sewagelag00n

Sometimes I think about how audience responses can say as much about ableist attitudes as works themselves do.

The music video for the song "Monitoring" by Deco*27 initially reads as "Miku is a scary stalker", but the narrative woven by the whole seems to be more "the pov character is having paranoid delusions and hallucinations, Miku is a concerned friend trying to check up on them, pov character eventually works up the courage to open the door and speak to their friend". Much more nuanced that how I've usually seen popular Vocaloid songs handle mental illness. There's a lot of bad edgy "look at this crazy sicko murderer, who kills people because they're insane" in Vocaloid music. The song is kind of leaning into those ideas, but ultimately I think subverts the expectations of them.

When I was reading the first few comments on it, I saw a Japanese comment that (auto-translated) was like "at first it seemed Miku was a dangerous person, but then actually it was the classmate who was a dangerous person!" And. Like. There are no signs the pov character is going to harm anyone. Dangerous... why? Just because they're having a break with reality that makes them scared to leave their apartment? I'd also seen English language bad takes, but that specific comment kind of stuck with me.

More recently, the producer published a miku pov version, it's genuinely sweet:

(Miku switching to the "hallucinatory" version at the end of the song seems to mainly be to mirror the original version. I've seen a few youtube comments argue that it means Miku really was a yandere all along, which I don't think... is narratively compatible with the rest of this song, or with the original song. When people aren't treating the POV character as "crazy dangerous" in comments and posts, they're sometimes instead putting that on Miku's shoulders, even when talking about the Best Friend remix.)

Unfortunately, when I looked on Tumblr for analysis of the best friend remix, I saw someone basically imply the pov character's delusions (of their friend being a "yandere" stalker-with-a-crush) would lead them to... sexually assault... their friend:

At the end of the song when Listener finally opens the door to let Miku in, Miku is unaware she's confronting someone who has convinced themselves that Miku "wants" the same kind of contact Listener is about to carry out.

Which feels deeply unwarranted to me from what the original song implies about the POV character's mental state, and falling into that same "people with delusions are dangerous monsters" thing that the Japanese commenter was doing.

I also find it irritating that sympathetic reading of POV character I've found always just call them "depressed" and treat the distortions of dialog and visuals as purely metaphors for the negative worldview that accompanies depression, and like... That's possible. That's a valid reading of the music video. But why is it apparently so hard to imagine that the distortions are literally being experienced by the POV character because they're having a psychotic episode. and that they're sympathetic in how their mental illness harms and isolates them, at the same time?

This is the most sympathetic I've seen a Vocaloid song(s) be to someone having symptoms of really demonized mental illnesses, and people can't even... I guess you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them drink.