just shut up and look at me not at the music everything you see and do sparkles so brightly what did you have in your heart up there what was your inspiration your lie in april is a tightly packed story interwoven with many themes the downfall of success moving on from loss finding purpose but first and foremost to me in all of this is the most simple in name with the most incomprehensible meaning love one of the most purely abstract concepts within human existence it's a source of the greatest pain and of the most memorable joy
both sides of this dichotomy are explored in the anime through kosei in his relationships with his mother and kaori it shows how negative love can be and its consequences and dangers as well as how positive it should be with one key word that distinguishes between the two sides creativity but before we get into just how it does that keep in mind we're discussing love in a general sense here not in a romantic one so words that may be typically coded in amorous arrangements like relationship or even love itself won't be carrying that incidental meaning here
today now let's get into a sort of philosophy of love or at least what i've interpreted as such from the anime to start we'll look at the side of things that failed which will provide one half of the evidence for our later claims of course this side of failure is kosei and his mother as the anime progresses we get a deeper look at how their relationship began to crumble once harboring a healthy bond between mother and son this deteriorated as his mother also did slowly dying to an unnamed ailment she became much more violent with
her son forcing him to practice the piano the same instrument she played for long hours and harsh nights so much so as he grew older he was hardly able to play with his friends and they'd often see him covered in bruises when they did if he deviated from the notes on the page he'd be hit and this instilled in him a technically perfect playing lauded by the judges as perfection but seen by his competitors as robotic an insult to his once soulful performance when his mother was still healthy and their life was still happy kosei's
first performance was one of these inspirational pieces but as they both grew older deviants from those notes that drew the admiration of others was beaten out of him however while this violent display was focused around what good playing was physical assault wasn't what drove kosei to become as proficient as he did all this did was serve to drive them further apart his motivation was set already when his mother told him early on that i take a lot of pills but you spreading your wings like this that's the best medicine for me with this she had
all but sealed his future issues what we've seen so far is a relationship driven by success defined by the piano and his accomplishments on it until he's able to move on all we see of them together is around this instrument and this additional motivation of his mother's health was nothing new in how their relationship worked at least at the end success in a traditional sense refers to the positive outcomes of an action and especially when used in situations like this with literal judges this binds it to the past everything is compared to what's occurred in
the past and from there it becomes successful or not and this is because perfection can only exist once but failure is infinite so every rating is a look to past perfection in this way kosai wanting to make his mother healthy again by playing well is the same thing when he thinks back on her it's not with hatred but with a soft contemplation he still prays at her shrine without an ounce of hatred showing he thinks of the moments before she grew cold and harsh his aim in playing well was a look to the past seeing
their once successful relationship and wishing to return to it she was forcing him to be in a position of worldly success and he was searching for familial success in that and the goal here it was tied to something that could never be it's obvious his playing wouldn't bring his mother's health back it was just the misguided wish of a child one she encouraged but even outside of that focusing on success and tying it to someone else is always doomed to fail no existence in this world is eternal and all paths end in the same place
they could never return to the past and his view forward was blocked by a mirror this motivation is a dangerous thing even with good intentions while kosei's mother did become an evil woman her heart wasn't in an awful place knowing her time left was limited in that she could never help her son to be prosperous she condensed years and years of that time into what they had left because if she could leave him as a grand pianist then he would be stable if nothing else there would be a path forward for him to live a
comfortable life and for this world it makes sense to stamp out creativity like this the easiest example is the judges characters with no more interaction or development than to look at the notes on a sheet listen to the notes played compare the two and dish out a quantitative value to the sound of the soul and they don't care the least bit about soul they care about what best represents the successes of long dead men kosei's mother was playing the world's game on a limited timeline it doesn't justify anything she did but makes her violence down
to earth in a chillingly accurate way they lived for each other each one seeking to better the future of the other but without creativity consisting of simply violent repetition their relationship failed the last thing we see kosei say to his mother is this after he gave a performance that deviated from the sheet music and she began to hit him cuz i don't care anymore now i just wish you were dead for how reasonable a stamping of creativity may have been for the world it's the worst thing for love i'm going to use myself as an
example here for a moment but simply because it's the simplest solution and i find it easier to explore my own weaknesses than someone else's i've spent the majority of my adult life with a steadfast belief living your life for or majorly with anyone else is dangerous it's your own and giving it to anyone else is just a way to fail it's based on my own past failures and the ones i've witnessed as well i thought the only way to have a good life was to live it for myself needless to say in trying to avoid
pain and love i've never succeeded either your line april presents a clarification on this and my mistake living your life for or majorly with someone else isn't the mistake discarding creativity simply focusing on some end goal while you do this is the mistake kosei's purpose and where he seems the most complete and alive is at the piano the gusto with which they say lies like and so i play not because it haunts me but because i want to heart and soul i'm a pianist and the general idea of music as something from the soul the
way he and others play their feelings into the music to the adoration of entire concert halls it's not a stretch to say the piano is like his life itself as his teacher says cause once you're done you can't imagine life without it see how good i am while my partner is even better creating something new out of nothing is tough but that's the part of it that feeds your soul so i i'm gonna play for you and he plays it for two people in the anime both times under the banner of love once for his
mother the time it fails and emotionally decimates him and secondly for kaori the time it makes him a complete and more healthy person and this is despite the fact both situations have the same outcome the most abrupt kind of ending why is living for someone else so often once but so grand the next time creativity and success are exactly why his mother stamped out creativity and focused on success the love between them became a thing of goals rather than for love itself the notes on the page are the perfect summary the successes of long dead
men it's all about the past and copying it not about creating anything new this became the core of their relationship if kosei wasn't a child one who had to be around his mother and felt some obligation to her would he have stayed there it was more of a duty than anything else but love love must create not just cling to the past and this is exactly what happens with kaori from their very first moments what draws kosei to her is creation the music she makes the way she plays it in such a passionate form giving
performances that sounds similar to ones given before but never exactly the same as something in the past this is why it's hard to get a read on her you can't look at other things and discover what she is you have to just look at her when he seeks her out it's not to sustain some image of the past it's to create a new one she even gets him to do this with the thing that causes him the most pain the piano the object his mother tied to success and then abruptly to failure it's the fault
of that misguided and stale love that he can't play anymore for kosei the piano has become a thing of worldly success now despite all of this kaori does convince him to try it once more but the way he's playing sloppily here would lead keori to fail so he stops mid-performance but right here kayori does something genius when she stops herself fully tanking her own performance it attaches what's occurring from his old motivation they can no longer succeed but she goes on anyway proving the act of creation as something of its own value and he follows
suit as they give a performance which inspires the crowd and then both of them to keep playing this moment becomes one of those that drives them both forward for the rest of the series and that's why specifically in love creativity is so important rather than clinging to the past and trying to recreate what's worked before it should be about looking to the future inspiring each other to create more and more moments along the way and there should be no goal but love itself every path will end in the same place so why care where it
leads and what do you do along the way to make that your own this may sound like life but it's also love when we defined love as a concept we stuck it to our own minds as something to be achieved like notes on a sheet you could look at what has worked for others or yourself in the past and copy it but we've seen how that works out and it does nothing to make that path your own as kaori says how do you want to play this piece no one can tell you how it's your
decision to make creativity is what takes a path leading to the same place and makes it into something that's actually yours the same as deviating from the notes on the page make a song your own no one's love will be fully unique but if you stay inspired and creative it will be different and that's all we can hope for and this is what they keep doing keori inspired kosei so when she loses faith he pays that back to her and re-inspires her and unbeknownst to him this wasn't the first time she was living her life
for him all this go her goal knowing her time was limited was simply to achieve her childhood dream and perform a duet with the pianist after seeing his magical performance as a child she was living her life for him but instead of leading to pain like our last example it led to something amazing and this is because she was creative and that was the only point it was a journey not heading to a destination life is just a series of moments and creativity is looking to the future to make more whatever the past is she
brought this idea into kosei's life and it made him better and it gets paid back to her as he began to live his life more and more for her but because they kept their eyes locked in the future it didn't stagnate and leave them broken living for someone else it pushes them forward so when one fell the other was there not to pick them back up but to give them a reason to pick themselves back up to be inspired to create more of these moments that define us together it's important that they're not picking each
other up either as kosai tried to do with his mother and she in despicable methods tried to do with him it's a large part of why things ended so awfully there if you're just helping each other up every time what happens when one of you is gone will the other just lie there on the ground forever in kosei's case the answer was yes until kayari and how much the relationship departs from this couldn't be clearer as he plays a duet they were meant to play together by himself a duet is the literal bolstering of two
musicians as they share the stage and elevate each other but kosei does it alone drawing a clear line they aren't reliant on each other even if they live for each other as they so often wonder after a performance did it reach her i hope that it did that was simply the goal did it reach her did it reach everyone else to show how much she inspired him did the song ring out love true and clear off-script and creative they never do get to play a last duet as kaori dies leaving kosei without active inspiration but
when the relationship itself was built off of inspiration to simply stay on the ground where you followed being insult to everything it was with his mother staying on the ground and not moving forward meant staying as close to her as possible a focus on the past but kayori was something that was so against the past it would be a disgrace to not move forward this was all and always about the future as creativity is by definition making something new even just somewhat new can only happen in the future everything in the present is already made
the best thing he can do to honor kaori is to keep pushing himself forward as they did for each other to maintain the creativity they shared both in music and in moments to use the past not as a goal but as an inspiration in this way kaori will always be a part of his music and they do get to play one last duet the last performance we see from kosei is a solo but in his own mind she appears to make it a duet she's not there but her influence is in him her inspiration that
got him there the creativity that they shared she drives him forward as love should he finishes this duet alone knowing that she won't ever be there to make these moments again but it's important he ends it alone because it shows that he won't be held back by the past this time even if he is inspired by those moments it's just to seek out more and to make more he'll honor her memory and their love as he should even if it's gone it made him better a better musician sure but also a better person a person
more aware of what love is and what it should be do you resent me huh hey hey hey your lie in april to me stressed the idea of creativity being important to love and to me that fits because love is an act of creation something else the anime highlights for a story that would be described as being about mad musicians there are oddly few performances they occur in only about thirty percent of the episodes and even then they usually don't take up the entire time at least definitely not for kosei and kyori making the actual
percentage much lower i think this is a great detail because love is certainly crafted in grand demonstrations like the ones they share just as important are the slow beats of the story the plotlines which convey us from one performance to the next the moments which true to what the anime mimics in life account for most of our existence these are the moments that at least in my experience always created the biggest obstacle to love moments where exhaustion takes over and creation is strangled by everything else life forces on us moments full of awkward silences you
wish you could fill with everything that's unsaid love like any act of creation is a fickle thing that has to be propped up again and again it can be lost in an instant creativity is important to make the moments that prevent that these performances the large moments of their relationship hold no value outside of rankings and positions at least as far as a traditional sense is concerned for others in the series those are the aspects that matter but for kaori and later for kosei as well it's anything but that they're creative in these moments making
them into something more memorable impactful and relationship building if she never stops playing in their duet and that moment is nothing to build off of it would have just been the duty of friend a to help her win if they don't play creatively the crowd would have cared no more for them than anyone else and everything would continue on just waiting for the next silence to be filled just like those moments in between but these performances change that these moments we create change that and we do create them there is nothing inherent to these moments
that make them something special the anime is full of moments in that percent that are just as beautiful full of stunning scenery and impactful dialogue moments where the moon is shining bright and beautiful the trained siren ended blaring by windows that are open just enough to let in the cherry blossoms all of these things are traditionally adorn memorable moments and create the platform for a life-changing one but not all of them can be life-changing these all have the potential but it's impossible to make them all great and it's even more impossible to remember them all
even if we could just like so many of these scenes are forgotten under the glory of others in the anime we'll never remember every moment we spend with someone but we have the option to make a select few that we do the ones that drive us not to sit and reminisce forever but inspire us to keep moving forward for more to keep creating something that's worth giving half of your being to a true love i think the summary of this adds more detail to the phrase living for someone else to remove its danger something more
like living for the moments you'll create with someone else a statement that includes creation and refuses to state an end goal to me at least this is one of the things your line april is saying naturally though even for being a narrative that covers dark moments and the loss of loved ones it still exists in an idealized space everything comes back to kosei and his performances as he inadvertently inspires seemingly everyone and everything is wrapped up in one nice singular package for real life this is hardly ever the case and trying to have some love
like kosei and kaori would never have the same end result as they exist in a unique situation where their lives can be so dedicated to each other and music our world doesn't usually allow for that and pushes many more dull moments the ones which danger love rather than inspire it our version of this task is a lot more complex and open well this may be obvious to some i remember sitting here when a thought struck me love isn't a guarantee if it's truly something great then it has to be earned like something else great anything
else would just be an insult to it when we want love we can't wait for it we have to go out and find it and respect it much like kosai sitting around in fear won't get you anywhere if he had never albeit with heavy cokes and conquered that fear he would have never grown and changed never reconnected with his purpose and never loved like he did it caused him a lot of pain as well his love was abruptly cut short once again but we don't see all this pain the second time around because to him
it was worth it making those moments that will inspire him forward again maybe that's what we all need to try as well at least i know that i probably need to but i won't bog down the hopeful message if you're lying april and this video alike with a long rambling outro but i will mention the pinned comment which will include a few important links like my twitter discord and twitch where i'll be streaming on thursday nights and saturday afternoons just afternoon technically as well as my patreon the most important link where you can get your
name at the end of videos like these lovely people above me right now in addition to some extra benefits when we get a few more people and there's even a script for this that i didn't want to use uploaded there now if you want a little bit more kind of rambling late night prof but anyway i'll just leave you by saying thank you for watching and i do hope that i'll see you again soon
