The other side of the song
June 22, 2023
Like many early Zoomers, I was a diehard Vocaloid fan back when I was in middle school. My phase lasted from age 11-12 to about 15 years old. I was a bit of a weeb in general, although I haven't watched that much anime nor read that much manga. Let's say I was a surface level weeb. After all, my generation grew up with quite a lot of Japanese stuff. But that's not exactly the topic.
At the age of 12, I became friends, then best friends with a girl on deviantART. She was the one to call me her best friend I reckon. We were the same age, with our birthdays relatively close, I think by a couple weeks. We bonded over drawing, she introduced me to Soul Eater which was the first anime I truly became a fan of (those were rather rare, I can count on one hand all that I really got into), all of that. We had other friends on the side, and there was another girl who I was mildly friends with, but would soon take the status I had, leaving me in the dust. Looking back we were just immature teenagers, but when I learned that she replaced me, I was into such a rage I straight up wanted to murder both of them in the bloodiest way. That's also a time where I started to self-harm. My right arm still has scars from this time. Just to reassure you, reader, I no longer self-harm. I haven't cut since 2019 and would do it mostly sporadically under extreme stress or in a fit of rage.
I wanted to murder them, kill myself, it was an extremely violent reaction. It was a betrayal. I'll talk about abandonment and betrayal in another article, but in a nutshell, while I can get over abandonment after a while and come back to my senses, betrayal fucks me up in such a way that I go down a spiral of rage, despair and self-destruction, and it's extremely hard for me to get over it. Of course, I never acted on my death threats. I don't think I truly had the intention to do so, and I was 12. A bullied 12 year old who had already endured a bunch of psychological and emotional trauma. At 12, you don't realize what you are wishing for. You're just blinded by your rage, your pain, the awakening of the original wound that is inside you. Added to this the yandere thing, everyone wanted to be a yandere (when now I find the glorification of the whole thing among young people really scary), and that was the deadly cocktail that exploded in my face at that time of my life.
That's when I discovered this song. Twilight Homicide Song. It described perfectly what I was going through. The promise, the betrayal, the cheating. The murderous intent. I even made a since-deleted music video with my character, that of my former friend, and of the other girl. It took me a long time to recover from this, and I probably damaged the other two as well. But time has passed, it was 11 years ago, now I think it's probably far buried in their memory. My gut feeling tells me they haven't forgotten about me, however. Not like it matters today anyway.
Years passed and I would periodically come back to this song. I didn't know until yesterday evening, however, that there was a "sister song" to it, entitled Guren Veritable Pandemonium. One that describes the point of view of the other woman in the story, who turns out, has been deceived by the woman's lover in the original song. The best thing? In my life, the same thing happened: the girl I was replaced with was replaced, herself, a few years later. My former friend and this girl haven't been talking since.
Meiko's song has a distinct angry flavour to it. It's not simply about killing her lover and having him all to herself. It transpires of anger. Miku's song on the other hand, you can feel the anger, but it feels more subdued, and it has more sadness to it. Meiko straight up says "I will kill you", whereas Miku says "Let's go to hell together". Both have been betrayed. Both are in pain. They go about it in a different way. Meiko is violently unforgiving, Miku is heartbroken and resentful.
I think the other girl didn't react as dangerously violently as I did when she got replaced in turn. Of course, age probably played a role, but I think she was less inclined to anger than I am, despite having mental health issues of her own. Her emotional trauma also was way different from mine, and she's quite sociable, tending to circle through friends and make acquaintances rather quickly. And, uh, at the time we were both equally venting and the people in our Skype group were basically shutting me down and calling me a drama queen, they were giving her a pass and comforting her, as well as another girl who was part of the same furry group. This definitely didn't help my own state as I felt shamed for expressing myself and that somehow, my emotions were not just unimportant, but a straight up nuisance to others. I was called mentally deranged by another person in the group (who was 16, in her defense) who wished me a life of shit. There are many factors at play here, but her reaction still wasn't as unhinged as my own.
A mashup of the two songs was made, and although it sounds kinda weird at times, I find that in the choruses, it really beautifully intertwines. It's actually this track I listened to before listening to Miku's song, and that's what inspired me to write this entry...
Crazy how things can turn out, right? Life sure works in mysterious ways.