This video is 50% my analysis and 50% me really liking the songs and dances (and also a secret third thing, you'll never guess it though) btw I have some extra things in the description I forgot to put in the video
I hadn't noticed until you pointed out that Pete backs up more in IILY. But after that I was so conscious of it. I noticed in CAITIA reprise, Steph backs up more bc she doesn't want to love him more, cuz she has to shoot him if she does. (22:16)
Essentially I’ve heard that Jon’s character in hatchet town is actually boy jeri but I have no clue if it’s actually true ( I think the lyrics are changed in the official cast recording where the accuse jeri instead of Gerald) it may be a conspiracy but you never know
Remember how Max specifically notes how ruth's skele-un was "really special?" He gives her a bow, she does a cute little curtsy in response. That was probably the first and only time Ruth got a complement on her acting. Then Revenent!Max tears her down again.
How dare you. How dare you point that out. I’m also glad I’m not the only one that calls Undead Max a revenant, even though they expressly say he’s a ghost
I just realised that one of the big "theme" or the biggest tragedy in NPMD is that young people always die right after they had found themselves (Max after feeling loved, Richie after feeling he belongs, Ruth after finding herself on stage ; Chastity after exorcising a ghost and embracing her sexual desires) - only the adult, the mayor, dies atfer being still an awful person
That`s...Ouch. A heartbreaking realisation. But wait a second - Did Grace die? Or did you mean that she basically dies as a person, and now she is just a power-high maniac, working for the Lords in black?
@@ПростоЧеловечек-б1е true, grace didn’t die… but by the end I don’t think she’s as human as she was in the beginning. If that makes sense 😂 or at least, what I thought (I think) was that she « lost » her chance to become a healthy adult. Since she hunts dudes now. Which is cool for her.
@@aude4747 I mean. It is cool we sure do love women's wrongs. But yeah, no healthy adult future. Though we do say that about a girl, who valued her "chastity" and purity more, than her faith, came up with the plan of dismembering and hiding the body, slept with a ghost, took a pistol from a policeman,,, did she even have a chance for that adult healthy life?
@@ПростоЧеловечек-б1е exactly ! Although I have read somewhere, probably on Tumblr, someone questioning if Chastity isn’t under the influence of the LIB since an early point in the musical. She is a lot, always has been but she does « descend into madness » during the show to the point where she breaks and asks « who am I ? ». Plus we know she has a connexion to the black and white ´cause she dreamed of Max killing Richie. So has she always been doomed by the narrative, by the LIB or by the culture of shame ? Guess we’ll never know
@@aude4747Considering the ending of Abstinence Camp, I think she’s just on the edge of snapping in every universe anyway. I can’t help but feel that dream is Max sending a message to his VIP target, and her whole madness across the multiverse stands moreso as a commentary on conservative fundamentalists and emotional repression. Just my read though; the idea of the one following God so close being whispered to by the demons most unholy also works as a similar commentary, I’m just going for Occam’s Razor on this one
Ooh...theory? Grace thought it was just her chastity she valued most, but the truth is it was her moral values as a whole. So she's become more a puppet of the Lords in Black because that was what she gave them, all her morality. Thus she becomes more a parody of those values by luring in "dirty dudes" with easy to fail tests of chastity because they're so over the top. Because the lights on her when she opens the book are the colors of the Lords seen during The Summoning.
YES totally agree. My original thought even when she first took action to complete the deal was that what she was giving up was God and religion as a whole as it was the thing she was grasping onto the entire play to justify her actions to herself. With the Christian God not an option anymore she is looking for something to replace that hole. I mean “darkness will save my soul” is such a good line when you think that she has been told her whole life that God is the only one who can save souls. She’s gone through a traumatic experience and presumably has had other unwanted sexual advances made on her other than just max (she tells her date that he is just like all the men before him) and she is in the middle of a crisis of faith, it’s the perfect recipe for the lords in black to swoop in and gain a follower who they can get to do their bidding.
@@jee462 yes, this 100%. They play it as a joke, but Grace is constantly praying and asking for God to support her. In the end it's the Lords In Black who actually answer her prayers and offer her an answer and power.
I have my own interpretation of the haunted house scene. When the jig is up steph says 'We made this plan to scare the shit out of you, because you deserve it' We're all aware that max has a god complex so in my mind him hearing steph say 'Because you deserve it' max is literally incapable of thinking they meant for it to be negative reasons
I think the reason Ruth doesn't have her retainer at the start is because she's already dead there. Richie says that he's dead and he and Ruth are the only ones on stage at the time, implying both of them are.
The cast and crew commentary said that was a good explanation, but the real reason was that Lauren didn't want people laughing immediately upon seeing her for the first time in a relatively serious moment.
@@Lady_Ginnie I noticed it was missing and wondered too, and that makes sense that it would pull focus - the opening number would be about "who's the girl with the retainer?" before we're introduced to Ruth.
I'm obsessed with how jon matteson falls in npmd, like he actually looks like he got pushed to the ground by telekinesis or smth and he falls SO hard I have no idea how his legs weren't bruised to shit, just commitment
I was recently in a show where I had to fall/be thrown to the ground multiple times and I had knee pads and STILL hurt my knees And that just makes it more impressive
I also noticed that Grace starts the show with two butterfly hairclips, but she enters the Beanie’s scene with only one in her hair, symbolising her gradual unhinged descent (because that one clip is literally hanging on by a thread at that point.) After Shapiro’s car crashes, you can see in the blackout that Angela removes that butterfly clip and puts it in her back pocket right before The Summoning, symbolising that Grace has completely departed from the person she was at the beginning of the show, which allows her to make the completely left-field decision to seduce Max to save Hatchetfield. This also justifies the cigarette moment, plus the fact that she uses swear words without censoring herself from then onward - she’s not acting like herself by that point. During the prom scene, we see Grace with two butterfly clips again, but this time they’re blue, not pink. She’s back to being herself again…or so we think. 😈
Very nice addition about the clips! If we colour code them according to the LIB, the pink hair clips would represent a hunger. Grace loses the first one when she gains the gun from Officer Bailey, and the second before she opens the Black Book. In both instances, she had access to a source of power, something she relishes in greatly (in 'Dirty Girl', she fantasised about using Max to satisfy her superiority complex, under the guise of converting him ['I am expecting you to betray' vs 'I am expecting you to behave']). Therefore, when she has the blue clips, it signifies that her hunger has been satiated, and now she seeks to make her voice 'the only voice'...which is very evangelical of her.
Blue has been one of Grace's main colours throughout the show, so the new clips and her all-blue dress don't feel like a significant change at first. But blue is Max's theme colour too. Blue is strongly associated with who he is in both life - a sadistic persecutor with a god complex who judges people as unworthy and brutally punishes them regardless of their actual characters and deeds, justifying it as "bringing order" and "separating light from darkness" - and undeath - all of those bad things magnified with all his more sympathetic traits gone and a vast amount of supernatural power that elevates him to an apocalyptic threat, since he can now effectively commit genocide. His ghost's blue veins, independent of Pokotho, imply that blue might be the colour of the specific form of magic that animates him. And Grace has also worn blue from the beginning! In fact, if you remove the pink from her original clothes' colour scheme, you're left with his clothes' entire colour scheme of blue, white and grey. She always had the potential to be as bad as him due the toxic, oppressive puritanical ideology she'd internalized. Her blue was just a lighter shade, and she had something else keeping that potential at bay. Some earnest humanity, kindness and remorse. The stress, guilt, danger, desperation and temptation that events of the story subject her to bleed that warmth out of her. At the start of "Dirty Dudes Must Die", Grace is already thinking like Max did in life and has the power and ambition of him in undeath. By the end, she's murdered a teenage boy while nobody else even knows it was her, putting her exactly where Max was at the end of "Nerdy Prudes Must Die". She even gleefully laughs and taunts her victim with "Run, you little bitch!"; this mirrors the undead Max's constant mockery and use of "bitch" in practically every line, and contrasts the old Grace's aversion to swearing, instead saying "B-word" for "bitch". The only previous time she said the full curse word, it was directed at God during an emotional breakdown and crisis of faith. You'd think she would menacingly quote the Bible about damnation or sin or something, but no. She just says what Max would say. She has new gods now, and they don't care what she says or feels or does, as long as she feeds them.
@@azira6620 the part about her being 'the only voice' is very reminiscent of Pokey, his literal title is 'the singular voice' and the blue hairclips links her even more to him
🤓☝️ moment real fast: i hate to be that guy sm but for some of the butterfly clips it is an editing error 😭 anytime we see her take one off i mean that obviously happened but in some she alternates from one on each side of her hair to 2 becaus it was filmed across multiple shows. ANYWAY!!!! my nerd moment over I LOVE THIS THEORY. especially because we know grace is always a little evil (axe man and all that) and knowing her family has the clips as their kinda thing i think it is a good way of showing her going against what her families norm is by getting rid of the clips
Something that has stuck with me is that both Richie and Ruth realized something before their deaths. Richie being that he’s not actually a loser, he really isn’t, and that Ruth can actually sing and preform well, even if she only realized it for a brief moment. And right before Max died, he was shown the first act of “compassion” towards him, that people would actually wanna do something for him. All of them were set up to probably have some good character development or growth, but then they were killed off or died :’)
Same thing with Pete and Steph! It's only after Pete and Steph agree they would have gone to homecoming together ("if things were different" but still basically a confession) that Max jumps in. If it wasn't for Grace's intervention, Max would have killed Steph first, then Peter in that scene. Contrastingly, Grace doesn't get that same realization within the show. Because she is the one who ends up making the sacrifice (the thing she values most), she not only doesn't grow - she loses her sanity. I don't think she was always THAT evil (certainly many questionable evil decisions, sure), but the Lords in Black taking an integral part from her is what makes her go entirely off the rails, much like the Wiggly doll making people aggressive, the Pokey meteor controlling people, or Blinky's Watcher World making Bill and Alice fight one another to near death despite their familial bonds. Grace sacrifices all opportunities to grow as a character in order to save the nerds.
I will note, for the line about Steph converting crypto into money, that it's actually confirmed by Mariah and Cory that Steph gets her lunch money in crypto and she needs to convert it herself
This. It's also 100% funnier that way, which makes sense to me. If she really was a crypto bro then she wouldn't be struggling to make the conversions.
the "darkness will spare my soul" is my absolute favorite line in the entire musical and I am actually so normal about the delivery of it, and how absolutely breathtaking it is, haha, yeah, so normal about it
y’all ever think about how max was probably the first person to ever compliment ruth’s acting (and the skele’un? that was really special!) and he murders her while making fun of her for it? cause i do
Okay but my favourite bit of the opening is that our two student victims are outright telling us that they die before going into 'haha jk' and later being like 'no jk'. Brilliant
I interpreted it as a tragedy-style peek at the ending before transitioning into the intro. It's cool how that causes two different ways of watching it. (Not knowing they were going to die vs knowing they were going to die eventually and just wondering how)
my favorite 100% overanalyzing detail is when steph first mentions cheating to pete in high school is killing me, the dance blocking shifts grace over into the spotlight. and it's implied through the lighting that she was present for the entirety of their conversation from that point onward. we love an eavesdropping queen
25:25 when Grace says, “ like all the other guys that came before you” I took that Grace, having unwanted sexual advances thrust upon her by other guys. And in my mind that also is the reason why she sings, dirty dudes must die. Is that just me?
after watching the digital ticket specifically of The Summoning, I think it's criminal that Pokey and Tinky didn't get better lighting or feature in this version. As well as Tinky continually reaching for Peter (who's always facing Tinky) during the bargaining bits
My favourite little detail in the mayor singing "the psychos killed two, if he gets me next make it three", with the mayor being the next and third person to be killed
for 13:14, Trevor was a student in the bbq monologues, and it would be weird if he was the only student singing this song; and considering Jon is wearing a shirt and tie under the jacket, I think it's safe to say that it is indeed Paul who thinks Donna turned brains into soup
If you listen to the cast recording of the song, he’s actually Boy Jerry, not Paul. He’s the one originally accused for the killings during Bryce’s solo. The line was changed for the proshot for a cameo by Dylan Saunders (since he didn’t work on this musical) there were four lyric changes from the cast recording and the pro shot for the sake of on screen cameos. Ziggys line was originally Dan Reynolds for a Jae Hughes cameo , Barry Swifts line was originally Officer Baileys for a Jeff Blim cameo (even tho it’s not his only cameo) , Charlie’s line was originally Karen Chasitys line for a James Tolbert cameo) and Of course Geralds line lol
26:06 - 26:08 One thing I've noticed has gone unmentioned is the fact that when she turns around,the lighting on her face,mainly around her eyes,makes her look similar to Max after his death. In other words, *we're screwed.*
10:50 considering max's whole goofy and sadistic bully personality and everything i like to think that when he realised that he's a zombie/spirit/ghost thing, he'd get really excited and hone in on that zombie demeanour stereotype. like how he keeps doing the “zombie hands” after his death. also just overall goofiness prolly because hes strutting and mockingly boasting about how much power he has over the prudes? i think its like a point and laugh but in dance form lol
I don’t know if you watched Jon’s live stream with Jeff watching NPMD and a cool fun fact is that the song at homecoming is supposed to be canonically an in universe song, written by the band featured in Killer Track, that everyone would actually know so technically a diegetic song which is fun.
12:04 that's the Nightmare Time leitmotif! It tends to crop up when the lords in black are involved, or things are generally getting darker. This is the reveal of Max's Revenant, so it makes sense that this would be its first use in the show, given that the Church of the Starry Children are responsible for his reanimation!
also, when they're digging up the black book and Mayor Lauter is giving exposition about the Waylons and the Lords in Black, the main music backing it is a heavy piano hit, followed by chopped up pieces of the Nightmare Time leitmotif, which then plays in completion when the book is revealed! Super cool bit of music telling the story in parallel to the actors.
it was first heard in TGWDLM in Not your seed (look what happens nightmare time) and eventually became the Nightmare time leitmotif across the hatchetfield universe
@@iridescent28actually! You can hear it in the background of the meteor scene as far as I could tell! So when the characters are doing their things before the meteor hits, the moment that bill is talking to Alice you can hear the nightmare time theme! Idk if that’s the first time you hear it or not tho, I just remember noticing it on the last time I watched TGWDLM. So it could show up earlier or other times before not your seed! :) but yea it’s synonymous w/ nightmare time now but I wonder if it was ONLY used in reference to Alice in the first musical. Guess I’ll have to rewatch to double check
also at 17:01 where ruth essentially reaches the climax of the song, she looks utterly surprised that she was capable of reaching that note i don't know if this applies to everyone, but every time i sing this song, when i get to this part, i essentially "let go" and let my head tone do the work for me, and i think that's what ruth goes through with this part as well, she fully embraces the character and the performance, no longer feeling awkward and is now fully in the moment until she pulls herself back when her voice cracks at the end of the word "once" this (in my overanalyzation of this song) was the moment where she realizes that she wasn't just being delusional when she says she can perform on stage in the beginning of the scene; she absolutely can, she's rough and needs practice, but she has the potential and she finally sees it for herself, even if it was only for a few seconds (and then she dies but we don't talk about that)
Said this on tumblr, but the background noises during grace and Max going at it makes it seem like Max is actually a virgin but it's posturing with either a) people spreading rumors about him or b) he purposefully spread those himself Now that i think about it, when Max is meeting the LIB he asks wHAt ArE yOU?!?!? in the same tone as Jeff during TTO's dysentery world. probably is just a cute lil reference if TTO ends up not being retconned into hachetverse Canon. BUT if it is put into hachetverse, then that means our first (rather unintentional) encounter with the LIB was blinky more than 4 years before TGWDLM
@@cynnie_artpretty sure it’s been said that TTO is canon to Hatchetfield by being a musical shown at the Starlight in universe (I like to think that the writer of the show in universe(is Jeff Blim canon to hatchetfield?)had an encounter with Blinky and wrote that joke as an allusion to him)
When Richie is like dying in npmd and everyone is watching, I think that symbolizes that theyre all seeing it happen but they’re not paying attention to it, instead they’re watching the game, so it’s like they were technically all there when he died😭
I saw it in a more metaphorical sense, but I think the idea of it being them watching the game and not noticing really well ties into it. I saw it as a sort of commentary on the way bullying works in so many highschools, it’s rampant and everyone knows who the targets are but for the most part, everyone just ignores it and pretends it’s not happening. Them watching on in the background as Max literally kills Richie’s is a sort of satiric dramatization of how they previously watched on as he killed them in the metaphoric sense mentally.
God, Ruth's song consistently makes me cry and you analyzing her as "feeling worn out with day-to-day life but still feeling underdeveloped mentally" hit a little too close to home holy shit
i think the arm swinging of Jon is to reflect on Wiggly's true form. He's an octopus like creature, so it's like he's waving his tentacles I'm also pretty sure their dances are supposed to look robotic. They took on these forms so they could look approachable, doesn't mean they'll do it naturally It also looks like their dances reflects on their characteristics. Pokey shows off his mask, Wiggly swings his arm like an octopus, Tinky shakes his toybox like he's playing with it, Nibbly does circular movements with the lollipop and with her arms like a tongue licking it, Blinky moves her head around looking at everything
I know I've commented the same thing on other NPMD videos but I'm still obsessed with the staging for the end of Dirty Dudes Must Die being the same as Let It Out in TGWDLM - being that it's when one of the key "protagonists" are officially corrupted by the Lords in Black
I might be stretching it here, but I like they had Richie sing the "he's the horror in every rumor" bc I feel like in american culture u don't rly associate rumors with horror, but in _anime_ you hear the word "rumor" is used all the time when talking about what you'd usually classify as urban legends (which I assume is a translation thing), and those u very much do associate with horror
Small detail but Curt’s the only one who tilts his head when they all sing “darkness will spare my soul” at 26:02 AND I FIND THAT SO SILLY FOR NO REASON MAKES ME GIGGLE
Something that always gets me in Bully/Bury the Bully that I haven't seen anyone talk about is that they try and fail to harmonize in Bully, but they manage to harmonize later in Bury out of fear, which is both a neat touch, but can also be seen as them banding together fully as as a group as they commit to doing a crime when before it was harmless prank that Ritchie, Ruth, Steph, and Pete weren't fully behind when they tried to harmonize the first time
I just realised that Richie just Charlotte'd. If you don't get what I mean, Charlotte's guts are torn off. Right before the screen fades, you can see Max aim for Richie's stomach, as if he's grabbing it.
@@santiagoloi8489 its fully possible that the toilet-drowning was just what finished him off, and considered the fact that the scene was gruesome enough that Sam puked upon seeing Richie's body, I'd image he suffered some pretty nasty injuries before dying
@@toxin2518 I rewatched it some time before, he had his nips torn off and probably also got beat up badly, tho it never mentions his guts getting torn off like Charlotte's
@@santiagoloi8489 oh yeah no that's fair im not trying to say i think he did get disemboweled, just that we didn't see him die so a lot more stuff could've happened before that we also didn't see
the phrase "has to fight off joe walker" is absolutely hilarious, and also laughably true. this is like, what, the third time that's happened to his character in a starkid musical? also i'm pretty sure jon is supposed to be boy jerry in hatchet town, at least according to other internet sources
yeah, in the live version ppl in the ensemble get accused instead of the cameos, that’s just for RUclips, Jon is definitely being boy Jerry as seen in the digital ticket
btw i think the reason max makes richie sing during nerdy prudes must die is bc the things hes making him sing is a version of what was going through maxs head when he was dying
Mariah actually said on twitter that the reason Steph "does crypto" is because her dad converts all her allowance into crypto because he just hates her
I don't know if anyone else has noticed this but I think that the words that Max has Ritchie repeat in Nerdy Prudes Must Die are a reflection of his thought process as he died, which fuels his vengeance and his drive to murder. When he says “who will pray for you, when your body is gone,” he reflects on how the world instantly got better and that his friends and everyone around him who had worshiped him had realized how much better the world is without him and therefore didn't pray for him to come back and didn't care that his body was gone. In fact, they were happier that his body was gone and no one prayed for him. We know for a fact that his family (or more specifically his father) didn't care either, which not only proves his point that high school would have been his peak but also that he was never truly loved. When he says “this is the consequence for what you've done” he is talking about his murder being the consequence of the way he treated all of these “nerds” and how seeing them all 10 times happier because of what they did to him even though it was morally wrong was his consequence. He needed to get his revenge on the people who were becoming happier and reaching the height of their teenage evolution because that was what was done to him.
wait stop I actually love this theory. and how when richie and ruth die, they get killed right as they're fully becoming themselves (richie getting accepted as part of the team and ruth realizing her dream and passion for being on stage, also she doesn't die, but max almost kills steph right after her and pete confess their love for each other), and it makes sense that they never get to live past this because max didn't, he died right as was opening up and feeling loved for the first time, so he never got to experience life beyond that, so as a vengeful spirit he made sure that the nerds never get to live past their revelations either.
24:56 NO ONE TALKS ABOUT THIS PART! Where they say “just as we start lying down, forever!” Like what does that mean?? I can’t be the only one that thinks that isn’t just a cute romantic line right? Like on my brain it makes me think they knew what grace’s plan was and that they had to make the most of tonight or- SOMETHING?! IDK!? It feels weird to me, like they know something before we do. Lmk what you think cause it drives me crazy lol /lh
OKAY I HAVE A HUGE THEORY ABOUT THIS ONE LINE The whole thing is "Lights up on the town / Just as we start lying down...forever" Lights up is stage speak for the end of a show or the start of a new one when the house or stage lights go on. And it makes me think of BF when they talked about how the world never actually ends and Hatchetfield isn't allowed to die. People suffer in cycles and then it's undone and new suffering happens. SO my theory is that this is referring to that! They start to lie down and die, but before they can the lights go up and a new cycle begins! A new show for the Lords amusement
The two at 12:19 seem to be the understudies. Probably wanted to include them in the proshot as a brief little cameo, but they didn't have full choreography for the rest of the scene so they just sneak offstage. According to the fan wiki theyre briefly in the homecoming scene as well
someone said that, during nerdy prudes must die, the other students in the back represent the fact that everyone was present when richie died but nobody was there. like they were all at the football field whilst he was getting killed in the locker room also!! Jon's playing Boy Jerry in Hatchetown. in the cast recording, instead of Gerald, Bryce’s reporter accuses Jerry and he goes 'it was girl jerry that dirty girl'. trevor is his barbecue monologues guy :)
Crazy how little appreciation Just for Once gets, such a bop and just amazing characterization of Ruth. Probably my favorite use of the 'if I can finally be cool' motif too. Also I'm not sure if its intentional but I love how the whole bbq fantasy of suburban life is a perfect example of how something can be 'medium AND well' ... Maury >:(
when steph talks about crypto, i actually think it could be a situation of "my dad gave me this useless currency bc we're rich" and she's trying to at least convert it to lunch money, something that her dad 100% does not care about idk
I adore how seamlessly Ruth weaves between the character she’s playing and her own internal monologue during her solo and the way Lauren pulls it off. It punches you in the face every time.
13:14, it's boy Jerry. In the cast recording and during the live shows the towns people blame other towns people who are also on stage, and they call out Jerry as one of the murderers, and he pivots trying to blame girl Jerry before the "Let's Kill 'Em" line Edit: Trevor is the kid he plays during the Barbecue Monologues
11:55 iirc, there has been claim that the other students are in the background because they were technically all “present” for Richie’s murder (at the game), but were otherwise occupied. Though it’s probably odd that none of the football team specifically used or checked the locker room at halftime or after the game, as one of them would have found Richie’s body earlier if they had (though this, in turn, likely would have made it to the news, and let the other nerds catch wind of what happened before getting called into the office).
Richie died in the bathroom. I think it was insinuated with the chase at the beginning that Max lured Richie from the locker room to the bathrooms, as well as telekinetically closing doors as he tried to escape?
24:14 I only just looked at Max's expression while the LIB take him and god it's perfect. Such a wonderful mix of awe, terror, amazement, confusion- exactly what someone seeing five colourful eldritch abominations coming specifically to claim their soul should look like.
i think mariah said that she thinks the reason steph is trying to convert crypto to lunch money in the opening is bcs solomon gives her crypto instead of regular lunch money bcs he hates her 😭
I HATE how Ruth, Richie, and Max die. Ruth & Richie die after finding themself in a very heartwarming way, which is just so sad to me. Max death is so tragic too because he was sooo close to becoming a likable character who was just a product of his environment but misunderstood. I WHICH IT NEVER HAPPENED I LOVE THEM SO MUCHHHH
as a third year theater major and a life long theater kid, i could write pages and pages about just the lighting design - and i don’t know much about light design LMAO
As an audio engineer, this show scratches an itch I didn’t know I had. The audio is mixed extremely well, along with some background vocals being panned left/right, or being filtered at 2:44 NPMD in the best Starkid show in terms of production, quality, and audio. It’s extremely polished
I have a couple things to explain that you seemed confused about at 11:54 you asked what the other students are doing there and i think it's because they're all in a close vicinity to richie dying, watching the football game while Richie gets changed in the locker room but don't hear him being killed due to the football game sounds. you can see that they're staring past richie and into the audience, showing how someone could've noticed but nobody did then at 13:32 you were confused about where Virginia and Davis went and they're not there because hatchetown was filmed separately, hence why people like jeff, dylan and jae are in the song in the yt version but in the soundtrack they're not. they're very much cameos that happened once, specifically for the filmed version, because it was filmed separately i assume that virginia and davis weren't there for it.
2:58 I dont think that Mayor Lauter was telling Steph that she was a mistake. "October surprise" is a phrase used when talking about something coming out in the news that would affect an election/the reputation of a candidate. Since they were talking about how Stephanie's detention would affect the election, I really think he was guilting her (not exactly, but I can't think of the words)
How I believe the Hatchetfield series works is every show, unless otherly specified, is in its own unique universe connected by the black and white and the Lords in black. That's why characters may seem different between shows
one thing i found really cool is cause of will branner's deep-set eyes the lighting causes him to look like he has full black eyes - you can see it at the end of literal monster when he does his final pose as well as a lot of times when he's dead which makes the zombie make up more effective :)
Another thing I noticed was in dirty girl max said he expects grace to betray him and then at the end she does betray him and he didn't expect it the irony is awesome
1:19 Actually, Mariah adressed this in a tweet. Since it is a bit OOC of Steph to use Crypto. Mariah said "I think her father is such a piece of shit he gaves her only crypto money instead of lunch cash money so she has to figure out how tf does it work" 😅😅
finally, someone giving Just For Once the praise it deserves. that song fucking knocked the wind out of me and the ending bit of "i used to dance,,,, i used to dance,,," makes me want to sob every time i hear it. i think i also resonate with the idea that all i want is to be worn out by normal life things, not whatever bullshit that makes me different from everyone else's struggles. also you hit the nail on the head with her feeling like she was somehow underdeveloped and behind mentally and everyone else just seems to have figured things out. also just because i feel like its important- i watched someones song ranking video and they ranked Just For Once DEAD LAST, and i immediately clicked out of the video. WRONG ™ . thank you for doing it justice, although it was a little painful that you cut out the "i used to dance" bit loll :,)
2:08 I asked in a live stream, and apparently there was a number on the flyer that, when called, played a recorded message of Grace talking about how scary and horrible school dances are and why they should be cancelled. The voice message is gone now, but it sounded so funny!
12:03 isn’t there a line in “not your seed” where it goes “and look what happens, nightmare time”? Everytime someone talks about NT I think about that lyric so much
Hi, I’m the person who actually edited the NPMD IMDb page and added all the characters to everyone’s cast credits. Jon in the Hatchet Town scene was Boy Jerry (it’s revealed in the studio version of the song). Trevor is the guy in the BBQ Monologues 😊
I also love how the costumes for the LIB have some form of fur on them I think to symbolize their toy versions which I think is cool and I haven't seen anyone else mention it before.
I actually never thought of Angela breaking character as Grace losing hold of herself but that makes so much sense! Also I love how sort of cartoonish Grace sings, like how cartoon characters with a distinct voice sing with the same exact vocal quality as when they speak
I love that Max doesn’t get a traditional villans’s “I want song”. Everyone says he’s terrible, and then the villain would usually croon about how they’re misunderstood or that they have goals and ambitions, but Max’s song is “yeah I am actually irredeemably terrible because I want to be” 😂
I will always love villain characters that seem like theyre a lot more surface level than other characters but if you actually pay attention to the words theyre saying and not not just the tone theyre saying them, they’re a lot smarter and more interesting than you realize How does Max know so much about theatre? How does he know so much about politics? In what universe would he properly use a metaphor about the Bible? Apparently this one. And Grace being an antagonist the entire time but being pushed off as just a nerdy religious prude because there was a bigger threat at hand only makes me realize her interest in Max and his violent nature. She was naturally violent, didn’t consider murder a bad thing, and only pushed off Max because she didn’t think he knew the Bible… But he does… And that creates a whole new dynamic and possible character points thats not even necessarily addressed by the story at hand. And like in this video it’s possible that Grace sees herself as a god like figure like Max did but on the “nerdy prude” side TLDR; Lowkey I’m feeling this HolyGhost ship because the writing creates so many parallels throughout the direct and subtle antagonists the entire time making it all the more jaw dropping
11:54 apparently the other students were there because they were watching they game, and they didn’t notice Ritchie getting murdered because they were too busy watching it
I'd like to think there's an alternate nightmare time universe where Max didn't die in the house and actually grew to become a better person. They all become an unlikely friend group (but probably face some other horrible scenario like an apocalypse caused by the LIB)
12:04 i agree with thinking the Nightmare time motif comes up because of the Lords In Black/Waylons are somewhat involved in Richie’s death because they are the reason Max’s spirit is still around HOWEVER I also do think it is a reference to Not Your Seed because of how powerless the adults are here. Like when Paul and Bill came to “rescue” Alice, they couldn’t do anything, they couldn’t save her, like how no adults could save Richie. This is a running theme in all of the Hatchetfield musicals, how the adults don’t really know what is happening in their kids lives at all, and are just as powerless as them, ex: Bill & Alice, Tom & Tim, and (basically all the kids with their parents in NPMD) but specifically Grace & her parents or Steph & her dad
I enjoyed Starkid casually in early 2020 and then got really into smosh so I didn't know. Much if anything about upcoming shows on yt n stuff, but I remember when npmd came out it was JUST after sword af finished (smosh dnd, Angela played a goblin) and I never really clocked before that. Angela smosh was Angela Starkid and the DIFFERENCE between her onstage acting and her dnd acting... I love Angela i am Angela Stan number one
Trevor is the name of the male student who fudges his line in the Barbeque Monologues. This probably means Paul is the one who is singing in the Hatchet Town song.
It's amazing to see the conversation showing between father and daughter being close to the camp as events can happen a little simular but different in each universe and also with paul and emma
At 16:00 the keyboard sounds like it's set to a harpsichord rather than fake guitar. There's definitely symbolism still at play with the instrument choice though, as harpsichords are seen as upper class, high society, and perhaps funnily enough... prudishness
I AM SO GLAD SOMEONE ELSE LIKES JUST FOR ONCE!! I thought I was biased as a lights person, i thought i was looking into it way to much bcause i was just glad to see lights brought up!!! Everyone says it doesnt really have anything to do with her character, but they are only seeing ruth acting as a actor, not how the song actually connects to ruth!!
Ruth's number reminds me of myself at that age singing "I Miss The Mountains" from Next To Normal. The way a musical can make you resonate with a character with a very different life from yourself bc the emotions feel the same and are expressed in the song just as intensely as you are feeling them, especially at an age when you might not even have the words to properly describe or identify those emotions yet.
![Jeff Blim's Falsetto [JBF]](http://yt3.ggpht.com/ytc/AIdro_m-pZdP1s-rBpwCXzqXghwbR673-NDZB3q6HmJtHRnrcA=s48-c-k-c0x00ffffff-no-rj)
This video is 50% my analysis and 50% me really liking the songs and dances (and also a secret third thing, you'll never guess it though)
btw I have some extra things in the description I forgot to put in the video
is the 3rd thing having a romantic relationship with mariah rose faith casillas?
@@ikiam8021idk if I’d go that far, but I’m pretty stoked about going to homecoming with her
I hadn't noticed until you pointed out that Pete backs up more in IILY. But after that I was so conscious of it.
I noticed in CAITIA reprise, Steph backs up more bc she doesn't want to love him more, cuz she has to shoot him if she does.
(22:16)
Essentially I’ve heard that Jon’s character in hatchet town is actually boy jeri but I have no clue if it’s actually true ( I think the lyrics are changed in the official cast recording where the accuse jeri instead of Gerald) it may be a conspiracy but you never know
@@ikiam8021
Remember how Max specifically notes how ruth's skele-un was "really special?" He gives her a bow, she does a cute little curtsy in response. That was probably the first and only time Ruth got a complement on her acting. Then Revenent!Max tears her down again.
How dare you. How dare you point that out.
I’m also glad I’m not the only one that calls Undead Max a revenant, even though they expressly say he’s a ghost
thank you for making me even more sad now :( if nobody writes ao3 where they're fine I'm doing it myself
I just realised that one of the big "theme" or the biggest tragedy in NPMD is that young people always die right after they had found themselves (Max after feeling loved, Richie after feeling he belongs, Ruth after finding herself on stage ; Chastity after exorcising a ghost and embracing her sexual desires) - only the adult, the mayor, dies atfer being still an awful person
That`s...Ouch. A heartbreaking realisation. But wait a second - Did Grace die? Or did you mean that she basically dies as a person, and now she is just a power-high maniac, working for the Lords in black?
@@ПростоЧеловечек-б1е true, grace didn’t die… but by the end I don’t think she’s as human as she was in the beginning. If that makes sense 😂 or at least, what I thought (I think) was that she « lost » her chance to become a healthy adult. Since she hunts dudes now. Which is cool for her.
@@aude4747 I mean. It is cool we sure do love women's wrongs. But yeah, no healthy adult future. Though we do say that about a girl, who valued her "chastity" and purity more, than her faith, came up with the plan of dismembering and hiding the body, slept with a ghost, took a pistol from a policeman,,, did she even have a chance for that adult healthy life?
@@ПростоЧеловечек-б1е exactly ! Although I have read somewhere, probably on Tumblr, someone questioning if Chastity isn’t under the influence of the LIB since an early point in the musical. She is a lot, always has been but she does « descend into madness » during the show to the point where she breaks and asks « who am I ? ». Plus we know she has a connexion to the black and white ´cause she dreamed of Max killing Richie. So has she always been doomed by the narrative, by the LIB or by the culture of shame ? Guess we’ll never know
@@aude4747Considering the ending of Abstinence Camp, I think she’s just on the edge of snapping in every universe anyway. I can’t help but feel that dream is Max sending a message to his VIP target, and her whole madness across the multiverse stands moreso as a commentary on conservative fundamentalists and emotional repression. Just my read though; the idea of the one following God so close being whispered to by the demons most unholy also works as a similar commentary, I’m just going for Occam’s Razor on this one
Ooh...theory? Grace thought it was just her chastity she valued most, but the truth is it was her moral values as a whole. So she's become more a puppet of the Lords in Black because that was what she gave them, all her morality. Thus she becomes more a parody of those values by luring in "dirty dudes" with easy to fail tests of chastity because they're so over the top. Because the lights on her when she opens the book are the colors of the Lords seen during The Summoning.
YES totally agree. My original thought even when she first took action to complete the deal was that what she was giving up was God and religion as a whole as it was the thing she was grasping onto the entire play to justify her actions to herself. With the Christian God not an option anymore she is looking for something to replace that hole. I mean “darkness will save my soul” is such a good line when you think that she has been told her whole life that God is the only one who can save souls. She’s gone through a traumatic experience and presumably has had other unwanted sexual advances made on her other than just max (she tells her date that he is just like all the men before him) and she is in the middle of a crisis of faith, it’s the perfect recipe for the lords in black to swoop in and gain a follower who they can get to do their bidding.
@@jee462I NEVER UNDERSTOOD THAT LINE AT THE END IT MAKES SO MUCH MORE SENSE NOW OMG
@@jee462 yes, this 100%. They play it as a joke, but Grace is constantly praying and asking for God to support her. In the end it's the Lords In Black who actually answer her prayers and offer her an answer and power.
I have my own interpretation of the haunted house scene. When the jig is up steph says 'We made this plan to scare the shit out of you, because you deserve it' We're all aware that max has a god complex so in my mind him hearing steph say 'Because you deserve it' max is literally incapable of thinking they meant for it to be negative reasons
He probably grew up hearing that he doesn't deserve anything from his father, so he thought the opposite is a positive thing.
1:20 Mariah actually said that Solomon hates her so much he gives her her allowance in crypto
That's somehow both sad and also very funny. He probably also gives her NFTs as Christmas presents (I don't know how NFTs work).
I think the reason Ruth doesn't have her retainer at the start is because she's already dead there. Richie says that he's dead and he and Ruth are the only ones on stage at the time, implying both of them are.
The cast and crew commentary said that was a good explanation, but the real reason was that Lauren didn't want people laughing immediately upon seeing her for the first time in a relatively serious moment.
@@Lady_Ginnie I noticed it was missing and wondered too, and that makes sense that it would pull focus - the opening number would be about "who's the girl with the retainer?" before we're introduced to Ruth.
I think Lauren also explained she didnt want to break it during the more intensive parts of choreo in Highschool Is Killing Me
I'm obsessed with how jon matteson falls in npmd, like he actually looks like he got pushed to the ground by telekinesis or smth and he falls SO hard I have no idea how his legs weren't bruised to shit, just commitment
He did say in the watch party he did with Jeff that the fall in this recording wasn't safe and that he had actually hurt his legs 😭
@@V4MP_.IR3 oh god of course🤣
I was recently in a show where I had to fall/be thrown to the ground multiple times and I had knee pads and STILL hurt my knees
And that just makes it more impressive
23:23
She puts her hair down all seductive like and stuff, but she never puts it up usually, which means she put her hair up PURELY to let it down
She has it up in the very first scene
I also noticed that Grace starts the show with two butterfly hairclips, but she enters the Beanie’s scene with only one in her hair, symbolising her gradual unhinged descent (because that one clip is literally hanging on by a thread at that point.)
After Shapiro’s car crashes, you can see in the blackout that Angela removes that butterfly clip and puts it in her back pocket right before The Summoning, symbolising that Grace has completely departed from the person she was at the beginning of the show, which allows her to make the completely left-field decision to seduce Max to save Hatchetfield. This also justifies the cigarette moment, plus the fact that she uses swear words without censoring herself from then onward - she’s not acting like herself by that point.
During the prom scene, we see Grace with two butterfly clips again, but this time they’re blue, not pink. She’s back to being herself again…or so we think. 😈
Very nice addition about the clips! If we colour code them according to the LIB, the pink hair clips would represent a hunger. Grace loses the first one when she gains the gun from Officer Bailey, and the second before she opens the Black Book. In both instances, she had access to a source of power, something she relishes in greatly (in 'Dirty Girl', she fantasised about using Max to satisfy her superiority complex, under the guise of converting him ['I am expecting you to betray' vs 'I am expecting you to behave']).
Therefore, when she has the blue clips, it signifies that her hunger has been satiated, and now she seeks to make her voice 'the only voice'...which is very evangelical of her.
oh my god? i love this sm??
Blue has been one of Grace's main colours throughout the show, so the new clips and her all-blue dress don't feel like a significant change at first. But blue is Max's theme colour too. Blue is strongly associated with who he is in both life - a sadistic persecutor with a god complex who judges people as unworthy and brutally punishes them regardless of their actual characters and deeds, justifying it as "bringing order" and "separating light from darkness" - and undeath - all of those bad things magnified with all his more sympathetic traits gone and a vast amount of supernatural power that elevates him to an apocalyptic threat, since he can now effectively commit genocide. His ghost's blue veins, independent of Pokotho, imply that blue might be the colour of the specific form of magic that animates him. And Grace has also worn blue from the beginning! In fact, if you remove the pink from her original clothes' colour scheme, you're left with his clothes' entire colour scheme of blue, white and grey. She always had the potential to be as bad as him due the toxic, oppressive puritanical ideology she'd internalized. Her blue was just a lighter shade, and she had something else keeping that potential at bay. Some earnest humanity, kindness and remorse. The stress, guilt, danger, desperation and temptation that events of the story subject her to bleed that warmth out of her.
At the start of "Dirty Dudes Must Die", Grace is already thinking like Max did in life and has the power and ambition of him in undeath. By the end, she's murdered a teenage boy while nobody else even knows it was her, putting her exactly where Max was at the end of "Nerdy Prudes Must Die". She even gleefully laughs and taunts her victim with "Run, you little bitch!"; this mirrors the undead Max's constant mockery and use of "bitch" in practically every line, and contrasts the old Grace's aversion to swearing, instead saying "B-word" for "bitch". The only previous time she said the full curse word, it was directed at God during an emotional breakdown and crisis of faith. You'd think she would menacingly quote the Bible about damnation or sin or something, but no. She just says what Max would say. She has new gods now, and they don't care what she says or feels or does, as long as she feeds them.
@@azira6620 the part about her being 'the only voice' is very reminiscent of Pokey, his literal title is 'the singular voice' and the blue hairclips links her even more to him
🤓☝️ moment real fast: i hate to be that guy sm but for some of the butterfly clips it is an editing error 😭 anytime we see her take one off i mean that obviously happened but in some she alternates from one on each side of her hair to 2 becaus it was filmed across multiple shows.
ANYWAY!!!! my nerd moment over I LOVE THIS THEORY. especially because we know grace is always a little evil (axe man and all that) and knowing her family has the clips as their kinda thing i think it is a good way of showing her going against what her families norm is by getting rid of the clips
Something that has stuck with me is that both Richie and Ruth realized something before their deaths. Richie being that he’s not actually a loser, he really isn’t, and that Ruth can actually sing and preform well, even if she only realized it for a brief moment. And right before Max died, he was shown the first act of “compassion” towards him, that people would actually wanna do something for him. All of them were set up to probably have some good character development or growth, but then they were killed off or died :’)
Same thing with Pete and Steph! It's only after Pete and Steph agree they would have gone to homecoming together ("if things were different" but still basically a confession) that Max jumps in. If it wasn't for Grace's intervention, Max would have killed Steph first, then Peter in that scene.
Contrastingly, Grace doesn't get that same realization within the show. Because she is the one who ends up making the sacrifice (the thing she values most), she not only doesn't grow - she loses her sanity. I don't think she was always THAT evil (certainly many questionable evil decisions, sure), but the Lords in Black taking an integral part from her is what makes her go entirely off the rails, much like the Wiggly doll making people aggressive, the Pokey meteor controlling people, or Blinky's Watcher World making Bill and Alice fight one another to near death despite their familial bonds.
Grace sacrifices all opportunities to grow as a character in order to save the nerds.
I will note, for the line about Steph converting crypto into money, that it's actually confirmed by Mariah and Cory that Steph gets her lunch money in crypto and she needs to convert it herself
so her dad is the douche?
the reveal that the crypto bro in the family is actually SOLOMON is so fucking funny
i think it started as a mariah's headcanon of why steph isn´t a cryptohead and cory just rolled with it lol
This. It's also 100% funnier that way, which makes sense to me. If she really was a crypto bro then she wouldn't be struggling to make the conversions.
Was gonna mention this
the "darkness will spare my soul" is my absolute favorite line in the entire musical and I am actually so normal about the delivery of it, and how absolutely breathtaking it is, haha, yeah, so normal about it
The way it's a perfect cycle on the album makes me feel normal feelings and act normally
It gives until dawn that line
Glad to know I'm not the only one
y’all ever think about how max was probably the first person to ever compliment ruth’s acting (and the skele’un? that was really special!) and he murders her while making fun of her for it? cause i do
Oh no 😭
Okay but my favourite bit of the opening is that our two student victims are outright telling us that they die before going into 'haha jk' and later being like 'no jk'. Brilliant
I interpreted it as a tragedy-style peek at the ending before transitioning into the intro. It's cool how that causes two different ways of watching it.
(Not knowing they were going to die vs knowing they were going to die eventually and just wondering how)
my favorite 100% overanalyzing detail is when steph first mentions cheating to pete in high school is killing me, the dance blocking shifts grace over into the spotlight. and it's implied through the lighting that she was present for the entirety of their conversation from that point onward. we love an eavesdropping queen
25:25 when Grace says, “ like all the other guys that came before you” I took that Grace, having unwanted sexual advances thrust upon her by other guys. And in my mind that also is the reason why she sings, dirty dudes must die. Is that just me?
I actually had the same thought initially and never even considered the idea that she had done this before until other people suggested it!
after watching the digital ticket specifically of The Summoning, I think it's criminal that Pokey and Tinky didn't get better lighting or feature in this version. As well as Tinky continually reaching for Peter (who's always facing Tinky) during the bargaining bits
and the way Steph holds onto Pete when Tinky starts talking to him !! I also really wish there were more wide shots in the summoning for the proshot
Will should play every bully in anything ever, it would heighten the quality of media as a whole
Why was my first thought Will playing Heather Chandler-
@@MemberOfTheTitanArmy He'd 100% slay in the role
he’s currently playing a bully in back to the future on broadway and he continues to play the role perfectly
@@MemberOfTheTitanArmy I would accept Will Heather Chandler or Will Kurt/Ram and I think either would be perfect
Will as all three and he just moves around the stage depending on who’s talking
My favourite little detail in the mayor singing "the psychos killed two, if he gets me next make it three", with the mayor being the next and third person to be killed
Next is Ruth
@nemo53 It's a complicated numbering, since Ruth *was* the 3rd to die but she was the 2nd to be killed by Max
@@kspoo10_ yeah mayor third killed and Ruth is second
But mayor doesn't die next because only Richie is dead during a song
@@nemo53 Oh, right. Drat, I guess the theory/detail is kinda broken then :(
It was nice while it lasted...
I thought his assistant was the third to be killed? She gets decapitated directly before he's killed
for 13:14, Trevor was a student in the bbq monologues, and it would be weird if he was the only student singing this song; and considering Jon is wearing a shirt and tie under the jacket, I think it's safe to say that it is indeed Paul who thinks Donna turned brains into soup
If you listen to the cast recording of the song, he’s actually Boy Jerry, not Paul. He’s the one originally accused for the killings during Bryce’s solo. The line was changed for the proshot for a cameo by Dylan Saunders (since he didn’t work on this musical) there were four lyric changes from the cast recording and the pro shot for the sake of on screen cameos. Ziggys line was originally Dan Reynolds for a Jae Hughes cameo , Barry Swifts line was originally Officer Baileys for a Jeff Blim cameo (even tho it’s not his only cameo) , Charlie’s line was originally Karen Chasitys line for a James Tolbert cameo) and Of course Geralds line lol
I think Trevor may also be in the ending scene at the homecoming dance since Jon Matteson is obviously not playing Richie
26:06 - 26:08 One thing I've noticed has gone unmentioned is the fact that when she turns around,the lighting on her face,mainly around her eyes,makes her look similar to Max after his death. In other words, *we're screwed.*
10:50 considering max's whole goofy and sadistic bully personality and everything i like to think that when he realised that he's a zombie/spirit/ghost thing, he'd get really excited and hone in on that zombie demeanour stereotype. like how he keeps doing the “zombie hands” after his death.
also just overall goofiness prolly because hes strutting and mockingly boasting about how much power he has over the prudes? i think its like a point and laugh but in dance form lol
I don’t know if you watched Jon’s live stream with Jeff watching NPMD and a cool fun fact is that the song at homecoming is supposed to be canonically an in universe song, written by the band featured in Killer Track, that everyone would actually know so technically a diegetic song which is fun.
12:04 that's the Nightmare Time leitmotif! It tends to crop up when the lords in black are involved, or things are generally getting darker. This is the reveal of Max's Revenant, so it makes sense that this would be its first use in the show, given that the Church of the Starry Children are responsible for his reanimation!
also, when they're digging up the black book and Mayor Lauter is giving exposition about the Waylons and the Lords in Black, the main music backing it is a heavy piano hit, followed by chopped up pieces of the Nightmare Time leitmotif, which then plays in completion when the book is revealed! Super cool bit of music telling the story in parallel to the actors.
it was first heard in TGWDLM in Not your seed (look what happens nightmare time) and eventually became the Nightmare time leitmotif across the hatchetfield universe
@@iridescent28actually! You can hear it in the background of the meteor scene as far as I could tell! So when the characters are doing their things before the meteor hits, the moment that bill is talking to Alice you can hear the nightmare time theme! Idk if that’s the first time you hear it or not tho, I just remember noticing it on the last time I watched TGWDLM. So it could show up earlier or other times before not your seed! :) but yea it’s synonymous w/ nightmare time now but I wonder if it was ONLY used in reference to Alice in the first musical. Guess I’ll have to rewatch to double check
yeah he and ruth said the same “watch some porn you’ll see” as if it showed real life sex so i thought he was a virgin too
also at 17:01 where ruth essentially reaches the climax of the song, she looks utterly surprised that she was capable of reaching that note
i don't know if this applies to everyone, but every time i sing this song, when i get to this part, i essentially "let go" and let my head tone do the work for me, and i think that's what ruth goes through with this part as well, she fully embraces the character and the performance, no longer feeling awkward and is now fully in the moment until she pulls herself back when her voice cracks at the end of the word "once"
this (in my overanalyzation of this song) was the moment where she realizes that she wasn't just being delusional when she says she can perform on stage in the beginning of the scene; she absolutely can, she's rough and needs practice, but she has the potential and she finally sees it for herself, even if it was only for a few seconds
(and then she dies but we don't talk about that)
Said this on tumblr, but the background noises during grace and Max going at it makes it seem like Max is actually a virgin but it's posturing with either a) people spreading rumors about him or b) he purposefully spread those himself
Now that i think about it, when Max is meeting the LIB he asks wHAt ArE yOU?!?!? in the same tone as Jeff during TTO's dysentery world. probably is just a cute lil reference if TTO ends up not being retconned into hachetverse Canon.
BUT if it is put into hachetverse, then that means our first (rather unintentional) encounter with the LIB was blinky more than 4 years before TGWDLM
I think it was once said by nick that TTO is an unofficial part of the hatchetfield multiverse (I'm not sure when or where tho)
@@cynnie_artpretty sure it’s been said that TTO is canon to Hatchetfield by being a musical shown at the Starlight in universe (I like to think that the writer of the show in universe(is Jeff Blim canon to hatchetfield?)had an encounter with Blinky and wrote that joke as an allusion to him)
I don’t think Maxie’s a virgin, I think he was just nervous honestly and also bad in bed
@@LeefLettJeff Blim is canon to Hatchetfield Jeff Blim himself said so (he is the principal of Hatchetfield high)
@@funyarinpamaster I didn’t know that lol that’s cool!
When Richie is like dying in npmd and everyone is watching, I think that symbolizes that theyre all seeing it happen but they’re not paying attention to it, instead they’re watching the game, so it’s like they were technically all there when he died😭
He's still in the locker room, so I took it as "This is everything he just gained that he's now losing forever"
Blinky must have liked that
@@QuikVidGuy oh I was thinking he was walking to the locker room but nvm
This goes so well with the fact that max saying richie has lost everything before he dies
I saw it in a more metaphorical sense, but I think the idea of it being them watching the game and not noticing really well ties into it. I saw it as a sort of commentary on the way bullying works in so many highschools, it’s rampant and everyone knows who the targets are but for the most part, everyone just ignores it and pretends it’s not happening. Them watching on in the background as Max literally kills Richie’s is a sort of satiric dramatization of how they previously watched on as he killed them in the metaphoric sense mentally.
8:42 this implies that Bury the Bully ( and by extension, Bully the Bully) are actually happening in universe and I’m here for that, that’s hilarious
it’s just a meta joke, like the cigarette thing
God, Ruth's song consistently makes me cry and you analyzing her as "feeling worn out with day-to-day life but still feeling underdeveloped mentally" hit a little too close to home holy shit
I agree just for once is such a great examination of Ruth’s character. That second “I used to dance” hits fucking HARD
i think the arm swinging of Jon is to reflect on Wiggly's true form. He's an octopus like creature, so it's like he's waving his tentacles
I'm also pretty sure their dances are supposed to look robotic. They took on these forms so they could look approachable, doesn't mean they'll do it naturally
It also looks like their dances reflects on their characteristics. Pokey shows off his mask, Wiggly swings his arm like an octopus, Tinky shakes his toybox like he's playing with it, Nibbly does circular movements with the lollipop and with her arms like a tongue licking it, Blinky moves her head around looking at everything
I know I've commented the same thing on other NPMD videos but I'm still obsessed with the staging for the end of Dirty Dudes Must Die being the same as Let It Out in TGWDLM - being that it's when one of the key "protagonists" are officially corrupted by the Lords in Black
I might be stretching it here, but I like they had Richie sing the "he's the horror in every rumor" bc I feel like in american culture u don't rly associate rumors with horror,
but in _anime_ you hear the word "rumor" is used all the time when talking about what you'd usually classify as urban legends (which I assume is a translation thing), and those u very much do associate with horror
Wait he says horror?
I always heard whore
Small detail but Curt’s the only one who tilts his head when they all sing “darkness will spare my soul” at 26:02 AND I FIND THAT SO SILLY FOR NO REASON MAKES ME GIGGLE
Something that always gets me in Bully/Bury the Bully that I haven't seen anyone talk about is that they try and fail to harmonize in Bully, but they manage to harmonize later in Bury out of fear, which is both a neat touch, but can also be seen as them banding together fully as as a group as they commit to doing a crime when before it was harmless prank that Ritchie, Ruth, Steph, and Pete weren't fully behind when they tried to harmonize the first time
Yeah, the Lords in Black really like having avatars, they maybe wanted to have another Mukwob, which coincidentally is played by Angela, hmmm
Willabella Muckwab 🤝 Grace Chasity
Being tempted by the Lords In Black
I just realised that Richie just Charlotte'd. If you don't get what I mean, Charlotte's guts are torn off. Right before the screen fades, you can see Max aim for Richie's stomach, as if he's grabbing it.
Iirc at the beginning Bailey says he was drowned with a swirlie or however you call it
@@santiagoloi8489 its fully possible that the toilet-drowning was just what finished him off, and considered the fact that the scene was gruesome enough that Sam puked upon seeing Richie's body, I'd image he suffered some pretty nasty injuries before dying
@@toxin2518 I rewatched it some time before, he had his nips torn off and probably also got beat up badly, tho it never mentions his guts getting torn off like Charlotte's
@@santiagoloi8489 oh yeah no that's fair im not trying to say i think he did get disemboweled, just that we didn't see him die so a lot more stuff could've happened before that we also didn't see
@@toxin2518 yeah you're right
the phrase "has to fight off joe walker" is absolutely hilarious, and also laughably true. this is like, what, the third time that's happened to his character in a starkid musical?
also i'm pretty sure jon is supposed to be boy jerry in hatchet town, at least according to other internet sources
in the cast recording instead of man in a hurry, it's boy jerry saying the murderer was girl jerri not him
@@beanamean880 yeah but in that same cast recording karen chasity and dan reynolds also get accused despite being in the number’s ensemble
yeah, in the live version ppl in the ensemble get accused instead of the cameos, that’s just for RUclips, Jon is definitely being boy Jerry as seen in the digital ticket
Trevor is Jon’s character that shows up during the Barbecue Monologues and The Best Of You. Ruth addresses him by name after he gets a line wrong.
@@al_eggs that has nothing to do with this scene. we're just talking about jon's character in hatchet town
btw i think the reason max makes richie sing during nerdy prudes must die is bc the things hes making him sing is a version of what was going through maxs head when he was dying
Mariah actually said on twitter that the reason Steph "does crypto" is because her dad converts all her allowance into crypto because he just hates her
I never noticed this but at 1:32 Grace crosses herself when on the chair. Angela's characterization shines during this show it's crazy.
I don't know if anyone else has noticed this but I think that the words that Max has Ritchie repeat in Nerdy Prudes Must Die are a reflection of his thought process as he died, which fuels his vengeance and his drive to murder. When he says “who will pray for you, when your body is gone,” he reflects on how the world instantly got better and that his friends and everyone around him who had worshiped him had realized how much better the world is without him and therefore didn't pray for him to come back and didn't care that his body was gone. In fact, they were happier that his body was gone and no one prayed for him. We know for a fact that his family (or more specifically his father) didn't care either, which not only proves his point that high school would have been his peak but also that he was never truly loved. When he says “this is the consequence for what you've done” he is talking about his murder being the consequence of the way he treated all of these “nerds” and how seeing them all 10 times happier because of what they did to him even though it was morally wrong was his consequence. He needed to get his revenge on the people who were becoming happier and reaching the height of their teenage evolution because that was what was done to him.
wait stop I actually love this theory. and how when richie and ruth die, they get killed right as they're fully becoming themselves (richie getting accepted as part of the team and ruth realizing her dream and passion for being on stage, also she doesn't die, but max almost kills steph right after her and pete confess their love for each other), and it makes sense that they never get to live past this because max didn't, he died right as was opening up and feeling loved for the first time, so he never got to experience life beyond that, so as a vengeful spirit he made sure that the nerds never get to live past their revelations either.
@@kaylee3242 YES YES THIS WAS MY EXACT THOUGHT PROCESS, thank you for this
24:56 NO ONE TALKS ABOUT THIS PART! Where they say “just as we start lying down, forever!” Like what does that mean?? I can’t be the only one that thinks that isn’t just a cute romantic line right? Like on my brain it makes me think they knew what grace’s plan was and that they had to make the most of tonight or- SOMETHING?! IDK!? It feels weird to me, like they know something before we do. Lmk what you think cause it drives me crazy lol /lh
Maybe it’s just some cool foreshadowing? That’s my idea anyway
OKAY I HAVE A HUGE THEORY ABOUT THIS ONE LINE
The whole thing is "Lights up on the town / Just as we start lying down...forever"
Lights up is stage speak for the end of a show or the start of a new one when the house or stage lights go on. And it makes me think of BF when they talked about how the world never actually ends and Hatchetfield isn't allowed to die. People suffer in cycles and then it's undone and new suffering happens.
SO my theory is that this is referring to that! They start to lie down and die, but before they can the lights go up and a new cycle begins! A new show for the Lords amusement
@@bananaboatcharlieholy fuck I love that ty
@@bananaboatcharlie im actually so obsessed with this theory it makes so much sense
10:57 Max’s makeup is so cool whenever he’s shown after he’s died
It makes his face so expressive, it almost looks animated
The two at 12:19 seem to be the understudies. Probably wanted to include them in the proshot as a brief little cameo, but they didn't have full choreography for the rest of the scene so they just sneak offstage. According to the fan wiki theyre briefly in the homecoming scene as well
Okay thank you!! I thought I was tripping because I was like who are they??😭
someone said that, during nerdy prudes must die, the other students in the back represent the fact that everyone was present when richie died but nobody was there. like they were all at the football field whilst he was getting killed in the locker room
also!! Jon's playing Boy Jerry in Hatchetown. in the cast recording, instead of Gerald, Bryce’s reporter accuses Jerry and he goes 'it was girl jerry that dirty girl'. trevor is his barbecue monologues guy :)
Crazy how little appreciation Just for Once gets, such a bop and just amazing characterization of Ruth. Probably my favorite use of the 'if I can finally be cool' motif too. Also I'm not sure if its intentional but I love how the whole bbq fantasy of suburban life is a perfect example of how something can be 'medium AND well' ... Maury >:(
when steph talks about crypto, i actually think it could be a situation of "my dad gave me this useless currency bc we're rich" and she's trying to at least convert it to lunch money, something that her dad 100% does not care about idk
I adore how seamlessly Ruth weaves between the character she’s playing and her own internal monologue during her solo and the way Lauren pulls it off. It punches you in the face every time.
13:14 the character jon is here is actually boy jerry. Also trevor is the highschooler jon plays during "Best of You"
Trevor is also in The Barbecue Monologues
I’m so glad to FINALLY see Just for Once get the praise it deserves
also i am realizing grace saying "invoke his fury" was foreshadowing, ugh so good at this point i might have hatchetfield tattooed on my body
“curt is stanced up” took me out HELP
13:14, it's boy Jerry. In the cast recording and during the live shows the towns people blame other towns people who are also on stage, and they call out Jerry as one of the murderers, and he pivots trying to blame girl Jerry before the "Let's Kill 'Em" line
Edit: Trevor is the kid he plays during the Barbecue Monologues
11:55 iirc, there has been claim that the other students are in the background because they were technically all “present” for Richie’s murder (at the game), but were otherwise occupied.
Though it’s probably odd that none of the football team specifically used or checked the locker room at halftime or after the game, as one of them would have found Richie’s body earlier if they had (though this, in turn, likely would have made it to the news, and let the other nerds catch wind of what happened before getting called into the office).
Richie died in the bathroom. I think it was insinuated with the chase at the beginning that Max lured Richie from the locker room to the bathrooms, as well as telekinetically closing doors as he tried to escape?
24:14 I only just looked at Max's expression while the LIB take him and god it's perfect. Such a wonderful mix of awe, terror, amazement, confusion- exactly what someone seeing five colourful eldritch abominations coming specifically to claim their soul should look like.
oh my god i've watched NPMD a million times and I did not notice that Ruth didn't have her retainer on in the opening
mind blowing
i think mariah said that she thinks the reason steph is trying to convert crypto to lunch money in the opening is bcs solomon gives her crypto instead of regular lunch money bcs he hates her 😭
I HATE how Ruth, Richie, and Max die. Ruth & Richie die after finding themself in a very heartwarming way, which is just so sad to me. Max death is so tragic too because he was sooo close to becoming a likable character who was just a product of his environment but misunderstood. I WHICH IT NEVER HAPPENED I LOVE THEM SO MUCHHHH
as a third year theater major and a life long theater kid, i could write pages and pages about just the lighting design - and i don’t know much about light design LMAO
12:24 Seems linked to the "Problematic Pooch" from the Twitter fight mentioned at the start of the show.
As an audio engineer, this show scratches an itch I didn’t know I had. The audio is mixed extremely well, along with some background vocals being panned left/right, or being filtered at 2:44
NPMD in the best Starkid show in terms of production, quality, and audio. It’s extremely polished
"Joey Rochter has to fight off Joe Walker again"
I'm dead! 😅😅
4:14 you can see jon smirking slightly when he says “im not a loser” freaking FORESHADOWING
I have a couple things to explain that you seemed confused about
at 11:54 you asked what the other students are doing there and i think it's because they're all in a close vicinity to richie dying, watching the football game while Richie gets changed in the locker room but don't hear him being killed due to the football game sounds. you can see that they're staring past richie and into the audience, showing how someone could've noticed but nobody did
then at 13:32 you were confused about where Virginia and Davis went and they're not there because hatchetown was filmed separately, hence why people like jeff, dylan and jae are in the song in the yt version but in the soundtrack they're not. they're very much cameos that happened once, specifically for the filmed version, because it was filmed separately i assume that virginia and davis weren't there for it.
2:58 I dont think that Mayor Lauter was telling Steph that she was a mistake. "October surprise" is a phrase used when talking about something coming out in the news that would affect an election/the reputation of a candidate. Since they were talking about how Stephanie's detention would affect the election, I really think he was guilting her (not exactly, but I can't think of the words)
How I believe the Hatchetfield series works is every show, unless otherly specified, is in its own unique universe connected by the black and white and the Lords in black. That's why characters may seem different between shows
I WAS HOPING SOMEONE ELSE WOULD CATCH THE STARWARS REFERENCE BECAUSE NO ONE I WATCHED THIS WITH GOT IT
one thing i found really cool is cause of will branner's deep-set eyes the lighting causes him to look like he has full black eyes - you can see it at the end of literal monster when he does his final pose as well as a lot of times when he's dead which makes the zombie make up more effective :)
Another thing I noticed was in dirty girl max said he expects grace to betray him and then at the end she does betray him and he didn't expect it the irony is awesome
I had never noticed angelas facial expressions on dirty girl and im now obsessed
I LOVE THAT SOMEONE FINALLY NOTICED THAT WE WILL BUILD A PORTAL PLAYS WHEN WIGGLY IS INTRODUCED OMFG I THOUGHT I WAS THE ONLY ONEEEE
1:19 Actually, Mariah adressed this in a tweet.
Since it is a bit OOC of Steph to use Crypto.
Mariah said "I think her father is such a piece of shit he gaves her only crypto money instead of lunch cash money so she has to figure out how tf does it work" 😅😅
finally, someone giving Just For Once the praise it deserves. that song fucking knocked the wind out of me and the ending bit of "i used to dance,,,, i used to dance,,," makes me want to sob every time i hear it. i think i also resonate with the idea that all i want is to be worn out by normal life things, not whatever bullshit that makes me different from everyone else's struggles. also you hit the nail on the head with her feeling like she was somehow underdeveloped and behind mentally and everyone else just seems to have figured things out.
also just because i feel like its important- i watched someones song ranking video and they ranked Just For Once DEAD LAST, and i immediately clicked out of the video. WRONG ™ . thank you for doing it justice, although it was a little painful that you cut out the "i used to dance" bit loll :,)
2:08 I asked in a live stream, and apparently there was a number on the flyer that, when called, played a recorded message of Grace talking about how scary and horrible school dances are and why they should be cancelled. The voice message is gone now, but it sounded so funny!
12:03 isn’t there a line in “not your seed” where it goes “and look what happens, nightmare time”? Everytime someone talks about NT I think about that lyric so much
Hi, I’m the person who actually edited the NPMD IMDb page and added all the characters to everyone’s cast credits. Jon in the Hatchet Town scene was Boy Jerry (it’s revealed in the studio version of the song). Trevor is the guy in the BBQ Monologues 😊
I would post receipts to prove it but RUclips doesn’t allow pictures in the comments 😢
This is great to know, but I’m still going to headcanon that Boy Jerry only wears his camp shirt and it can’t be him
@@JeffBlimsFalsetto maybe it’s under his jacket?
That kingdom heart comment towards Jon was outta pocket
I also love how the costumes for the LIB have some form of fur on them I think to symbolize their toy versions which I think is cool and I haven't seen anyone else mention it before.
I actually never thought of Angela breaking character as Grace losing hold of herself but that makes so much sense! Also I love how sort of cartoonish Grace sings, like how cartoon characters with a distinct voice sing with the same exact vocal quality as when they speak
Pretty sure Angela was raised Catholic too so that line is extra funny to me
5:10 the reason it looks so good is they got an intimacy coordinator!!
you saying "pop off" every three seconds truly enhances the experience (positively, believe me i say the same in my head)
your comments on mariah are so real ur literally me fr fr 😭😭😭
FRR
I love that Max doesn’t get a traditional villans’s “I want song”. Everyone says he’s terrible, and then the villain would usually croon about how they’re misunderstood or that they have goals and ambitions, but Max’s song is “yeah I am actually irredeemably terrible because I want to be” 😂
one thing i love to point out is that when they are singing "im so fucking dead" grace covers her mouth since she doesnt swear
I will always love villain characters that seem like theyre a lot more surface level than other characters but if you actually pay attention to the words theyre saying and not not just the tone theyre saying them, they’re a lot smarter and more interesting than you realize
How does Max know so much about theatre? How does he know so much about politics? In what universe would he properly use a metaphor about the Bible? Apparently this one.
And Grace being an antagonist the entire time but being pushed off as just a nerdy religious prude because there was a bigger threat at hand only makes me realize her interest in Max and his violent nature. She was naturally violent, didn’t consider murder a bad thing, and only pushed off Max because she didn’t think he knew the Bible…
But he does…
And that creates a whole new dynamic and possible character points thats not even necessarily addressed by the story at hand. And like in this video it’s possible that Grace sees herself as a god like figure like Max did but on the “nerdy prude” side
TLDR; Lowkey I’m feeling this HolyGhost ship because the writing creates so many parallels throughout the direct and subtle antagonists the entire time making it all the more jaw dropping
11:54 apparently the other students were there because they were watching they game, and they didn’t notice Ritchie getting murdered because they were too busy watching it
I'd like to think there's an alternate nightmare time universe where Max didn't die in the house and actually grew to become a better person. They all become an unlikely friend group (but probably face some other horrible scenario like an apocalypse caused by the LIB)
I actually found a fic like this, and at the end it's the musical apocalypse in TGWDLM
12:04 i agree with thinking the Nightmare time motif comes up because of the Lords In Black/Waylons are somewhat involved in Richie’s death because they are the reason Max’s spirit is still around
HOWEVER I also do think it is a reference to Not Your Seed because of how powerless the adults are here. Like when Paul and Bill came to “rescue” Alice, they couldn’t do anything, they couldn’t save her, like how no adults could save Richie. This is a running theme in all of the Hatchetfield musicals, how the adults don’t really know what is happening in their kids lives at all, and are just as powerless as them, ex: Bill & Alice, Tom & Tim, and (basically all the kids with their parents in NPMD) but specifically Grace & her parents or Steph & her dad
I enjoyed Starkid casually in early 2020 and then got really into smosh so I didn't know. Much if anything about upcoming shows on yt n stuff, but I remember when npmd came out it was JUST after sword af finished (smosh dnd, Angela played a goblin) and I never really clocked before that. Angela smosh was Angela Starkid and the DIFFERENCE between her onstage acting and her dnd acting... I love Angela i am Angela Stan number one
Trevor is the name of the male student who fudges his line in the Barbeque Monologues. This probably means Paul is the one who is singing in the Hatchet Town song.
It's amazing to see the conversation showing between father and daughter being close to the camp as events can happen a little simular but different in each universe and also with paul and emma
At 16:00 the keyboard sounds like it's set to a harpsichord rather than fake guitar. There's definitely symbolism still at play with the instrument choice though, as harpsichords are seen as upper class, high society, and perhaps funnily enough... prudishness
The part where Max says, “or until another Richie comes along”, hits close to home, and it goes super hard-
At 13:36 I just realized that its Gerald from Black Friday and he’s calling Linda for a lawyer which is a reference to the show :0
I AM SO GLAD SOMEONE ELSE LIKES JUST FOR ONCE!!
I thought I was biased as a lights person, i thought i was looking into it way to much bcause i was just glad to see lights brought up!!! Everyone says it doesnt really have anything to do with her character, but they are only seeing ruth acting as a actor, not how the song actually connects to ruth!!
Ruth's number reminds me of myself at that age singing "I Miss The Mountains" from Next To Normal.
The way a musical can make you resonate with a character with a very different life from yourself bc the emotions feel the same and are expressed in the song just as intensely as you are feeling them, especially at an age when you might not even have the words to properly describe or identify those emotions yet.
7:21 bruh she’s literally going ☝️🤓 I’m dead 💀💀💀