>>20765375>9. Scuffed Up Age (Part 1 because I love this song too fucking much)Or, as Camellia initially titled it...
>This World's The Worst.This is the turning point of the whole album, where Mori finally drops the pretense and turns her introspection outwards to the reality out there beyond her VTuber bubble - the world she wants to break into, the world she wants to shine a light on and guide her fans into, rather than just blinding them with sparkles.
The problem is that reality fucking sucks.
>Honest to god, it’s just not our time>Promises flawed by cosmic designShe's thrown away the fantasy of being the death-dealer who thwarts all of God's plans in DOA. She's thrown away the fantasy of being able to stop "fighting God" and trust in the power of friendship. She's thrown away the fantasy of being some memelord Joker who revels in the master of hell, like in HUGE W. Those might have been good enough for when Mori was a face-tracking model who lives on her surface, but now it's a dream that lives inside her, one that wants to be our "light", not a hollow daughterwife surrogate. She deserves More. *We* deserve more.
>Coming of age, the stage doesn’t light up>Just right away, they told us it might’ve>We choose to know>The struggles of this scuffed up age we’re giving inBut that means confronting the fact that her rise fame was, in no small part, a fluke that had more to do with mass illness that killed millions, cut her off from her own family, obliterated the rap scene and left her deadbeats desperate for an ideal she knows no human can actually live up to.
>これくらいどうってことない>でも涙の跡は消せない>夢はもう諦めますIt means saying outright what she's been hinting at since Cursed Night: She fought like hell for her dream, she got everything and more...and it didn't make her happy. The dream just grew with her new opportunities and responsibilities, and she's just as helpless as an iTunes bestseller as she was playing for 5 people in some underworld bar. There might not actually be a happy ending for her to find, so maybe she should give up on dreams and aspirations outright and just coast/peace out.
>This cynical mind says “why’d you try?”>“Why not give up and play the bad guy?”Here's that same soul-splitting temptation that we started with in UnAlive, embraced in DOA, repressed in LLD, then finally worked up the courage to confront in Resting Power: If VTubing's all smoke and mirrors, if we're all slowly rotting to death anyway, if the drive to strive gets faster and faster the further ahead you get from it, if there's no difference between hearts & jokers, shinigami and jiangshi, why not just give up on the whole shack of shit and do whatever's convenient? Why not just resign yourself to "the lore" - Just do the collabs Omega wants, spout the memes your subscribers expect, avoid the antis, don't bother with charity streams or limiting superchats. Accept the inevitability of death and the ephemerality of life, because anything else wouldn't make things less miserable.
>運命が波立てながら 貴方飲もうとするのなら>崩れ落ちそうな身体 抱きしめるから>それでも貴方を捨ててしまわないでClassic Mori, putting the gachi bait in Japanese because she's too shy to say shit like this in English. Even in the heights of her own despair, she promises to hold the listener while they rot away and begs them not to let her leave their side. The Grim Reaper is no longer a wicked witch, nor Money Mori, nor just a shitpost - She's our chaplain, our guiding light to the end of our miserable lives, like a volunteer worker at a senior center showing compassion for the humans everyone else has already given up on.
>The sun is rising A new horizon>With friendships lacking lies and>The knives in your back, so what are you prioritizing?>You aren’t sick of crying? See, I don’t buy it>But here we are, hanging on, fighting strong despite itShe reminds herself (and us, by proxy) that the people in our lives are honestly pretty great, but going through a lot, and that's something to be proud of.
>分からないんだ >埃塗れの街で [In the dusty streets] 貴方のため息の影 [the shadow of your sighs] >私の微かな火で 照らしたいだけ [With my flickering fire]Unlike Cursed Night, where she dares us to chase her through the streets to find the darkness she's hiding, now she wants to find us in those same streets and turn our darkness into light.
>This rusted world wound up real>Still wanna love the way it feelsAnd she wants to find that happiness herself, circumstances be damned.
