The story in Love song~Last Angel~Virgin Road

[NeK Hamasaki]

Hey!
I think there's no thread about this yet...

I haven't figured out totally the story of the PVs, so let's share our thoughts and see what we can get

My guess is that Mannie is dead and ayu "sees" him on their house, then running behind the cab, and finally she thinks that the thieves on the bank are them.
Then ayu is hurt and starts dying while someone is chasing her soul. She finally dies and see that it was Mannie who was following her and they take off to get married, steal some cash and fire some guns in "the other side"

I can't quite figure out the scenes with Mannie and the other girl...
what do you guys think?

[isthisLOL?]

I thought it was obvious that at least one of the Mannies in the story(or are they all the same?) is cheating on Ayu, she is leaving him in the beginning of Love Song after all.

[NeK Hamasaki]

At first I thought it was just a matter of cheating too; but I started thinking he's dead because they can see each other only when ayu dies.

Offtopic: I love your nickname

[adantatu2]

i really can't understand the pvs!!
maybe we can ask ayu about this

[Sandy]

I don't get the story either, but I really don't like the PV's. Something about cheating and death and oh-my-god so Iamsobored.

[Luja.]

I can't figure out the story either, but thanks for the thread! Hopefully someone can enlighten us! What totally confuses me is the park house scene. I totally don't get it.
I thought at first they were married, and they are some kind of Bonnie and Clyde Then Mannie cheated on her and she left him and when she sees this bank she remembers how they once robbed it and the memory is so hurtful (symoblized by Mannies shoot) that she ... dies inside? I don't know.
My friend had another version: she thought that Virgin Road is just a dream of ayu's (the wedding especially). That's why it's black and white. She thought that ayu and Mannie robb banks together but are not a real couple. In fact, Mannie has another girlfriend, but ayu dreams she'd be his girl. The park house scene means that she is hunted by the truth, or the "true" Mannie. And in the end, she dies (same thing as I thought, pistol shoot = painful memory ... even thought that wouldn't really kill her) and in the end she is in her dream again, where Mannie is her husband. But in this version the scene where she leaves doesn't make sense.
So, it's still a mystery to me

[Tony G]

There's a thread on this already...

[NeK Hamasaki]

^ link please??

[(miss)understood]

I dont know what it means at all. I have thought about it and thought some more and I can't understand it. Although I love the Last Angel PV. I hated the song until I watched the video, and now it's a favorite. It's funny how impressionable I can be, or how watching something you like can change how you feel about a song

[NeK Hamasaki]

^ I just LOVED the song from the first listen ♥

[C+R+E+AYUMI]

cannot understand the PVs too..the story is unclear to me

[Bad Wolf]

I think the story makes sense if you look at it this way... It's the only thing I could come up with. The videos are meant to be watched as Love songs > Last angel > Virgin Road but the story order is different, sort of like a Tarantino movie being told in a disjointed order, where past and present mingle and interrupt each other constantly. Or like how Memento is a movie told backwards, with the black and white parts filling in the backstory and taking place in the past. I think Virgin Road takes place in the past, Love songs in the future a little after that, and Last angel as both a past and "present" arch.

Still, the videos can work in their original order, too. Ayu leaves in Ls > her spirit wanders in La > as she moves on to die, she remembers her time with Mannie originally, hence the black and white.

I feel like Ayu and Mannie were like Bonnie and Clyde, got married, did some crimes, then moved to the city. Then something.. happened, I guess, and both he and Ayu separated. Hence that new girl he was seen gallivanting around town with. Ayu dies in a shoot out caused by THEIR life of crime and Virgin Road is her remembering the time she had with Mannie, while Last angel is both her being outside of her body, not accepting her death and still observing the world, and feeling pursued and haunted by some fact she can't quite see -- the fact that she's dead (hence those scenes in the apartment and the parking garage).

Love songs fits if you consider it as the moments right before Ayu is killed. She leaves him -- perhaps realizing that he's with another woman? -- and is killed before she can move on. I think that the Mannie who chases after her can't be seen proves it's her memory of him or that it's what she'd LIKE to happen, or would like him to do. She loves him, so she wants him to try to stop her from leaving -- but he hasn't, he doesn't, and that's why neither she nor the cab driver reacts to him hunting them down.

[Luja.]

^ that sounds logical to me!!
... then there is just one thing left that I wonder about.. Love song talks about holding the loved person close and how the life should be. Last angel talks about how a difficult love turns into a great love? and Virgin Road talks about having found the right partner (and is a "thank you" to her mother). So all 3 songs are pretty positive, then why are the PVs having such a sad story?

[Bad Wolf]

I was wondering that myself, and I think it's because she likes showing different stories as often as she can with lyrics. Consider how her live performances of songs, with beautiful lyrics, haven't always had the most positive live implications. "Carols" from AT05 comes to mind here, along with "part of Me" from AT07.

I think Ayu, in using these videos with such beautiful lyrics to tell sad stories, is showing that even if you feel these sort of things, tragedy and heartache can and will still happen to you, because that's how life is. Not only that, that's how love is. She's said recently that to her, life is love. Since they're on an even level for her, I figure she thinks that the sort of ups and downs one can feel in life is the same thing one can feel when they're in love. You can't avoid them, basically.

And, Ayu being the way Ayu is, she would probably say something like you hold your head up and you face this, because "nothing is as frightening as giving up."

That's my take on the matter. I hope it makes sense!

[Luja.]

^ it really does! thank you for writing down your thoughts!!

[JackieRos]

with ayu you may never know
Never gonna give you up

[Sandy]

Originally Posted by JackieRos

with ayu you may never know
Never gonna give you up

^

[Bad Wolf]

I don't think that's necessarily true. It's not like the story's complicated enough where a person can't figure it out without, you know, watching and thinking about what's going on...

[AngelSenshi]

Just to clarify one thing: Ayu is NOT dead for most of Last Angel PV.

In Love song one of the reasons we knew Mannie was dead was because he had no reflection when he passed by store windows (amongst other things) but for the majority of Last Angel Ayu is singing into the reflection of a shop window. The hotel/garage running around scene is basically her frantic movements between life and death; Mannie sort of being like an angel of death. So from the start of the PV she isn't died, just knocked out, and she dies a little after the end of the garage scene.

As for the cheating scenes, which confuse people the most, because if those cheating scenes were left out then most people already have the story understood. The cheating scenes...I think they were all in Ayu's head. Just getting the feeling of the lyrics of Last Angel, and using them loosely and with the feeling of the video, I think people cheated on her in the past, and now that things with her and Mannie were excellent, she thought that he would cheat on her too; so wherever in her mind she had memories of the things they did together, she thought he was doing them with someone else also.

Or you can take it a bit differently; maybe she couldn't accept Mannie's death, and instead she had a feeling that he was away with someone other woman. I find this one a bit less...welll not that it's not interesting, I mean it's possible but not more likely. If this album had You were... squeezed into it between the tracks then I would think that it would make a good storyline.

[dreamland2.0]

^It's true that Ayu doesn't look directly at Mannie when she's leaving. And it would make sense if they are both dead when they leave together in their wedding outfits.