Every now and then I think about how it's odd that there's a long gap in my life where I stopped listening to The Protomen (I listened to the everloving fuck out of them in late middle school, ca. late 2010, stopped at some point in early high school - ca. 2012? - and then didn't really pick them back up until, like, two years ago? give or take a year?), considering how much ass they kick, but then again it at least makes sense that I got an urge to listen to them again when I did, considering that as an adult I'm much more able to pick up on the value of the underlying message of Acts I and II. Which basically boils down to "it is not only morally correct to punch fascists, it is your moral imperative to do so if you're able, otherwise you kinda deserve the shitty fate you'll face at their hands, dumbass," which is, uh, quite a relevant sentiment these days, methinks. As a kid I listened to Act II: The Father of Death and wondered how people could possibly be so dumb as to buy Wily's bullshit so easily and hand total power to such an asshole. "A neat sci-fi story, but kinda unrealistic and exaggerated," teenage me thought.
Haha. Ha. Yeah, no, these days it seems pretty on-point, actually.
Also the part near the end of V: The Stand (Man or Machine) where Raul Panther (as Protoman1) raises his voice suddenly during the last iteration of the chorus is just. one of the actual best fucking deliveries of a line I've ever fucking heard, holy shit???
We've given everything we can...
And that's just one of my favorite parts of what is, in hindsight, probably one of my favorite songs. Like, in general. And that's to say nothing of how great their use of leitmotifs is (that riff at the end of The Stand is from the first song on the album, Hope Rides Alone, which, like many Protomen songs, kicks all of the asses).
Keep Quiet (from Act II) is also a fucking all-time favorite. Like, seriously:
Oh, speaking of Keep Quiet, I drew this in the 8th grade:
Proud to say I've seen them in concert twice (the shirt I got at my first Protomen concert hasn't fit me in years - I was a scrawny kid back in middle school), though I apparently neglected to grab any photos from either of those concerts off the old family PC (if there were any, anyway). But hey, at least I finally used one of the stickers from all the way back then on my laptop! I think I'll save the other one for something more permanent though, like maybe a PC tower case if I ever get around to building a desktop or something.
Addendum: OH GOD HOW DID I FORGET TO MENTION THE BEST PART OF "LIGHT UP THE NIGHT", WHICH POPS INTO MY HEAD LIKE AT LEAST ONCE A WEEK, USUALLY WHEN I'M GETTING PISSED ABOUT FASCISTS:
(You can tell I'm obsessed with that part because I was able to type it correctly from memory without pulling the song up)
- I'm normally pretty adamant about never turning the English names of robot masters into compound words (Rockman is fine, MegaMan.EXE is fine, but Megaman gives me agita - it's Mega Man, dammit!!!), but given that The Protomen's albums are clearly in a very different AU, I'll respect their decision to format the names that way.
- Oh look, a lyrical callback (call forward? Act II is a prequel) to Act 1, where that phrase is used not only in the subtitle of The Stand but also in the chorus of IV: Vengeance ("Send your armies / there's no man or machine who can stop me"). The Protomen's use of lyrical repetition, both within an album and across Acts I and II, is just so fucking good ("Ready. Willing. Prepared to fight." is another echoed phrase they use that I love a lot)
- I've always heard this as "drained out", but that doesn't make sense with the following line (which is more clearly "drag it out") and is an odd word choice in the context of the sentence regardless, and every transcript of the lyrics I've ever seen has it as "drag" and not "drain" (including the lyric book I think? but I haven't looked at that since I was a teenager, since my brother was the one who owned the CD, and he moved out years ago)
