Understanding the Misguided: Analyzing the “folklore” Trilogy

“And another thing I think we should point out before we play the song is that there is a recurrent theme in my music where I happen to love explaining—or womansplaining—to men how to apologize. It just gets me. It’s my thing. I love it, in my songs, writing a how-to manual, right? “Love Story” is basically just a how-to on how to propose. This is how you do it! This is how you get the girl! This is how you fix it. If you made a mistake, this is how you get her back. And so I decided I’m going to create a character of a teenage boy named James who really screws things up with a girl and has to apologize to get her back. And her name? What’s her name?”

Taylor Swift, 3/25/23

When Taylor Swift began penning folklore, it was, by her own admission, “two seconds” into the COVID-19 pandemic. Swift, who had built her empire upon writing deeply personal songs about her own life, much like everyone in the entire world, was desiring an escape from her own life. And so, she did something a little new for her – she began writing songs about fictional people, fictional worlds, and the fictional lives they led.

Now, when I say this was new for Swift, I’m telling a little bit of a lie. Fictional narratives was actually already a part of her discography. Her 2019 release, Lover, included the fan-favorite “Death by a Thousand Cuts,” a song inspired by the film Something Great. Even one of her biggest hits, “Blank Space,” involves Swift stepping into the role of a jet-setting, man-discarding woman with a mercenary attitude, an intentional attempt to get into the mindset of the character that media had created for Swift.

But in these cases and others, Swift still couldn’t help but place a little token of herself in each song. “Death by a Thousand Cuts,” by Swift’s own admission, was an exercise in putting herself in the shoes of the characters in the film, inspired by a dream she had where she convinced herself that she had lost the love of her life in the same way the film depicted. And, obviously, while “Blank Space” is based on a character, that character is Swift, or at least an exaggerated version of her villainized media persona.

But in this time, in this place, Swift decided to try something new. Try really making up a person and exploring their life.

It’s arguable how much folklore and its sister album evermore really does stick to their fictional premise. Songs like “invisible string,” “peace,” “my tears ricochet,” and “long story short” have obvious connections to Swift’s actual real-life relationship and career. But also core to these albums are songs about other people and characters – “epiphany,” “the last great american dynasty,” “marjorie,” “no body, no crime” etc.

And, of course, there is the folklore trilogy.

The core to folklore‘s fictional themes, the folklore trilogy is three interconnected songs all telling the same story from three different characters’ perspectives. It is this trilogy that I’d like to examine today.

Read more: Understanding the Misguided: Analyzing the “folklore” Trilogy

The folklore trilogy centers on three teenagers – Betty, James, and an unnamed third teenager who the fandom and Swift herself has chosen to name Augustine, Augusta, or simply August, after the song in her perspective, “august.” James’s perspective can be found in “betty” and an adult Betty looking back on the situation they all lived as teenagers can be found in “cardigan.”

The story begins (chronologically, at least) in “august,” when a summer affair starts and ends between James and Augustine. While Augustine has true and intense feelings for James, she is constantly aware of his girlfriend, Betty. In the end, Augustine lets James go, aware of the fact that he isn’t “hers.”

(A brief note on gender: While the songs never explicitly state James’s gender, Taylor Swift often refers to him as a teenage boy.

Regardless, many fandom interpretations of James take him to be a girl, mostly due to the fact that he was named after the real-life daughter of Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds, who are friends of Swift’s. The couple also has a daughter named Betty and another named Inez, two other names that come up in the trilogy.

Personally, James’s gender doesn’t matter much to my analysis – most of my points still stand no matter what. I personally picture him to be a teenage boy and so I’ll refer to him as such. But I wanted to acknowledge this common queer reading and note that I have nothing against it!)

Then, chronologically, comes “betty”, where James asks for Betty’s forgiveness for cheating on her with Augustine. Betty learns of the affair from a notorious gossip in their class named Inez, and James confirms that it’s true. Obviously, the affair has caused a rift in their relationship, but James imagines himself showing up on Betty’s doorstep, asking for forgiveness, and imagines what her response might be.

In this song, we also hear about the beginning of James’s affair with Augustine from his perspective. Unlike the deep, emotional connection described by Augustine, James characterizes the affair as spur-of-the-moment and an error of judgment caused by some unexplained incident in his relationship with Betty, described vaguely as “I saw you dance with him.” As Augustine waxes poetic about the feelings she had for James, he simply describes the time as: “Slept next to her but / I dreamt of you all summer long.” In the end, James ends up on Betty’s front porch, asking for her forgiveness, but we aren’t told how Betty responds.

Finally, in “cardigan,” we experience a jump forward in time. Betty, now an adult, reflects upon her relationship with James, paying special attention to the way he made her feel wanted and desired when no one else did, comparing herself to a discarded cardigan that James puts on and calls his favorite. Interestingly, there’s no obvious confirmation or denial that she decided to accept James’s porch-apology, though she does mention it, stating that she “knew” he would come back to her.

We do know, however, that Swift herself imagines Betty and James getting married, obviously having to work through the consequences of the affair to some extent. This is the part of the story that often causes grief amongst Swifties, and is the tension that I wanted to address in this post.

I think anyone could look at this collection of events and come away with a clear idea of who is the villain of this story. It’s James, obviously. It’s he who cheated on his girlfriend and then showed right back up on her doorstep, asking for her to take him back with no further explanation of his actions and lightly blaming her for dancing with an unnamed and unexplained “him.” His repeated refrain – “I’m only seventeen / I don’t know anything” brushes aside his cheating as a mere childish mistake, easily forgiven, and not a sign of disrespect for Betty’s feelings (or Augustine’s, for that matter.)

Plus, I mean, according to Miss Taylor Swift, he’s a teenage boy. Enemy of the people. Carelessly loping through life, not caring about the feelings he hurts along the way.

So why, cries the fandom, does Betty take him back? He’s careless, foolish. He doesn’t deserve her forgiveness. This part of the story is either a tragic end or a quirk of Swift’s, to be lovingly eye-rolled at and ignored. “Taylor might say Betty and James get back together, but I know the truth. She dumps him and runs away with Augustine!”

But I don’t buy it. I don’t believe that James is meant to be the enemy, the singular villain of the folklore trilogy. And it all comes back to the central aim of folklore – telling the stories of other people.

The folklore trilogy, in my view, is the story of three flawed, naive teenagers making questionable decisions. All three of the characters make choices that, on their face, seem ill-informed and even downright immoral at the face of it. The missteps of James are obvious – he cheated on his girlfriend and dared to get away with it with nothing but a shrug and an apology.

Augustine seems fairly obvious, too. While she is certainly more sympathetic, her song filled with emotion and sentiment proving that she actually did feel for James and thought their love was real, she also obviously knew he was in a relationship and went through with their affair anyway.

But Betty – well, what did Betty do wrong? Easy. She took James back. The thing that Swifties tear their hair out over, wondering why… despite everything, she took him back!

The key, though, to the power of this trilogy, is in its interest in showing the thought process of the teenagers it focuses on. The point of the trilogy, in my mind, is not to present a morality play on the crimes of one 17-year-old boy. Instead, I feel quite strongly that this is a trilogy seeking to explain why these three characters made the decisions they did, even if those decisions might not be obviously understandable on the face of it.

Taylor Swift has always talked about “august” this way. In the folklore long pond studio sessions, she says:

“So, the idea that there’s some bad, villain girl in any type of situation who takes your man is actually a total myth because that’s not usually the case at all. Everybody has feelings, everybody wants to be seen and loved and all Augustine wanted was love.”

And that’s the thesis statement of “august,” I think. Taking a villain archetype – the girl who steals your man away – and explores why someone might make the decision to go through with such a relationship. Augustine states that the relationship was her living for “the hope of it all,” a statement which I think explains so much about her mindset. She loved James from afar, saw a chance when some sort of rift appeared between him and Betty, and decided to take her shot, hoping she could make it work. But she knew all along, despite everything she felt, that James just wasn’t hers and ultimately had to let him go.

It’s a sad and ultimately sympathetic song, and listeners understand intimately why Augustine made the choices she did.

Despite Swift not discussing them in this way, I feel that “betty” and “cardigan” contain extremely similar themes. In the case of “betty”, we are treated to a simple, folksy, acoustic song purposefully portraying James as young and naïve. We meet him riding on a skateboard and obtusely wondering if his cheating may have been the cause of his girlfriend switching classes in order to avoid seeing him. We understand innately who this boy is – lacking the ability to self-reflect, maybe. But another thing we learn about him is his genuine feeling that he messed up – he states that his affair was “the worst thing” he ever did.

I think this nature of James is best summed up in that repeated line, the one I brought up before. “I’m only seventeen / I don’t know anything” ends with “But I know I miss you.” To me, this suggests that, young as he is, James doesn’t really understand his feelings innately. This is pretty obvious from the simplistic language and sound of the song in his perspective. But the one thing he does understand, the one feeling he knows to be true, is that he loves Betty and wants to make it up to her.

Plus, while we don’t fully understand what went down between him and Betty, we do understand James’s tendency to follow his feelings blindly. This explains why he might have impulsively climbed into Augustine’s car and why he was willing to just as impulsively leave her at the end of the summer.

Perhaps we don’t need to approve of James’s actions. But we can understand him, and perhaps understand why he makes the decisions he does. He’s a naïve boy, following his feelings blindly.

It’s this key line in James’s perspective that connects so much into Betty’s perspective as well. I feel ultimately what their two songs in tandem prove is a certain unity in their perspective on the events.

The line in “cardigan” that reflects “betty” is “when you are young they assume you know nothing.” I think the usual interpretation of this line is that it contradicts what James says – while he expresses (or perhaps feigns) ignorance, Betty disagrees. But I think people forget the key part of the ending of James’s sentiment – he knows nothing except that he loves Betty.

And it turns out, Betty expresses something very similar. In the bridge of “cardigan,” she goes from her line into a list of the things she knew –

“I knew you’d linger like a tattoo kiss / I knew you’d haunt all of my what if’s / The smell of smoke would hang around this long / ‘Cuz I knew everything when I was young / I knew I’d curse you for the longest time, chasin’ shadows in the grocery line / I knew you’d miss me once the thrill expired and you’d be standing in my front porch light / And I knew you’d come back to me.”

I actually think this mirrors James’s sentiment in a very particular way. Just like him, she calls to the naivete of youth, but contrasts it with her own certainty about how she felt at the time. To me, this is an explanation as to why Betty ultimately took James back – she understood certain things about her feelings and so did he.

Also important to Betty’s perspective is her relative maturity by comparison to the perspectives of James and Augustine. She has the hindsight that both “betty” and “august” lack, and it allows her to see a bird’s eye view of the relationship, one where she is unable to deny the way James made her feel needed. And so, ultimately, even if the listener wouldn’t make the same decisions she would if put in her shoes, they are lead toward understanding why Betty does.

This is the power of the fictional narratives in folklore and evermore. With unbounded creativity, we’re able to mine the lives of three people who make mistakes – clear, obvious mistakes – and try to understand what emotions would have led them toward those mistakes. It’s an empathy that creates the album’s power and depth.

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