21 min read
At the end of every year, Spotify does their thing where you see your year of music in review. I’m expecting to see a couple of songs with a high play count, but nothing will come even close to “Fragments” by The Stupendium. And honestly, I just have to compliment this man on his creativity and talent. There are a number of songs about video games that I’ve really enjoyed listening to on repeat, but Fragments has to be at the top based on how much I connected with the lyrics.
If you aren’t familiar with the game Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, let me give you a small overview of it. The Ratchet & Clank series itself is a series of 3D action platformers starting in the PS2 era of games alongside the other great series of Jak & Daxter and Sly Cooper. R&C features the adventures of a Lombax named Ratchet and a small robot sidekick named Clank. I won’t go into plotlines of all the games as much as I would love to gush about the series, but suffice it to say that the duo regularly saves the galaxy many times over throughout the 6 main story games (3 on the PS2 and 3 on the PS3). There are other games from different studios, but for the longest time those were the main games until Ratchet & Clank Rift Apart came out.
Rift Apart was special because it featured a second Lombax playable character in an alternate dimension named Rivet. The names Ratchet and Rivet fit well together due to the ever-present machine and vehicle tinkering nature of Lombaxes according to their historical lore. These two Lombaxes were both the last of their kind in their respective dimensions and only discovered each other when Dr. Nefarious stole a device called the Dimensionator from Ratchet and Clank. The story of the game proceeds to switch between playing as the two Lombaxes to stop evil and save their respective dimensions from disaster all while battling various interpersonal struggles. It’s an incredibly fun game that is true to form of the original 3 PS2 games and the follow up Future series on the PS3. I highly recommend playing it.
The overall vibe of the song, to me anyway, is about the duality of your life. One one hand, you are dealt a hand and you have the make the best of what you are given. However, we have the ability to do more than that and we can make our own life what we want it to be, to a certain extent. There are certain things we can’t do much about and in those situations we have to make the best of it. I’m going to pull lines of lyrics from the song to write about them and provide my own insight about how I feel they apply to my life so far.
The first part of the first verse is a chunky one to quote, but talks about how you can go from feeling like you’ve got your life figured out and everything is going smoothly to having rug pulled out from under your feet. All of a sudden, this life doesn’t feel like what you were used to and you have a whole set of new challenges to deal with because of a single (or many) events that occurred
You’ve been living as the main event
Live a life on red carpets
You can’t be surprised when you ask where the rug went
When it’s pulled out from under your feet
It’s hard to deal with such a drastic change and it is especially hard when that is compounded with a new environment. I attended Marquette University for my first year of college. This was a very new situation for me: being far from home and living on my own for the first time were the two biggest challenges. Other things arose after I completed my first semester and started my second semester as a Freshman. Partway through, I feel into a really deep and dark depression where I felt utterly hopeless. I kept to myself and stayed secluded in my dorm room. In the beginning of this, I would still go to some classes, but eventually I stopped going to classes all together. I started to have thoughts of suicide as time went on because I felt like I just didn’t belong and I didn’t have anyone to reach out to. Finally, I had a moment of huge panic that piled onto the depression when I had a final paper due in my English Composition class that I had not even started on. That’s when I broke down and called my parents because I simply couldn’t handle everything at once.
Taking a short intermission from that story, I want to cover these couple of lines because they make me laugh a bit. We all have weird families and weird things about ourselves that we get from them either genetically or through the ways we were raised.
Don’t get to choose the loose screws you inherit.
(That’s more than a face in the mirror you’re seeing)
Stepping back, however, we all have loose screws that are with us in a less literal sense of inheriting from our parents or family. Ultimately, we are who we are and there’s not a lot we can do about that at a core identity level. We can discover new parts of ourselves over time to reveal those “loose screws”, and we can even change who we are at a surface level. At the end of the day, though, we are who we are and that’s what makes each of us special: there’s more to us than we are show to the world.
I didn’t actually realize until I’m writing this how much of a damn play-by-play this seems to be of my life, fuck.
Together you’ve got the tools to repair it
Might just be a Lombax with a wrench
I was sat on the bench, now I’m back with a vengeance
Back to story time: I took a medical withdraw and started an outpatient partial hospitalization program that went on for about 7 or 8 months of daily group therapy sessions and individualized cognitive behavioral therapy. I’m not going to say it was easy, but I got through it and came out the other side with a new balance of medications and coping mechanisms to work through future problems. This is when I took a job at Target while taking a break from school.
I wasn’t alone at this point, I had people helping me through this and, to abuse the metaphor, I had the tools to repair it (myself) at least as best as I could. Things improved for a while before I started some community college. I had ups and downs there with this same depression hitting me for a second wave. I stopped going to classes and ended up having to take withdraws again due to my poor grades. At this point I pretty humiliated and felt like I was never going to get myself back up again. I felt like I was stuck on the bench and I wasn’t able to overcome my struggles.
Fast forward a few years filled with work, moving around the country, and I’m finally in Georgia where I gave college a final try. Throughout those two or so years, I did a lot of personal growth and really worked on myself. One of the most important parts of this time was me working on my personal discipline I started my first semester with just a single course in Human Geography. Anything related to Social Studies was a weak subject for me, historically, but I really wanted to make this work. I was a strange mix of timid and determined, I think? Well, I had an amazing professor that I stayed in contact with throughout the rest of my college career despite my major having nothing to do with an history course. My performance in this course showed me that I could do it one final time. I was more determined and back with a vengeance.
R&C games are known for their wide range of creative weapon concepts. Throughout the history of the series, we have seen weapons make reappearances and new weapons in each game, Rift Apart is no exception. One of the more unique weapons is called The Sprinkler which freezes an enemy in place by turning them into a topiary while doing damage to them.
When realities collide, it’s appealing to think
There’s green on the other side, well, you’re wielding the Sprinkler
I always chuckle a bit at these lines for its reference to the grass being greener on the other side. It’s something I hear a fair bit when growing up: the grass isn’t actually always greener on the other side despite how it may look. I spent a lot of my comparing myself to others as I was growing up, and to a certain extent I suppose I still do. I’ve gotten better about this these days and I like to think I do it in a much healthier way now. Before I looked at life with a healthier perspective, I would think that just because I’m not as good as that other person, I must not be worth anyone’s time. This type of thought infested my brain in all sorts of areas of my life from friendships and relationships to school and jobs. It was a really toxic way to think.
What I like about these two lines, though, is that it suggests we have the power to make our own side of the fence greener. We wield the sprinkler to make the grass greener because we have control over how we live our lives, to a certain extent. Without getting into a whole debate on predestination versus free will, we have the ability to shape our future given what we have at our disposal to work with. I may have depression, but with the right help and the right tools, I can overcome that and make my life better, if I choose to.
The next few lines come from the pre-chorus and are a core theme to the song.
The world’s what you make it, your fate’s not ingrained
Every crack in the paint’s still a piece of the picture
And of course this is one of the crescendos of the song as we spin up into the chorus. But before we go there, let’s think about this a bit. We already know that the world is what we make of it. Something else I was told a lot when I was younger was that “you get out of something what you put into it”. And to a certain extent, that’s very true and the song echoes this sentiment.
The second line really made me think, though. We all want to have a really nice looking painting that’s pristine and without any faults or cracks. I imagine those cracks are like the hard times we go through, and while they may be ugly to look at, they are most certainly part of who we are. It’s hard to say if any of us would be the same as we are today if we didn’t go through the hard times we had, I know I wouldn’t be the same. So it’s interesting to think about how the cracks in the pain really are still a piece of the picture.
As mentioned, Rivet is the female Lombax that is the other playable character in the game Rift Apart. I don’t think her name was an accident with how it references a method of holding two pieces of material together as a fastener.
So this world is not the one you intended to be?
Well, a Rivet’s what you need when things might tear at the seams
I really like the play on words with her name here. It highlights how crucial she was to the story and the success of Ratchet and Clank. Given how things started off, it would have been impossible for Ratchet to keep things together as the story progressed if Rivet wasn’t there helping him along. That makes me think of the friends and family I had when I was going through some of the darker periods of my depression before I finished my degree. And if I’m being honest, I have people like my partner and others to thank for supporting me through the good times and the bad these days.
I’ve lost contact with all of my friends from high school and college quite a long time ago, so a lot of my long time friends today are ones I know mostly from online. Of course, there are some amazing friends that I’ve seen in person and get to hang out with regularly, but those are more recent. With so many of my friends scattered across the country, and some across the world, it can be really sad to think about how far they are. It’s not likely I will be able to meet up in person more than once or twice, but technology has made it really easy to stay in contact. We can be hundreds or thousands of miles away and still talk as if we were right next to each other. All of that to say, no matter how far you are from someone, you can still be very close. One of the lines in the chorus that’s repeated a lot, and the title of the game talks about this very thing, but in slightly different circumstances.
When you’ve crashed into fragments of all that you know
Well, you’re far from alone
We’re just a rift apart
A rift apart
When you need your friends and support system most because things aren’t what you expected, they will be right there for you. In fact, some of my most amazing friends have put aside their own tasks and dropped what they were doing when I was really struggling with anxiety and depression about 6 or 7 years ago.
Things seem really big when you’re dealing with them right now. It’s not always the case, but a lot of the time our mind can fool us into thinking something is bigger than it really is. Only once we are through the situation and are able to look back, can we really see the true size of the problem.
Keep breathing, it’s all gonna pass in a season
Believe it, and call it a flash in the pan
And release it, let a thought stop with a dash
You’ll leave it all looking real small in the past
I don’t think those lines are really meant to minimize a struggle, but instead help put it in perspective. I don’t necessarily look back at my struggles in the past and think about how minor and insignificant they are, but I can see that I was able to conquer those problems. In the moment, they seem insurmountable and that can be very overwhelming. I suppose that the fact some of these struggles seem to impossible is ultimately one of the reasons suicide is seen as the only way out. Looking back, I can see that they were big struggles, but not so big that I couldn’t work through them.
Another big shift if my life was when I moved to South Carolina for work after college. This wasn’t the first time I would be on my own since the issues at Marquette, but this is definitely different than not being home for a few weeks or months. I was taking the next big step in my life as an adult: to start living on my own.
It’s hard to know where to start first
Each step becomes a departure
It’s funny to think about how many firsts in one’s life happens once they move out on their own, especially to start a career after college. Each one of those firsts, even events leading up to moving out such as packing, looking for an apartment, job interviews, etc. all feel like big steps and a departure from the comfort and familiarity of what we’re used to.
And you may feel like a drifter
Resists a piece in the mixture
Is this a crack in the rift or
Another piece of the picture?
Even today as I take on new tasks at work, plan for a wedding, continue to save for retirements, and more, I feel like each step I take is a department from what I know. It’s the beginning of an adventure: some big and some small. The bigger ones can definitely be scary at times, and it can be hard to tell if these are even the right steps to take. It’s interesting to think about each of these departures pulling us further from our comfort zone and making us feel like a drifter, in a way. Leaving that grounded comfort zone can almost feel aimless in the beginning. Or perhaps there’s a lot of excitement in the beginning, but in the middle the aimlessness shows up as the newness wears off. Either way, I’d argue that all of these experiences are building up to be additional pieces of the picture of our life.
Raritanium is a bit of a tongue-in-cheek joke from the game studio at this point. In the early games it was said to be one of the rarest minerals in the universe. Well, as the series continued more and more Raraitanium showed up in the games and was used to various upgrades. I suppose it’s still pretty rare compared to other minerals and materials in the universe.
There’s one thing that’s rarer than Raritanium
That’s a fate that don’t seem alien
No matter how long you’ve been on that grind
Life soon finds ways of derailing
Eventually, we settle into our “normal” life and find a groove to stay in. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing as I don’t equate this with stagnation or complacency, which are bad. This feeling is more of a constant and steady grind at work and getting things done at home.
This section didn’t really make sense to me at first for some reason, but I think I get what is being said. Our future, our fate, is a big unknown to each of us. We will end up taking meandering paths as we live our lives. Other times, we’ll end up veering in an unexpected direction due to the circumstances we face. We once again see this idea of us both being in control and not in control of our lives showing up. Funny enough, I don’t think that life derailing is a bad thing, always. Perhaps we do get stuck in a rut and stagnate a bit, so life throws us a curve ball. While I didn’t know it at the time, life was doing just that when I met my partner for the first time. It would be a while, and several more life-derailing events for both of us, until we started dating. What’s the most important is how we handle it and respond.
This next bit of the song is here more because I like how it sounds and the callback to the Sprinkler from before, but maybe I think of something else to say soon.
If a legacy’s planting seeds
You’d better believe I’m leaving these
Enemies in leaves and geraniums
Okay, I did end up thinking of something: One of the big struggles I’ve had recently is related to what my purpose in life is. It makes sense to compare leaving a legacy with planting seeds. We don’t always get to see what our legacy will be, but we leave our mark on the world in one way or the other. I’m certain that we have more of an impact on others than we know or think about. Even the mundane like holding a door open may be a small enough gesture to help remind someone that not everything in the world is bad.
We return to The Stupendium contrasting the roles of what we are given in life with the impact our own choices have in the next few lines.
And though change may choose our canvas
Only we can paint the hues
But your flaws don’t mean you’re broken
They’re just deeper shades of you
We have the duality of life represented in a really concrete way with the painting analogy. We may be given a canvas, but that doesn’t dictate what we paint on it. Sure, the shape of canvas may guide us or influence us to paint certain things or use certain colors, but we still have control over what we do with the canvas. The next lines, funny enough, touch on the painting bit more with a mention of Bob Ross. It’s a really good connection when you think of how he didn’t ever call anything a bad accident when painting. That’s reflected in how our flaws are just deeper parts of us. I like to think of them as lore or backstory. Yes, they absolutely had an impact on us, but they also don’t determine what we do today.
I really nerded out when I heard the reference to Carl Sagan and his show The Cosmos from long ago. Something about that just really tickled me!
Combination of Sagan and Bob Ross
No mistakes when repainting the cosmos
If things seem grey, it’s the start of a gradient
Can’t make hay without raking the compost
But it’s a good point that is made here. Like I said, Bob Ross wouldn’t call something a bad mistake and he wouldn’t let us think that it’s an unrecoverable error. Our life derails in an unexpected way and we have the power to right ourselves, even if its on a new track. We have to go through tough times to come out the other side as who we are today. Like raking compost to fertilize soil to make hay, there’s a dirty part of the job before we get to the end product.
The importance of a supportive team cannot be overstated because one of the most repeated concepts in the game and the song is about how we don’t have to do this alone. In the game, there’s a Rift Tether that is part of Ratchet’s glove. It allows him to zip across large gaps by latching onto a rift. I like the callback to that in these lines here.
When your reality cracks, it can feel like forever
Trapped in the gaps as the pieces are severed
If you feel you could lapse, all you need is a tether
To that team at your back, you can keep it together
Some of the hardest moments to get through and when we feel alone and stuck. I know personally, there have been many days and nights when I was alone and those hours dragged on. Sometimes I felt like things were falling apart and one of my deepest fears of growing old alone would eat at me. As scary as it was, there were times when I realized what was going on and I tried to pull myself out of it by reaching out to friends. I say it was scary because sometimes it feels like a huge gap that you’re crossing to get to the other side. But scary things can be worth it, and knowing that my “team” so to speak was just a text message away helped to make that gap feel smaller.
This was a lot longer than I expected, but I guess that’s what I get for putting it off for so long. I wish I could see how many times I’ve listened to a particular song already, maybe there’s something in the Spotify API that lets me pull that information. Regardless, I hope you’ve enjoyed some analysis of the some Fragments and my reflection on some part of my life as I’ve grown up and gotten myself to where I am today.
If you take just one thing away from this: I hope it’s that you know you don’t have to do it alone.
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