that the language the devs used to describe these instances where Cloud reacts to Aerith in this way is always about “remembering” or “recognizing”; Cloud has to have seen Aerith, known Aerith, loved Aerith, lost Aerith and felt the pain of living without Aerith before in order to recognize and remember these feelings. Think about it: this is the only thing that can explain Cloud’s extremely selective MOTFs and the fact that he has MOTFs at all.
The Remake trilogy is all about Cloud and Sephiroth stepping into the ring one more time, both ready to risk it all to get what they lost in the OG timeline. Sephiroth is hungry for destruction and godhood, while Cloud stands determined to save the love of his life. Fighting for their respective goals, the fated enemies enter a new battle in Remake, one to end the war, both needing to win this time after losing so horribly in OG. Now, it’s all or nothing. Sephiroth vying for the planet, and Cloud reaching out for Aerith.
Cloud’s back with a quest, one he can’t fail— it’s the most secret and important plot point of all. I call this the “Mission Theory”.
IV. b) Mission Theory Logistics
There are a few things that remain vague, so I’m going to use this section of the analysis to speculate on the logistics of my theory. We know very little about the hows of the timeline and multiverse shenanigans, so I’m going to hypothesize. However, this analysis is about the whys: so if you’re not interested in mechanical speculation on the logistics of time travel and multiverses, you can totally disregard this section and skip to section “V.”.
IV. b) i. Cloud the Time-Traveler?
It’s unclear whether Remake is the result of post-OG Cloud going back in time to try his hand at the OG timeline again, or the result of post-OG Cloud somehow informing OG Cloud that he must save Aerith this time around. It’s vague in the same way that we aren’t sure if Remake Aerith is post-OG Aerith or if she’s been informed by post-OG Aerith via her connection to the Lifestream as a Cetra. Though it doesn’t much matter how Cloud has memories of Aerith’s death in Remake, I personally think that Remake Cloud is a time-traveling post-OG Cloud. My explanation as to why might be a little confusing, so again, feel free to skip to section “V.”.
One must be able to communicate with the Lifestream in order to obtain knowledge of the future. This access can only be granted to the Cetra or to the souls of the deceased that compose the Lifestream itself. Since Cloud is not a Cetra, he cannot commune with the Lifestream while he is alive, meaning a deceased post-OG Cloud would not have been able to communicate his memories of the OG plot-line with a living OG Cloud. Therefore, the only way Remake Cloud could have knowledge of the future (manifested as MOTFs) would be that Remake Cloud is inhabited by his post-OG consciousness. Effectively, this is time-traveling.
Then comes the question of how Cloud was able to time-travel at all. I have what I consider a pretty solid hypothesis. The most interesting thing about the realm of Palamecia is that every FF character that’s ever appeared in the realm for a cameo died in their core world beforehand (spoilers for FFI, FFV, FFVI, FFX, FFXII, FFXIII, FFXV incoming). These characters include Tidus (FFX), Lightning (FFXIII), Garland (FFI), Sephiroth (FFVII), Gilgamesh (FFV), Vargas (FFVI), Gabranth (FFXII) and Ultros (FFXV). My interpretation of Palamecia serves at least partly as a directory for deceased souls that can’t simply fade. For instance, FFX’s Tidus actually came back to life to be with his love>! Yuna !! FFX!<. Of course, MFF x>! FFX !!FFX!< and FFX-2, just like MFF x FFVII Remake came out between FFVII OG and FFVII. And similarly to Fatal Calling, the ending cutscene of MFF x>! FFX !!Next thing you know, FFX-2 comes out and shows Tidus returning to Yuna and their core world in an optional cutscene.!< The MFF x>! FFX !! Tidus !Remake.
IV. b) ii. Post-OG Cloud’s Amnesia
If we consider that Remake Cloud is a time-travelling post-OG Cloud who’s returned to the start of the OG timeline, we encounter another logistical problem: why doesn’t Cloud remember everything or most things from the OG plot-line in Remake, like Sephiroth and Remake Aerith do? After all, aren’t the three of them in the same time-travelling boat? Why isn’t Cloud as lucid on the matter as the two others? Didn’t the post-OG Cloud in Fatal Calling face his past and origins? Shouldn’t that mean Cloud would remember all that stuff in Remake from the start?
In OG, the true Cloud’s memories are repressed by both his false persona and Jenova. The latter’s memetic abilities are able to block Cloud’s memories of the past from emerging and conflicting with his SOLDIER persona. For instance, in both OG and Remake, Cloud is unable to hear Aerith tell him Zack’s name in Evergreen Park: Jenova blocks it out. I think this is a similar situation: post-OG Cloud’s consciousness carries memories things that Jenova doesn’t want Cloud to know, so she pushes down on them. On top of that, after travelling through different worlds and back through the Lifestream for who knows how long, post-OG Cloud’s consciousness must be quite weak. We know how good Cloud is at repressing, so it makes total sense to me that post-OG Cloud’s consciousness would be trapped or suppressed somewhere deep in Remake Cloud’s subconsciousness. After all, it’s not like this whole time-travelling-consciousness thing is normal for a mind to experience. It’s no wonder Remake Cloud doesn’t consciously remember how things go in OG. However, post-OG Cloud’s love and grief for Aerith are so strong that memories related to her can occasionally pierce through to his Remake consciousness and Jenova’s barriers, resulting in his MOTFs. His pain and love for her are definitely permanent and strong enough:

“A young woman descended from the Ancients who will forever be engraved in [Cloud’s] heart” (Dirge of Cerberus, Japanese manual, Aerith’s character description).
“I believe for those who formerly traveled with her as comrades and for the viewers, each carries their own feelings and love for Aerith. In this story, Cloud also carries his own undying feelings for Aerith, even to this very day… Its relation with the church scene is… Yup. I’ll leave this part to your imagination. (laughs)” (Nomura interview on Advent Children “Designer’s Note” in *Famitsu PS2!*magazine, October 24th issue).

So you see, Remake Cloud’s mind is a little more complicated than OG Cloud’s mind. Everything is still the same in Remake as in OG, but with the added complication that his future self is hidden in his subconscious mind, probably trying to get out.
There is actually pretty good evidence of this. I’m sure you’re aware that whenever Jenova is trying to hide something from Cloud or altering his memory and/or perception, the screen glitches green with an audio cue (34:15-34:29, 1:15:30-1:15:41 and 1:17:14-1:17:29). Guess what? These Jenova audiovisual cues also occur during the MOTFs (ie: MOTF 3 2:58-3:07 and MOTF 4 0:29-0:42). Whenever post-OG Cloud’s consciousness encounters anything that reminds it of losing Aerith, the strength of its pain helps it push memories of Aerith to the surface so that RemakeCloud can consciously see them. Remake Cloud then experiences sensations and/or visions, all from his future self’s memories as they rise to the surface, propelled by grief. Jenova can’t allow Remake Cloud to fully recover his post-OG memory, so in order to shut down the process, its cells jump in to repress the MOTFs: this results in the classic Jenova audiovisual cues. The only time Jenova doesn’t bother to fight against a MOTF is the sixth, as it is quite weak: no visions occur, only a tight sensation in his chest.
IV. b) iii. Eclipse Contact and Cloud’s Memories of Reactor 1
There is one problem I have trouble decoding. In Eclipse Contact, Cloud tells Wol and Echo that the last thing he remembers is the run-up to his arrival at mako reactor 1 (FFVII OG, disk 1, chapter 1). Recall that usually, people summoned to Palamecia have no memories of their world of origin and lives before that point at all. So then why is it that upon being summoned to Palamecia, Cloud recalls the events that took place right before the start of the OG game? This strikes me as highly relevant since this is the exact point in time where post-OG Cloud’s consciousness needs to be transported to in order for Remake to begin, but I haven’t been able to figure out a solid hypothesis on what it could mean. My best guess is that this is the devs’ way of signalling to us that the events of the MFF x FFVII Remake collaboration occur before the very beginning of post-OG Cloud’s second try at the OG timeline (Remake).
Now that I’ve shown you how I’ve come to form my Mission Theory and we’ve done some pesky housekeeping, let’s connect some dots, shall we? It’s time to really get into it and see if any of my wild speculation tracks with content from the Remake trilogy so far.

V. Musical Evidence

What about the music of the game? Any hints there? Let’s try to see if we can find support for the Mission Theory in the music made for the Remake trilogy thus far!
As a preface to my musical evidence analysis, I want to insist on something: the story guys tell the soundtrack guys everything. In a high-quality production such as Remake, people who make music for audiovisual media are told everything in advance. They need to know the secrets of every little scene, because their job is to depict whatever is happening through music.
Therefore, if the Mission Theory is true, then there has to be musical evidence for it.
V. a) Preface: The Basics of the FFVII OST
There’s a lot of evidence in the music of the Remake trilogy that we have to address, but before we get into it, I do have to give you the basics of the FFVII soundscape! For the easiest experience, I suggest you keep a tab open for every link I provide for you until the music analysis is over, because we will be hopping from one musical theme to another and then back again.
V. a) i. The World Theme: Cloud’s Troubled Identity
The world theme of FFVII is a perfect example of how musicians working on an OST have to know the secrets of a story as they compose for it. On top of representing the FFVII world as a whole, it doubles as Cloud’s character theme… except that isn’t exactly right. You see, this piece does indeed contain Cloud’s true theme, but Sephiroth and Jenova’s musical motifs also contaminate it. This, of course, symbolizes how Cloud experiences identity sabotage because of these two antagonists. The result is that globally, the world theme does indeed represent Cloud’s character, but it isn’t exclusively Cloud’s in the same way that Cloud’s mind isn’t exclusively his. It’s brilliant storytelling through musical motifs, and evidently requires Uematsu to know in advance that Sephiroth manipulates Cloud’s identity in the story.
For future reference, let’s isolate Cloud’s true theme from Jenova and Sephiroth’s influence.
V. a) i. 1) Sephiroth: Dissonance and Semi-Tone Motif
I’m sure you know Sephiroth’s infamous theme: “One-Winged Angel”. The first motif we need to know is Sephiroth’s threatening, repetitive dissonance motif, which plays all throughout the piece (plays solo at 0:00 to 0:04). The second motif is what I call the semi-tone motif. “One-Winged Angel” has a ton of minor 2nd intervals, which is what we call the relationship between two notes that are only a semi-tone apart. You might recognize the minor 2nd interval in the foreboding Jaws theme. Just like in Jaws, the minor 2nd interval or semi-tone is commonly used to indicate an impending, life-threatening danger, a monster, predator, evil, or insanity; suits Sephiroth quite nicely!
V. a) i. 2) Jenova: Parasite Motif
The track “J-E-N-O-V-A” contains many competing melodies and has generated many variations of those melodies —almost like clones— that all represent aspects of the alien’s character. The main Jenova motif is simply a descending, two-octaves-long, arpeggiated mb6 chord (eight notes total). I’ve played it for you here. Sometimes, this motif is altered to form variations. For instance, in “Listen to the Cries of the Planet”, a variation of Jenova’s main motif is created by changing the order of the notes and reducing the number of notes to only six (0:00-0:03), however, it remains an arpeggiated mb6 chord. Regardless of the alteration, if you hear an arpeggiated mb6 chord, it means Jenova is creeping close by or that its influence is at work.
The variation of the mb6 arpeggiated chord that concerns us alters Jenova’s main theme so it ascends from the tonic to the b6 note and descends back to the tonic, then ending on the lower dominant for a total of eight notes. I’ve played it for you here. I call this variation the “parasite motif”, because it is often heard when Cloud is being controlled by Jenova. For instance, it plays when Cloud loses himself and becomes unusually violent in Rebirth’s chapter 13 (17:25-18:34), signalling to us that Jenova is in control. It is also the main motif of the track “Who… Am I?”, which evidently symbolizes Jenova’s fuelling of Cloud’s identity crisis— though here, the parasite motif is shortened to its six first notes.
V. a) i. 3) Cloud’s True Self
Now that we can recognize Sephiroth and Jenova’s motifs, let’s return to the world theme to isolate Cloud’s true self. Cloud’s true theme can be heard from 0:51 to 3:48. It consists of a section A (0:51-1:54), followed by a section B (1:54-2:41), and then returns to section A (2:41-3:48).
After Cloud’s true theme concludes however, it seems he experiences a psychic interference: doubt and confusion weave through the world theme (3:48-4:09), representing an instability in his identity. I call this interruption of Cloud’s true theme the “interference section”. It symbolizes a moment of psychic interference or weakness within Cloud that Sephiroth and Jenova take advantage of to take control of Cloud.
The end of the interference section introduces Jenova’s parasite motif. It slithers in (4:09), later joined by Sephiroth’s dissonance motif (4:16): Cloud’s mind and identity are being hijacked by the two antagonists in service of their evil plans.
They torment Cloud, dominating his mind until he manages to free himself: section A of Cloud’s true theme begins playing again (6:06), closing the loop of the theme.
Based on this musical storytelling, if you already knew the character motifs going into OG, you might’ve suspected something odd was going on with Cloud’s identity, and that Jenova and Sephiroth were involved. All this to say that whatever music is playing at any given time can give us hints as to what is going on. That’s the power and significance of a good soundtrack. Trust me when I say that with Uematsu and his team, we’re in excellent hands. And remember: the story guys tell the soundtrack guys everything.
V. a) ii. Aerith’s Theme
Another base we have to cover before checking out the Remake soundtrack is Aerith’s theme. I’m sure everyone here is familiar with it, but I insist that you refresh your memory. It consists of a section A (0:00-0:34), a section B (0:34-1:13) and a section C (1:13-2:00), concluding with a repeat of section A.
V. a) iii. Motifs and Timing in FFVII OSTs
I’m going to analyze pieces in great detail, which people who haven’t studied or paid attention to soundtracks may find strange. To prevent anyone from making the mistake of thinking that I’m reading too much into things, I want to emphasize that the music that plays during the Remaketrilogy’s cutscenes is carefully timed, composed and arranged to match the events in the cutscenes, as they are provided in advance to the musicians. Composers pay lots of attention to whatever is going on onscreen so they can include the corresponding musical motifs as accompaniment at the exact right moments, always striving to get the timing perfect. I’m not exaggerating the effort and minutia involved in soundtrack composition and arrangement. Here are just a few sound staff comments from the “Material 4: Soundtrack” section of the FFVII Remake Material Ultimania to prove it:

“[To] make sure players really feel the weight of the moment, we worked hard on getting the tempo and the entry timing of each instrument exactly right. In particular, that big ‘boom’ that sounds almost like a meteor crashing down was fine-tuned to match the timing of the logo's appearance. I remember this was a real sticking point for us, because if the boom's timing was even slightly off, the effect would be completely different. We […] had to sequence [each and every sound] to play at exactly the right moment” (Shotaro Shima on track “Midgar, City of Mako”, page 229).

&

“I was originally told to keep this piece to under two minutes, but it ended up being over six minutes long, in order to match the flow of the cutscene. I arranged the track while watching the latest CG visuals that had been rendered for the scene” (Naoyuki Honzawa on track “Smash ‘Em, Rip ‘Em”, page 309).

&

“This is the track that plays during the tour of Shinra’s different divisions. The movie shown in the Visual Entertainment Hall describes the history of the Ancients (0:25 onward in the soundtrack version), and I wanted to create a musical link to them as well, so I made use of the chord progression from ‘Aerith’s Theme’ [D(I)-Am(Vm)-D(I).] [This simple sequence of moving from major to minor and back again creates a really mysterious air. Then, during the section where the movie recounts the history of the construction of the Shinra Building (1:47 onward in the soundtrack version), I quoted a section of the Shinra theme” (Yasunori Nishiki on track “Stewards of the Planet”, page 313).

V. b) The Remake OST
Now that you’re ready, it’s time to verify the Mission Theory’s validity with Remake’s music.
V. b) i. MOTF 6 Music
We were able to explain Remake Cloud’s MOTFs with the Mission Theory, and it just so happens that the music that plays during the scene of MOTF 6 is unique to Remake. This gives us the perfect opportunity: we should analyze the piece that plays as it occurs to evaluate the legitimacy of our theory on the Remake trilogy, using all the motifs we uncovered in section “V. a)”.
First, a refresher on the scene and on our theory’s interpretation of it. The party is gathered in Aerith and Ifalna’s old room at Shinra HQ. Here is how the scene is described by the VA script notes:

“The Whispers once again close in [on Aerith], but Aerith refuses to stop speaking this time.
Aerith: Listen to me. […] Shinra isn’t the enemy. They were the ones who set things in motion, but our true foe is someone else.
At that moment, the spectacle of Meteor they saw in the Visual Entertainment Hall comes into Cloud and the others’ heads.
Aerith: Somehow, some way, I want to help— all of you… the planet…
For some reason, Cloud feels his chest constrict tightly” (FFVII Remake Material Ultimania Plus, VA script notes, “Aerith Speaks”).

Indeed, right after Aerith says she wants to help the planet any way she can, Cloud looks down at his chest with a frown and a quiet grunt (7:46-7:54). According to the Mission Theory, this tightness in Cloud’s chest can be explained as an emergence of post-OG Cloud’s grief, triggered by the slightest allusion to Aerith’s sacrifice.
The piece that plays during this scene is called “Aerith’s Theme - The Cetra”. It is one of many variations of Aerith’s iconic theme arranged for Remake. However, Cloud’s theme is just as prominent in the piece— if not, more.
V. b) i. 1) The Fate Motif
Before we interpret “Aerith’s Theme - The Cetra”, I need to introduce you to one more motif that crops up in the piece. There is a windy motif that appears (from 1:45 onwards) and it is unaccounted for, despite how it’s clearly meant to represent something. I’ve become certain that this wind noise symbolizes fate, and I’ll tell you why.
In the MOTF 6 scene, just after Nanaki explains how he gained knowledge of the Whispers via contact with Aerith (7:23), they emerge and begin swirling aggressively around Aerith (7:26). Her hair and dress blow and ripple in the resulting wind. From this very moment onward “Aerith’s Theme - The Cetra” (3:00), a string section (bowed instruments in the violin family) that deliberately emphasizes the airy sound of the bow crossing the strings enters, creating a windy effect that adds to the already present wind noise (that started at 1:45). As the Whispers progressively become even more aggressive onscreen, both the wind SFX of the cutscene and the wind noise in the piece get louder and louder. Because of the timing of its appearance and crescendo in the cutscene, I’m certain the wind noise is meant to represent the restrictive flow of fate; it only makes sense, given that destiny is a current —or a wind— that cannot be broken, and Aerith is like a helpless petal in fate’s carefully planned storm. Of course, it’s also quite significant that the Whispers make a windy noise as they fly. You can hear it every time they’re onscreen, like when they first appear to Cloud in chapter 2 of Remake (17:45-18:20), or when the White Whispers hold Cloud back from chasing after Aerith during Rebirth’s Sleeping Forest scene in chapter 14 (28:43-29:45). You can also hear the wind sounds in other Whisper-related tracks, such as “Whorl of Whispers” (clearly audible at 2:50-3:05), as well as “A Death Not Ordained by Fate” (clearly audible at 2:56-3:18). Therefore, I’ll call these wind noises the “fate motif”.
V. b) ii. 2) Interpreting “Aerith’s Theme - The Cetra”
In part 1 of “Aerith’s Theme - The Cetra” (0:00-1:45), Aerith’s theme and Cloud’s true theme play simultaneously, their respective phrases fitting perfectly together, interweaving peacefully and softly. It sounds like the two of them are chatting, dancing bashfully yet contently and in perfect sync, glad to be exactly where they’re meant to be as their themes sing together in harmony (soft piano). Part 1 of this piece is about Cloud and Aerith becoming important to one another as they discover their soulmate bond.
Unfortunately that contentment doesn’t last. In part 2 (1:45-3:00), Cloud experiences a moment of psychic vulnerability (world theme’s interference section). Fate lurks (fate motif enters quietly). His instability forces our couple’s sweet dance to a halt, and Aerith’s theme must retreat as Cloud’s confusion takes center stage. Sephiroth torments and taunts him (semi-tone played by strings, 2:03-2:10), taking advantage of Cloud’s psychic interference to plunge him into darkness (world theme’s interference section ends, low cello enters, 2:18): Cloud temporarily becomes a darker version of himself as evil corrupts him (piano plays section A phrases 1 and 2 of Cloud’s true theme in minor, 2:18-2:53). Jenova finally reveals itself and promptly exits, releasing Cloud’s mind from its grasp (seven first notes of parasite motif played twice on piano 2:53-3:00). Cloud is free, but the damage has been done: his dance with Aerith has long been interrupted, and she is gone. Part 2 of “Aerith’s Theme - The Cetra” is about Cloud being manipulated in service of Sephiroth and Jenova’s evil plan, interrupting his interaction with Aerith.
Part 3 (3:00-3:33) kicks off the mechanisms of a tragic fate (strings section joins fate motif, 3:00). Both anxious that she’s disappeared from his side and terrified of the darkness he just discovered inside him (in part 2), Cloud fearfully calls out for Aerith (phrase 1 of Cloud’s true theme’s section A, timid and hesitant piano, 3:04-3:15). Before his psychic interference began (start of part 2), Cloud’s voice was accompanied by Aerith’s as they grew closer and closer (their character themes mingling in part 1)… but now, Aerith isn’t answering his call, and he cannot find her (Aerith’s theme doesn’t to join Cloud’s anymore).
Anxious, Cloud tries calling out for Aerith a second time (section A phrase 2 of Cloud’s true theme’s, 3:19-3:31), searching for her in the hopes that they can continue their dance, but even now, Aerith does not respond. She’s gone (Aerith’s theme remains absent). Destiny keeps Aerith away from Cloud (fate motif gently crescendos). Part 3 of “Aerith’s Theme - The Cetra” is about Cloud’s separation from Aerith, his search for her, and the fear and anxiousness he feels when he realizes he cannot find her.
And then, part 4 begins with a sweet, gentle voice, calling out from the blackened horizon: it’s Aerith (section B phrase 1 of Aerith’s theme, soft piano, 3:33-3:45). Cloud finally hears her respond to his pleas: he’s found her. Fate begins howling in protest, doubling its efforts to keep Cloud and Aerith apart (fate motif crescendos noticeably in reaction to Aerith’s theme, 3:45). You can just picture Cloud running toward Aerith, struggling against the current of destiny to try and close the distance between them. Aerith tries calling out for Cloud a second time, (section B phrase 2 of Aerith’s theme, 3:40-3:43), but the Whispers only swirl around her more ferociously, taking her away in the uncompromising current of fate (fate motif continues to crescendo). Aerith tries again (section B phrase 1 of Aerith’s theme, 3:47-3:49). It sounds like she’s saying “Cloud, I’m over here, come find me!”
Fate doesn’t take too kindly to her defying it. Cloud and Aerith are not supposed to be together; it can’t be, it won’t. She’s destined to die to save the planet, and he’s destined to remain hollow forevermore. I can picture Cloud breaking into a sprint at the sound of her voice, running countercurrent to the flow of destiny— but the winds are so loud, fate’s demands are so strong, and the Whispers are shrieking in defense of destiny now. Aerith’s voice emerges for the fourth time (first three notes of section B phrase 3 of Aerith’s theme, 3:54 to 3:56). Fate screams louder, louder (steep crescendo of fate motif, 3:59-4:02). In a desperate hail Mary, Aerith shouts out one more time, as though throwing her hand out toward Cloud’s extended fingers (section C phrase 1 of Aerith’s theme, louder and more insistent, cutting through the fate motif as it crescendos sharply, 4:00-4:06). Part 4 of “Aerith’s Theme - The Cetra” is about Cloud and Aerith desperately trying to defy fate in order to be together. And then, it all stops: fate has seemingly quieted Aerith (4:04-4:08)…
Part 5 (4:08-4:27) begins with Cloud jumping, launching himself off the ground with all his strength (Cloud’s true theme section A phrase 2, first 5 notes, melody starting on the note E5 and ascending) as Aerith plummets toward the ground in a fatal fall (Aerith’s theme section C phrase 1, melody starting on the note E6 and descending, the last note altered)— he successfully catches her in mid-air (both Cloud’s ascending melody and Aerith’s descending melody meet in the middle of the octave, first uniting on B5, and then ending on A5). I’ve recreated the melodies for you here so you can hear this reunion more clearly. If you consider that the airy strings in this piece represent fate, which I do, the fact that they follow Cloud and Aerith’s themes in part 5 signifies that they are now in control of their own destinies, and successfully making it their fate to reunite.
To be completely frank, I did not realize until right now writing this that Cloud unites with Aerith in part 5, even though his theme is right there. I’m so excited to share this part with you.
We hear Aerith once more, her voice quietly trailing off into the silence (phrase 4 of section C of Aerith’s theme) with no conclusion (phrase 5 normally follows phrase 4 to conclude Aerith’s theme, but is absent here). Part 5 of “Aerith’s Theme - The Cetra” suggests that Cloud will save Aerith and that the couple will change their fate, but also conveys an uncertain and open-ended quality.
(continued in part 5)

I have noticed that there a lot of scammers in the slack channels but the team leads don't seem to do anything about it. I'm on the east coast US, so I try to avoid asking questions at 9am eastern to someone on the West Coast who is probably still sleeping at 6am. Anyway, I've noticed that there are a lot of people in English language projects from timezones that are in India or the Philippines, but oddly, not England. This wouldn't be that big of a deal IF those freelancers understood the language well enough to accurately follow the project guidelines, but they don't. How can any TL respond to someone from a timezone listing that corresponds to India, who wrote a slack message like, "A payrate is very less than suppose actuel payrate"? More importantly, because the person is likely to perform low-quality work and so many projects are being paused because of that, why wouldn't the TL immediately throw them out the project? My grammar is not perfect but using the word "very" instead of "much" or even "far" in that quote is a red flag that indicates the person's understanding of the English language is not good enough to work on English language projects and is proof that the person paid someone to take the assessment for them.

Thanks mods for letting me post.
Sharing some stuff that I can share to see if it helps you and if you can help me in return perhaps.
EbonyPrince identity (with name redacted) https://imgur.com/a/C3DAx0l
Information on XXXtentacion, who Daylyt in this video claims was killed by Drake. Also notable that X said if he dies it was drake. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qmcJe3xXVQ

1. XXXTentacion, born Jahseh Onfroy, was approximately six years old when he lived with Emmanuel Bruno Jaramillo, a period that had a significant impact on his life. This was after his mother was no longer able to take care of him, leading to a tumultuous upbringing that involved frequent relocations and unstable living conditions​2
2. [23:18]https://www.miaminewtimes.com/music/the-real-story-of-rapper-xxxtentacion-10410980
3. [23:19]https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/a-timeline-of-rapper-xxxtentacions-abuse-allegations-10424586
4. XXXTentacion, whose real name was Jahseh Onfroy, did speak about experiencing abuse and mistreatment during his upbringing, including his time living with Emmanuel Bruno Jaramillo. In Jonathan Reiss's book "Look at Me!: The XXXTentacion Story," it is detailed that XXXTentacion faced significant challenges and hardships during his childhood. This included alleged instances of physical abuse and severe disciplinary measures. XXXTentacion himself recounted various forms of mistreatment in interviews and personal reflections. He described a tumultuous relationship with Jaramillo, who was a prominent figure during his formative years. The exact nature and extent of the alleged abuse have been subjects of various accounts and reports, contributing to the complex and troubled image of the rapper's early life.
5. [23:22]- - "Jahseh would later describe being brutally beaten by Bruno, including instances where he was left bruised and bleeding."
   • quote from Look at Me!

My theory on Alvarez: "drake told me to come here and listen to beats" "uh okay man u can wait inside so u dont freeze to death" drakes buddies: "why did u let him in we dont know him we didnt invite him" security guys (2) get fired alvarez took the invitation to 'listen to beats' as a sincere gesture
Drake's unc on his mothers side - allegedly sex trafficked at N05 bar. Testimony. Working on image of him at 905. (purposely leaving out information to avoid this showing up on google search) (more sources needed)
From a handsome redditor's post: https://web.archive.org/web/20090416184520/http://www.jupiterindustries.com/company.html
apparently the Juniper CEO (someone also named Stephen Sher) had a father named Reuben Sher. interestingly Drake's grandfather is named Reuben Sher. https://www.zoominfo.com/p/Stephen-She8744013061 https://www.frasersdirectory.com/suppliers/jupiter-industries-inc-16693231412/ https://www.zoominfo.com/pic/jupiter-industries-inc/65832017 https://www.frasersdirectory.com/suppliers/jupiter-industries-inc-16693231412/ https://jupiterindustries.com/about-us.html https://twitter.com/Jupiter_Ind https://www.instagram.com/jupiterindustriesbaby/?hl=en
"Jupiter started in Toronto in 1981 when the CEO was asked by his father Reuben Sher to pioneer a new sleep product for his grandchildren. The result was the first dust mite resistant mattress ever made. Being ahead of our time has always been and still is the basic principle in our company. Innovative products with purpose is now our mandate."
Update on Kdot (from 2 days ago) Been in the studio and TDE doesn't know what he's working on (info not from fucking coolee)
Update on TDE on the day EbonyPrince had set the deadline for, Monday, TDE went to UMG offices for a meeting. Phones left in cars. TDE feels relationship with UMG is being harmed thru EbonyPrince stuff and people associating TDE with EP. The fact that the vids appear to be from Kdots appartment or nextdoor don't help the paranoia. Mentioned this before but Daylyts video with Lebron raised concerns over TDE/Lebron relationship too.
I know nothing about what's going on at UMG.

I am a 19 yr old female and I have always had a fear of the dark. It’s ridiculous i know but when the lights are off the mind wanders. And mine often makes me see things that freak me out. When i was younger it was small things like seeing a face on a chair, and when the lights turned on it was just a pile of clothes. Over active imagination, i know. But we recently moved out of an old house and there a lot of things happened. My first time ever experiencing sleep paralysis when i was 14. I was laying in bed and i was at the end of the hall. We all know how sleep paralysis works but as i couldn’t move my body, my eyes wandered, and in the side of my view, i thought i saw someone in my closet. I could hear creaking and noises but it broke when i blinked. That was the first time i’ve ever felt that true fear of the super natural.
Around a year ago, we moved into a new house. A cute place but the neighborhood is terrifying. In the past year there were 3 murders just blocks from my home. It’s not a good area. Whole living in this house, I’ve been things move from my peripheral vision and at night i hear foot steps in my room, when i know everyone is asleep and no one else sleeps in here with me. I’ll hear whispers in my ear that will cause me to wake up and i have been experiencing nightmares that wake me up in a sweat. Nightmares are common for me but these ones have become more gruesome.
The other day I was talking to my mother about my feelings of this house and she said she also experienced something. She had woken up in the middle of the night to use the restroom. when she got out of bed, she said and i quote, “A tall black figure hovering over my father.” She said she turned on her lamp and it was immediately gone. When she told me this the lights above the kitchen bar flickered. It was chilling but we shrugged it off.
There are also some times when i feel like i see someone looking like a member in my family and I’ll follow calling their name but when i turn the corner they are gone.
Is this just my imagination? Please give input on what I should do.

Written 5/8/2024- updates attached below

I tried posting this on kendrick almost a week ago and it got no response, I messaged the mods to ask about Karma restrictions or account age requirements and they never replied. I made a new account and it was the same issue, but I found out last night I wasn’t fully banned, so I figured I’d throw it up and see if anyone finds it valuable. It’s written for people who have no prior knowledge of the rap game/music business. I don’t have to go as hard on obscuring names this time. One of the influencers I mentioned in my last post is known for doxxing and threatening violence against people who mention the many contradictions in their stories. (Sorry for any typos/mistakes I want to go to bed.)
Origins
I believe the current Drake and Kendrick Lamar beef is either completely or partially fabricated by certain industry leaders or the parties involved in an effort to distract from something bigger going down behind the scenes. If you were an influential label owner facing major accusations, and you needed to deflect media attention from yourself, recreating one of the most defining moments in rap history during the social media era would be a way to do it. It also wouldn’t hurt that two of the biggest rappers in the world were already sending shots at each other in their music for years prior. The public consensus is they are simply two famous rappers who hate each other and fighting over the spot for the top like in the 90’s. Only people who were directly involved could paint a more cohesive picture of the whole story. Even when all the cards drop, there is a good chance the average person won’t be able to find direct sources on their own and will continue to support their favorite artists and dismiss any evidence of their crimes like the drizzy subreddit or Ak fans.

As I said the beef between Kendrick and Drake has been brewing in the background for years, with both rappers sending shots and sneak dissing each other over the course of at least 8 years. The most agreed upon origin story is the first diss was the 2016 Big Sean and Kendrick collaboration, “Control,” and Drake responded with, “The Language”. Things stayed relatively lighthearted for a while and both were intentionally vague for many years. Before I go deep into the Kendrick and Drake stuff, it’s really important to examine some of Drake’s prior beefs because they add a ton of context to my theory. In my opinion Kendrick and Co. started scheming all of this some time around Mid 2020-Mid 2022, well after the whole Pusha T beef had transitioned into the Kanye beef.

What exactly started the beef is debatable, but at the time many attributed it to rumors of Drake pursuing Ye’s ex Amber Rose. Unfortunately the timeline isn’t 100 percent clear, and if I included every detail this would be at least 200+ pages so I’ll stick with the important stuff. The ultimate outcome of the Pusha T battle in 2018 was the revelation of Drake’s son Adidon that he had previously been hiding from the world along with getting Ye directly involved in the beef.

Here are some more examples of Drake antagonizing Ye and of him trying to use women as pawns to get material for his diss tracks. The Drake line, “Yeah, I probably go link to Yeezy, I need me some Jesus, but as soon as I start confessin' my sins, he wouldn't believe us," could be a reference to sleeping with Kim Kardashian, trying to double down on his threats to harm him or his family, or it could be a double entendre. Another example is using the name Kiki in another song, which was apparently one of Kim’s nicknames. Some other possible examples include the theories he may have tried the same thing with Kendrick’s wife Whitney around 2020-2021 in an attempt to use as ammo against Kendrick, which I’ll go into later. I don’t listen to much of either artist's music, but there are probably many of other examples in Drake’s catalogue that I’m leaving out. There is also his song Omerta released in 2019, which I'll go into below.

“Your baby mother call me when she lonely My tailor see me twice a week, he like my homie Forever grateful, forever thankful Diamond necklace, but she wears it on her ankle”

(Probably referring to Kim Kardashian since she had a few pictures with her wearing diamond ankle bracelets and was trying to make it into a trend.

“I plan to buy your most personal belongings when they up for auction”

(There were various rumors floating around for a while that Drake was blackmailing Ye with something and he was fighting to keep it from the public. I thought about it and this line might be referencing a sex tape with Kim or her little sister who me was very touch before she turned 18. In 2022 there was a whole storyline on Kim’s show where Ye flies to LA to prevent her second sex tape from being released.)

West Hollywood, know my presence is menacing
Cosa Nostra, shady dealings
Racketeering, the syndicate got they hand in plenty things The things that we've done to protect the name are unsettling But no regrets, though, the name'll echo Years later, none greater
Death to a coward and a traitor, that's just in my nature, yeah
(Drake and Ye both frequented the Delilah Nightclub located in West Hollywood and lived closeby on the same street for a while.)
"I don't carry cash 'cause the money is digital
It's the American Expresser, the debt collector"

(Sounds a lot more like it could be crypto to launder or send large amounts of ill gotten gains. It started becoming mainstream around them)

"Last year, niggas really feel like they rode on me
Last year, niggas got hot 'cause they told on me
I'm 'bout to call the bluff of anybody the fold on me"

These lines stood out because they could be referring to Ye telling the public about Drake's alleged threats a couple months before the songs release. This happened not long after the release of Sicko mode which was towards the end of 2018 as well. Ye was discussing the incident on Twitter and reached out to Drake and Travis to talk to him in private. In the next set of tweets Kanye publicly accused Drake of threatening him and his family in a major way. Surprisingly Ye seemed genuinely scared and amongst his, “crazy rants,” some of the stuff he said makes a ton of sense in hindsight. This also the beginning of his second serious public struggles with Bipolar disorder after being committed in 2016 shortly after an on stage rant where he calls out Jay Z for selling out and says he's afraid he might kill him.. As someone who shares the same diagnosis, I have a pretty good understanding of mania and psychosis and firmly believe that it's important not to write people off right away due to their mental illness. Some of my most thoughtful, creative, and productive periods were inspired by mania. Industry bigwigs have also been using mental illness to discredit influential black celebrities and visionaries going back decades, but it really picked up in the 80’s.

Dave Chappelle has gone into this a lot in the past and claims he experienced something similar before he quit show business and dipped to Africa. Their stories have a lot of interesting parallels if you’re familiar or curious. I remember he actually visited Ye at his house in Wyoming after he was reported to have had a, "mental breakdown," during his presidential run in 2020 thus marking his third breakown in six years.. The reason I put it in quotes is because it happened right after he publicly accused Kim of cheating and delivered his legendary speech on abortion. Dave went as far as going on live tv and telling the public he wasn’t crazy, he was just really struggling because he was the only one at the time fighting against the narrative, which can often be a suicide mission or a ticket to obscurity. These are three examples of someone speaking up and being deemed crazy, two years later came the nazi stuff and I'm sure we'll have plenty in store for 2024.

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the very common pattern of artists dying or having their careers destroyed either after they try to leave their label or threaten to reveal industry secrets. A few more interesting industry connections I made in my research include the connections between:

T.U.G. records and J Cole's independent label Dreamville are both managed by Interscope Records, whose parent company is Universal Music Group.

Universal Music Group also hac Drake's label OvO label as well as Ye and Kendrick's old labels on their roster before they left to form their own independent labels in 2022 (around the same time the disses between Kendrick and Drake started escalating). Finally Bad Boy Records, which is owned by Diddy, and Motown Records who own Diddy's other R&B label Love Records, are also both owned by Universal. This means every label I mention is currently or was previously owned by Universal Music Group.

Ye tried for years to get out of his contract with Defjam, which happens to be ran by Jay Z who is known to be a close associate of Diddy. Jay would always used his money and power to fight against it. Ye even spoke out publicly on a few occasions, including when he said Jay Z was trying to kill him during one of his concerts. My theory is after years of getting nowhere and having his reputation skewered, in 2022 Ye finally said, "Fuck it," and dropped all the anti- Semetic stuff intentionally in a successful attempt to force his label to into using their morality clause, which requires labels to drop an artist if they're accused of any major controversy that could hurt the label’s profits. For the fourth time in four years the media reported he was having a breakdown. Even though they tried to punish him by cutting off all of his sources of income and freezing his accounts he still managed to bounce back pretty quickly. It was often reported how much he was losing, but it rarely discussed how he still was filthy rich in spite of the retrictions. His label wanted to discourage other artists from trying the same thing. My theory is he might have bought Kim or Kylie's alleged sex tape and used it for his own leverage. For Kendrick, his transition to his independent label ApLang went a lot smoother, but he had to split ownership of his new label with the previous manager owner Dave Free. Sadly it's still difficult for new or more niche artists to establish themselves without the some help.

He may be a lot of things but Ye isn’t dumb just because he has a mood disorder and the guys at the top know this, which is why I think he has really played up his diagnosis when it benefitted him. He’s still one of the most talented musicians in the game and I really think he sees his bipolar like a superpower as he says. It’s like his own invisibility cloak. He can go off his meds for a little, make an album after staying up for 72 hours, go on a “psychotic” twitter rant dropping facts throughout, then start up again once he makes enough news headlines. I think it’s worth noting the first divorce rumors in 2020 coincided with Ye’s abortion speech during his presidential run and the cheating accusations. that led to him dropping out and moving to Wyoming, and a couple months ago in February 2024 he was committed again.

The point I’m making is bipolar is complex, but pretty manageable especially if you have a ton of money to find meds that work for you and a good doctor and can keep substance abuse and stress at a manageable level. I think Ye is smart enough to know this, but it’s just safer for him to really play up the mental issues in the media. He’s proven he can literally say whatever he wants after getting cancelled and the average person is just going to write it off as psycho babble. While bias in health care is a sad fact of society, if you can use it to your advantage I say go for it. It might’ve just kept the microscope off of him long enough to plan his attack.

Ye v. Drake: Quotes of 2018
(Start of the beef, drake threats, and suspicion towards Kardashian family. )

“ It’s not about rap. It’s about family. We have to be close as a family and never let these people infiltrate just for radio spins”

“We need to show the world that people can talk without people ending up dead or in jail.”

”This is a man speaking to a man that has been placed in the program to fuck with Kanye West head and set me up“

”See when you care about your family you don’t let no man push you to do nothing that could risk your freedom“

These first four tweets by Ye were all in reference to perceived threats made by Drake after their beef escalated circa 2018. He began speaking on the industry and talking more about his psych hospital commitment two years prior and how he thought they were going to kill him. It's pretty obvious how the whole thing was planned by the sketchy doctor who called it in and his physical trainer who has a ton of connections to weird shit involving his celebrity clients.

I found interesting that Ye might not have been the first major league rapper whose life Drake threatened. During a similar period of mental illness the up and coming rapper XXXtentacion accused Drake of stealing his flow and dissed him a few times. Not long after he made a post online saying if he dies, it was Drake who did it. There are tons of conspiracies online, but none of the evidence is strong enough to draw a definitive connection. Also while it maybe be coincidental, Kendrick’s latest album Mr Morale also painted the picture that Kendrick was dealing with some serious personal issues. Some lines throughout the album may have been used to bait Drake into escalating, but it wasn’t until The Weekend, Future, and Metro Booming dropped, “We Don’t Trust You,” then Drake and J. Cole dropped, “First Person Shooter,” which was followed a couple days later with, “Like That,” where Kendrick started the chain of events that has led us to today.

Kanye vs. Drake: Quotes of 2020

Summary: Ye runs for president and gets suppressed for saying what very well could be the truth and was immediately deemed insane by the media. Kim did a couple interviews and everything he said was immediatly false. There is almost guarenteed to be some sketchy shit going down revolving her and her family. Ye was absolutely terrified of her keeping the kids away from him and it seems like there are still efforts being made to this day to paint a certain image of him for ulterior motives.

Below are six more quotes from a fan taking a deep dive into his 2020 tweets courtesy of u/ thehatstore42069 on Yeezy
”NORTHY I AM GOING TO WAR AND PUTTING MY LIFE ON THE LINE AND IF I AM MURDERED DON’T EVER LET WHITE MEDIA TELL YOU I WASNT A GOOD MAN,” West, 43, wrote in the tweet, adding, “WHEN PEOPLE THREATEN TO TAKE YOU OUT OF MY LIFE JUST KNOW I LOVE YOU”

"I need a public apology from J Cole and Drake to start with immediately... I'm Nat Turner... I'm fighting for us."

"the utmost respect for all brothers" and said "we need to link and respect each other... no more dissing each other on labels we don't own"

"Ye is constantly trying to tell people that his family does not have his or his kids best interests at heart. He goes on to list others, linking them together with the thinking emoji. These people include rap artist Drake and Larsa Pippen, wife of Scottie Pippe. Kim K is goddaughter to Pippen's daughter, showing how close the families actually are. All of these families that associate with Ye through Kardashian connections, as well as Drake, have been accused of the same thing Kris has. EVERY SINGLE ONE of these people have mixed race children that are groomed from a young age to fuck around with celebrities so the parents can remain famous. Drake on numerous occasions has been accused of grooming girls and then getting handsy on their 18th birthday.”

“These labels want their artists to make them money and they dont care about anything else. When Kanye says things like this in an attempt to expose him, the first thing they wanna do is drug him up and put him back in the studio.”
“Righteous indignation is typically a reactive emotion of anger over mistreatment, insult, or malice of another. It is akin to what is called the sense of injustice. This is how they keep the black man down. Keep people outraged about trivial things and distract them from the real issues in the world. The real problems in the industry. If you tell people enough times that they are unequal or discriminated against they start to believe it. Drug them when they step out of line and toss them aside when the checks run out. Ye is realizing he is pawn in a bigger game, and now that he has all these roots in the game such as Yeezy or the Gap or his music, too many people cant risk (Afford) a Ye who speaks his mind.”
(End of quotes)

Amongst the twitter rant, Ye warned about the predatory nature of record deals and discussed trying to get out of his own deal, and said again how his life may be in danger if it wasn’t already and was doing anything he could to protect his kids. The most fascinating part to me though is the public call to arms he made to Drake, J Cole, and Kendrick on twitter. After inviting them to all link up, he said, “It’s time to get free, we will not argue amongst each other while some guy we don’t know in Europe is getting paid and putting that money in a hedge fund.” I believe if Ye was able to pull off this meeting, there is an ever so slight chance that all four artists might be working together to take down a greater enemy. Weirdly there have been times throughout the last couple years where these supposed enemies were photographed together being friendly or praise each other in interviews, then out of no where the disses would start flying again.

To wrap things up I want to share my a few of my theories about the Drake/Kanye beef

A. Everything is exactly as it seems and the beef is over. Ye let his mental illness ruin his life and career so Drake simply picked another target after Ye stopped putting out disses. All of these connections are just a coincidence and all of this was choreographed to boost Drake and Kendrick’s music sales and possibly distract people from the Diddy trial and possibly the complicated geopolitical issues currently facing the U.S.

C. There is also the possibility that all four rappers are in cahoots and Drake’s dirt isn’t as extreme as people are theorizing, at least in comparison to the rest of the business. This could explain why everything has played out like a movie and how they were able to predict each other’s moves so well. This could either mean they’re all just trying to boost their sales or they’re all trying to take down the “slave masters,” as Ye calls them, and change the dynamic of the music industry in favor of the artist.

D. They may be trying to help their friends in the industry who are being abused or in shitty contracts. I know a lot of famous rappers have done a lot of collaborations with Jhene Aiko and Anderson Paak, who were both signed to T.U.G. records which I mentioned above in the connections to Universal Music Group. Considering they are both frequent collaborators with all of the artists involved on both sides, it’s not unlikely they may have played some part in influencing the takedown.

T.U.G was started by Chris Stokes with his partner Ketrina Askew. Back in the early to mid 90’s were gaining popularity attracting lots of young up and coming talent. They often collaborated with Diddy and his associates. In the 2000’s Raz B from the boy band B2K claimed he was molested by Stokes and his friend Marques Houston, then quickly retracted his claims. Years later he came forward again and said we was bribed into silence and that the rest of the victims were bribed with hush money and had another singer corroborate his story and they came forward together to level the accusations. After some of his former B2K members made fun of him for his claims and accused it of being a shakedown, Raz B revealed Stokes and Houston had preyed a lot of the children associated with the label including at least one of the former bandmates and paid them off.

I thought it was worth noting that the second whistleblower named Quindon Tarver died young in a car crash after mentioning his abuse again a few years prior. He seems to have left the industry not long after the incidents occurred and has few credits to his name. To this day Raz B is still trying to get his justice, while Stokes and his partner Askew, who was also involved in the abuse are still running the label to this day. Askew also has a ton of lawsuits, accusing her of using shady tactics to try to foreclose on houses. (Don’t quote me if a lawyer wants to take a look just google her full name), and has been tied to a ton of LLCs, similar to Drake. This is a good example of a shitty record deal, but I'm sure they have countless other friends in the industry who have even worse. While they were never convicted even Chris Stokes' wife confirmed it to be true.

E. The theory I personally think fits the narrative best and is the most realistic conspiracy is that Kendrick and possibly J. Cole went to the meeting, but not Drake due to his close relationship with Lucian Grange, the president of Drake’s label. Silence often speaks louder than words and this could explain why Kendrick was so ruthless and put so much effort into finding dirt on Drake. Ye, Cole, and Kendrick co-writing would be like the rap allstar team and if J. Cole wasn’t involved, it would also answer the question of whether or not he baited Drake into the battle by asking him to feature. I don’t think Drake is really their primary target though, which would explain letting him off easy. Compared to his bosses and their bosses he’s a small fish. If you take the big guys down you stand a better chance of landing a bigger blow on their operation.

Another really interesting connection is Kendrick and Ye were both signed under Universal Music Group and they both got out of their deals around couple months apart in 2022. As we speak U.M.G’s CEO Lucian Grange, who is often acccused of giving Drake special treatment, is facing charges related to sex trafficking by no other than P Diddy. This could very well explain the timing of it all. The craziest timeline would be Diddy masterminding all of this and using his connections to get it done and all the allegations are bullshit. The guy does seem pretty confident all things considered and constantly posts himself in his Batman costume which could mean he’s a vigilante.

It seems like there's a slight religious angle as well. (Ye and Diddy are both very vocal advocates of Christianity and Drake and Lucian Grange are both Jewish.) Obviously this is a reach, but they’ve been saying rap music was specifically promoted by mostly white label owners in the 80’s to help in the ongoing effort to expedite the systematic oppression of those living in black neighborhoods and the destruction of their family systems. Apparently it was an intentional decision to heavily promote rappers that promoted the very things that were destroying their neighborhoods. (So people know I'm and atheist and have zero agenda, I just thought it was interesting, please stay away from anything antisemitic. War is wrong on both sides.)

*** If my favorite theory is true, there is a possibility the Kendrick and Ye are going after Drake due to their mutual disdain for him and because he’s got a ton of power to dominate the charts and hog the radio airtime like Meek Mill and OG Maco claimed years ago. Even him dropping a record the same day as you could really fuck your album sales up. I’m also sure some of the many rumors throughout the years have had a least some truth and he will most likely snitch to avoid cell block one. I think that Drake could have been instructed to instigate this whole mess in order to draw attention away from the UMG charges brought about by Diddy. Or on the other hand it could be that Kendrick, Ye, and possibly Cole, may have had intel that Drake was going to be involved in the Diddy trial and are just gonna let the receipts show themselves. It might not have been the original plan, but they’ve already accomplished their mission of humiliating him, assuring he couldn’t use his influence to slide through the cracks, and taking over the throne.

Please take everything I say with a grain of salt I have no connection to this world or lifestyle. Regardless I believe all of the knowledge above does a pretty solid job at painting a picture of what may have let up to this and what may have been the source.
——————————-
More details found the last couple days…

Drake and Diddy Connections+Coincidences

Drake- In the P Diddy wig video from 2016 he talks about going to party with Drake, Cash, and The Weeknd in Toronto. Drake is also one of Birdman’s protégées who is known for being a predator and is rumored to have used label artists to lure young women.

Travis Scott- Interview where he comes out and says Diddy tried to lure him. Still has a long history of associating with him, video of him running from Diddy, his connection to Ruby Rose while underage.

Tim Westwood- Diddy had connections with sex offender Tim Westwood who also inspired the Drake song, “Westwood”. They also both were victims of drive by shootings along with The Weekend and they were all facing some type of allegations.

T.I.- Also has been associate with Diddy through the years, in 2021 his kid died and 11 women can forward at the same time to accuse him and his wife of drugging and assaulting them. Clearly someone wanted to fuck his life up. Possibly due to him getting arrested so many times for wild shit and people wondering how he continued to get away with it shining a light on how powerful industry lawyers are. He also had recently talked about having a gynecologist check to see if his daughter is still a Virgin, which sounds like it could have been an industrty secret. Could have been because he worried about someone trying to take advantage of her to get to him? Regardless that shit is fucking insane.

50 Cent- Has been saying pretty much the same thing as Travis Scott and has trolled Diddy for most of his career. It came out that his wife was a sex worker who was possibly recruited Diddy to help ruin his career. It sort of worked, which raises the question if 50 Cent is the only victim.

Ray J- Him and his sister worked with T.U.G. records when they were very young. Chris Stokes in the nineties who had connections with Diddy. He has been involved in a lot of sex scandals and allegedly may have played a part in Whitney Houston's death. (Which is also allegedly connected to Michael Jackson's death and both were deemed suspicious and happened during their final tours when their masters (song rights), became more valuable than their lives. Sony Records and Tommy Motolla, who also abused Mariah Carey when she was trying to start her career. These are just a few of the alleged examples of labels taking out musicians when they were worth more dead, another is the signing of high risk artists and requiring them to get life insurance so they can profit beyond releasing all their posthumous records. Also the ever so common story of the rising star artist that die at 21 after their first album or two.

He also partied with Diddy in Vegas with along Floyd Mayweather and a bunch of other famous industry people and athletes.

Tory Lanez- Tons of blackmail, also was signed by Interscope under UMG. got sent to prison for ten years after trying to leave his label. Also history of SA and and other allegations of violence towards women.

French Montana- On Diddy's label, close with Rick and Khaled, tons of drug and sexual assault allegations, also dated a Kardashian. Generally grimy.

DJ Khaled- Diddy said he could get anything in Miami, either referring to drugs or women, could explain his connections and lack of any notable talent. (New update, he was one of the first to promote Chris Alvarez’s instagram not long after he turned 18).

Rick Ross- Diddy said some weird shit about him and licked his lips and kissed him at a show. Ross is also signed to Bad Boy under Diddy. He ended up getting involved in the current feud and spamming social media nonstop dissing and threatening Drake.

A lot of the back and forth was both of them threatening to release dirt on each other. One strange coincidence I found was Drake recently trolled Ross about the 20 million dollar renovation to his home on Star island, where Diddy is currently residing. It’s rumored back in the day that P Diddy was caught in a room full of rich guys on ecstasy possibly at the beginning stages of a gay orgy. Drake also mentioned in the same tweets about Rick Ross that Birdman owned a house on the island and asked Rick Ross why he didn’t help him out.

Considering Ross is so sketchy and Drake claims the house isn’t that big, that’s a ridiculous amount of money. He may be covering up evidence, or creating tunnels in his house to escape if shit pops off and Drake might know what’s good. Interestingly enough Ross is very close with French Montana and also signed to Bad. He said his beef was related to something involving French, and Drake’s tweet popped up the same day the info came out concerning the Chris Alvarez stuff.

The famous line from U.O.E.N.O.

Meek Mill- “OG Maco called himself defending his friend Quentin Miller by substantiating the ghostwriting claims and agreeing with Meek. He hit up Twitter saying, "Some of us been knew. Meek just put it in the air. Sucks to have to compete with 6 n****s and get compared to”

Meek mill also had a short beef with Drake, some disses included lines referring to TI’s homie pissing on Drake at the movie theater, which is also interesting considering the current case against him. He also dropped a line saying Diddy almost got a domestic charge when he smacked Drake, which could either be saying that Drake is like a woman, or saying he was Drake’s boyfriend/sugar daddy.
( If you made it to the end comment with the number 8)
I thought it was interesting how the beef just kind of disappeared and even Meek said it didn’t seem genuine. Considering the allegations against Meek in the Diddy trial, and his rumored affair with Kim contributing to ending Kanye’s marriage, Meek Mill definitely did some dirt on him.

“Niggas frauds I told the truth, don't ask me shit
All this industry fake enemy and rap shit”

“Money make a sucker that told look trill again”

One of the many chapters in Drake's history in which he is seen paying his way out of trouble and starting beefs randomly.
“Now when that shit went down with Chris, you wrote a check”
This line is referring to Chris brown beef, another beef that was lost to time. All I can remember off the top was someone throwing a champagne bottle at the other’s entourage.

Ty Dolla $ign- Huge feature artist, close with Ye. Grew up in the industry and talks about growing up on the road and being in the studio with his dad and Rick James who was should have already been in prison for life for dragging, torturing, and S assaulting multiple women and children throughout his career and was himself a victim of the industry. May be part of Ye's motivation, considering their recent close working relationship.
The end.
Courtesy of,
The Randomest Moniker

today at work i messed up. for some background, out of need for money i took my brothers old insurance sales job about a month ago(ironic given i got my autism diagnosis this year). i think i’ve been doing pretty good ive made 3 completed sales so far and have 3 more lined up. i really enjoy most parts of the job and think i enjoy doing service work more than sales so far. today, my coworker who has been training me wasnt in the best mood because he had little sleep. throughout the day when i had questions and issues with stuff i could feel his annoyance having to walk over to my desk when he let out long sighs. i couldn’t really tell what he was thinking at all, but i felt burdensome. towards the end of my day, a customer came in and on the spot i was giving her a quote. i was already on a live chat dealing with another customers issue. i felt awkward because i was doing two things at once and wanted to explain to her that my attention was divided because of what i was doing. but what i said to her was a bit too literal, i told her that i was trying to figure out why my customer had an increase in premium— i know that was a mistake looking back but i was having a hard time juggling so many things at once. as soon as that left my mouth, my coworker messaged me on my computer saying “why would you tell her that”. the rest of the quote until the lady left the office i was just trying to act like a normal person while i had hot waves of shame and embarrassment cloud my entire existence. it was so hard. i left work early, as soon as the woman left, because i didn’t want to have a meltdown at work. i’ve been crying almost all evening about it. i wanted to reach out to other autistic people to ask if they have debilitating embarrassment when they make mistakes. rationally, i know that when i’m training for a job ill have to have an awkward phase where i make mistakes and all, but the way i had an immediate consequence and reminder that i was being perceived and judged in real time pushed me over the edge.
idk how im even gonna go into work and feel okay tomorrow, this is keeping me from falling asleep even.

Shortly after Final Fantasy VII hit the gaming world in 1997, Cloud Strife’s howls of grief at the loss of his beloved companion Aerith Gainsborough were echoed by droves and droves of fans. These echoes gathered in swarms, reaching the developers in the form of petition signatures, each begging the makers of the game to allow Aerith’s resurrection. Though these prayers remained unanswered —until now—, there soon came more protests: this time, fans pleaded with the developers to consider making a remake of the original game. Both of these wishes were met with considerable derision, with large chunks of the fandom calling the requests delusional— which is why the Final Fantasy world had to prepare for another meteoric hit when the Remake project was finally announced in 2015. With Kitase, Nomura, Toriyama, Nojima, Uematsu and more of the original developers at the helm, along with longtime FFVII fan-turned-developer Hamaguchi, the Remake trilogy was met with great expectations. These were nevertheless surpassed, though one aspect of the trilogy’s first entry seemed to thoroughly puzzle some and enrage others. Far and wide, the resounding questions were “What are these Whisper things?”, “Why is Cloud having visions unrelated to Nibelheim and Zack?” and “Why and how in the hell did Zack survive?”
Friends, I believe the answer lies within this post. Welcome to my literary-analysis-based theory on the Remake trilogy’s most important and most secret plot point: Cloud’s hidden mission. I want to make this fun and suspenseful to read, so I will write my analyses in the same order and manner in which I encountered them while putting my theory together. You will be reading what initially sparked my curiosity, the path I took while researching for answers, the conclusions I made every step of the way, and only then will you read my theory, after which we’ll try and apply it to the Remake trilogy so far and see if it fits! I want you to experience the rollercoaster that I did when digging through SE content to bring you this post. Thank you so much for waiting for and anticipating this analysis, and I do hope you read every word to soak in every last bit of Clerith you can get. I also hope it’s really fun and touching for you (I cried at least once making this)! Let’s embark on our adventure through the compilation, other FF games and real-life events to find out what the Remake project is truly all about and anticipate the events of part 3.
N.B.: Please be aware that I have never seen this theory navigate online, so I have no idea if anyone has ever come up with a similar hypothesis. The big reveal I’m building toward might be something you’re already aware of or suspected. In that case, I hope this post doesn’t disappoint you if you’re one of the lovely people who requested it! At the very least, it will provide you with valuable literary and musical analysis, a ton of evidence you haven’t considered yet, and hopefully, entertainment too!
WARNING: Please be careful with the censored spoiler text, because I'll be referencing other FF games in this analysis and I don't want to ruin anything for you! Obviously, this analysis contains spoilers for the entirety of the FFVII compilation. Additionally, if you're not a fan of Clerith and you've stumbled upon this post, please stop here. I would hate it if something I worked on and posted made you angry, so please don't read this analysis. I have only good intentions and I just want everyone to enjoy the FFVII world as much as they can.

I. Groundwork: The Remake Timelines Theory

Before I take you on this ride, we must lay down the framework of the Remake Timelines Theory. In this section, we’ll be reviewing the general consensus of theorizers within the fandom on timeline/multiverse shenanigans, with some added specifications on my part. Please keep in mind that because the timeline mechanics are kept quite vague by the devs, there might be certain inaccuracies in my iteration of the timelines theory. Thankfully, these potential variances won’t have any effect on the legitimacy of the theory I’ll be presenting to you in this analysis.
I. a) Sephiroth’s Plan
The premise of the Remake trilogy is widely thought to be the result of post-OG Sephiroth attempting to succeed where he failed in OG. There are six key points we need to keep in mind to understand how this was possible.
I. a) i. Sephiroth in the Lifestream
Firstly, it’s important to remember that Sephiroth is dead and located in the Lifestream before OG even begins, and remains that way for almost all of OG's duration. He is only able to operate in the world of the living via his/Jenova's control over the living Sephiroth clones. In the OG timeline then, Sephiroth is sent to the Lifestream by Cloud twice: once before the game takes place on the night of the Nibelheim incident (pre-OG), and a second time during the final battle against Sephiroth (disk 3, chapter 3). During the long period between the Nibelheim incident and Sephiroth’s rebirth at the Northern Crater (disk 2, chapter 2), he exists in the Lifestream. After his ultimate defeat (post-OG), he returns there for good.
II. a) ii. Sephiroth Unintegrated
Secondly, because he is full of hatred and unyielding determination, Sephiroth’s spirit cannot become one with the planet. After both occasions where Cloud kills him in OG, Sephiroth retains his individual will and the memories of his lifetime, remaining a separate entity in the Lifestream. He says so himself in Nojima’s Advent Children prequel novel On a Way to a Smile:

“[Sephiroth] could sense the Lifestream trying to erode his spirit— the memories of his former experiences, thoughts and emotions. If he allowed himself to be taken into the current, the being he once was would soon disseminate and disappear amongst the spirit energy cycling around the planet. [He] thought this unacceptable. The planet was to be his to rule, and to become a part of that system would be nothing short of defeat” ("Lifestream Black 1").

Combined with Bugenhagen’s basic lesson on planetology (FFVII OG, disk 1, chapter 19), this excerpt provides interesting information on how the Lifestream normally works. Usually, when a life returns to the planet, its individuality (personality, will, consciousness, memories, etc.) is stripped away. The trappings of a soul’s former lifetime are progressively dissolved so that all that is left is the spirit itself, ready to integrate into the Lifestream. This way, soul energy can be “recycled” by the planet to animate new lifeforms in a sort of reincarnation process. The erasure of one’s memories in the Lifestream is necessary for the creation of a brand new life, poised to make its own memories: the slate must be wiped clean, so to speak. Sephiroth’s sheer hatred for and desire to dominate the planet is enough to keep him from undergoing this process.
It is also thought that Sephiroth cannot be integrated into the Lifestream because he was conceived with the use of Jenova cells in vitro. Given that so much of his consciousness and genetic makeup originate from an alien life force, it is impossible for him to become one with the planet.
Regardless of the reason, it is precisely this persisting individuality in death that allows Sephiroth to meddle in the world of the living during the post-OG events of Advent Children, as explained to us by post-OG Aerith in On a Way to a Smile:

“[Aerith] had sensed a different presence within the Lifestream cycling around the planet. It was the vehemence of a strong will, one that would never join with the planet. She knew this consciousness. It was [Sephiroth]. A merciless spirit hidden behind a beauteous wall. That spirit was now operating from within the Lifestream. [She] sensed that he was planning to exert his influence to the surface of the planet“ ("Lifestream White 1").

I. a) iii. The Lifestream Beyond Time
Our third point is that the Lifestream has existed for as long as the planet, and has therefore touched every part of its history— including, of course, the events of OG. On that account, one could think of the Lifestream as atemporal. Considering this, it is possible for a spirit in the Lifestream to communicate with or even travel to the past, provided the necessary circumstances and/or abilities. For instance, the Aerith that appears in Cloud’s resolution scene in Remake (chapter 14) is commonly considered to be a post-OG Aerith, appearing to him from the future to try and dissuade him from falling for her. This time-defying event is made possible by the fact that post-OG Aerith’s spirit has access to the atemporal Lifestream because she's deceased. In my view, this explains why she dissolves into green light (Lifestream visual cue) at the end of the resolution scene (5:19-5:45). This is not time travel per se, but it is a manner of communication unobstructed by the one-directionality of a linear timeline that only spirits can perform.
I. a) iv. Sephiroth Beyond Time
What we’ve covered so far amounts to our fourth point. Please familiarize yourself with the graph below before you continue reading. Refer back to the graph when you encounter text in bold.
The Remake Timelines Theory: FFVII OG Timeline
As we discussed in section “I. a) i.”, Sephiroth is dead and located in the Lifestream for the duration of the green arrow and beyond point D: in the context of the OG timeline, he can only ever be considered “alive” during the period highlighted in purple. In section “I. a) ii.”, we asserted that Sephiroth retained his individual will in the Lifestream, enabling him to exert his influence on the world of the living by manipulating his clones on the surface. In section “I. a) iii.”, we covered the atemporal nature of the Lifestream, which allows post-OG Aerith’s spirit to communicate with her past, living self thanks to her Cetra abilities. Now, I will explain to you how Sephiroth was able to do virtually the same thing, albeit his lack of Cetra blood.
To the characters of the story and a fully immersed first-time player of OG, the timeline above was not always an established series of events: when they first started playing FFVII OG, the player began at point B, with nothing existing beyond it. It is only as the player moved Cloud forward that the black, arrowed timeline was drawn, accumulating lived events (or points) in Cloud’s wake. The picture you see above is only available to Cloud and to the player with hindsight. All this to state the obvious: at point B, Cloud could not know what would occur, say, at point C.
During the period highlighted in purple, Sephiroth was “alive” again, accumulating new memories on the surface of the planet and adding them to his consciousness. When he entered the Lifestream for the second time at point D, he brought these memories with him. Simply put, after returning to the Lifestream at point D, Sephiroth remembers what happened during the period highlighted in purple. However, given that the Lifestream exists beyond time, upon Sephiroth’s consciousness’ return to the Lifestream at point D, his newly acquired memories were also made available to him at all points on the green, double-arrowed line— including point A, before the OG timeline even begins at point B. So while it is true that Cloud cannot know what will occur at point C if he is only at point B, Sephiroth indeed knows what will occur during the period highlighted in purple when he is only at point A. While a living, pre-OG Aerith would be able to receive post-OG Aerith’s spirit’s knowledge through the Lifestream thanks to her Cetra powers, Sephiroth has no need for this ability. The fact that he resides in the Lifestream for practically the entire FFVII OG timeline renders the limitations of time irrelevant: as far as the FFVII OG timeline is concerned, Sephiroth exists beyond time itself.
In summary, after point D was first encountered in OG, pre-OG Sephiroth (in the Lifestream) is made aware of his eventual defeat, and begins plotting an alternate path to victory. This time, with the benefit of hindsight, he will do things differently: we experience his "second” attempt at FFVII as the Remake trilogy.
I. a) v. Sephiroth Against Fate
Of course, the Whispers stand squarely in Sephiroth’s way. This leads us to our fifth point, which Remake Ultimania describes better than I ever could:

“According to Red XIII, who gained knowledge through his contact with Aerith, ‘The Whispers are drawn to those who attempt to alter destiny’s course and ensure they do not’ […]. It would appear that what the Whispers deem to be ‘fate’ is the original story of Final Fantasy VII” (section 08 “Secrets”, “Newly Arisen Mysteries”, “What Is the Goal of the Elusive Whispers?”, page 733).

OG’s plot line is the fated timeline, and the Whispers are tasked with its preservation. They prevent alternative paths from even beginning to branch out from the OG timeline, which poses a problem for Sephiroth: he cannot win FFVII if his destiny is to lose it.
I. a) vi. Sephiroth and the Multiverse
Consequently, our sixth point is that Sephiroth must dismantle the mechanisms of fate before he can even try to accomplish his dreams of godhood.
As Sephiroth explains in chapter 14 of Rebirth, “the planet encompasses [an ever unfolding] multitude of worlds”, and these “[new worlds are born] when the boundaries of fate are breached.” Since the Whispers uphold the “boundaries of fate”, a world in which Sephiroth’s evil plans succeed can only emerge after the Whispers have been defeated. Otherwise, destiny will continue to protect the OG plot line by preventing any significant deviations. Consequently, before the party vanquishes fate, the Remake timeline and the OG timeline are one and the same: before chapter 18, Remake Barret is OG Barret, Remake Tifa is OG Tifa, Remake Hojo is OG Hojo, etc. After the defeat of Destiny, the OG timeline is no longer protected by fate: there are now an infinite number of timelines or worlds, including those we see glimpses of in Rebirth: Remake Barret is no longer necessarily OG Barret, Remake Tifa is no longer necessarily OG Tifa, Remake Hojo is no longer necessarily OG Hojo, etc. Perhaps this is why Aerith gives the party the following warning at destiny’s crossroads in Remake:

“[This] is the wall of destiny. If we go through it… if we go beyond it… then all of us will change, too” (FFVII Remake Material Ultimania Plus, VA script notes, “Destiny’s Crossroads”).

I. a) vii. Sephiroth’s Plan
Now that these six points have been elucidated, we can compose a solid hypothesis on how Sephiroth plots to win FFVII.
After gaining knowledge of his eventual demise (disk 3, chapter 3), pre-OG Sephiroth began thinking of what he must do in Remake from the Lifestream. First, Sephiroth must antagonize the Whispers in the initial stages of the OG timeline. He accomplishes this by commanding his clones to commit acts that drastically violate the fated timeline, engendering plot-line deviations that the Whispers must course-correct. The most extreme example transpires in Remake’s chapter 17 when the Sephiroth clone in President Shinra’s office kills Barret, forcing the Whispers to restore the fated plot line by coming forth and reviving him. The Whispers react to Sephiroth’s prodding by rushing in to protect fate, their efforts culminating in the protective wall of destiny that surrounds Midgar in chapter 18.
Secondly, after he’s created an opportunity for a battle against the Whispers, Sephiroth must convince the party to seize it and beat fate for him. After all, a mere Sephiroth clone is probably no match for Destiny. This second step is accomplished in Remake’s chapter 18 when Sephiroth successfully tempts Cloud to breach the boundaries of fate. Now that destiny is no longer a limitation, worlds deviating from the OG timeline can finally emerge; Sephiroth has a chance at victory.
The steps Sephiroth plans to take going forward are unknowable at this stage, but we do get more hints in Rebirth’s chapter 13. At the Temple of the Ancients, Sephiroth reveals a part of his plot:

“Sephiroth: My fragmented mother, these errant worlds... All shall be one again.
Aerith: The ‘Reunion’…!”

It seems Sephiroth eventually plans to merge the worlds created by destiny’s defeat in Remake’s chapter 18. My guess is he hopes to achieve godhood in part 3 and consolidate all diverting worlds into a single timeline protected by destiny once more— only this time, his victory will replace the ending of OG as the destined outcome. If he succeeds, Sephiroth’s Black Whispers will likely replace the planet’s Whispers as the arbiters of his desired fate.
I. b) Aerith’s Intervention
But Aerith can’t let this slide unchallenged!
We know that before chapter 18 of Remake, while the OG plot-line is still protected by fate, Aerith has knowledge of its future. This is insinuated by certain slips of the tongue: for instance, when Aerith reveals she knows Cloud is a mercenary upon meeting him for the second time in chapter 8, just like she knows Tifa will ask her to retrieve Marlene at Seventh Heaven in chapter 12. In the run-up to Remake, post-OG Aerith's spirit likely sensed Sephiroth planning his second try at FFVII in the Lifestream. She’s been able to anticipate Sephiroth’s plotting in the Lifestream before, namely in the context of Advent Children:

“[Aerith] had sensed a different presence within the Lifestream cycling around the planet […]. It was [Sephiroth] […]. That spirit was now operating from within the Lifestream. [She] sensed that he was planning to exert his influence [on] the surface of the planet” (On a Way to a Smile, "Lifestream White 1").

If you’re wondering how Aerith was able to maintain her individuality in the Lifestream like Sephiroth, On a Way to a Smile provides the following explanation:

“[Aerith] was an Ancient, which explained how she was able to maintain her individuality even within the Lifestream. If she so wished she could become part of the planet at any time, but [she] thought it too early for that just yet” ("Lifestream White 1").

It is thought that, as a countermeasure to Sephiroth's scheming, post-OG Aerith’s spirit used the atemporal nature of the Lifestream to inform her past, living self (pre-OG Aerith) of this new threat to the planet. Because the Cetra can commune with spirits, pre-OG Aerith would have been able to receive post-OG Aerith’s message from the Lifestream without a problem. Essentially, pre-OG Aerith received post-OG Aerith’s memories of the fated OG timeline. As a consequence, pre-OG Aerith embarks on the OG timeline with knowledge of the fated future that demands she give her life: the player experiences this version of her in Remake.
Be that as it may, it’s unclear how much Remake Aerith is aware of. You would think she’d be completely opposed to defeating, destiny since it protects the planet, but Aerith shows ambivalence toward the idea instead. Had she gotten a clear message from her future self that she must keep fate intact, she would not have allowed the party to enter the battle against fate in chapter 18. She doesn’t seem to know what the Whispers are the first time she encounters them either. Regardless, what’s important is that the Aerith seen in Remake is the result of pre-OG Aerith receiving knowledge from post-OG Aerith via the Lifestream.
I. c) Ambiguity: Memory Transfer or Time-Travel?
There remains an ambiguity pertaining to the Aerith we see in Remake and the question of time travel. What I’ve described to you in section “I. b)” is post-OG Aerith's spirit transferring her memories to her past self through the Lifestream. However, it’s possible that post-OG Aerith’s consciousness used the atemporal nature of the Lifestream to inhabit her living OG body instead, effectively time-traveling. There is no evidence to outright refute either explanation, since the gaps in Aerith’s memories of the OG plot-line in Remake can be explained in both cases. For instance, in a memory transfer scenario, it’s possible that post-OG Aerith only communicated the most essential information to pre-OG Aerith. On the other hand, in a time-travel scenario, one could interpret the following quotes as proof that the Whispers are progressively erasing Aerith’s memories of OG as Remake advances:

“Aerith: Every time the Whispers touch me, a piece of me falls away” (FFVII Remake Material Ultimania Plus, VA script notes, “Aerith Speaks”)

&

“At any rate, Aerith is perplexed at how, like a flower being scattered, something inside is being taken away by the Whispers and lost to her” (Toriyama in FFVII Remake Material Ultimania Plus, VA script notes, “Aerith Speaks”, “Scenario Staff Q&A - Answered by Motomu Toriyama”).

This ambiguity is completely irrelevant to Sephiroth’s situation in Remake, as we established in section “I. a) iv.”.
The specifics don’t matter nearly as much as I’m impressing upon you by explaining all these little alternatives. Simply keep in mind that: regardless of why, the Sephiroth and Aerith we see in Remake know the events of the OG game because they have acquired this knowledge from the future, and the events of Remake occur squarely within the OG timeline until the Whispers are defeated in chapter 18.
So there! That’s my iteration of the Remake Timelines Theory! I hope I’ve made it clear in your mind, or at least clearer. Now that we’ve established the widely theorized premise of the Remake trilogy, we can get into our theory on its hidden premise.
II. My Initial Curiosity
My theory first burgeoned upon going through Remake for the second time. I noticed something strange going on with Cloud, something that could not be explained by the Remake Timelines Theory. Key moments in Remake Cloud’s experience of the OG timeline (aka, everything before chapter 18) stuck out to me as strange and mysterious, and certain inexplicable audiovisual cues struck me as hugely significant. It was upon watching the tear fall from Cloud’s eye during my second go at chapter 8 that I knew I had to look into this.
At the very end of Remake’s chapter 8, Cloud watches Aerith walk away from him, humming happily into the night air as she sets off to lead the way to Sector 7. According to the VA script notes, “his heart skips a beat” and watching her walk away provokes a sudden “anxiety” within him. Triggered by the familiarity of the sight, a strange sensation overcomes Cloud:

“[There’s a] close-up shot of Cloud’s fingertips (they’re tingling). He presses them to his temples (his eyes are burning). A trickle of tears quickly rolls down from the eye hidden behind his hand” (FFVII Remake Material Ultimania Plus, VA script notes, “A Midnight Ambush”).

If you’re clever, you’ll recognize these lines as a reference to the speech Cloud makes in OG following Aerith’s death at the City of the Ancients (“My fingers are tingling. My mouth is dry. My eyes are burning!”) (disk 1, chapter 28). In this small moment in chapter 8 of Remake, Cloud experiences a flash of the profound grief he is destined to feel upon Aerith’s fated death.
Many players immediately recognized the composition of this scene: the blue-greenish air, the straight path Aerith heads down, the sight of her walking away itself… this moment closely resembles Cloud’s Sleeping Forest dream of Aerith in OG, wherein Cloud and Aerith’s very last words are exchanged (disk 1, chapter 25). Toriyama, codirector of the Remake project, comments on this scene thusly:

“It’s possible these similarities […] cause a memory of the future to be called forth in Cloud” (FFVII Remake Material Ultimania Plus, VA script notes, “A Midnight Ambush”).

The language used by Toriyama here is strange in both the English translation and the Japanese original: the term “memory of the future” makes no sense. One cannot remember things they haven’t already experienced, so why did Toriyama use the word “memory” to describe a "future" event? Couldn’t he have simply said that Remake Cloud experiences “visions of the future” rather than “[memories]”?
Cloud experiences a few moments like these throughout the game. These pseudo-premonitions are just as markedly exclusive to Remake as the Whispers are. I did not want to dismiss them as a foreshadowing device the devs included just to elicit emotional reactions from OG players; I felt they were more important. And thus began my digging! My mission was initially to figure out what these “[memories of the future]” (MOTFs) could signify… I had no clue it would turn into what I’m writing right now.
II. a) Each MOTF and Its Context
I began by finding every one of Cloud’s MOTFs so I could better understand them.
MOTF 1 occurs in chapter 2 on Sector 8’s Loveless Street, when Cloud sees Aerith struggling against the Whispers. The VA script notes reveal that even though this is only his first time seeing her, Cloud recognizes Aerith’s face:

“Recognizing Aerith’s face causes Cloud to experience [a hallucination]. Sephiroth is suddenly standing between him and Aerith” (FFVII Remake Material Ultimania Plus, VA script notes, “Encountering Aerith”).

Sephiroth then taunts Cloud with words that, according to the script notes, “[live] inside of Cloud's heart”: “You can’t protect anyone. Not even yourself”. Cloud should not recognize Aerith’s face at this point in the OG timeline, nor should he associate it with not being able to protect people.
MOTF 2 occurs in chapter 3, at the plaza in front of the Sector 7 slums support pillar. Cloud experiences a MOTF of the plate falling, which is fated to occur at a much later point in chapter 12. The Whispers float near him, “watching Cloud alertly as he sees a vision of the future” (FFVII Remake Ultimania, section 08 “Secrets”, “Newly Arisen Mysteries”, “What Is the Goal of the Elusive Whispers?”, page 733).
MOTF 3 occurs in Aerith’s church at the start of chapter 8, when Aerith mentions that her mother’s materia is “not good for anything at all”. Triggered by the mention and sight of the White Materia, Cloud’s fourth MOTF takes the form of a vision: he sees quick flashes of the materia falling into the lake of the Forgotten Capital and Aerith holding her hands together in prayer. These are evidently visions of her death in OG (disk 1, chapter 28).
MOTF 4 is the one we first discussed, occurring at the very end of chapter 8 as Cloud watches Aerith walk away from him to lead the way toward Sector 7.
MOTF 5 occurs in chapter 13 shortly after the Sector 7 plate has fallen on the slums. Cloud tells Barret that Marlene is safe at Aerith’s house, and they begin heading there. As Cloud thinks about Aerith, the VA script notes describe the very next moment as follows:

“Cloud: Tifa, you know anything about the Ancients?
Tifa: I’ve heard of them before, but…
Barret walks on ahead, showing little interest in the topic.
Barret: Read a book on planetology and they’re sure to come up. They’re a tribe that cultivated the planet a real long time ago. Used to talk to it. That sort of stuff.
Cloud: That must be why the Turks were after her.
[Psychic] interference starts up.
[Cloud has a] flashback of Sephiroth from five years ago, after learning of his ancestry at Shinra Manor […].
Sephiroth [(in flashback, voice tinged with madness)]: Within my veins flows the blood of the Ancients. I am the rightful heir to this planet!
The flashback ends and Cloud looks lost in thought. The interference starts up once more. Cloud makes agonized sounds. When he opens his eyes, Sephiroth is actually standing before him.
Sephiroth: You failed again— failed to protect [her]*.
Cloud is startled. He shrinks back. Tifa watches what’s happening. The other two can’t see Sephiroth. All they see is Cloud acting frightened.
Sephiroth: But loss will make you strong. […] Isn’t that what you want?
With that, Sephiroth departs.”

*Sephiroth does not use a gendered pronoun here, because the grammatical structure of the original Japanese sentence doesn’t necessitate it. I've seen some debate as to whether the proper translation is “her” (Aerith, who’s just been kidnapped), or “them” (Jessie, Biggs or Wedge, who have seemingly just died). I believe Sephiroth was referring to Aerith for a few reasons. First, Cloud’s hallucinations of Sephiroth always appear as a response to whatever he is perceiving or thinking about at the moment. At this point in the scene, Cloud has been thinking and talking about Aerith for some time, and not about Jessie, Biggs or Wedge. The Sephiroth hallucination must therefore be referring to “her” rather than to “them”. Secondly, Cloud was never tasked with “[protecting]” Avalanche, but he was in fact tasked with “[protecting]” Aerith as her bodyguard back in chapter 8: it makes far more sense for Sephiroth to be referring to Aerith when he speaks about someone Cloud “failed to protect”. Finally, FFVII Remake Ultimania describes this piece of dialogue as “[Sephiroth aiming] these profound words at Cloud, who not only failed to prevent the tragedy in the Sector 7 slums but allowed Aerith to be abducted” (Sephiroth’s profile in section 01 “Character & World”, “Impressive Words”, page 29): the specific mention of Aerith here seals my decision to translate the line with the pronoun “her”.
Contrary to Sephiroth’s words, this is the first time in Remake that Cloud “[fails] to protect [Aerith]”, and he hasn’t “[lost]” her either— not yet, at least. So why use the words "again" and "loss"? This fifth MOTF must be similar to MOTF 1, in that Sephiroth is referring to Cloud’s guilt surrounding Aerith’s death in OG.
MOTF 6 occurs in chapter 17, in Aerith and Ifalna’s old room at Shinra HQ. The Whispers swarm Aerith as she tells the party earnestly that she wants to do everything in her power to help her friends and the planet: according to the script notes, it is at this very moment that, “for some reason, Cloud feels his chest constrict tightly” (FFVII Remake Material Ultimania Plus, VA script notes, “Aerith Speaks”). In the corresponding cutscene, this unpleasant physiological reaction to Aerith’s words makes Cloud glance down at his chest with a confounded frown. This physical response to her speech about wanting to fulfill her duty to the planet implies that Cloud somehow knows deep down that saving the world will cost Aerith her life.
At this point, I noticed that five out of the six MOTFs Cloud experiences in Remake are triggered by and/or revolve around Aerith specifically, the one exception being a MOTF of the Sector 7 plate fall. One could actually argue that this MOTF revolves around Aerith too, considering the plate fall marks the first time Aerith is taken away from Cloud since reuniting with her in the Sector 5 slums church. This is more than plausible, as MOTF 5 proves that in the wake of the Sector 7 plate fall, Cloud’s main concern is Aerith (see section “II. a)”). How fitting is it, then, that the merc of few words’ longest uninterrupted piece of dialogue in all of Remake is:

“We found an underground Shinra lab where they've done human testing. This wasn't the first time and it won't be the last. I know these people, and I know they're never gonna let Aerith go. She's the last living Ancient on the planet. Think about what that means to Shinra's scientists. Especially to that son of a bitch Hojo. We're all just numbers and meat to him—“ (Remake, chapter 13).

Cloud would’ve gone on too, had Elmyra and Tifa not stopped him.
At this juncture in my research, my questions were only stacking up. What are these MOTFs? Why is Cloud the only one experiencing them? Why do all of them implicate Aerith? What did the devs hope to accomplish with their inclusion in the game? What do they mean for Remake’s story? But most importantly:
II. b) What Does Cloud Know?
The first assertion we have to make is simple, yet essential: the only reason Cloud would experience MOTFs is that whatever’s triggered them is significant to him in one way or another. Some part of him must recognize his triggers for them to be triggers at all. It’s clear he doesn’t consciously understand the meaning of his MOTF triggers, just like his Jenova triggers: for example, Cloud doesn’t know why Zack’s name causes him to experience psychic interference, but it sure does. We as players know Cloud’s MOTFs are hinting at Aerith’s fated death because of our awareness of OG, but as a character navigating the OG timeline, Remake Cloud shouldn't even be unconsciously aware of Aerith’s eventual death in the slightest! Whatever the nature of the MOTFs, it’s essential to understand that if Cloud “[recognizes]” Aerith’s face the first time he sees her, it must mean some part of him knows Aerith’s face in the first place. If this recognition triggers a hallucination of Sephiroth telling Cloud he “can’t protect anyone”, it must mean some part of him knows he was once unable to protect Aerith. The same goes for every other MOTF: subconsciously, Remake Cloud somehow has memories of the OG timeline. Most interestingly, it looks like he either only has OG memories related to Aerith, or like his OG memories of Aerith are simply the only ones prominent enough to trigger his MOTFs. Why and how does Remake Cloud have memories of OG, and why are they so focused on Aerith in particular? What does he know?
When examining a situation with no explanation, it’s wise to examine similar situations that have already been explained. Maybe the mystery of Remake Cloud’s MOTFs will become more approachable if we consider the cases of the only other Remake characters who seem to know the future: Aerith and Sephiroth. Remake Sephiroth knows the future of the OG timeline because his consciousness exists beyond time in the Lifestream, while Remake Aerith likely obtained her knowledge of the future from post-OG Aerith’s spirit via the Lifestream. But what about Cloud? Where does his weaker, fragmented knowledge come from?
(continued in part 2)

Everyone seems to be digging this album, so I suppose ill strike while the iron is hot here - does anyone else find the level of lyricism in this album not only a high point for the band (though frankly, they've always had good lyricism especially for the scene they're in), but also just very solid even out of the musical context?
I'll admit to being a bit of a nerd when it comes to writing and lit, and after listening to the album I sat down and listened again while reading through the lyrics of each song as they played and was left with a few standouts.
1) From the initial track, 'Thirst.'
Followed by the thirst An honest gaze left broken and marred
...
Dragging my knuckles Forward but through the mud Secluded lower form Sickened by my thirst for change
..
Though not the strongest lyrics on the album, still evocative imagery and impressively emotionally compelling while also being careful in its diction. Like the message of the song (and extending to the album, really) the song comes with a sense of jagged brevity which to me adds to the poignancy of it. It also sets the continuing motif of water being an agent of change, the process of grief and loss (of people, identity, and faith) being the core of the album.
2) From 'Don't Reach For Me'
I dream of a cleansing wave Reborn Don't reach for me No lies can spread (Spread, spread) From a tongue removed
..
I dream of a cleansing wave Set me free I return to form No longer bound to mе
Though this track is much more on the nose, largely characterized by the visceral and aggressive dogma that metalcore is known for, is still points back to the previous ideals and symbolism established in the initial tracks. Again we are lent the idea that water will wash away (erode, even) our imperfections. Change will aid in the 'return to form,' grief and harbored grudges 'no longer bound to me.'
3) This one is cheating, as it's really the whole song of 'Moss Covers All' with its 46 second run time:
This house just swallows me It doesn't feel like it did before Trapped in endless rain Barren moor
And all the vines will find their way Through the dirt and hardened clay
The wind and rain will force decay Moss covers all
This frankly reads pretty well even as spoken word poetry. From the established messages of conflicting ideals of faith, self, and loss, we are given the line 'Trapped in endless rain, barren moor.' This deep into the album the layers have been stripped away, and we get the image of rocks, stripped and naked (barren) being exposed to the harsh elements of rain (water) again. Over time, despite everything, this allows moss and roots to crack and mold them. Neat.
4) Jumping from 'Moss Covers All' immediately into 'The Calm that keeps You Awake'
You fill your home with waves Nothing still can stay When the storm starts to recede Parting clouds reveal your grief Nothing still can stay
Hey look at that! Water enacting change again. Who'da thunk? While not super overt and beating you over the head every track, the album continues its steady use of the metaphor. I'm impressed by how lyrically cohesive and well stated the album is, with this never coming across as corny. Again, the imagery lent from the lyrics are both very well done and somewhat understated, especially when examined through the context of typical metalcore lyricism.
5) Closing with 'Sit and Mourn'
Collecting petals of every memory All I'm left with is all I know (I know) Finding my own time to sit and mourn Grief that spreads but will not show
..
A test at every turn All I focus on is strength I will carry you through fire
Loss we share means swallowing pain Will you inherit my grief If I finally choose to sleep?
..
"Why'd you leave?" "I feel like I'vе failed."
I really, really like this closing track. The amazing mixing, use of ambience, and killer vocals / instrumentals aside, I found the change in expression super neat here. Once again we are given the notion of grief expressed as petals. i.e. plant life and growth. While capable of shattering and eroding rocks (barren moore, yada yada) it also can create beauty. Grief then once again can be seen as spreading through the soil, unseen from above.
This final use of the recurrent theme is then given its needed closing juxtaposition, as they express the strength needed to 'carry you through fire.' While the grief and doubt expressed thus far has always been in the processing stage, prone to mourning and self reflection, in this last closing cacophony we are seeing the narrator of the album push aside their own feelings to help someone through the immediate feelings of loss and rage and pain that come from a fresh loss. Then, we get the expressed doubt of if the narrator gives up, will the party they are helping have that fire smolder and die? Will they find themselves dealing with the cold, liquid grief we've heard about up to this point?
The final eerie quote from this track implies that this did happen, and the cycle of the album will continue as this person who could not be helped slips into the thirst for change within their heart, and the constant state of erosion granted by that search.
TL;DR - This album rocks in a lot of ways, and I think the lyrics are a huge part.