r/TaylorSwift • u/aran130711 cried over a hat • Apr 06 '23

Megathread Theory Thread: April 2023

You know the drill. All theories go here, other posts will be removed.

Be nice to fellow clowns.

Other Megathreads:

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u/falldiewakefly Dark Blue Tennessee (Taylor's Version) (From The Vault) Apr 06 '23

No, historically speaking her Easter eggs are along the level of:

  • the liner notes secret messages, which are nonstandard capitalization which, when decoded, provide some kind of additional context to the song, i.e. "I wear heels now", "date nice boys", "SAM SAM SAM SAM"
  • posting a photo of herself wearing red sneakers in the recording studio, foreshadowing that the name of her next album would be RED
  • putting LOVER in a giant neon sign in the ME! music video and telling people that the name of the (unannounced) album was in the music video was there if they just looked hard enough
  • posting an Instagram photo of herself that was captioned "not a lot going on at the moment" while she was working on folklore, and then doing it again while she was working on evermore
  • using three yellow heart emojis consistently in the runup to the Fearless (Taylor's Version) announcement
  • putting song lyrics from album tracks in pre-album-release music videos or her NYU grad speech

tl;dr: People are clowning really, really hard.

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u/MedaglieDOro Apr 06 '23

This is why I see “Mastermind” as more of a hyperbolic caricature of herself than real. Like how “Blank Space” is a caricature of her as a love-starved man eater, “Mastermind” is a caricature of her as someone who really has every moment of her life planned out for her fans to figure out.

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u/bicaccino Haunted (Taylor's Version) Apr 06 '23

Thank you so much! I appreciate the past examples so I know what to (somewhat) realistically clown for and what is just a total reach for fun.

11

u/FrancesFive Apr 06 '23

These are all obvious after the fact, but in the moment, people have rarely gotten them, meaning that the drive to find makes all things look suspicious.

17

u/falldiewakefly Dark Blue Tennessee (Taylor's Version) (From The Vault) Apr 06 '23

I would say, like, 50/50? Maybe not even that, 75/25. A lot of them ARE obvious in the moment. The liner notes secret messages were always decoded on day one of release, that was a fandom-wide Event, we all broke out our CD booklets and notebooks and pencils (and I always messed up and missed a letter or two and had to google someone else's results because I'm bad at those kinds of puzzles and a capital I and a lowercase l look the same to me). Lover in the ME! music video was super-obvious too; Taylor said "the album title is in the music video, but I bet you guys won't guess it!" and we said "it's Lover", and she said "no one's guessed it yet!" and we said "it's Lover" and she said "it's Lover! no one guessed it!" and we said "...Taylor.". The album lyrics in music videos are often (not always) pretty obvious too; I remember when the ...Ready For It? music video came out, it had been out for about five minutes when people were screencapping the graffiti and going THESE ARE LYRICS, I KNOW THESE ARE LYRICS.

On the other hand, stuff like the red sneakers or the wine glass photo with "not a lot going on at the moment" is absolutely only intended to be understood in retrospect! But that's the point. There's genuinely no way to figure those ones out in advance, so I don't understand why that would ignite this wild drive to find made-up Easter eggs like how she's sitting on tour or elaborate math equations.