Father

Father
And what of the father? Will he analyze?
And what about the mother? Will she discover
The truth behind this lie we’re living?

(I knew that I kept this for a reason)
(I knew that I kept this for a reason)
Now everything we’ve ever had is here for us
Now everything we’ve ever had is here for us

Don’t worry ’bout the father, you’ll take care of him
And as for the mother, she always loved her son
And you look like him

🌲🌲🌲

What happens?
Having assumed the Son’s identity, Hunter considers the obstacles that could ruin his plan. Though he dismisses the Son’s Mother as an issue, figuring that himself and the Son look enough alike that she won’t notice the swap, he decides the General is a problem. Using the bottle the Poison Woman gave him, Hunter kills the General.

What’s in a name?
‘Father’ — mirroring ‘Son’, to point to the Father/General as the subject who dies in this song and underline his relation to both Hunter and the Son, as it’s kind of like second half or immediate continuation of the train of thought left off in ‘Son’.

Whose viewpoint?
Hunter, being devious.

🌲🌲🌲

>0:00 – 0:28 Black Sandy Beaches Reprise
Here’s that BSB smile through the pain again. This is the most peaceful and subdued that we’ve ever heard it, though, more in the vein of how it was in VVV than in BSB, so this time it strikes me less as trying to distract oneself from pure agony (though that’s still the fundamental thing that’s going on here), but Hunter finding a kind of small, warm hope and happiness in this plan of being the Son. For once he’s feeling something that isn’t just total misery. He’s happy that he feels the potential of being happy.

>And what of the father? Will he analyze? / And what about the mother? Will she discover / The truth behind this lie we’re living?
Hunter considers the immediate obstacles that could ruin his plan. The Son’s father, that being the General, has interacted with both Hunter and the Son. Though Hunter and the Son look so alike that anyone could confuse them, the General has a frame of reference to know each one’s specific attitudes and mannerisms. It’s highly possible, if not within the first period of seeing Hunter as the Son, then at some point when they’re all back home in the City, that he’ll figure out Hunter has stolen the place of his Son.

Meanwhile, there’s the issue of the Son’s mother. Hunter knows from rifling through the Son’s postcards the rough family dynamic the Son has going on — the Son and the mother are close. However, she has no knowledge as to the existence of Hunter. It would be a far leap of logic for her to think her Son had coincidentally bumped into someone who looked so exactly like him, and stole his identity coming home, than for her to figure the Son just got rattled by the war as a way to explain away inconsistencies. Still, the fear she could figure it out is there.

‘The truth behind this lie we’re living?’ -> Hunter has already extended his sense of himself to be both himself and the Son. He’s asking himself this question both as Hunter and the Son.

>(I knew that I kept this for a reason)
Referring to the Poison Woman’s bottle of poison that she gave Hunter. The Poison Woman is a character whose ‘thing’ is killing people without their realising and without facing accountability for it. Using her bottle means Hunter, too, will be able to commit a killing that nobody will trace to him and that he won’t have to face responsibility for. A consequenceless killing.

Hunter sounds so gooey and happy as he realises this plan will totally work. A lot of things have built up to this moment — Hunter’s hatred of the General, his need to escape his own life, his lesson from the Thief of compromising morals for personal gain, his challenge from the Poison Woman to find someone who is justifiable to kill, his abandonment by the world in WIMTBA, his disbelief in a just God after Mustard Gas, the lack of power of ethics and morals before the Tank — really everything that’s happened up to now. It’s the horrors of war sequence that gives him the (lack of) moral impetus to be able to do this, but thinking about it I think the biggest element (like aside from He Said He Had A Story + the cost/benefit hurt/comfort reflex) is actually WIMTBA, because WIMTBA had Hunter realise he had to be the one actively trying to get his life back on a happier course rather than trusting the world to do it for him, and he’s certainly taking proactive action here to make sure his little plan is flawless.

>Now everything we’ve ever had is here for us
Hunter regards the plan of killing the General as perfect. He’s the only barrier between Hunter and a perfect life, and he shortly won’t be an issue.

I get the image of him smiling as he prepares a poisoned drink for the General, then goes on to find the General, sit with him and offer the drink. Again hearkening to WIMTBA; ‘everything you thought you had you lost’.

>Don’t worry ’bout the father, you’ll take care of him
Man, are you hearing this? We didn’t hear much of it to have a great reference, but this is the Son’s intonation. Hunter stop trying to justify doing abominable stuff by imagining that the Son would want you to/encourage you to do it.

But yeah, the General’s not an issue, Hunter will just kill him.

>And as for the mother, she always loved her son
And the Son’s mother? Also not an issue. Hunter has read through postcard correspondence how much she seems to miss and adore the Son, and without knowing that Hunter exists, will likely accept and dote on him as if he were her son. Hunter’s found another potential Ms Terri surrogate and is probably pretty pleased about that.

>And you look like him
The big whammy and the big reveal of the album — Hunter and the Son look so alike, the Son’s own mother could mistake them.

Which is strange. Let’s talk about that.

So the general sentiment across the fandom is that the Son is Hunter’s half-brother through the General, though we have these two points from Casey nudging towards the idea that he’s not, and the relation is actually closer:

• The “half-brother” is Hunter’s half brother, actually more than his half brother, but to explain that would be very hard right now. But it will be 100% clear in the graphic novel. But he is related to him, very close in age. They both have the same father.
• Hunter and the half-brother look eerily similar for reasons that will be revealed in the graphic novel.

So for them to be closer than half-brothers under these circumstances, you can take two routes. Either they have the same mother, and they are full brothers, or their mothers are related. Whatever the case, the circumstances going on behind Hunter and the Son’s relation sounds to be very complicated. Let’s go through these scenarios.

Scenario 1: Hunter and the Son are twins born to Ms Terri. This would explain why they look alike; they are literally genetically identical. This also gives us an incredibly interesting scenario for Act I — Ms Terri impulsively deciding to escape with Hunter after being forced to surrender the firstborn. (Also puts a literal read into ‘you were born with the sun’).

There are some big questions with this, though. For one, it implies that TP&P had some arrangement with the General to hand off the newborns to him. While it’s fair to figure that TP&P wouldn’t want kids killing the mood around his brothel, how would he know that the children belonged to the General? Do they normally have contraceptive measures in the Dime, and the General specifically forsook those? And why would the General accept such a proposition? Blackmail? How was the General able to explain away the kid to his wife? Why would she accept mothering someone else’s child?

I guess on the topic of the General’s wife, the impression I get of her from At The End Of The Earth, the song she narrates, is that she loves the General more than the Son and sees the General in the Son. ‘And the Echoes of you / Rhyme like a distant verse on forgotten words’, echoes of you being echoes of the General being the Son. So she would love the Son largely because he reminds her of the General, that is, she accepts the Son because she loves the General and he is the General’s son. Maybe the Mother was struggling to conceive, or maybe the Son was already born before he met the Mother, and the General explained him away as being from a previous marriage?

I’ll also note that if the Son was listening back in He Said He Had A Story, unless the described encounter is chronologically set before he hooked up with the Mother, he just got to hear his dad bragging about cheating on his mom with a hooker.

Scenario 2: Ms Terri and the General’s wife are sisters. This makes the boys cousins and three-quarter brothers, which is a pretty convoluted state of affairs. Since the kids are close in age, the General would’ve been screwing his wife and Ms Terri around the same time, but it either comes down to coincidence that he selected Ms Terri, or he had some discontents with his wife and chose to vent them on a hooker that resembled her. This leaves massive questions about the relationship between Ms Terri and the Mother, though, which are hard to fill. Why is one of them suffering as a hooker while the other is living comfortably in the City? Are they not on good terms? You could maybe scrape evidence for this from Remembered, reading ‘met your life before us’ as referencing the Mother rather than the Dime… ehhhh possible?

Scenario 3: Ms Terri and the General’s wife are twin sisters. This makes Hunter and the General’s son for all purposes full brothers again, and is the same as scenario 2 except that the General would have absolutely made the connection between his wife and the hooker he bedded. Also explains why having visual depictions of the characters would make it clear.

In the end I can’t decide which of these I ascribe to, but one of these three scenarios is true. Place your bets?

>3:13 – 3:25 Black Sandy Beaches Reprise
And a return to BSB to close us out. A little bit harsher, perhaps the General dies here?

Son | Act III | Life and Death