u/pedanticbutright

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I appreciate that some of the lines in “Eldest Daughter” rub people the wrong way. Specifically, “we all dressed up as wolves and we looked fire.”

The “bad bitch” / “savage” repetition bugged me at first too. But the more I’ve sat with the song, the more convinced I am that the discomfort is intentional. And honestly, I think it might be one of the best songs she’s ever written.

To me, “Eldest Daughter” is about the gap between feminine performance and real emotional experience, especially in the context of internet culture and modern womanhood.

I think the title operates more symbolically than literally. I identify deeply with almost everything she writes here, and I’m not first in birth order. “Eldest daughter” feels more like shorthand for women who feel responsible for holding everything together emotionally while simultaneously performing competence, polish, humor, beauty, resilience, and emotional self-sufficiency for everyone else.

This echoes themes she has touched on before in songs like “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” and “The Life of a Showgirl.”

>Now I make my money being pretty and witty
Thank you for the lovely bouquet

From the first stanza, the song situates us in a hyper-performative online world:

>Everybody's so punk on the internet
Everyone's unbothered 'til they're not
Every joke's just trolling and memes
Sad as it seems, apathy is hot
Everybody's cutthroat in the comments
Every single hot take is cold as ice
When you found me, I said I was busy
That was a lie

Right off the bat, we’re talking about performance and emotional distancing, especially online. Internet culture rewards irony, detachment, curated coolness, and performative indifference far more than sincerity or vulnerability.

This is why I really don’t think the kind of “cringe” slang throughout the song is accidental or bad songwriting:

“dressed up as wolves”
“looked fire”
“bad bitch”
“savage”

These phrases feel jarring because they don’t sound like the intimate, emotionally open writing style many of us associate with TS at her best. They sound intentionally online, performative, detached, hyper-self-aware. Curated, defensive identities.

So in this context, we go: huh? Why is she doing this?

These things sound like the kind of thing women post under each other’s mirror selfies online. Compliments of the highest order in the internet age. Celebrations of performative confidence, power, desirability, emotional hardness.

And I think that’s exactly the point.

We perform power, sexiness, intimidation, apathy, emotional hardness, and inaccessibility because contemporary culture increasingly seems to reward those traits more than it rewards openness, sincerity, tenderness, or vulnerability. Women are often encouraged, both by each other and by culture generally, to conflate emotional detachment with empowerment.

But underneath all of that, the emotional core of the song is beautifully earnest.

Beneath the detached persona is someone deeply loyal, sentimental, wounded, hopeful, and desperate to love and be loved securely.

The song contrasts the way most of us move through the world as children, openhearted and emotionally honest, with what happens after our vulnerability is exploited or punished. Eventually, we learn to perform hardness, control, irony, and emotional invulnerability as self-protection.

That’s why lines like:

>When I said I don't believe in marriage
That was a lie

and

>Ferris wheels, kisses and lilacs
And things I said were dumb
'Cause I thought that I'd never find that beautiful, beautiful life that
Shimmers that innocent light back
Like when we were young

land like a gut punch.

I think the song is ultimately admitting: I cared deeply the whole time. I always cared. I just had to pretend I didn’t because vulnerability gives people the power to hurt you. And I see you doing the same thing.

The idea that modern women care less than we do? That was the lie.

This is a new level, even for our bizarre co-parenting dynamic with my husband’s ex.

She got my stepkids (11 and 14) secret phones so they can have them at her house even when they’ve lost phone or iPad privileges at our house for failing classes, not turning in assignments, etc. She explicitly told the kids to lie about the phones to my husband, but he eventually found out and made it clear he was not okay with his 11-year-old having an iPhone, or with her undermining consequences implemented in our home. Nothing changed and the kids kept using the devices at her house.

Now she’s refusing to even give my husband their phone numbers, saying she has no obligation to provide that information.

At this point, I barely even care about the phones themselves. What wears me down is the constant escalation and chaos. I desperately want boundaries and distance from this person, but (literally) every basic co-parenting matter every day turns into conflict that spills outward into my marriage, my home, and the emotional state of the kids.

I’m sure there are better examples, so weigh in. 😄

Suffice it to say, most of my favorites live in the reactive or volatile columns: things I wish I could say, or had said, but didn’t.

https://preview.redd.it/ezz563j8ej0h1.png?width=1779&format=png&auto=webp&s=f6ff25578436f3dcad86a466a7f5bf950a57c1dd

Every time I listen to this one, my brain gets stuck on the “Portofino” stanza:

>That view of Portofino was on my mind
when you called me at the Plaza Athenee
Ooh, oftentimes it doesn't feel so glamorous to be me
All the right guys
Promised they'd stay
Under bright lights
They withered away
But you bloom
Portofino was on my mind and I think you know why

>And if your letters ever said, "Goodbye"...

>I'd cry my eyes violet
Elizabeth Taylor
Tell me for real
Do you think it's forever?
Been number one but I never had two
And I can't have fun if I can't have...
Be my NY when Hollywood hates me

I feel like there’s a lot going on here, and (hot take) this might go beyond the obvious Elizabeth Taylor metaphor and dip into (kind of annoyingly basic, but that is Taylor's marketing gimmick/strategy) Carrie Bradshaw territory. I'm not a SATC fan to be clear, but bear with me.

Liz --> Carrie --> Taylor.

Being widely desired is not the same thing as being securely loved.

Lots of relationships, lots of “good on paper” men, and still the question: why doesn’t anything stick? Carrie also, obviously, processes her relationships through storytelling, and this stanza reads like she’s narrating while still inside it.

We know Portofino isn’t random, it’s a reference to Elizabeth Taylor’s remarriage to Richard Burton. So when she says the “view of Portofino was on my mind,” it sounds to me like she’s in a second-chance headspace, thinking about going back to something familiar and long term that didn't work out the first time. The kind of post-breakup nostalgia where you know it wasn't right for you, but you still seriously consider going back because the loneliness (and honestly the dopamine withdrawal) is excruciating.

She places herself at the Plaza Athenee, but immediately undercuts it:

>oftentimes it doesn't feel so glamorous to be me.

This is where I started picking up the Carrie breadcrumbs/vibes. In the final season of SATC, Carrie is in Paris with Petrovsky, and she’s finally “settled,” living the most glamorous, romantic version of her life - dating a famous artist, living out of the Plaza Athenee, beautiful clothes, luxury shopping, all in the most beautiful city in the world.

But she’s miserable. She’s alone. She’s in a foreign country and she’s isolated and ignored. It’s secure, but it’s not fulfilling.

And in that exact moment, something new comes along.

>If your letters ever said ‘Goodbye’…
Tell me for real, do you think it’s forever?

Also very Carrie-coded: asking rhetorical questions about the permanence of a relationship and basically telling the story of how it might end while you’re still in the thick of it. She’s scripting the breakup before it happens.

>Be my NY when Hollywood hates me

“If you only get one great love, New York may just be mine.” - Carrie Bradshaw

New York = constant, authentic, home
Hollywood = fickle, performative, conditional

The ask: be the always-evolving but constant safe place where I can be my true self, even when it's "too real" for other people.

>Under bright lights / They withered away
But you bloom

Feels like another thematic echo:

In the wrong relationships, you shrink, dull, or disappear.
In the right relationship, you expand, become more yourself.

What ties all of it together for me is the quiet desperation under the wit. Polished and self-aware on the surface, but there's an undercurrent of deep fear:

• that nothing lasts
• that you might keep choosing the wrong people
• that you might end up alone

Thoughts?