【Dex】BLACK&WHITE【Original Song】

Original upload date: May 30, 2016

please read the pinned comment!! thank u

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[ghostandpals]

hello to the Tubed You

it's 1am on a saturday morning and i'm gonna talk about communications hopefully for the last time because in the past i didn't do a very good job of keeping my previous talks about it in a Conveniently Accessible All Compiled In One Place, and because of that some people heard what i had to say and some missed :( i don't want people to miss out so i hope this is a good place to put this!

if you don't know what communications was, i'll try to nutshell explain it real quick: it was a song series i started back in early 2016 and cancelled in mid-2017. it's comprised of rotary dial, black&white, housewife radio and broadcast illusion (in that order), and while colorbars is *technically* related, it wasn't an official part of the series (tl;dr i was gonna use colorbars, didn't like the song though, so i made a new song that basically tells the same story). while small summaries of what each song specifically covered were in the original descriptions, a majority of the story was kept pretty much contained to my now-deleted tumblr account and pretty much only the people who paid attention to that blog knew the most about the story. i talked a lot about what i planned on doing, a majority of which didn't get put into a song before i cancelled the project.

personally, i don't want to re-tell the story (both the stuff that was in video descriptions, stuff that was only on tumblr, and stuff i never talked about publicly). i know doing so would clear up any info and give context to what i'm talking about, but i'd still rather not. a LOT of other people and i have had a lot of valid criticisms against communications, and while i know there's some nuance concerning liking something you acknowledge objectively bad/problematic, i personally don't wanna be the one to introduce more people to the series since i currently over twice as many subscribers as i had when i cancelled it, i think? i can't remember how many i had back then but it was definitely under 100k. that's just my personal preference and i hope you can understand!

so here's where i fucked up: my plans for communications started out as a three-song, really shallow story. i didn't have much of anything in mind for it other than a "this happens and then this happens" sorta story, but as more people showed deeper interest in the story and asked questions about it, i started fleshing things out more. it quickly turned into what i planned to be a 12-song series, broken into four separate stories called cases. now, what i did was make the mistake of not thinking at all before i did any of this. i improvised answers to questions without really thinking about how it connected to the story, i didn't give an ounce of thought into how each aspect of the story would reflect on each other, i didn't try to predict what sorts of meanings people could draw from the series (i know that anyone can come up with any interpretation of my stories they want and that's kinda out of my control, but to an extent i do want to make sure my stories couldn't *easily* be interpreted as something harmful or offensive), just i mean it literally when i say communications was entirely improvised. and improvisation isn't inherently bad, don't get me wrong! but you really need to know what you're doing when you improvise, and unfortunately "knowing what i was doing" and "18 year-old me" were on COMPLETELY opposite ends of the globe

we ended up with a story and characters that hardly made any sense, some characters' developments were flatter than some people think the earth is, and in more aspects than one were insensitive as hell towards even my own experiences. for context, i base a majority of my songs/stories/characters off my own personal experiences. they're not all self-insert levels of similarities, but if you really think about it you'll notice like 80% of my ocs have abandonment issues and are too emotional for their own good. for just one example out of many others.

nancy was a character with abandonment issues, henry was a character who had been abused by his mother frances since childhood, and kennith was a character who faced abuse from his peers and emotional neglect from his parents. except 18 y/o me thought there wasn't gonna be any issues with having nancy kill someone because of her issues, having henry come out relatively un-traumatized, and not talk publicly nearly enough about how kennith's experiences impacted him in adulthood.

while it's true that mentally ill people and abuse survivors can do bad things or be bad people, there's a difference between realistic portrayals and over-represented stigmas. mentally ill people aren't violent, and in reality are much more likely to face violence than commit it themselves, yet the "scary, dangerous mentally ill person" seems to be the majority of the representation we get. emotional abuse is often taken way less seriously than it should be due to there not being any physically visible scars. and lastly, if i say a character is something (especially something under-represented), i should actually show it!

i've heard the argument "but fiction doesn't affect reality that much" over and over again, and i personally disagree? there's plenty of examples of fiction affecting reality - take for example what jaws did to sharks, or a bit closer to this topic, how movies like "psycho" and "split" affected the public's perception of people with dissociative identity disorder. even outside of fiction impacting society, it's just my own personal preference to avoid stigmatic portrayals of mental illness in my songs and stories and i hope that can be respected regardless of your opinion on this particular criticism.

even though the characters in communications stemmed from my own experiences with mental illness, abuse, and neglect, that doesn't mean i could just do whatever the hell i wanted without giving it much thought. i'm still responsible for how i portray my experiences! i genuinely am sorry to anyone who was hurt by how these characters were handled, you guys deserved a lot better.

since working on communications i've learned a lot about myself that's changed the way i view my experiences, and for the past couple years i've been heavily focusing on doing everything i can think of to avoid repeating communications. i had planned a remake of communications to improve all its flaws, but in the end i felt a total loss of enjoyment towards the series because i just wanna move on and do better (which is why i finally cancelled the series). as much as i wish i could turn communications into something that isn't Yikes, i don't see myself working on the story again and actually being happy while doing so. that's really the best way i can explain why i won't be revisiting the story. i hope i can show i've learned from the whole experience through my future story projects.

this also brings up a side-topic specifically regarding communications' cancellation - i want to say that that decision was in no way anyone's fault but my own. at the time i had expressed feeling pressured when fans would ask "when is the next part coming out?" and "why haven't you uploaded a new part yet?". i can't remember exactly what i said, but i said something along the lines of implying that i might cancel the series if people continued pressuring me to finish it faster. though this wasn't meant as a threat and more of a "i don't perform well under pressure" statement, i totally understand why people would assume it was meant as a threat and why that would be really hurtful (especially considering people were asking those questions out of curiosity, not with the intent to pressure me to work faster). i'm really sorry for having said that, that wasn't ok and i should've handled expressing my concerns with more empathy. i wanna make sure it's clear that the final decision to cancel communications wasn't the public's fault at all - just my own loss of interest in the project.

i that's about it. i'll come back and edit this post if i think of anything else to add.

thank you for reading!! obligatory reminder to drink water and take ur meds if u have meds u need to take

[reislashbai]

Henry (singing): Its killing me!
Nancy: * snaps her fingers * that gives me a great idea!

[thedtc]

Henry :you're not the girl I used to know. It's killing me
Nancy: *cleaning blood off knife* Honey, I really don't think that's what's killing you right now

[grecha]

I can kinda hear "Вы живы" in the static. Which is Russian (formal and/or plural) for "You're alive". Which is weird, but kinda makes sense, since the same phrase is repeated in Rotary Dial and Housewife Radio

[APHxVOCALOIDlover]

"it's killing me" literally

[trixierubberhose]

Nancy: "and he ran into my knife...
FIFTEEN TIMES"

[dylan-xgpn]

i'd answer the phone mom but im--

*D E A D*

[adaslothland]

I love how he was supposed to say "love" at the and but he said "life" instead.

[justanotherlazytrashpanda]

Who else hears “buy me a lizard” in the static at the end?
Who knew that Henry was into exotic animals

[yqmspdj]

This is so sad
Alexa play Housewife Radio

[flareonmay]

"You're not the girl I used to know, it's killing me?"
No, Henry. That's the blood loss.

[thatstheway]

Like a misheard game of telephone / These are the [GRU VOICE: GORLS] of my world

[justanotherlazytrashpanda]

I’m sorry but am I the only one that can imagine Henry trying to make a stupid excuse for being in the kitchen at midnight with a suitcase
“No Nancy please! I needed to wash my suitcase in the dishwasher, Honest!”

[garlikbred]

All the different things I hear in the static at 2:03

"I really miss you"
"I love you Nancy"
"My final message"
"I will miss you"
"Why would you, Nancy?"
_"bio illumination"_
_"Buy me a lizard"_
*_"By the way, I'm a lizard"_*

[lydia]

does anyone else hear "i love you nancy" in the distorted part?
just me?

[pineapplehexanoate]

My final words are on the page...
IN MLA FORMAT!

[stupidfemboybastard]

He’s got an RGB typewriter this is truly a gamer moment

[canofkai]

Henry looks so happy!!








Never mind.

[cringegoddess]

nancy killed her husband for using comic sans

[sacredsin]

I only found out today that this song is a part of a story told across some of the other songs GHOST has made, and first off, I think it's such a cool idea, and I hope that they pick up the tale again at some point, and second, all the symbolic additions to each video is so, so cool to look for when you know the full, arching story line. When I watched this again knowing the plot and having re-watched the other connected videos, I realized how brilliant it was to have his colors and the typewriters at 3:00 be green, blue, yellow and red, the colors that Nancy repeats in Housewife Radio and are briefly seen in Rotary Dial. That little inclusion is just so clever! That the man who can't see colors, in his death, is full of color. Poor Henry though, man...Both women who played a major part in his life wanted him dead. Are we to assume the his mother can't get a hold of him in Rotary Dial and grows steadily more crazy with each missed call because she doesn't know he is dead? I think I read somewhere the police couldn't get in contact with her to inform her that Nancy and Henry were dead.

I'm not an avid fan of Vocaloid songs (honestly, I rarely listen to them), but I just love your songs, GHOST! I've listened to all of them, and Candle Queen, Housewife Radio, and Appetite of a People Pleaser are my absolute favorites. I can't wait for the new stuff you come out with. Thank you so much for your hard work and for sharing your amazing creations! I'm not someone that generally comments, since I'm more content to be a lurker, but I just had to say how much I adore your music.