This explanation of the album contains repeated mention of sexual violence. Please proceed with caution.
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When the Roman Emperor Nero's wife died, he found a teenage boy who had the misfortune of being feminine enough to resemble her. He had him castrated, renamed him Sporus (which means "seed" - it's ironic, get it?) and forced him to live as his "wife." When Nero died, Sporus was passed around from emperor to emperor until he was eventually driven to commit suicide to avoid the final humiliation of being raped to death in the arena.

In October of 2020, I came across a meme gleefully describing this scenario captioned "government mandated femboys." The consensus among the comments section was that this was, in fact, very hot and very funny. I lost my mind. It was the most upsetting thing I had ever seen. I didn't sleep that night. I cried for days. I sent vicious messages to almost everyone in the comments and texted my therapist massive rants about how nothing mattered and humanity was evil. I couldn't think about anything else. It just absolutely shattered me. I didn't want to make music about it, I just wanted to live in a world where it didn't happen. I connected to him on a very deep level. I felt like I was him.

When I googled his name, I discovered that his legacy is entirely that of a laughingstock and a fetish object. There is sexualized art of him. The "wheel breaks the butterfly" line in that Coldplay song is actually from a poem that mocks him as weak. That's all we fucking know about him. He was mutilated, renamed, raped, humiliated, driven to suicide, and is now remembered as an emasculated sex object. I desperately wanted to learn more about who he was as a person, but historians don't value people like Sporus. There's a shitton out there about Nero, of course. But nothing about Sporus.

I became obsessed. I couldn't think about anything else. And eventually I did start making music about it, because what else is there to do? I decided I was going to create a massive, towering monument to him. If nobody else cared, I would, and I would make something that could - in some small way - give him his dignity back. So I decided it would be a sprawling double album.

Not every song on this album is about him. He is at the core of it, but as I kept writing I branched out into other explorations of human cruelty which I saw as being linked in some way to his suffering. There is Colleen Ritzer, a math teacher whose preserved twitter account reveals her to have been a sweet and upbeat person - who was nonetheless one day brutally violated and murdered by one of her students for no reason. The subject of "Brokencoathanger" is Geneva Ayala, who was tortured by her untouchably powerful boyfriend XXXtentacion while pregnant. Many of the songs contain allusions to close personal friends who experienced unspeakable things at the hands of those who were supposed to protect them. And then there are my own experiences as well.

"Mailbox" is the eye of the storm, a fantasy of having a quiet life with someone you love far away from the brutality of the rest of the album. It does not last: it leads right into "For Colleen Ritzer," who had a perfectly normal and peaceful life right until it was cut short out of arbitrary sadism.

Part One ends on an ambiguous note, taking a step back with the more personal track "Divingstation25" and leading into an intermission track that segues into the beginning of Part Two.

Part Two is not done yet. It is coming soon.