This song really gets to me.
Although the butterfly line has puzzled me for some time, I've been thinking and reading all of these quotes and I've tried to synthesize the entire chorus into a meaningful concept.
Butterflies are fragile, soft, and innocent. Passive-aggressive to me has to do with taking a situation in which you should stand up for yourself, and instead avoiding conflict and complaining about the situation later. So the passive-aggressive butterflies are ignoring and avoiding their problems (putting them on the shelf, so to speak), but they're beautiful. Incidentally, in conflict, girls are often guilty of passive-aggression, which relates back to the gentle, soft, innocent connotations that butterflies carry as stereotypical perceptions of femininity. To deny your problems like this would probably be described as "kidding yourself"--nobody can deny that problems exist and need to be dealt with.
If Ben is singing this song to some male character who sounds heartbroken, then I think the chorus is about someone breaking your heart because they let all the resentment and unpleasantness build up. But everyone he finds will be like that. Sociologists say that anything perceived as real will resultingly have real consequences (the Thomas dictum). The real consequences of kidding yourself must be "the demise of the beautiful." So, the end of the butterflies--their innocense, or maybe just their life. But then Ben asks "What is beautiful?" to remind us that there are more butterflies than we might initially see.
I'm not sure that this made any sense.
This song really gets to me. Although the butterfly line has puzzled me for some time, I've been thinking and reading all of these quotes and I've tried to synthesize the entire chorus into a meaningful concept.
Butterflies are fragile, soft, and innocent. Passive-aggressive to me has to do with taking a situation in which you should stand up for yourself, and instead avoiding conflict and complaining about the situation later. So the passive-aggressive butterflies are ignoring and avoiding their problems (putting them on the shelf, so to speak), but they're beautiful. Incidentally, in conflict, girls are often guilty of passive-aggression, which relates back to the gentle, soft, innocent connotations that butterflies carry as stereotypical perceptions of femininity. To deny your problems like this would probably be described as "kidding yourself"--nobody can deny that problems exist and need to be dealt with. If Ben is singing this song to some male character who sounds heartbroken, then I think the chorus is about someone breaking your heart because they let all the resentment and unpleasantness build up. But everyone he finds will be like that. Sociologists say that anything perceived as real will resultingly have real consequences (the Thomas dictum). The real consequences of kidding yourself must be "the demise of the beautiful." So, the end of the butterflies--their innocense, or maybe just their life. But then Ben asks "What is beautiful?" to remind us that there are more butterflies than we might initially see. I'm not sure that this made any sense.