[ SECRET POST #4033 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #4033 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 06 secrets from Secret Submission Post #577.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, that scene was horribly unflattering to Ego. Also, it's a character named Ego. Of course he's gonna Godsplain commonsense shit like he's the only one who has ever listened to "Brandy (You're a Fine Girl)" and realized it's about a dude who prizes his freedom over settling down.

[cbrachyrhynchos]

I don't think the song is really about the sailor. But YMMV.

[(Anonymous)]

nayrt - Who do you think the song is about?

[cbrachyrhynchos]

Brandy, the character who's mentioned in the title, mentioned in all three verses, and as a type is the subject of all the folk variations of the trope going back a few hundred years.

[cbrachyrhynchos]

To start, "Brandy" is a soul version of a cautionary ballad form in which a woman has an affair with a man of some traveling profession and is "ruined" by it. Usually in these ballads are sympathies are with the woman who's "led astray" and, in older versions, is the subject of pity. Ballads on this theme from the man's perspective are usually first-person confessionals. "St. John's Infirmary" is one of the best of that first-person confessional variation.

One sign that Ego doesn't understand the lyrics is that the first chorus is spoken by the sailors:

> The sailors say "Brandy, you're a fine girl." ...
> "Yeah your eyes can steal a sailor from the sea."

I suspect there's some flattery and irony in the chorus. She's a unmarried service worker, which in American history has tended to be at the low end of respectable. She gets flattered by drunk, likely merchant sailors about a respectable life. I suspect a bit of social class tension going on in the subtext.

On the second chorus, The Sailor changes just one line of the chorus:

> "My life, my love, my lady is the sea"

The Sailor's chorus is the exact same pickup line as all the other sailors, he's just more honest about his intentions. Ego's muse is a plagiarist pick-up artist.

Almost everything in the latter verses is grounded in Brandy's perspective. She saw, she watched, she listened, she tried to understand, she loved, she remembers. The affair described repeats a theme of earlier variations of this ballad type. Denied a sailor's life, women can only experience the sea vicariously. (I think some folklore theories would argue that the token left behind is a symbol for pregnancy.) And Brandy gets left in the end to her memories.

I think that "Brandy" has some variations on the theme that reflect greater agency for women in the 60's. It's still a "good girls led to ruin by sailors" song. In some older variations the sailor is deliberately cruel and manipulative from the start. Brandy could be read as going into the affair with eyes wide open. One of the things that 20th century blues music did to influence post-war popular music was to position women as capable of choosing sex with full understanding of the limits of the relationship involved. (Take Memphis Minnie's songs about casual sex from the 30s for example.)

So, in my opinion, Ego using that song as a rationalization for his actions just demonstrates that Ego just doesn't understand human beings very well. As a metaphor, the song serves a a portrait of Peter's mother. But The Sailor isn't the protagonist of that story, and neither is Ego.