Ramblings

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Bad Apple!! is the third stage theme of the fourth Touhou Project installment Lotus Land Story, composed by ZUN¹⁾. The original song was quite a standout within the game, but it was the remix of that song that became famous. I am linking the English cover of the song made by the brilliant artist Juliet Simmons, acting online under the artist name “JubyPhonic”:

In my opinion, this song is, well, it's extremely good, and I think it deserves a full page analysis for everything I could find in the lyrics. I don't normally analyze lyrics a lot, but this one is special and I hope that I can do it justice and get across how brilliant it is through the analysis. However, I will not be looking at the song from the typical angle. The standard angle to take, on this track, is that the song is about Depression. This is “correct”²⁾, however, I have found that it becomes even more interesting to talk about when analyzed from the angle of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. As far as I understand this, this angle is wrong, but it turns out that NPD and major depression are related in a lot more ways than might be superficially apparent. A lot of NPD symptoms, and a lot of behaviors that NPD causes, are very similar to Depression. Or, in my words, the overlap in terms of mechanics and dynamics in both NPD and Depression, is very large, large enough that it is actually still very useful to look at the song from the NPD angle, even though that will be a very unorthodox and canonically “wrong” angle to take.