Introduction
Hello. My name is /u/Wolfchrist, and I’ve been a fan of Dance Gavin Dance since the release of Acceptance Speech and hearing The Robot With Human Hair, pt. 4 while doing coke at a college party. Since then, I’ve become an avid fan, and the release of Artificial Selection has got me super excited.
I’m also a huge nerd who likes to overanalyze things and shit post, which leads me to the subject of this short essay: Care is about the video game Kingdom Hearts. For those of you who are unfamiliar, Kingdom Hearts is an action RPG series developed by Square Enix that mashes together Final Fantasy, Disney classics, and probably the single most unnecessarily convoluted plot ever imagined. The series has been ongoing since the original’s release in 2002, and now spans something ridiculous like 20 titles across an equal number of platforms (seriously, they released a side game for that fucking Nokia phone/handheld thing). Fortunately for you, you’ll only need a passing familiarity with Kingdom Hearts to understand this lyrical analysis, and I’ll be more than happy to provide it for you.
The purpose of this essay is to, line by line, show how the lyrics of Care sync up with events and themes from the first installment of the Kingdom Hearts series, and to show that, despite common perception, DGD songs do in fact make sense. So, on to the analysis.
Analysis
Care opens with Tillian’s verse, singing:
“For now we'll lay by the ocean
For now no one is around
For now we'll act like we're still young
For now we'll never come down”
These lines, sung serenely over lilting guitar work, evoke the sense of something either passed or passing; they are wistful, and prepare us for the nostalgic themes of the song. Tillian is singing, to someone, about a moment that is fleeting. In particular, the mention of the ocean and youth are important. You see, Kingdom Hearts begins on the world of Destiny Island, a serene tropical paradise where young teenages spend their days playing with wooden swords and racing one another for bragging rights.
Artwork depicting an aerial view of Destiny Islands
The similarities between the scene Tillian is depicting and the Destiny Islands is pretty striking, and will only become more so as we continue our examination.
It is on Destiny Island that we are introduced to the three main characters of Kingdom Hearts: Sora, Riku, and Kairi. These three teenagers long for something more than peaceful island life, and have built a raft to sail away from the island to other worlds (it makes sense in game). However, things go awry, and Riku becomes a bad guy, Kairi loses her soul, and Sora becomes -Dah Chosen One-.
From left to right: Kairi, Sora, Riku, before shit goes south
I would make the case that, in this first verse, Tillian is singing from the point of view of Riku upon reuniting with Sora, who has realized his former friend has fallen to the Dark Side. Such a theme of friendship and betrayal is common in Dance Gavin Dance’s works, and its fitting that they would be attracted to a video game that also shared that theme. In this verse, Riku/Tillian is pining for the good old days, before he was morally compromising himself to try and save the hot girl they grew up.
“But wait, /u/Wolfchrist,” you say, “What about the ‘never come down’ line?” I’m glad you asked, because the level where Sora and Riku are reunited is none other than motherfucking Neverland. And guess what you get to do when you go to Neverland?
Fly. The answer is you get to fly.
They literally mean that they’ll never come down. You see, at this point in the story, Riku is having some second thoughts about using the power of evil to save the people he cares about; it makes sense that he’d want to go back to more innocent days, and since you never grow up in Neverland, he and his friends could stay in that world and forget their responsibilities.
This is where the pre-chorus comes in. Because who do you think Riku/Tillian is singing to? The pre-chorus goes:
“I know you're not empty
I know you're still there
I know you're not empty
I know”
Who isn’t empty? Who is still there?
It’s this bitch. She ain’t got no soul.
It’s Kairi, the hot girl that Sora and Riku are both crushing on, and who has lost her soul. You see, in Kingdom Hearts, its possible for one to lose their heart (which renders them essentially a lifeless doll). Both Riku and Sora spend the game trying to recover Kairi’s heart. Riku is actually carrying around her comatose body, and is shown in several scenes to be watching over her. I would make the case that the pre-chrous is depicting Riku’s thoughts during those scenes. He knows that there’s still hope of saving her; that Kairi isn’t just an empty shell.
Then Mr. Mess shows up:
“You still care
I remember you back in the day
Care
Prodigy show 2003
Care
We were camping out in Jnco jeans
Care
The ecstasy was super clean”
Again, we are referred back to better days; days when things were simpler. Cleaner...oh shit, guess what the theme song for this fucking game is?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKgBhxWMTGM
Simple and Clean, by Utada Hikaru, is the title song of Kingdom Hearts. It’s lyrics are also about as convoluted as your average Dance Gavin Dance song, but at least she has the excuse of not being a native English speaker. The common interpretation is that the chorus is referring to literal ecstasy, but I would posit that the ecstasy here refers to the happiness of childhood and halcyon days, not drugs, and that what Jon means by clean is just that...good clean, innocent fun.
And that 2003 line? Kingdom Hearts came out in 2002, so it isn’t impossible to imagine that it took Tillian or Jon until 2003 to sit down and play it.
But you know what really seals the nail in the coffin, and is the piece of evidence that got me thinking about this whole thing to begin with?
Look. At. Riku’s. Mother. Fucking. Pants.
How can you not look at those and thing, “Oh, those are fucking Jnco jeans with belts around the ankles,”? Riku wears Jnco jeans. HE WAS HANGING OUT ON THE ISLAND IN JNCO JEANS. Wake up people. Jon Mess is a weeb.
And finally, we arrive at verse 2:
“Higher than all of their voices
Higher than fading away
Got lost, lost in the moment
Got lost in tempting our fate”
Now, we’ve already established that our characters are flying at this point, because they’re doing pixie dust on a pirate ship with a child kidnapper. The first two lines of verse 2 are reiterating Riku’s desire to escape the complexities of his morally gray circumstances. The last two refer to the corrorsion of Riku’s soul, both literally and metaphorically.
Does this look like someone with a clean conscience?
Riku at this point has both lost his sense of morality (he’s stealing the souls of Disney Princesses in exchange for getting Kairi’s back), but is also possessed by the Big Bad of the series, Ansem. At the beginning of the game, Destiny Island is swallowed up by darkness; a darkness that Riku invited in because of his desire to see other worlds. He tempted fate, and in that moment lost not only himself, but everything he cared about.
Conclusion
Maybe I’m just sleep deprived. Maybe I’m on to something. Maybe I just wanted to shit post. Either way, I’ve spent six pages and at least an hour writing this, and I think that its a valid interpretation of the song. The jeans, the lyrics, the similarities in themes, it all adds up. Dance Gavin Dance has always loved songs about weird shit, and I promise there are very few things out there weirder than the game where Goofy and Donald Duck team up with a generic anime boy to save the universe alongside Cloud and Leon. But, more than that, DGD love to write songs that express a feeling of losing one’s sense of self, and that’s exactly what happens to Riku.
Maybe the entirety of Artificial Selection is actually about Kingdom Hearts. I have to listen to it some more. Idk, but I hope you’ve enjoyed this shit post.