POP SONG REVIEW: Taylor Swift’s “The Fate of Ophelia”

Was "words, words, words, and not good words" also a Hamlet reference? Because that would qualify as Doing the Reading.

14:45 ok, nice video, solid argument, but this litterature section is just nonsence.

To begin with Romeo & Juliette, at this point in the story (we're still in the flirting phase so no triple death quiproquo yet) the goal was to get married and escape the fight between the families. They are, at that point, a cliché love at 1st sight teenage romance with the objtive to create a contrast with the end. At this point, this is the love story part so the reference is justified here, especialy since right after she's talking about her family being against this relationship.

Talking about that, what is the point of the scarlett letter ? Not talking about the book but about the big A on the chest, which is what Taylor is referencing here. Isn't it to put a sign of shame to a women who did a moraly questionable thing through the lense of the puritain closed comunity ? Puritain closed comunity like the Capulet and the Montague ? This is just a classical hyperbole, which does work in the context of the shakespearian tragedy stuff. Is it omega over the top for a teenage love pop song ? I mean yeah but like it's a theatre kid referencing shakespearian tragedies because her parents told her once to not see her boyfriend, it's already over the top so why not go all out at that point yk.

Also, yeah there's no physical towers in Hamlet, but it's a metaphore : the entier point of Ophelia's character is that her relationships were so horrible (had no agency, her husband pretended to be crazy, he slutshamed her, he killed her father, who wasn't the nicest father also…) that they made her go insane, her madness being like a mental prison and the only escape she seen was, as you said, to drown herself in a lake. The mental prison is the whole point of the fate of Ophelia in Hamlet, so making a metaphore about it in a pop song, especialy in a Taylor Swift song which is already the hyperbole over the top theatre kid, is more than justified. And for why tower, historicaly prisons have been build as towers because they're surface efficient so using it as a synonym of prison is normal (remember Shrek, highest room of the tallest tower), and since prison doesn't rhyme with power where tower does, tower is just a better word here.

I hate that every time I hear this song it gets stuck in my head immediately.

18:12 I love that

The moment i saw she made a song about hamlet i knew it was gonna be ASS. I KNEW she'd misinterpret Hamlet I LVOE HAMLET

# should print 0
wget https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/27761.txt.utf-8 -o log && mv 27761.txt.utf-8 hamlet.txt && fgrep –count tower hamlet.txt

ELIZABETH TAYLOR!!!!

ive never been a fan of taylor swift's music or her as a person but for some reason i like this song, it feels like a cringy wine mom babbling to her adult kids at a family gathering

taylor swift is like the colleen hoover of songwriting 💀

She is obviously artistcally stunted. She should just retire because what does she need to prove with her art at this point in her life?

If not retire. Maybe she should focus making music with the intention of just creating music. She should stop making mainstream friendly art because it is obviously affecting her writing

I love how part of the joke in this video is that Todd slowly unveils how he does in fact understand the Ophelia character at a literary level.