12 minutes ago, gagacasanova said:

More serves from the rep era 

 

Came to post this…

@Taylor fanboy upper right would've ate as the album cover or even the magazine one 

Is this reputation in chronological-ish order?

 

Gorgeous

Look What You Made Me Do

Getaway Car

I Did Something Bad

Don't Blame Me

End Game

...Ready For It?

Delicate

Dancing With Our Hands Tied

Dress

So It Goes...

King of My Heart

This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things

Call It What You Want

New Year's Day

Edited September 7, 20251 yr by Onion Girl

On 9/7/2025 at 9:44 AM, Onion Girl said:

Is this reputation in chronological-ish order?

 

Gorgeous

Look What You Made Me Do

Getaway Car

I Did Something Bad

Don't Blame Me

End Game

...Ready For It?

Delicate

Dancing With Our Hands Tied

Dress

So It Goes...

King of My Heart

This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things

Call It What You Want

New Year's Day

Gurl… the album track list is in chronological order.

33 minutes ago, Taylor fanboy said:

Gurl… the album track list is in chronological order.

Please respect my privacy during this difficult time as I process and reflect...

 

 

Reports of a surprise film on October 3rd is making rounds on Twitter today. Any leads if it's related to Showgirl?

10 hours ago, taptowake said:

Reports of a surprise film on October 3rd is making rounds on Twitter today. Any leads if it's related to Showgirl?

i guess it is 

Taytay entered the stadium today covered in bullet-proof moving wall. This country has reached a new level of something.

to the people that were around longer, are those fans that try to hold her 'accountable' a folklore aftermath, or have they been there forever? because looking at how recent beyonce thing is playing out, and moving aside media control aspect, the behavior in both fandoms is very different. swifties always act like martyrs, overexaggerating every single thing, signal boosting and feeding haters. there are also gaylors, who hide behind virtue causes, but in reality they are just mad she is not gay, so they feel vindictive. so every little thing is always blew up, and root cause is always from within the fandom. meanwhile beyhive just ignores **** and moves forward.

Not everyone is able to hold their fave accountable and we know why

Is the chicken in yet?

You said, "I remember how we felt sitting by the water
And every time I look at you, it's like the first time
I fell in love with a careless man's careful daughter
She is the best thing that's ever been miiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiine"

 

 

Ordered the Calendar 2026.

Love the TTPD Shoot.

Puta being 7X platinum is so underwhelming…

3 minutes ago, Taylor fanboy said:

Puta being 7X platinum is so underwhelming…

it's over 8x as per BB

 

meltdown:

Spoiler

ok where to even start. my past 48hr have been nothing but taylor and i never want to hear Ophelia again (it's playing in my head right now). please keep in mind im a little emotional from drinking, being up for 20 hours and things i will go into. im just here to vent. i first listened to the LQ leak because i have a meme account so i wanted to be familiar with the songs so i could start posting immediately on friday. so i repeatedly listened to the LQ leak especially Ophelia. i was initially pleased with the album tho definitely a bit lukewarm. friday came around and i worked on my memes, posted and listened to the HQ a bit. i was preparing for a showgirl album release party so i wanted to know the tracks fairly well. at that point i realized most of them are not very danceable (red flag). i was still fairly into the album at that point though i was noticing which parts i dislike. it takes 1-2hours to travel to where this party was, i left around 9pm and took a small break from listening. i got in around 11:40, the doors had opened at 11. i was going by myself bc i don't have any swiftie friends, and arranged to watch the cinema premiere in the same night (5am in my timezone). thank god i had not gotten there any earlier. it was one small room with a small stage and dancefloor, with like 10-15 young girls. there were a couple of people by themselves at the bar and on the sidelines. i got myself a drink to help get into an outgoing mood. they had 'themed' cocktails, which my naive ass had expected to be fun and glittery. they were just basic spirit + extra flavor mixes like a regular vodka + lemonade type of drink. i bought the showgirl which was OJ and tequila and awkwardly sat down at a table looking towards the DJ and dancefloor. immediately i noticed the music was weird. this DJ girl looked so bored, she was barely dancing/moving and left her station to go behind stage during every song. the room was full of empty space, there was maybe 20-25 of us total, it was a major flop. and i didn't want to go approach these younger girls as im a slightly older guy there by myself, so i stayed at the table and bopped my head a bit with the music. a drag queen came on and did one song (YBWM). she barely danced, just walked around a bit and lipsynced with a fairly boring outfit. she promised that her second performance would be really good. she came back like 20 minutes later and did this really weird mashup. it was based on a Taylor SNL skit where she sings parody lyrics about herself then it would chop up between Mean, LWYMMD and keep cutting back to the monologue after like 10/20 seconds. she barely danced in that one too and nobody cared or knew about the SNL skit especially here in australia but still she was more fun then the absolutely terrible DJ that came back. granted i missed the first 40 minutes, but i didn't hear ANY of the following:

-15, Mine, Sparks Fly, BTD, Mean, BTR, SOG, IKYWT, WANEGBT, 22, BS, Style, SIO, OOTW, RFI, EG, IDSB, Delicate, LWYMMD, any folklore, ANY VAULT SONG, AH, LH, Karma

 

instead she played WEIRD choices like:

Smallest Man Who Ever Lived, TWILY, YNTCD, Wildest Dreams, Bejeweled, Fearless, Red, Lover, Ruin the friendship, TLOASG, Tolerate It

 

it literally felt like she just hit shuffle on TS. there was no flow or anything, slow songs that should come later like Wildest Dreams were played early in the night and straight after the random uptempo ones. it was a whole mess and she just kept leaving the stage and making bored faces when she was up there and trying to make eye contact with the cute bartender because nobody was there and i guess we were all embarrassed. WHY TF would you play the smallest man who ever lived?? im trying to dance and turn up!! and Tolerate It???? ***** play WIllow or something. the ONLY songs that we properly got into were Bad Blood and Getaway Car. everything else was just weird AF choices that you can't really dance to. these (mostly white) girls were giving their best and singing every lyric, but it's still cheesy TS songs that you can't really turn up to unless ur super drunk and/or in a safe space. like Red song after a bunch of taylor smashes and a few drinks? absolutely. same with most of those. but NOT when ur trying to warm up this flop room of like 20 people. just give us the up tempo hits we can dance to. ******* christ this ***** really ruined it and she looked so pissed to be there. the girls literally had to ask her to play Style and 22 at the end because we weren't satisfied. 

 

aside from getting up for the drag queen, i spent most of the first 90 mins checking grindr for hookups, slowly sipping drinks and bopping at the table. i had nowhere else to go and was waiting until 5am, so i wasn't in any hurry to leave. i was still planning to go anyway because it was so awkward, but then a girl came up to me and invited me to her group. she was very sweet and we all danced together for the last part. when it reached the final song ATW10MV we all sang loudly together as you do (one of my favorite memories was doing that at a house party) and we even huddled together in a circle, gently swaying singing 'wind in my hair, i was there...' it was definitely a cult fan witchy moment. the girl straight across from me was smiling and looking into my eyes as we sang the lyrics together, all of them were so sweet. in the midst of all the shitiness, im grateful that i was able to connect for a moment with these girls over the thing that brought us together. sadly i didn't make any friends out of the experience, but at least i have 1 good memory. then the emotional turbulence comes in.

 

so we finish the event with ATW10MV in really good spirits (it might be my favorite taylor song ever), then one girl demands Style and another demands 22, thankfully the DJ gave us both with the lights on as they started closing. THEN... this girl comes up to me and asks to talk when it's finished. she warns me that the convo could be awkward. i am well aware of the predicament, as i am the only grown guy there in a bunch of girls who spent most of the night watching them from the sides. she straight up asks me how old i am and whether im gay or straight. i answer truthfully and she says how she presumed i was straight for most of the night, up until that girl had invited me to talk/dance with her friends. i dont remember exactly what she said but basically her point was: it looks creepy, it makes the girls uncomfortable and i will have a better experience if i directly go up to the girls and say hi to people until i make it work. keep in mind, she was friendly with this, she wasn't being rude. she was actually being really sweet and was just trying to give me advice as i guess it's obvious that i don't go to clubs much. but there was nothing i could have really done tonight. the music was **** and i didn't feel like dancing, plus i can only dance for 1-2 hours at most, i usually get tired of dancing after like an hour. i am much happier sitting and drinking on the sideline usually. but IF there had been more people there, not just a couple of big groups of young girls, then i actually would have approached people and blended in a bit more. that's why i wasn't worried about going by myself, because i'm good enough at chatting to strangers and coasting by. but i didn't want to approach these younger girls and i didn't feel like dancing to Tolerate It and Ruin the Friendship! i explained a bit of that to her and she agreed that the night was a flop because nobody was there. my issue is not with her but just the situation in general- even though i hadn't really done anything wrong, nobody likes to hear that they might have looked like a creep. you'd think dressing fashionably and showing up to a taylor swift party would be enough to indicate that im not a typical straight guy (which she had partially acknowledged), but i guess it wasn't. and i absolutely do sympathize with the position it puts those girls in, having a random guy sitting alone near them. im not sure whether her main point was the creepiness or whether she was just encouraging me to put myself out there more, but as i explained it was a **** night anyway which resulted in me sitting outside by myself for like 2 hours waiting for the cinema. i was chatting with guys a bit on grindr but at this point didn't feel like hooking up with a random and was also conscious of my phone battery. i did ask some of the girls about the cinema premiere, but none of them even knew about it.

 

so eventually it came to 5am and i watched the TS special. Ophelia music video? great. fun. no notes. very beautiful and i appreciate the work put into it, the continuous shot moving around style reminded me of WANEGBT. not 100% gagged but the video is great. but then we get her short ass song explanations, these lyric videos and clips of Ophelia BTS inter spliced.

the BTS: at the end you get to watch Ophelia again after seeing all the different set productions. it made me appreciate it more for sure. but girl... the way she was acting in these BTS. keep in mind that im tired and emotional and just here to vent. ***** stop acting. stop cracking jokes and acting super friendly with these crew for the cameras. i KNOW that you are genuinely nice and a total professional all the time, so you don't need to be chummy like this. don't ASK if you can include your bread in the music video. if the director had said no, you literally would have fired her. we all know that you're the boss and creative control here, that's why we love you! this BTS is framed in a way to appeal to the masses and young girls who will laugh at her goofy persona and i am so over it. i never watch BTS or lyric videos anymore, so i know that they've always been like this, but im coming to this with fresh and older eyes so im perceiving it differently- if you watch all of her BTS and lyric videos then none of this will bother you. i also think it's fair to be a bit more critical when i paid to see this.

 

lyric videos: what basic pieces of ****. i could literally do 90% of these in premiere pro right now. the saving grace was the puta font reference in Cancelled. Elizabeth Taylor was the first one we saw after the Ophelia music video and it was the WORST WORST WORST!!!! such a beautiful and stunning look/set, yet her movements are SO awful. so ungraceful and unsexy. how the **** did this get approved??? taylor has always struggled with her physicality, and i have mostly come to accept it and not let it bother me. with that in mind the Ophelia video is actually incredible because she doesn't look cringe at all, except for half a second when she's popping her back/ass out. and this shot of the ET lyric video is from Ophelia, so why is it so bad?? watching her on loop awkwardly trying to be sexy for 3 minutes... Britney in her house could record a better and more sexy clip than this. it doesn't help that i don't like the song either. it bops but it's too serious and annoying for me, Miss America was enough. the other lyric videos range from boring/repetitive to passable. there are a couple where she's holding the camera herself like a selfie- those are way too basic. literally looks like they're shot on an iphone. i hate the way she's using these expensive, beautiful glamorous visuals and combining it with glitter gel pens, the most basic music and the most basic formatted lyric videos. now if this was just on youtube, i wouldn't be complaining- but i experienced this in the cinema. this is not an acceptable standard for you to be charging fans to see imo. the ones that don't have an annoying/boring loop of her posing just use a chopped/glitchy backdrop that is so so simple and not impressive to look at. it works, and some of them are passable, but it's such a low standard. i dont even care about lyric videos that much but i was here watching them and already pissed.

 

the music- so by watching those lyric videos, it was even easier to see the parts in the album that piss me off. BTW, the film is the clean version of the album. so no '*****', no ****, no 'makes me wet'. it makes the album lose its edge and makes the songs feel like grocery store music. taylor just have the artistic backbone for ONCE to commit to ur vision instead of catering to the kids. can't you have 2 versions in the cinema, one for kids and one for adults??? these clean versions are ******* lame and really take a lot of spice out of the tracks, because the tracks were already lacking spice to begin with. the lyrics are the predominant issue, and the clean versions makes it worse- 'makes me sweat' instead of wet is not a sufficient zinger/climax to one of the better songs. i can't even remember what she says instead of '*****' but i know it was unremarkable. OH the important one, no 'my dick is bigger!'. that's like the whole song!! we NEED to see the words 'because my dick is bigger' on the screen. without that it's not even the same song. she sang 'my check is bigger' in the bridge, i dont remember the rest of it. Wood is such a basic bland Maroon 5 ass disco-ey pop song. the main issue with Maroon 5 is that they have like 10 singles that all use that sound, which Taylor does not. so even tho it's very very basic, im not too critical of that sound for her. but the sound was whack in the cinema. the 'knock on wood' sound effect was EXTREMELY loud, it overpowered the whole song  it was like someone was banging on a door outside the cinema. you could also hear a loud tambourine? and some of the tambourine hits were off beat, it sounded so sloppy. i think the knocks and tambourine were in the same stem file and not mixed properly with the song in this cinema file. Ophelia and Opalite are fun shimmery pop songs, and i want to like them, but at the same time they're so plain and reminiscent of what she's done before. there's a level of musical competence that stops anything from being truly awful- taylor has enough pop melody, max and shellback can have shiny instrumentals, and max is pushing taylor to belt, give some ad libs and larger than average stacks of harmonies. that's why the album is okay, because we haven't had stacked harmonies, belting and ad libs from taylor in ages. or breezy up tempo tracks. but if you look more closely, this album really doesn't hold a candle to most of the work she's done in the past decade. i was a major ttpd/ta apologist, i saw the signs of artistic burnout and unnecessary writer prose but tried to look the other way and forgive her because she still struck gold in that album. i don't come back to those songs but i hope i will because while there are obvious and major flaws, there's a lot of heart and greatness too. my worst fear was that we would get an album full of The Alchemy's, and we did. a bunch of unremarkable, unambitious love songs. with glitter gel hearts in the byline. but the difference is that The Alchemy has a terrible melody and instrumental, these songs don't. so the album is replayable and im sure i'll come back to it when i get over overplaying it this weekend. some of the other terrible lyric moments played out on screen: 'have fun, it's prom'. that one is a real dud and i don't think i will be able to move past it. which is a shame because RTF is close to being the best song on the album, but these lyrics need to be sharp and perfect but they're just not. the climax of it is on the words 'that than' ('Better that than regret it for all time'). you can't belt the high notes on 'that than'. phonetically it sounds bad and it's an amateur move. the reason why the crumpled up piece of paper part in ATW hits so hard and stands out is because every word PUNCHES when she belts it. OH you TORE me up AGAINnn, JUST TO BREAK ME LIKE A PROMISE. phonetics are really important in pop songs, both in big moments and the little more spacious moments like 'have fun, it's prom'. it's really important for the phonetics to pop in both of those. another example of weak lyrics phonetics in a climax is 'cos honey i'll, come get my THINGS but i can't let go' - things is not a strong word and reduces the impact of the chorus. it's not fun to sing along to. 'things' as a word does not pop. but back to taylor- 'you can call me honey if you want, cos i'm the one you want' - i think that's the lyric? lazy, annoying. this album has many filler visual type of lyrics, the kind of stuff that people always make fun of her for- the view of portofino was on my mind, cry my eyes violet, under bright lights, summertime spritz pink skies. 'i have been afflicted by a terminal uniqueness' - seeing that on the screen pissed me off. i also think the sabrina duet is ****, but i appreciated it a tiny bit more after her explanation.

 

her song explanations: a brief 5-10 minute video with not much depth for the kids. okay miss katy perry. im glad that we got it at all, but come on ***** just give us a bit more. please im begging. in Wood she basically said nothing, avoiding the sexual innuendo entirely. this ***** really spent like 10 minutes in the studio giving us this footage that wraps the whole film special together. and she's not even giving a look, she's dressed super normally. Ophelia was quite good combined with the BTS discussion, as im not familiar with the character so having her discuss Ophelia's demise and shakespeare actually helped a lot. TLOAS as a song a little bit confusing in terms of the tone/impression we're supposed to get, but she clarified that Kitty the showgirl is supposed to be nice and cautionary to the protagonist- i initially thought she was being a bit mean and standoffish. Father Figure was vague as obviously she doesn't want to say what it's really about, though she did mention that she relates to the older character as well as the younger one. i had totally forgot about the George Michael sample, it doesn't even register when you listen to the song. i guess it's more of a lyric copyright over anything else, though she said it was the inspiration as well. in Cancelled she said that people come to her often for advice/support when dealing with trouble. my guess is that Sabrina is the main person who has been under fire lately and coming to her. i can't imagine who else would, but she says it was lots of people so that makes me curious. who would be getting backlash and going to Taylor? i doubt Camila would. maybe Selena. i dont remember or care about most of her friends anyway. but like, Shawn and Gracie etc are not the backlash type of artists... girl all ur friends are vanilla teenpop. speaking of, i hate that she's still singing about trampolines and second period. i will accept it on this album, but enough is enough. come back to the present and stop this childhood and high school nostalgia. she mentioned for RTF that she rarely thinks or writes about high school and girl... that's a straight up lie. i really tried my best to accept and support these childhood lyrics on the past few albums, but i can't handle any more of it. did she really have that many profound and positive experiences from those days? or is she just making them up as characters? can't you make up memories and stories for adults instead? ITTG and TIMT are masterpieces because they're heartfelt vulnerable stories about adults.

 

so then, with no hookups, a mid album, sadness and not much success, i made my long journey home to immediately be hit with Ophelia when i got in the uber. it was the perfect cherry on the cake to end this flop of taylor mania week. i will now be decompressing for the next 7 days.

 

I did some research and I have a new theory:

 

She will release a documentary called "The crowd is my king".

 

Let's see if I got that right. 

 

 

On 10/4/2025 at 4:11 AM, Syňth said:

meltdown:

  Hide contents

ok where to even start. my past 48hr have been nothing but taylor and i never want to hear Ophelia again (it's playing in my head right now). please keep in mind im a little emotional from drinking, being up for 20 hours and things i will go into. im just here to vent. i first listened to the LQ leak because i have a meme account so i wanted to be familiar with the songs so i could start posting immediately on friday. so i repeatedly listened to the LQ leak especially Ophelia. i was initially pleased with the album tho definitely a bit lukewarm. friday came around and i worked on my memes, posted and listened to the HQ a bit. i was preparing for a showgirl album release party so i wanted to know the tracks fairly well. at that point i realized most of them are not very danceable (red flag). i was still fairly into the album at that point though i was noticing which parts i dislike. it takes 1-2hours to travel to where this party was, i left around 9pm and took a small break from listening. i got in around 11:40, the doors had opened at 11. i was going by myself bc i don't have any swiftie friends, and arranged to watch the cinema premiere in the same night (5am in my timezone). thank god i had not gotten there any earlier. it was one small room with a small stage and dancefloor, with like 10-15 young girls. there were a couple of people by themselves at the bar and on the sidelines. i got myself a drink to help get into an outgoing mood. they had 'themed' cocktails, which my naive ass had expected to be fun and glittery. they were just basic spirit + extra flavor mixes like a regular vodka + lemonade type of drink. i bought the showgirl which was OJ and tequila and awkwardly sat down at a table looking towards the DJ and dancefloor. immediately i noticed the music was weird. this DJ girl looked so bored, she was barely dancing/moving and left her station to go behind stage during every song. the room was full of empty space, there was maybe 20-25 of us total, it was a major flop. and i didn't want to go approach these younger girls as im a slightly older guy there by myself, so i stayed at the table and bopped my head a bit with the music. a drag queen came on and did one song (YBWM). she barely danced, just walked around a bit and lipsynced with a fairly boring outfit. she promised that her second performance would be really good. she came back like 20 minutes later and did this really weird mashup. it was based on a Taylor SNL skit where she sings parody lyrics about herself then it would chop up between Mean, LWYMMD and keep cutting back to the monologue after like 10/20 seconds. she barely danced in that one too and nobody cared or knew about the SNL skit especially here in australia but still she was more fun then the absolutely terrible DJ that came back. granted i missed the first 40 minutes, but i didn't hear ANY of the following:

-15, Mine, Sparks Fly, BTD, Mean, BTR, SOG, IKYWT, WANEGBT, 22, BS, Style, SIO, OOTW, RFI, EG, IDSB, Delicate, LWYMMD, any folklore, ANY VAULT SONG, AH, LH, Karma

 

instead she played WEIRD choices like:

Smallest Man Who Ever Lived, TWILY, YNTCD, Wildest Dreams, Bejeweled, Fearless, Red, Lover, Ruin the friendship, TLOASG, Tolerate It

 

it literally felt like she just hit shuffle on TS. there was no flow or anything, slow songs that should come later like Wildest Dreams were played early in the night and straight after the random uptempo ones. it was a whole mess and she just kept leaving the stage and making bored faces when she was up there and trying to make eye contact with the cute bartender because nobody was there and i guess we were all embarrassed. WHY TF would you play the smallest man who ever lived?? im trying to dance and turn up!! and Tolerate It???? ***** play WIllow or something. the ONLY songs that we properly got into were Bad Blood and Getaway Car. everything else was just weird AF choices that you can't really dance to. these (mostly white) girls were giving their best and singing every lyric, but it's still cheesy TS songs that you can't really turn up to unless ur super drunk and/or in a safe space. like Red song after a bunch of taylor smashes and a few drinks? absolutely. same with most of those. but NOT when ur trying to warm up this flop room of like 20 people. just give us the up tempo hits we can dance to. ******* christ this ***** really ruined it and she looked so pissed to be there. the girls literally had to ask her to play Style and 22 at the end because we weren't satisfied. 

 

aside from getting up for the drag queen, i spent most of the first 90 mins checking grindr for hookups, slowly sipping drinks and bopping at the table. i had nowhere else to go and was waiting until 5am, so i wasn't in any hurry to leave. i was still planning to go anyway because it was so awkward, but then a girl came up to me and invited me to her group. she was very sweet and we all danced together for the last part. when it reached the final song ATW10MV we all sang loudly together as you do (one of my favorite memories was doing that at a house party) and we even huddled together in a circle, gently swaying singing 'wind in my hair, i was there...' it was definitely a cult fan witchy moment. the girl straight across from me was smiling and looking into my eyes as we sang the lyrics together, all of them were so sweet. in the midst of all the shitiness, im grateful that i was able to connect for a moment with these girls over the thing that brought us together. sadly i didn't make any friends out of the experience, but at least i have 1 good memory. then the emotional turbulence comes in.

 

so we finish the event with ATW10MV in really good spirits (it might be my favorite taylor song ever), then one girl demands Style and another demands 22, thankfully the DJ gave us both with the lights on as they started closing. THEN... this girl comes up to me and asks to talk when it's finished. she warns me that the convo could be awkward. i am well aware of the predicament, as i am the only grown guy there in a bunch of girls who spent most of the night watching them from the sides. she straight up asks me how old i am and whether im gay or straight. i answer truthfully and she says how she presumed i was straight for most of the night, up until that girl had invited me to talk/dance with her friends. i dont remember exactly what she said but basically her point was: it looks creepy, it makes the girls uncomfortable and i will have a better experience if i directly go up to the girls and say hi to people until i make it work. keep in mind, she was friendly with this, she wasn't being rude. she was actually being really sweet and was just trying to give me advice as i guess it's obvious that i don't go to clubs much. but there was nothing i could have really done tonight. the music was **** and i didn't feel like dancing, plus i can only dance for 1-2 hours at most, i usually get tired of dancing after like an hour. i am much happier sitting and drinking on the sideline usually. but IF there had been more people there, not just a couple of big groups of young girls, then i actually would have approached people and blended in a bit more. that's why i wasn't worried about going by myself, because i'm good enough at chatting to strangers and coasting by. but i didn't want to approach these younger girls and i didn't feel like dancing to Tolerate It and Ruin the Friendship! i explained a bit of that to her and she agreed that the night was a flop because nobody was there. my issue is not with her but just the situation in general- even though i hadn't really done anything wrong, nobody likes to hear that they might have looked like a creep. you'd think dressing fashionably and showing up to a taylor swift party would be enough to indicate that im not a typical straight guy (which she had partially acknowledged), but i guess it wasn't. and i absolutely do sympathize with the position it puts those girls in, having a random guy sitting alone near them. im not sure whether her main point was the creepiness or whether she was just encouraging me to put myself out there more, but as i explained it was a **** night anyway which resulted in me sitting outside by myself for like 2 hours waiting for the cinema. i was chatting with guys a bit on grindr but at this point didn't feel like hooking up with a random and was also conscious of my phone battery. i did ask some of the girls about the cinema premiere, but none of them even knew about it.

 

so eventually it came to 5am and i watched the TS special. Ophelia music video? great. fun. no notes. very beautiful and i appreciate the work put into it, the continuous shot moving around style reminded me of WANEGBT. not 100% gagged but the video is great. but then we get her short ass song explanations, these lyric videos and clips of Ophelia BTS inter spliced.

the BTS: at the end you get to watch Ophelia again after seeing all the different set productions. it made me appreciate it more for sure. but girl... the way she was acting in these BTS. keep in mind that im tired and emotional and just here to vent. ***** stop acting. stop cracking jokes and acting super friendly with these crew for the cameras. i KNOW that you are genuinely nice and a total professional all the time, so you don't need to be chummy like this. don't ASK if you can include your bread in the music video. if the director had said no, you literally would have fired her. we all know that you're the boss and creative control here, that's why we love you! this BTS is framed in a way to appeal to the masses and young girls who will laugh at her goofy persona and i am so over it. i never watch BTS or lyric videos anymore, so i know that they've always been like this, but im coming to this with fresh and older eyes so im perceiving it differently- if you watch all of her BTS and lyric videos then none of this will bother you. i also think it's fair to be a bit more critical when i paid to see this.

 

lyric videos: what basic pieces of ****. i could literally do 90% of these in premiere pro right now. the saving grace was the puta font reference in Cancelled. Elizabeth Taylor was the first one we saw after the Ophelia music video and it was the WORST WORST WORST!!!! such a beautiful and stunning look/set, yet her movements are SO awful. so ungraceful and unsexy. how the **** did this get approved??? taylor has always struggled with her physicality, and i have mostly come to accept it and not let it bother me. with that in mind the Ophelia video is actually incredible because she doesn't look cringe at all, except for half a second when she's popping her back/ass out. and this shot of the ET lyric video is from Ophelia, so why is it so bad?? watching her on loop awkwardly trying to be sexy for 3 minutes... Britney in her house could record a better and more sexy clip than this. it doesn't help that i don't like the song either. it bops but it's too serious and annoying for me, Miss America was enough. the other lyric videos range from boring/repetitive to passable. there are a couple where she's holding the camera herself like a selfie- those are way too basic. literally looks like they're shot on an iphone. i hate the way she's using these expensive, beautiful glamorous visuals and combining it with glitter gel pens, the most basic music and the most basic formatted lyric videos. now if this was just on youtube, i wouldn't be complaining- but i experienced this in the cinema. this is not an acceptable standard for you to be charging fans to see imo. the ones that don't have an annoying/boring loop of her posing just use a chopped/glitchy backdrop that is so so simple and not impressive to look at. it works, and some of them are passable, but it's such a low standard. i dont even care about lyric videos that much but i was here watching them and already pissed.

 

the music- so by watching those lyric videos, it was even easier to see the parts in the album that piss me off. BTW, the film is the clean version of the album. so no '*****', no ****, no 'makes me wet'. it makes the album lose its edge and makes the songs feel like grocery store music. taylor just have the artistic backbone for ONCE to commit to ur vision instead of catering to the kids. can't you have 2 versions in the cinema, one for kids and one for adults??? these clean versions are ******* lame and really take a lot of spice out of the tracks, because the tracks were already lacking spice to begin with. the lyrics are the predominant issue, and the clean versions makes it worse- 'makes me sweat' instead of wet is not a sufficient zinger/climax to one of the better songs. i can't even remember what she says instead of '*****' but i know it was unremarkable. OH the important one, no 'my dick is bigger!'. that's like the whole song!! we NEED to see the words 'because my dick is bigger' on the screen. without that it's not even the same song. she sang 'my check is bigger' in the bridge, i dont remember the rest of it. Wood is such a basic bland Maroon 5 ass disco-ey pop song. the main issue with Maroon 5 is that they have like 10 singles that all use that sound, which Taylor does not. so even tho it's very very basic, im not too critical of that sound for her. but the sound was whack in the cinema. the 'knock on wood' sound effect was EXTREMELY loud, it overpowered the whole song  it was like someone was banging on a door outside the cinema. you could also hear a loud tambourine? and some of the tambourine hits were off beat, it sounded so sloppy. i think the knocks and tambourine were in the same stem file and not mixed properly with the song in this cinema file. Ophelia and Opalite are fun shimmery pop songs, and i want to like them, but at the same time they're so plain and reminiscent of what she's done before. there's a level of musical competence that stops anything from being truly awful- taylor has enough pop melody, max and shellback can have shiny instrumentals, and max is pushing taylor to belt, give some ad libs and larger than average stacks of harmonies. that's why the album is okay, because we haven't had stacked harmonies, belting and ad libs from taylor in ages. or breezy up tempo tracks. but if you look more closely, this album really doesn't hold a candle to most of the work she's done in the past decade. i was a major ttpd/ta apologist, i saw the signs of artistic burnout and unnecessary writer prose but tried to look the other way and forgive her because she still struck gold in that album. i don't come back to those songs but i hope i will because while there are obvious and major flaws, there's a lot of heart and greatness too. my worst fear was that we would get an album full of The Alchemy's, and we did. a bunch of unremarkable, unambitious love songs. with glitter gel hearts in the byline. but the difference is that The Alchemy has a terrible melody and instrumental, these songs don't. so the album is replayable and im sure i'll come back to it when i get over overplaying it this weekend. some of the other terrible lyric moments played out on screen: 'have fun, it's prom'. that one is a real dud and i don't think i will be able to move past it. which is a shame because RTF is close to being the best song on the album, but these lyrics need to be sharp and perfect but they're just not. the climax of it is on the words 'that than' ('Better that than regret it for all time'). you can't belt the high notes on 'that than'. phonetically it sounds bad and it's an amateur move. the reason why the crumpled up piece of paper part in ATW hits so hard and stands out is because every word PUNCHES when she belts it. OH you TORE me up AGAINnn, JUST TO BREAK ME LIKE A PROMISE. phonetics are really important in pop songs, both in big moments and the little more spacious moments like 'have fun, it's prom'. it's really important for the phonetics to pop in both of those. another example of weak lyrics phonetics in a climax is 'cos honey i'll, come get my THINGS but i can't let go' - things is not a strong word and reduces the impact of the chorus. it's not fun to sing along to. 'things' as a word does not pop. but back to taylor- 'you can call me honey if you want, cos i'm the one you want' - i think that's the lyric? lazy, annoying. this album has many filler visual type of lyrics, the kind of stuff that people always make fun of her for- the view of portofino was on my mind, cry my eyes violet, under bright lights, summertime spritz pink skies. 'i have been afflicted by a terminal uniqueness' - seeing that on the screen pissed me off. i also think the sabrina duet is ****, but i appreciated it a tiny bit more after her explanation.

 

her song explanations: a brief 5-10 minute video with not much depth for the kids. okay miss katy perry. im glad that we got it at all, but come on ***** just give us a bit more. please im begging. in Wood she basically said nothing, avoiding the sexual innuendo entirely. this ***** really spent like 10 minutes in the studio giving us this footage that wraps the whole film special together. and she's not even giving a look, she's dressed super normally. Ophelia was quite good combined with the BTS discussion, as im not familiar with the character so having her discuss Ophelia's demise and shakespeare actually helped a lot. TLOAS as a song a little bit confusing in terms of the tone/impression we're supposed to get, but she clarified that Kitty the showgirl is supposed to be nice and cautionary to the protagonist- i initially thought she was being a bit mean and standoffish. Father Figure was vague as obviously she doesn't want to say what it's really about, though she did mention that she relates to the older character as well as the younger one. i had totally forgot about the George Michael sample, it doesn't even register when you listen to the song. i guess it's more of a lyric copyright over anything else, though she said it was the inspiration as well. in Cancelled she said that people come to her often for advice/support when dealing with trouble. my guess is that Sabrina is the main person who has been under fire lately and coming to her. i can't imagine who else would, but she says it was lots of people so that makes me curious. who would be getting backlash and going to Taylor? i doubt Camila would. maybe Selena. i dont remember or care about most of her friends anyway. but like, Shawn and Gracie etc are not the backlash type of artists... girl all ur friends are vanilla teenpop. speaking of, i hate that she's still singing about trampolines and second period. i will accept it on this album, but enough is enough. come back to the present and stop this childhood and high school nostalgia. she mentioned for RTF that she rarely thinks or writes about high school and girl... that's a straight up lie. i really tried my best to accept and support these childhood lyrics on the past few albums, but i can't handle any more of it. did she really have that many profound and positive experiences from those days? or is she just making them up as characters? can't you make up memories and stories for adults instead? ITTG and TIMT are masterpieces because they're heartfelt vulnerable stories about adults.

 

so then, with no hookups, a mid album, sadness and not much success, i made my long journey home to immediately be hit with Ophelia when i got in the uber. it was the perfect cherry on the cake to end this flop of taylor mania week. i will now be decompressing for the next 7 days.

 

Just in case this is useful for anyone else:

This text is a lengthy, highly emotional, and critical review of a Taylor Swift album release experience, which the writer refers to as "Taylor Mania." The writer expresses deep fatigue, having been awake for 20 hours and drinking. 

 

The core of the emotional turmoil came from a disastrous album release party in Australia:
The party was a major flop, held in a small room with only 20–25 people, mostly young girls. The writer, an older male attending alone, felt awkward and isolated. Immediately after the party ended, one of the girls approached the writer to offer "advice." She pointed out that his behavior—a grown guy sitting alone on the sidelines watching younger girls—looked "creepy" and made some of the girls uncomfortable.

The writer defended himself, explaining the music was bad, he was tired, and the room was too empty, but acknowledges that no one likes to hear they looked like a creep.

He felt judged, despite believing he had done nothing wrong and that his "fashionable" appearance should have indicated he wasn't a "typical straight guy."

 

The writer concludes the weekend was a complete "flop" characterized by a mid-album, sadness, no hookups, and a final, annoying hearing of "Ophelia" in the Uber home. He is now planning a seven-day decompression period from "Taylor mania."

OMG what is #THAT 

this serve!

 

 

On 10/3/2025 at 10:11 PM, Syňth said:

meltdown:

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ok where to even start. my past 48hr have been nothing but taylor and i never want to hear Ophelia again (it's playing in my head right now). please keep in mind im a little emotional from drinking, being up for 20 hours and things i will go into. im just here to vent. i first listened to the LQ leak because i have a meme account so i wanted to be familiar with the songs so i could start posting immediately on friday. so i repeatedly listened to the LQ leak especially Ophelia. i was initially pleased with the album tho definitely a bit lukewarm. friday came around and i worked on my memes, posted and listened to the HQ a bit. i was preparing for a showgirl album release party so i wanted to know the tracks fairly well. at that point i realized most of them are not very danceable (red flag). i was still fairly into the album at that point though i was noticing which parts i dislike. it takes 1-2hours to travel to where this party was, i left around 9pm and took a small break from listening. i got in around 11:40, the doors had opened at 11. i was going by myself bc i don't have any swiftie friends, and arranged to watch the cinema premiere in the same night (5am in my timezone). thank god i had not gotten there any earlier. it was one small room with a small stage and dancefloor, with like 10-15 young girls. there were a couple of people by themselves at the bar and on the sidelines. i got myself a drink to help get into an outgoing mood. they had 'themed' cocktails, which my naive ass had expected to be fun and glittery. they were just basic spirit + extra flavor mixes like a regular vodka + lemonade type of drink. i bought the showgirl which was OJ and tequila and awkwardly sat down at a table looking towards the DJ and dancefloor. immediately i noticed the music was weird. this DJ girl looked so bored, she was barely dancing/moving and left her station to go behind stage during every song. the room was full of empty space, there was maybe 20-25 of us total, it was a major flop. and i didn't want to go approach these younger girls as im a slightly older guy there by myself, so i stayed at the table and bopped my head a bit with the music. a drag queen came on and did one song (YBWM). she barely danced, just walked around a bit and lipsynced with a fairly boring outfit. she promised that her second performance would be really good. she came back like 20 minutes later and did this really weird mashup. it was based on a Taylor SNL skit where she sings parody lyrics about herself then it would chop up between Mean, LWYMMD and keep cutting back to the monologue after like 10/20 seconds. she barely danced in that one too and nobody cared or knew about the SNL skit especially here in australia but still she was more fun then the absolutely terrible DJ that came back. granted i missed the first 40 minutes, but i didn't hear ANY of the following:

-15, Mine, Sparks Fly, BTD, Mean, BTR, SOG, IKYWT, WANEGBT, 22, BS, Style, SIO, OOTW, RFI, EG, IDSB, Delicate, LWYMMD, any folklore, ANY VAULT SONG, AH, LH, Karma

 

instead she played WEIRD choices like:

Smallest Man Who Ever Lived, TWILY, YNTCD, Wildest Dreams, Bejeweled, Fearless, Red, Lover, Ruin the friendship, TLOASG, Tolerate It

 

it literally felt like she just hit shuffle on TS. there was no flow or anything, slow songs that should come later like Wildest Dreams were played early in the night and straight after the random uptempo ones. it was a whole mess and she just kept leaving the stage and making bored faces when she was up there and trying to make eye contact with the cute bartender because nobody was there and i guess we were all embarrassed. WHY TF would you play the smallest man who ever lived?? im trying to dance and turn up!! and Tolerate It???? ***** play WIllow or something. the ONLY songs that we properly got into were Bad Blood and Getaway Car. everything else was just weird AF choices that you can't really dance to. these (mostly white) girls were giving their best and singing every lyric, but it's still cheesy TS songs that you can't really turn up to unless ur super drunk and/or in a safe space. like Red song after a bunch of taylor smashes and a few drinks? absolutely. same with most of those. but NOT when ur trying to warm up this flop room of like 20 people. just give us the up tempo hits we can dance to. ******* christ this ***** really ruined it and she looked so pissed to be there. the girls literally had to ask her to play Style and 22 at the end because we weren't satisfied. 

 

aside from getting up for the drag queen, i spent most of the first 90 mins checking grindr for hookups, slowly sipping drinks and bopping at the table. i had nowhere else to go and was waiting until 5am, so i wasn't in any hurry to leave. i was still planning to go anyway because it was so awkward, but then a girl came up to me and invited me to her group. she was very sweet and we all danced together for the last part. when it reached the final song ATW10MV we all sang loudly together as you do (one of my favorite memories was doing that at a house party) and we even huddled together in a circle, gently swaying singing 'wind in my hair, i was there...' it was definitely a cult fan witchy moment. the girl straight across from me was smiling and looking into my eyes as we sang the lyrics together, all of them were so sweet. in the midst of all the shitiness, im grateful that i was able to connect for a moment with these girls over the thing that brought us together. sadly i didn't make any friends out of the experience, but at least i have 1 good memory. then the emotional turbulence comes in.

 

so we finish the event with ATW10MV in really good spirits (it might be my favorite taylor song ever), then one girl demands Style and another demands 22, thankfully the DJ gave us both with the lights on as they started closing. THEN... this girl comes up to me and asks to talk when it's finished. she warns me that the convo could be awkward. i am well aware of the predicament, as i am the only grown guy there in a bunch of girls who spent most of the night watching them from the sides. she straight up asks me how old i am and whether im gay or straight. i answer truthfully and she says how she presumed i was straight for most of the night, up until that girl had invited me to talk/dance with her friends. i dont remember exactly what she said but basically her point was: it looks creepy, it makes the girls uncomfortable and i will have a better experience if i directly go up to the girls and say hi to people until i make it work. keep in mind, she was friendly with this, she wasn't being rude. she was actually being really sweet and was just trying to give me advice as i guess it's obvious that i don't go to clubs much. but there was nothing i could have really done tonight. the music was **** and i didn't feel like dancing, plus i can only dance for 1-2 hours at most, i usually get tired of dancing after like an hour. i am much happier sitting and drinking on the sideline usually. but IF there had been more people there, not just a couple of big groups of young girls, then i actually would have approached people and blended in a bit more. that's why i wasn't worried about going by myself, because i'm good enough at chatting to strangers and coasting by. but i didn't want to approach these younger girls and i didn't feel like dancing to Tolerate It and Ruin the Friendship! i explained a bit of that to her and she agreed that the night was a flop because nobody was there. my issue is not with her but just the situation in general- even though i hadn't really done anything wrong, nobody likes to hear that they might have looked like a creep. you'd think dressing fashionably and showing up to a taylor swift party would be enough to indicate that im not a typical straight guy (which she had partially acknowledged), but i guess it wasn't. and i absolutely do sympathize with the position it puts those girls in, having a random guy sitting alone near them. im not sure whether her main point was the creepiness or whether she was just encouraging me to put myself out there more, but as i explained it was a **** night anyway which resulted in me sitting outside by myself for like 2 hours waiting for the cinema. i was chatting with guys a bit on grindr but at this point didn't feel like hooking up with a random and was also conscious of my phone battery. i did ask some of the girls about the cinema premiere, but none of them even knew about it.

 

so eventually it came to 5am and i watched the TS special. Ophelia music video? great. fun. no notes. very beautiful and i appreciate the work put into it, the continuous shot moving around style reminded me of WANEGBT. not 100% gagged but the video is great. but then we get her short ass song explanations, these lyric videos and clips of Ophelia BTS inter spliced.

the BTS: at the end you get to watch Ophelia again after seeing all the different set productions. it made me appreciate it more for sure. but girl... the way she was acting in these BTS. keep in mind that im tired and emotional and just here to vent. ***** stop acting. stop cracking jokes and acting super friendly with these crew for the cameras. i KNOW that you are genuinely nice and a total professional all the time, so you don't need to be chummy like this. don't ASK if you can include your bread in the music video. if the director had said no, you literally would have fired her. we all know that you're the boss and creative control here, that's why we love you! this BTS is framed in a way to appeal to the masses and young girls who will laugh at her goofy persona and i am so over it. i never watch BTS or lyric videos anymore, so i know that they've always been like this, but im coming to this with fresh and older eyes so im perceiving it differently- if you watch all of her BTS and lyric videos then none of this will bother you. i also think it's fair to be a bit more critical when i paid to see this.

 

lyric videos: what basic pieces of ****. i could literally do 90% of these in premiere pro right now. the saving grace was the puta font reference in Cancelled. Elizabeth Taylor was the first one we saw after the Ophelia music video and it was the WORST WORST WORST!!!! such a beautiful and stunning look/set, yet her movements are SO awful. so ungraceful and unsexy. how the **** did this get approved??? taylor has always struggled with her physicality, and i have mostly come to accept it and not let it bother me. with that in mind the Ophelia video is actually incredible because she doesn't look cringe at all, except for half a second when she's popping her back/ass out. and this shot of the ET lyric video is from Ophelia, so why is it so bad?? watching her on loop awkwardly trying to be sexy for 3 minutes... Britney in her house could record a better and more sexy clip than this. it doesn't help that i don't like the song either. it bops but it's too serious and annoying for me, Miss America was enough. the other lyric videos range from boring/repetitive to passable. there are a couple where she's holding the camera herself like a selfie- those are way too basic. literally looks like they're shot on an iphone. i hate the way she's using these expensive, beautiful glamorous visuals and combining it with glitter gel pens, the most basic music and the most basic formatted lyric videos. now if this was just on youtube, i wouldn't be complaining- but i experienced this in the cinema. this is not an acceptable standard for you to be charging fans to see imo. the ones that don't have an annoying/boring loop of her posing just use a chopped/glitchy backdrop that is so so simple and not impressive to look at. it works, and some of them are passable, but it's such a low standard. i dont even care about lyric videos that much but i was here watching them and already pissed.

 

the music- so by watching those lyric videos, it was even easier to see the parts in the album that piss me off. BTW, the film is the clean version of the album. so no '*****', no ****, no 'makes me wet'. it makes the album lose its edge and makes the songs feel like grocery store music. taylor just have the artistic backbone for ONCE to commit to ur vision instead of catering to the kids. can't you have 2 versions in the cinema, one for kids and one for adults??? these clean versions are ******* lame and really take a lot of spice out of the tracks, because the tracks were already lacking spice to begin with. the lyrics are the predominant issue, and the clean versions makes it worse- 'makes me sweat' instead of wet is not a sufficient zinger/climax to one of the better songs. i can't even remember what she says instead of '*****' but i know it was unremarkable. OH the important one, no 'my dick is bigger!'. that's like the whole song!! we NEED to see the words 'because my dick is bigger' on the screen. without that it's not even the same song. she sang 'my check is bigger' in the bridge, i dont remember the rest of it. Wood is such a basic bland Maroon 5 ass disco-ey pop song. the main issue with Maroon 5 is that they have like 10 singles that all use that sound, which Taylor does not. so even tho it's very very basic, im not too critical of that sound for her. but the sound was whack in the cinema. the 'knock on wood' sound effect was EXTREMELY loud, it overpowered the whole song  it was like someone was banging on a door outside the cinema. you could also hear a loud tambourine? and some of the tambourine hits were off beat, it sounded so sloppy. i think the knocks and tambourine were in the same stem file and not mixed properly with the song in this cinema file. Ophelia and Opalite are fun shimmery pop songs, and i want to like them, but at the same time they're so plain and reminiscent of what she's done before. there's a level of musical competence that stops anything from being truly awful- taylor has enough pop melody, max and shellback can have shiny instrumentals, and max is pushing taylor to belt, give some ad libs and larger than average stacks of harmonies. that's why the album is okay, because we haven't had stacked harmonies, belting and ad libs from taylor in ages. or breezy up tempo tracks. but if you look more closely, this album really doesn't hold a candle to most of the work she's done in the past decade. i was a major ttpd/ta apologist, i saw the signs of artistic burnout and unnecessary writer prose but tried to look the other way and forgive her because she still struck gold in that album. i don't come back to those songs but i hope i will because while there are obvious and major flaws, there's a lot of heart and greatness too. my worst fear was that we would get an album full of The Alchemy's, and we did. a bunch of unremarkable, unambitious love songs. with glitter gel hearts in the byline. but the difference is that The Alchemy has a terrible melody and instrumental, these songs don't. so the album is replayable and im sure i'll come back to it when i get over overplaying it this weekend. some of the other terrible lyric moments played out on screen: 'have fun, it's prom'. that one is a real dud and i don't think i will be able to move past it. which is a shame because RTF is close to being the best song on the album, but these lyrics need to be sharp and perfect but they're just not. the climax of it is on the words 'that than' ('Better that than regret it for all time'). you can't belt the high notes on 'that than'. phonetically it sounds bad and it's an amateur move. the reason why the crumpled up piece of paper part in ATW hits so hard and stands out is because every word PUNCHES when she belts it. OH you TORE me up AGAINnn, JUST TO BREAK ME LIKE A PROMISE. phonetics are really important in pop songs, both in big moments and the little more spacious moments like 'have fun, it's prom'. it's really important for the phonetics to pop in both of those. another example of weak lyrics phonetics in a climax is 'cos honey i'll, come get my THINGS but i can't let go' - things is not a strong word and reduces the impact of the chorus. it's not fun to sing along to. 'things' as a word does not pop. but back to taylor- 'you can call me honey if you want, cos i'm the one you want' - i think that's the lyric? lazy, annoying. this album has many filler visual type of lyrics, the kind of stuff that people always make fun of her for- the view of portofino was on my mind, cry my eyes violet, under bright lights, summertime spritz pink skies. 'i have been afflicted by a terminal uniqueness' - seeing that on the screen pissed me off. i also think the sabrina duet is ****, but i appreciated it a tiny bit more after her explanation.

 

her song explanations: a brief 5-10 minute video with not much depth for the kids. okay miss katy perry. im glad that we got it at all, but come on ***** just give us a bit more. please im begging. in Wood she basically said nothing, avoiding the sexual innuendo entirely. this ***** really spent like 10 minutes in the studio giving us this footage that wraps the whole film special together. and she's not even giving a look, she's dressed super normally. Ophelia was quite good combined with the BTS discussion, as im not familiar with the character so having her discuss Ophelia's demise and shakespeare actually helped a lot. TLOAS as a song a little bit confusing in terms of the tone/impression we're supposed to get, but she clarified that Kitty the showgirl is supposed to be nice and cautionary to the protagonist- i initially thought she was being a bit mean and standoffish. Father Figure was vague as obviously she doesn't want to say what it's really about, though she did mention that she relates to the older character as well as the younger one. i had totally forgot about the George Michael sample, it doesn't even register when you listen to the song. i guess it's more of a lyric copyright over anything else, though she said it was the inspiration as well. in Cancelled she said that people come to her often for advice/support when dealing with trouble. my guess is that Sabrina is the main person who has been under fire lately and coming to her. i can't imagine who else would, but she says it was lots of people so that makes me curious. who would be getting backlash and going to Taylor? i doubt Camila would. maybe Selena. i dont remember or care about most of her friends anyway. but like, Shawn and Gracie etc are not the backlash type of artists... girl all ur friends are vanilla teenpop. speaking of, i hate that she's still singing about trampolines and second period. i will accept it on this album, but enough is enough. come back to the present and stop this childhood and high school nostalgia. she mentioned for RTF that she rarely thinks or writes about high school and girl... that's a straight up lie. i really tried my best to accept and support these childhood lyrics on the past few albums, but i can't handle any more of it. did she really have that many profound and positive experiences from those days? or is she just making them up as characters? can't you make up memories and stories for adults instead? ITTG and TIMT are masterpieces because they're heartfelt vulnerable stories about adults.

 

so then, with no hookups, a mid album, sadness and not much success, i made my long journey home to immediately be hit with Ophelia when i got in the uber. it was the perfect cherry on the cake to end this flop of taylor mania week. i will now be decompressing for the next 7 days.

 

I was bored so I put this in MLA format, and this is the equivalent length of a 10 page research paper for college. 

 

Edited October 6, 2025Oct 6 by l3disko

On 10/3/2025 at 9:11 PM, Syňth said:

meltdown:

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ok where to even start. my past 48hr have been nothing but taylor and i never want to hear Ophelia again (it's playing in my head right now). please keep in mind im a little emotional from drinking, being up for 20 hours and things i will go into. im just here to vent. i first listened to the LQ leak because i have a meme account so i wanted to be familiar with the songs so i could start posting immediately on friday. so i repeatedly listened to the LQ leak especially Ophelia. i was initially pleased with the album tho definitely a bit lukewarm. friday came around and i worked on my memes, posted and listened to the HQ a bit. i was preparing for a showgirl album release party so i wanted to know the tracks fairly well. at that point i realized most of them are not very danceable (red flag). i was still fairly into the album at that point though i was noticing which parts i dislike. it takes 1-2hours to travel to where this party was, i left around 9pm and took a small break from listening. i got in around 11:40, the doors had opened at 11. i was going by myself bc i don't have any swiftie friends, and arranged to watch the cinema premiere in the same night (5am in my timezone). thank god i had not gotten there any earlier. it was one small room with a small stage and dancefloor, with like 10-15 young girls. there were a couple of people by themselves at the bar and on the sidelines. i got myself a drink to help get into an outgoing mood. they had 'themed' cocktails, which my naive ass had expected to be fun and glittery. they were just basic spirit + extra flavor mixes like a regular vodka + lemonade type of drink. i bought the showgirl which was OJ and tequila and awkwardly sat down at a table looking towards the DJ and dancefloor. immediately i noticed the music was weird. this DJ girl looked so bored, she was barely dancing/moving and left her station to go behind stage during every song. the room was full of empty space, there was maybe 20-25 of us total, it was a major flop. and i didn't want to go approach these younger girls as im a slightly older guy there by myself, so i stayed at the table and bopped my head a bit with the music. a drag queen came on and did one song (YBWM). she barely danced, just walked around a bit and lipsynced with a fairly boring outfit. she promised that her second performance would be really good. she came back like 20 minutes later and did this really weird mashup. it was based on a Taylor SNL skit where she sings parody lyrics about herself then it would chop up between Mean, LWYMMD and keep cutting back to the monologue after like 10/20 seconds. she barely danced in that one too and nobody cared or knew about the SNL skit especially here in australia but still she was more fun then the absolutely terrible DJ that came back. granted i missed the first 40 minutes, but i didn't hear ANY of the following:

-15, Mine, Sparks Fly, BTD, Mean, BTR, SOG, IKYWT, WANEGBT, 22, BS, Style, SIO, OOTW, RFI, EG, IDSB, Delicate, LWYMMD, any folklore, ANY VAULT SONG, AH, LH, Karma

 

instead she played WEIRD choices like:

Smallest Man Who Ever Lived, TWILY, YNTCD, Wildest Dreams, Bejeweled, Fearless, Red, Lover, Ruin the friendship, TLOASG, Tolerate It

 

it literally felt like she just hit shuffle on TS. there was no flow or anything, slow songs that should come later like Wildest Dreams were played early in the night and straight after the random uptempo ones. it was a whole mess and she just kept leaving the stage and making bored faces when she was up there and trying to make eye contact with the cute bartender because nobody was there and i guess we were all embarrassed. WHY TF would you play the smallest man who ever lived?? im trying to dance and turn up!! and Tolerate It???? ***** play WIllow or something. the ONLY songs that we properly got into were Bad Blood and Getaway Car. everything else was just weird AF choices that you can't really dance to. these (mostly white) girls were giving their best and singing every lyric, but it's still cheesy TS songs that you can't really turn up to unless ur super drunk and/or in a safe space. like Red song after a bunch of taylor smashes and a few drinks? absolutely. same with most of those. but NOT when ur trying to warm up this flop room of like 20 people. just give us the up tempo hits we can dance to. ******* christ this ***** really ruined it and she looked so pissed to be there. the girls literally had to ask her to play Style and 22 at the end because we weren't satisfied. 

 

aside from getting up for the drag queen, i spent most of the first 90 mins checking grindr for hookups, slowly sipping drinks and bopping at the table. i had nowhere else to go and was waiting until 5am, so i wasn't in any hurry to leave. i was still planning to go anyway because it was so awkward, but then a girl came up to me and invited me to her group. she was very sweet and we all danced together for the last part. when it reached the final song ATW10MV we all sang loudly together as you do (one of my favorite memories was doing that at a house party) and we even huddled together in a circle, gently swaying singing 'wind in my hair, i was there...' it was definitely a cult fan witchy moment. the girl straight across from me was smiling and looking into my eyes as we sang the lyrics together, all of them were so sweet. in the midst of all the shitiness, im grateful that i was able to connect for a moment with these girls over the thing that brought us together. sadly i didn't make any friends out of the experience, but at least i have 1 good memory. then the emotional turbulence comes in.

 

so we finish the event with ATW10MV in really good spirits (it might be my favorite taylor song ever), then one girl demands Style and another demands 22, thankfully the DJ gave us both with the lights on as they started closing. THEN... this girl comes up to me and asks to talk when it's finished. she warns me that the convo could be awkward. i am well aware of the predicament, as i am the only grown guy there in a bunch of girls who spent most of the night watching them from the sides. she straight up asks me how old i am and whether im gay or straight. i answer truthfully and she says how she presumed i was straight for most of the night, up until that girl had invited me to talk/dance with her friends. i dont remember exactly what she said but basically her point was: it looks creepy, it makes the girls uncomfortable and i will have a better experience if i directly go up to the girls and say hi to people until i make it work. keep in mind, she was friendly with this, she wasn't being rude. she was actually being really sweet and was just trying to give me advice as i guess it's obvious that i don't go to clubs much. but there was nothing i could have really done tonight. the music was **** and i didn't feel like dancing, plus i can only dance for 1-2 hours at most, i usually get tired of dancing after like an hour. i am much happier sitting and drinking on the sideline usually. but IF there had been more people there, not just a couple of big groups of young girls, then i actually would have approached people and blended in a bit more. that's why i wasn't worried about going by myself, because i'm good enough at chatting to strangers and coasting by. but i didn't want to approach these younger girls and i didn't feel like dancing to Tolerate It and Ruin the Friendship! i explained a bit of that to her and she agreed that the night was a flop because nobody was there. my issue is not with her but just the situation in general- even though i hadn't really done anything wrong, nobody likes to hear that they might have looked like a creep. you'd think dressing fashionably and showing up to a taylor swift party would be enough to indicate that im not a typical straight guy (which she had partially acknowledged), but i guess it wasn't. and i absolutely do sympathize with the position it puts those girls in, having a random guy sitting alone near them. im not sure whether her main point was the creepiness or whether she was just encouraging me to put myself out there more, but as i explained it was a **** night anyway which resulted in me sitting outside by myself for like 2 hours waiting for the cinema. i was chatting with guys a bit on grindr but at this point didn't feel like hooking up with a random and was also conscious of my phone battery. i did ask some of the girls about the cinema premiere, but none of them even knew about it.

 

so eventually it came to 5am and i watched the TS special. Ophelia music video? great. fun. no notes. very beautiful and i appreciate the work put into it, the continuous shot moving around style reminded me of WANEGBT. not 100% gagged but the video is great. but then we get her short ass song explanations, these lyric videos and clips of Ophelia BTS inter spliced.

the BTS: at the end you get to watch Ophelia again after seeing all the different set productions. it made me appreciate it more for sure. but girl... the way she was acting in these BTS. keep in mind that im tired and emotional and just here to vent. ***** stop acting. stop cracking jokes and acting super friendly with these crew for the cameras. i KNOW that you are genuinely nice and a total professional all the time, so you don't need to be chummy like this. don't ASK if you can include your bread in the music video. if the director had said no, you literally would have fired her. we all know that you're the boss and creative control here, that's why we love you! this BTS is framed in a way to appeal to the masses and young girls who will laugh at her goofy persona and i am so over it. i never watch BTS or lyric videos anymore, so i know that they've always been like this, but im coming to this with fresh and older eyes so im perceiving it differently- if you watch all of her BTS and lyric videos then none of this will bother you. i also think it's fair to be a bit more critical when i paid to see this.

 

lyric videos: what basic pieces of ****. i could literally do 90% of these in premiere pro right now. the saving grace was the puta font reference in Cancelled. Elizabeth Taylor was the first one we saw after the Ophelia music video and it was the WORST WORST WORST!!!! such a beautiful and stunning look/set, yet her movements are SO awful. so ungraceful and unsexy. how the **** did this get approved??? taylor has always struggled with her physicality, and i have mostly come to accept it and not let it bother me. with that in mind the Ophelia video is actually incredible because she doesn't look cringe at all, except for half a second when she's popping her back/ass out. and this shot of the ET lyric video is from Ophelia, so why is it so bad?? watching her on loop awkwardly trying to be sexy for 3 minutes... Britney in her house could record a better and more sexy clip than this. it doesn't help that i don't like the song either. it bops but it's too serious and annoying for me, Miss America was enough. the other lyric videos range from boring/repetitive to passable. there are a couple where she's holding the camera herself like a selfie- those are way too basic. literally looks like they're shot on an iphone. i hate the way she's using these expensive, beautiful glamorous visuals and combining it with glitter gel pens, the most basic music and the most basic formatted lyric videos. now if this was just on youtube, i wouldn't be complaining- but i experienced this in the cinema. this is not an acceptable standard for you to be charging fans to see imo. the ones that don't have an annoying/boring loop of her posing just use a chopped/glitchy backdrop that is so so simple and not impressive to look at. it works, and some of them are passable, but it's such a low standard. i dont even care about lyric videos that much but i was here watching them and already pissed.

 

the music- so by watching those lyric videos, it was even easier to see the parts in the album that piss me off. BTW, the film is the clean version of the album. so no '*****', no ****, no 'makes me wet'. it makes the album lose its edge and makes the songs feel like grocery store music. taylor just have the artistic backbone for ONCE to commit to ur vision instead of catering to the kids. can't you have 2 versions in the cinema, one for kids and one for adults??? these clean versions are ******* lame and really take a lot of spice out of the tracks, because the tracks were already lacking spice to begin with. the lyrics are the predominant issue, and the clean versions makes it worse- 'makes me sweat' instead of wet is not a sufficient zinger/climax to one of the better songs. i can't even remember what she says instead of '*****' but i know it was unremarkable. OH the important one, no 'my dick is bigger!'. that's like the whole song!! we NEED to see the words 'because my dick is bigger' on the screen. without that it's not even the same song. she sang 'my check is bigger' in the bridge, i dont remember the rest of it. Wood is such a basic bland Maroon 5 ass disco-ey pop song. the main issue with Maroon 5 is that they have like 10 singles that all use that sound, which Taylor does not. so even tho it's very very basic, im not too critical of that sound for her. but the sound was whack in the cinema. the 'knock on wood' sound effect was EXTREMELY loud, it overpowered the whole song  it was like someone was banging on a door outside the cinema. you could also hear a loud tambourine? and some of the tambourine hits were off beat, it sounded so sloppy. i think the knocks and tambourine were in the same stem file and not mixed properly with the song in this cinema file. Ophelia and Opalite are fun shimmery pop songs, and i want to like them, but at the same time they're so plain and reminiscent of what she's done before. there's a level of musical competence that stops anything from being truly awful- taylor has enough pop melody, max and shellback can have shiny instrumentals, and max is pushing taylor to belt, give some ad libs and larger than average stacks of harmonies. that's why the album is okay, because we haven't had stacked harmonies, belting and ad libs from taylor in ages. or breezy up tempo tracks. but if you look more closely, this album really doesn't hold a candle to most of the work she's done in the past decade. i was a major ttpd/ta apologist, i saw the signs of artistic burnout and unnecessary writer prose but tried to look the other way and forgive her because she still struck gold in that album. i don't come back to those songs but i hope i will because while there are obvious and major flaws, there's a lot of heart and greatness too. my worst fear was that we would get an album full of The Alchemy's, and we did. a bunch of unremarkable, unambitious love songs. with glitter gel hearts in the byline. but the difference is that The Alchemy has a terrible melody and instrumental, these songs don't. so the album is replayable and im sure i'll come back to it when i get over overplaying it this weekend. some of the other terrible lyric moments played out on screen: 'have fun, it's prom'. that one is a real dud and i don't think i will be able to move past it. which is a shame because RTF is close to being the best song on the album, but these lyrics need to be sharp and perfect but they're just not. the climax of it is on the words 'that than' ('Better that than regret it for all time'). you can't belt the high notes on 'that than'. phonetically it sounds bad and it's an amateur move. the reason why the crumpled up piece of paper part in ATW hits so hard and stands out is because every word PUNCHES when she belts it. OH you TORE me up AGAINnn, JUST TO BREAK ME LIKE A PROMISE. phonetics are really important in pop songs, both in big moments and the little more spacious moments like 'have fun, it's prom'. it's really important for the phonetics to pop in both of those. another example of weak lyrics phonetics in a climax is 'cos honey i'll, come get my THINGS but i can't let go' - things is not a strong word and reduces the impact of the chorus. it's not fun to sing along to. 'things' as a word does not pop. but back to taylor- 'you can call me honey if you want, cos i'm the one you want' - i think that's the lyric? lazy, annoying. this album has many filler visual type of lyrics, the kind of stuff that people always make fun of her for- the view of portofino was on my mind, cry my eyes violet, under bright lights, summertime spritz pink skies. 'i have been afflicted by a terminal uniqueness' - seeing that on the screen pissed me off. i also think the sabrina duet is ****, but i appreciated it a tiny bit more after her explanation.

 

her song explanations: a brief 5-10 minute video with not much depth for the kids. okay miss katy perry. im glad that we got it at all, but come on ***** just give us a bit more. please im begging. in Wood she basically said nothing, avoiding the sexual innuendo entirely. this ***** really spent like 10 minutes in the studio giving us this footage that wraps the whole film special together. and she's not even giving a look, she's dressed super normally. Ophelia was quite good combined with the BTS discussion, as im not familiar with the character so having her discuss Ophelia's demise and shakespeare actually helped a lot. TLOAS as a song a little bit confusing in terms of the tone/impression we're supposed to get, but she clarified that Kitty the showgirl is supposed to be nice and cautionary to the protagonist- i initially thought she was being a bit mean and standoffish. Father Figure was vague as obviously she doesn't want to say what it's really about, though she did mention that she relates to the older character as well as the younger one. i had totally forgot about the George Michael sample, it doesn't even register when you listen to the song. i guess it's more of a lyric copyright over anything else, though she said it was the inspiration as well. in Cancelled she said that people come to her often for advice/support when dealing with trouble. my guess is that Sabrina is the main person who has been under fire lately and coming to her. i can't imagine who else would, but she says it was lots of people so that makes me curious. who would be getting backlash and going to Taylor? i doubt Camila would. maybe Selena. i dont remember or care about most of her friends anyway. but like, Shawn and Gracie etc are not the backlash type of artists... girl all ur friends are vanilla teenpop. speaking of, i hate that she's still singing about trampolines and second period. i will accept it on this album, but enough is enough. come back to the present and stop this childhood and high school nostalgia. she mentioned for RTF that she rarely thinks or writes about high school and girl... that's a straight up lie. i really tried my best to accept and support these childhood lyrics on the past few albums, but i can't handle any more of it. did she really have that many profound and positive experiences from those days? or is she just making them up as characters? can't you make up memories and stories for adults instead? ITTG and TIMT are masterpieces because they're heartfelt vulnerable stories about adults.

 

so then, with no hookups, a mid album, sadness and not much success, i made my long journey home to immediately be hit with Ophelia when i got in the uber. it was the perfect cherry on the cake to end this flop of taylor mania week. i will now be decompressing for the next 7 days.

 

what a saga  I'm sorry you had such a horrible time 

Base is the only safe space

 

 

But Ovulate you will forever be my love

Blondie was glowing on the Fallon show: "you are so gorgeous it actually hurts", lol

Taylor threads are such a cesspool lately

reorganizing my Taylor library today and realizing I have roughly 500 individual tracks