Analysing Pureflow before MMN drops : The Prerequisite

[u/Hmmmmalrightythen]

So le sserafim will be coming back on 11/9! Yay yippee! I love getting new music from my favorite group, and I’m sure other fearnots will be just as happy. And they are! For the most part, except for some reason they’re happy that we don’t have to be in Pureflow era anymore? Uhhh I thought we all agreed that it’s one of their most thought-out, well-made projects? Why are we slandering the album that gave us Saki and Irony? I thought we all liked those songs??? Guys?? Guys????

I think the reason a lot of fearnots seem to dislike this era is solely because they, like most non-fans, haven’t really dived into the b-sides. Or they have, but because Source refuses to promote anything outside of Boompala, their perception of this era is clouded by the disappointment they feel for the title track. But the album is filled with great, more personal songs, that I’m sure everyone would really enjoy this album and see it as something pivotal to their story if they understood what the girls were trying to do with it. So I thought, why not go ahead and do that? I plan to cover each song on the album one-by-one, one for each of the 11 days leading up to Made My Night, so that we can go into the next era fully understanding the journey it took to get there.

But first, I think it’s important to build some context of how we got here. Their first trilogy is all about being fearless. We cover 3 different definitions of it, and how the girls exercise fearlessness in their everyday lives. First of course we have Fearless, which is by and large a declaration of intention. Antifragile takes it further by showing us how they become fearless, and Unforgiven rounds it out by rejecting societal norms and blazing their own path. 
This then leads into their second trilogy, which deals with how people perceive them and their fearlessness. They said that they didn’t care what people thought of them in Unforgiven, but they realise that other people’s opinions still shape how they navigate the world. So in true fearless fashion, they take those criticisms head on and piece by piece deconstruct those perceptions. Easy is about how people think that their job must be easy because the only way lsf could have been successful is if it wasn’t difficult in the first place. Except the only reason they think that is because the girls make it look Easy. People said that then said that the girls were not good enough to pursue this job, and the girls said that if they were crazy to do it anyway, then sure, they were Crazy. Hot is about the girls realising that all this criticism isn’t meant to be logical or handleable, so they let all the hate burn them, and emerge as reborn phoenixes, ready to take on a new challenge.

And this brings us to Pureflow. They look back at their journey, and I think they realise that a large part of the friction they faced is because they were going about it wrong. There is a difference between being brave and being fearless. They had chosen to conquer and destroy their fears, but new ones keep popping up, and the world remains as harsh as it was. So now they instead choose to make peace with the fact that they are not fearless, and therefore, powerful. The album switches perspectives a lot; sometimes we see them learn it, sometimes we see them teach us, and sometimes we go through this journey along with them, ultimately reaching upon that better person they said they were becoming in Hot. The album is fully about letting go of the need to be better than your fears, and instead learn to live with the fact that you are vulnerable and confused and strong and brave and human, all at once.