I want to talk about my new song "Doomsday".

Hi there. I am regulus.

I would like to talk to you about my new song "Doomsday" that I posted the other day.

I know that many international fans are supporting me. Nevertheless, it is unfair to shut down what I want to tell you just because I am Japanese.

However, since English is the only language I can use for practical purposes, non-English speakers may have to further translate to get them. Sorry.

Also, I'm not a native speaker, so there's no guarantee I'll be able to convey what I want to say 100% correctly.

Well, here are the lyrics.

Lyrics （Original Lyrics are written in Japanese）

忘れていた思い出は夢の中にあるの？
Are there memories that I've forgotten in my dreams?
歪んでいた愛情もこの視界も消えて
My warped affections and this vision are gone

揺れる揺れる命が
夜明け前に潰えることすら
"儚い"と呼ぶ？
Can you call it "ephemeral" that a wavering life will crumble before the dawn?
君を守る機構が
徐々に君を壊していくなら
If the system that protects you is slowly destroying you
そんな理不尽が
How inexcusable

終わりの中で伝えたい感情が
きっときっと君を君を
消し去ってしまうから
In the doomsday, the emotion that I want to tell you will erase you

全て無くしてしまえばいいよ
Let it all go
それで何も感じないと
心が叫ぶなら
So if your mind is screaming at you to feel nothing

せめてもう一度だけ
声を聴かせて
At least let me hear your voice one more time
いつか同じように
君のことを呼べるように
I hope one day I can call you in the same way

凍りついた血液は燃えるように熱く
Frozen blood is hot as a flame
同じように想っても境界線を超えて
Even if I loved you like I did before, it would still violate the borderline

指に触れる温度を
当たり前に奪えることすら
"切ない"と呼ぶ？
Can you even call it "heartrending" that you take away the temperature of your touch on your fingers?
誰も罪を裁けないくせに
君を壊しているなら
If they're destroying you, despite the fact that no one can judge you for your guilt
そんな理不尽が
How inexcusable

終わりの中で伝えたい言の葉で
きっときっと君を君を
失ってしまうから
In the doomsday, I perhaps lose you because of the words I want to tell you

全て無くしてしまえばいいよ
Let it all go
それで何も感じないと
心が叫ぶなら
So if your mind is screaming at you to feel nothing

せめてもう一度だけ
声を聴かせて
At least let me hear your voice one more time
いつか同じように
君のことを呼べるように
I hope one day I can call you in the same way

(あなたの声が今僕を呼ぶ
(Your voice is now calling me
まだ独りで歩けないからと
"Because you can't walk alone yet"
優しい嘘は遠く儚く
The kind lie is far and ephemeral
ただ綺麗で僕を導いていく)
It's just beautiful and guiding me)

正しいことも教えてもらえないで
I can't even get them to tell me what's right
腕を伸ばす光求め
人で在り続ける為に
Reaching for the light to stay human being
答えはもう要らないの
I don't need any more answers
独り善がり、それでいいよ
I don't care if I'm called self-satisfaction
君の為になるなら
If that's what's best for you

終わりの中で伝えたい感情が
きっときっと君を君を
消し去ってしまうから
In the doomsday, the emotion that I want to tell you will erase you

全て無くしてしまえばいいよ
Let it all go
それで何も感じないと
心が叫ぶなら
So if your mind is screaming at you to feel nothing

せめてもう一度だけ
唇(くち)を塞いで
At least cover my lips one more time
いつか同じように
君のことを愛せるように
I hope one day I can love you in the same way

This song is from my 7th album "Absolute Zero" and the lyrics follow its story.

In brief, there is a girl who is the main character and a boy who is very close to her.
And after an incident, the girl gains the ability to easily take the lives of those around her. But it hurts the people around her regardless of her intentions.
The boy remains human, but he feels resentful of the world for not taking the girl's side.
Eventually the girl realizes that she is not human and wonders if she needs to follow the rules as a human being.
What is sin? What is a righteous deed? Who will judge her actions to get rid of her guilt?

The question I want to ask, as the author, is which is more sinful: sacrificing the few to save the many, or sacrificing the many to save the few?
(Trolley problem, Is there difference in the value of life?)

The word "Doomsday" in the title means 'End of the world' or 'Last judgment day' or like that.

In fact, however, the story is not a global apocalypse, but rather a relatively small-scale one centered around the main characters.

The word "Doomsday" is more of a metaphor for these characters' mental images. I would like to emphasize that.

Also, this time, the setting of the story, which was not described in "Borderline", is included to some extent.

As I mentioned before, I want to value the 'breadth of interpretation' that the listener has, so I don't want to make a work that says 'this is the correct answer'.*

*Annotation
What I mentioned in the "Borderline" article has not been translated into English. For now, don't worry about it and keep reading.

However, I can say this is not a correct answer, but rather a condition given to the question text.

Rather, in terms of getting individual interpretations, I find the song to be quite difficult to understand this time around.

If anything, the English translation may be easier to get a clue from than the original Japanese lyrics, as it is forced to express the subject and possessive case.

And, I need to say lest I confuse you, some of the "Beautiful Lie" lyrics in the middle of the song are completely crossover and separate from the world and story of this time.

I included it as a kind of fan service and because I wanted to experiment musically with bringing in a past work.

However, there was a good reason for bothering to choose "Beautiful Lie", not other. As a result, I definitely wanted to make sure that it was an element that would further color "Doomsday".

The songs I make have a certain pattern to them, as you can probably guess. It's probably closer to saying that they can be divided into several groups.

And this time it's a genealogy of "ABBY" or "Beautiful Lie" or like that. I'm not just talking about the tone of the songs. I mean as a work, or rather as a worldview.

The characters on "Doomsday" are common in the album, as mentioned above, it's the same with songs like "Borderline".

However, bringing the lyrics of "Beautiful Lie" into this world is suggesting that we can say 'It's completely unrelated, but the world that came to be like this surely existed in somewhere else', by evoking the feelings and circumstances of an otherworldly person.

(By the way, some parts of the lyrics are intentionally written in such a way that the reader can be aware of "Borderline". You could say this is another crossover, but it's based on the same story, so it's not unrelated of course.)

In a sense, it could be said that this is a kind of 'Breaking the fourth wall' element in which the performer speaks to the audience.

In this case, I honestly don't know, and I also don't think we have an answer, whether the narrator from the "Beautiful Lie" world is speaking to we audience, or to the "Doomsday" world, i.e., between performers from certain world to another world.

(It's strange how even I, as an author, can be spoken from within my work...)

I'm sorry. I am aware that this sentence itself is too difficult to understand.

But in light of all this, this is a mash-up of elements from different worlds that are independent of each other in the works, which can only be explained by the word 'crossover', after all.

What I said earlier about the genealogy being the same is that there is no way that two worlds that are so far apart in color could possibly blend well together if they tried to mash up.

(For example, if I suddenly put "FUTURE!!" or something in this song, it won't make any sense, you know)

Back to the main topic, this song is still difficult to understand. One of the reasons for this is that the narrator is not fixed to one person.

In short, while the song expresses emotions from the point of view of the girl who is the main character and the core of the story, it is the other boy's point of view that makes up the main part of the song.

This mixture of these points of view is a major factor that prevents us from trying to understand the song as a text.
(It's a stupid statement when I'm writing my own lyrics though.)

So what is the main part of it, as the word "inexcusable" appears in the lyrics, is "criticism and despair of the surroundings".

Who could judged a girl for her guilt as a human being who had crossed the "borderline" and become inhuman?

This is what I wrote in the "Borderline" article. I think the main part of "Doomsday" is to have it told in the words of a boy who is a character in this story.

"Borderline" is the borderline of the protagonist who oscillates between human and non-human. If she realizes that she is no longer a human, there is no reason to face the 'sins' that people judge her for.

This is what I wrote in the "Borderline" article.

'How inexcusable if no one could judge her for her guilt, yet destroy her?'

'If your mind cries out that you'll feel nothing if you lose it all, then lose it.'

These are statements definitely from the boy as a character, but I really don't know and I don't have an answer for myself, if they are statements made by the author, regulus, as its personality takes over or just as a role-player and a performer on stage.

(I'll write a side note about this below.)

I often use similar expressions in my other works.

Kill it, destroy it, lose it, burn it... well, it doesn't matter what the words are, it's all about the nuance of "then do it".

This means, for example, if the statement 'If you don't want to do it, then quit' pops up at work or in a club activity, most of the time it's more than just saying you should really quit, but I think there is a nuance like 'You don't want to quit, do you?' is hidden behind the statement. Of course, it's hard to say in general though.

Same as in this example,

全て無くしてしまえばいいよ
Let it all go (The literal translation is: you should lose everything)
それで何も感じないと心が叫ぶなら
So if your mind is screaming at you to feel nothing

This expression is exactly what restrains a girl who is wavering on the borderline between human and non-human, so that she can stay human.
And at the same time, it may have a nuance of saying that if the girl is more comfortable in this way, she should destroy the whole thing, as if to vent boy's resentment against "unreasonableness".

What I can say without a doubt is that this boy, as a position, will consistently remain on the side of the girl. The only thing I can be sure of is that he is putting that ahead of the peril of his position.

独り善がり、それでいいよ
I don't care if I'm called self-satisfaction
君の為になるなら
If that's what's best for you

We can read that into this part as well.

But, the difficult part is the two questions below.
(It's a stupid statement when I'm writing my own lyrics though.)

揺れる命が夜明け前に潰えることすら"儚い"と呼ぶ？
Can you call it "ephemeral" that a wavering life will crumble before the dawn?
指に触れる温度を当たり前に奪えることすら"切ない"と呼ぶ？
Can you even call it "heartrending" that you take away the temperature of your touch on your fingers?

It's clear that 'dawn' is a metaphorical expression, but it's very difficult to know who is asking this and to whom with what intent.

The pieces of the puzzle are 'girl', 'boy', and 'surrounding', but what position they are in as subject and object depends on how we are perceived.

This is what I'm going to leave for you as 'breadth of interpretation' and keep my opinion to myself.

Digression

I've talked about a lot of things, but I want to talk a little bit about regulus as an author and about the characters, which came up earlier.

I've stated quite a few statements that I feel like stupid in spite of I'm writing my own lyrics. The reason for that is because there are a lot of things that I really can't get a correct answer.

There are a lot of songs about themselves in the world, and I also can make such a kind of work. But this topic does not apply to that.

However, if there is a unique world in the each work, and the time flows there as a story that does not exist in reality, then I, as the author and a young man living in Japan, am a person from a different world that has nothing to do with that.

This is no exception, even if this is the world I created. The people who live there have different personalities, different opinions, and different values from me. But I am not a person who is incapable of distinguishing between fantasy and reality. I understand that the created world is only a created world, and that it is a play on a stage.

Even with this in mind, sometimes my own personality can take possession of the character in the play and I can become a performer myself. This is unintentional in more than a few cases. And this is not the same as role-playing.

It means, there is 'Mr. A' and I'm supposed to act as 'Mr. A' but I sometimes act on stage as myself (regulus). Essentially, I have to look down from behind the stage, from God's perspective though.

You know RPG, it's a Role-Playing Game.
It's the same feeling I get when I create a piece of work and when I play an RPG. It's also same when I dream.

Naturally, I understand that this is a world that does not exist in this world, but I remove that tactless outer framework and travel to the inside of the monitor if it's a monitor, to the inside of a dream if it's a dream, to the inside of a work if it's a work.

And I play out as the person assigned to me in that world. Until the moment of my assigned final moment. When the last moment arrives, I wake up in my room and be thinking, oh my world was here.

This is what I mean by role-playing, and it can happen in the making of a piece of work that I can go beyond this 'wall that separates the other side and this side' and interfere with the world.

Rarely does it happen in dreams. That's called lucid dreaming, and I think it's the same thing.

The reason I'm saying I don't understand myself while writing the text as a commentary article for "Doomsday" is that there are parts of it that I can't discern whether I'm speaking with my values as the characters are or my own.

Am I making no sense? Well, maybe so.

But maybe there are people out there who have a similar experience. I think such a person would be able to talk to me.

So, I feel like I've been able to talk quite a bit about my humanity, which is usually hard to show. I don't have a chance to talk about it too long, so please forgive me.

I'll see you soon. Thank you very much for following me up to this point.

2020.07.10 regulus