Writing On A Wall
Come away, young man, where the ground is red
And you need a mask to breathe
Oh it’s been so hard, but your luck could change
If you’d just roll up your sleeves
We had tried our best to warn before
But it didn’t get you far
Now we’re here again with a wish to mend
Your agonizing scar
Open eyes, young man, vigilante hands
And a heart prepared for pain
You will lose much more in this vicious war
Past and present stay the same
But the time to come can be altered some
If you listen to our song
But we sing in vain and the fact remains
There is no thing can be done
🌲🌲🌲
What happens?
Coming off the boat, Hunter again encounters the Oracles. They warn him not to involve himself in the war, as it will give him nothing he desires while only hurting him further. But does Hunter heed this advice? Of course, he does not.
What’s in a name?
‘Writing on a Wall’ — aka, ‘Things Are About To Go As Bad As You’d Expect, DUHHH’. Hunter is imminently going to enter an active warzone and will be heavily scarred by the experience. Given we know how sheltered he is, and have the benefit of our extremely negative post-Vietnam cultural perspective on war (something Hunter doesn’t have — it’s the 1910s), only Hunter doesn’t understand how serious of a situation he’s gotten himself into.
The phrasing, ‘writing on the wall’ hearkens to the prophetic but ultimately ignored nature of this warning (mene mene tekel upharsin; a prophecy of destruction from God), with the substitution of ‘the’ for ‘a’ being an extremely minor thing that emphasises Hunter’s ignorance — this wall is not even a prominent enough wall to be the wall to him, central in his thoughts, when it should be.
Whose viewpoint?
Oracles, speaking to Hunter.
🌲🌲🌲
>0:00 – 0:25 ooOOooOOooOOOooOO
OooOOOOOOooooOOOOoooo
Welcome to Act III, soldier! As will become convention over the remaining acts, we’re greeted into the story by our friends the Oracles, who will both give us a primer of what this chapter of the story is all about, and try to talk some sense into Hunter! As we can guess, and as they know, they’ll fail — but it’s nice that they try.
Before getting into anything else, let’s establish the setting. Hunter is now in his early 20s, the year is the mid-to-late 1910s, and he is in Europe to imminently fight in WW1 (The Great War, before there were 2 of them) on the Western Front (’hints of a higher hand / lost on the Somme’). Taking the chronological read of events as still true, the last thing that happened was Hunter’s ship came into port. We don’t have any location landmarks to guide us in this song, but I like to figure this dialogue happens either as he leaves the ship, or shortly after.
So were the Oracles on the ship? I mean it seems they can appear anywhere Casey wants them to appear, but why not? Sure.
Anyway, the song. This a-capella singing will come to be a sort of calling card for the Oracles, with their multiple voices.
>Come away, young man, where the ground is red / And you need a mask to breathe
Man, we’re already not in Kansas anymore with this tonal shift. Happenings here will be much more precarious and much more grave than they were in Act II. Musically I mean. Before even touching the lyrics.
‘Where the ground is red’ -> Foreshadowing a battlefield where the ground is saturated with blood from all the slaughtered soldiers; probably specifically implying The Tank.
‘And you need a mask to breathe’ -> Foreshadowing the Mustard Gas that Hunter will encounter, and hinting which war this specifically is — WW1 is the war that truly showed the devastating potential of chemical weapons — especially mustard gas — leading to their banning through the Geneva Convention in 1925.
Anyway — we’ll be going into war and the Oracles are telling Hunter to turn away from these horrors while he still can.
>Oh it’s been so hard, but your luck could change / If you’d just roll up your sleeves
The Oracles sympathise with the hardships Hunter has faced thus far, that being his loss of Ms Terri and his breakup with Ms Leading. However, they also advise that these problems are not so horrific as to be unfixable. Hunter still could find quite a peaceful and happy life for himself if he’d just concentrate on something other than running from pain, by being more honest with Ms Leading predominantly, but perhaps even by just settling down and grounding himself properly in the communities he’s fled.
Either way, his problems are still within his power to address; he’s just been too scared to.
>We had tried our best to warn before / But it didn’t get you far / Now we’re here again with a wish to mend / Your agonizing scar
Explicit confirmation that the speakers are the Oracles, and that they have an invested interest in Hunter’s wellbeing.
Why do the Oracles care so much about Hunter? It’s them being mouthpieces for Casey again, and Casey (presumably) cares about Hunter.
>Open eyes, young man, vigilante hands / And a heart prepared for pain / You will lose much more in this vicious war / Past and present stay the same
WOWWW that uptick with the whole military march thing going on. Seriously cool.
Anyway, the Oracles. Wait hold on these lines are actually nuts?
So they’re simultaneously listing qualities that Hunter already has, but alluding to how these qualities will be lost, or damaged, by his experiences over the act.
‘Open eyes’ -> What he already has is naivety and innocence; what he will develop is the revelation of the secrets Ms Terri kept from him, damaging that innocence and making him hate himself. Could also be a general thing of him seeing true horror over the war, and a command for him to pay attention. ‘Open-eyed oversight led me to here’.
‘Vigilante hands’ -> What he already has is the intention to kill in the name of good; what he will develop is him becoming a murderer through the killing of a horrible man, the General.
‘A heart prepared for pain’ -> What he already has is the conception of himself being sensitive and desperate for love, hence liable to get hurt; what he will develop is… ‘develop’ is the wrong word for this, but he will experience so much pain that it snaps him. Love will be the last thing on his priority list so much as quite literally killing people so that he doesn’t have to get hurt or live his terrible life anymore. (And once again, as he was in leaving the Lake, he’s confident he’s already survived such a devastating pain with Ms Leading that he fancies himself hardened enough to take whatever pain war can throw at him.)
‘You will lose much more in this vicious war’ -> And those three qualities are just the start of the things he’ll lose. He’ll lose his worldview, his faith, his morals, his squadmates, his brother…
‘Past and present stay the same’ -> Hunter came to war looking for a better future. He will not get a better future. Instead he’ll get more of what he already has: pain.
>But the time to come can be altered some / If you listen to our song
Hunter has not been deployed to battle yet, or at least hasn’t faced the real horrors of war yet. He still has the chance to escape them.
>But we sing in vain and the fact remains / There is no thing can be done
Unfortunately, the Oracles, equipped with Casey’s knowledge, know that Hunter isn’t going to turn back. Once again, he was let off his chain to hear this advice but naturally gravitates into the oncoming disasters anyway.
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