Keyinei | I'm Not Crying. You're Not Crying, Are You? @Keyinei | Uploaded 6 years ago | Updated 2 hours ago
yeah, that sounds about right.

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so here's a thing from about a year ago. i remember having planned on editing this for several years before starting. also i'm gonna need to pay someone to come over to my flat and put a hex on me against using dear and the headlights again, because this is like the third time now :’)

this song always made me think of... what it means to make stuff. and, of course, 'singing' is an easy almost-homonym for 'swimming', so that's definitely where i got the idea from.

then one day i think i was listening to this song and i thought, huh, this feels like a song you'd write about breaking up a band. and then i googled it and lo and behold d&th has indeed been broken up for a long while now. reading their breakup message is what made me finally get started on this video.

what struck me about the breakup message was this idea that if you turn production into your entire life, you won't really have any life left to tell stories about. except, y'know, this kind of meta-narrative piece about how the project has lost its meaning. it resonates, i think, with divorcing yourself from the things you love to do. but it's like...you don't get to go anywhere except from where you are. so first you have to be okay with that.

and free! has a lot of those themes in S1 (S2's more about the social aspect, which is a whole other video). there's this thing you love to do, but it's also got all these strings attached. so, why do you do it? who do you do it for? what's the point of an arbitrary goal? but if there's no goal, what's the point of doing anything at all? is it even possible to like doing something that feels meaningless and pointless? why are you so drawn to doing what you feel like a failure at? i mean, you keep doing it, so clearly there's gotta be some impetus. Is it even possible to be happy doing what you enjoy when you can’t be happy being you? and at what point do you realize you're poisoning the thing you love? anyway thanks for coming to my ted talk

i would’ve liked to include the final dialogue of S1 in this video somehow, because i think it finds a neat answer to all these questions. 'what's your dream?' rin asks and haru doesn't finish his line, cuz there doesn’t need to be an answer. the entire point is to see where the project takes you. the dream, maybe, is to just keep dreaming of...anything.

i'll probably ramble about this more if i ever get around to making my S2 focused video, but free! definitely has a place in my heart solely for being a highschool bildungsroman with deeply resonant archetypes that aired while i was just finishing up that particular period of schooling as opposed to having any particularly sterling writing, heh. it's honestly kind of hamfisted, but in an endearing, deeply teenagery way. figured now was a good time to upload this what with S3 kicking off (just in time for me to gear up for postgrad, too, so it goes). go get self-actualized you wet idiot college children.