🍬

set subtitles to "English (United States)" ^

not sure why I made this post in this contrived manner when I could have just made a short post like: isn't it weird how similar these two songs are? They're both about repeatedly starting over in life, they're just framed with a different pop culture reference: the Mario games (and the pop culture perception of video games more broadly) in Level Clear!, and the Isekai genre in Reincarnation Apple. Though Level Clear! relies more heavily on the audience understanding the reference and isn't as clear about what exactly is happening. Reincarnation Apple spells out exactly what's going on: bite into this apple and you leave your current life and are reborn into another one. But is Mario reincarnating every time he "start[s] again", or is it just metaphorical, representing him deciding to take a new path in life? The array of things Mario is able to accomplish only makes sense in the context of the real-life Mario games, which feature Mario actually doing all those things: the song can only be read as commentary on the non-story of the Mario franchise, framing it as Mario undergoing a repeated crisis. While Reincarnation Apple is itself commentary on the Isekai genre, this context is not required to understand the events of the song.

Beyond their narrative devices the biggest difference in the songs is that Mario is actually able to find success in everything he does (save for running a crime syndicate, which gets him killed^†). In Reincarnation Apple, however, the protagonist only seems to succeed at first, and then always "screw[s] up", and it's this failure that apparently brings them grief - presumably if they were able to succeed in even one universe, they'd finally be content. But both songs end with their protagonists rejecting "reincarnation" entirely - wait I think the post is cutting me off