As an autistic person who hates small talk, I’ve rarely seen people in the comments hearing how Miku says that ‘I’m sorry’, ‘Good morning’, etc will become nostalgic phrases, and I feel like it most certainly plays into the allegory of wanting to reveal how different she is from everyone else because of how boring and uncreative and restrictive the world feels to her in the way of demanding to be herself and say what she wants even if it’s unexpected or ‘wrong’ seeming to others. I absolutely love the meaning of this song and the price of it ‘if the friendless makes friends is that the happy ending?’ As in the masking and people pleasing that me and so many others do just to make friends and feel less like a freak. And asking if it’s a happy ending, is her suppressing a side of herself that she’s always wanted to express and forcing herself to be the same blob of meat as everyone else.
Your interpretation may be projection. The song is about bullying. The comment about those phrases becoming "nostalgic" implies the bullied taking their lives and are no longer around to say/hear those words as well as the optimistic hope that the bullying will end another way. And the line is, "If I become their friend(the bullies), is that the happy ending" and "then, where should the friendless go". Now this is conjecture on my part but I assume those lines mean it isn't enough to simply go along with it but find the root and end it. The song takes place in the perspectives of the bullied, the bullies, and the bystanders who just watch. Which explains the "Tanaka-san, Takahashi-san, let's laugh" and "someone help everyone". That last line is also from the perspective of them all. The bullied can't say "help me", the bystanders can't say "i'll help" or else they'll also be bullied, and the third perspective is "the bullies might also need help", so instead they ask for someone to help everyone. The common world domination is for bullying to end. That all being said, the cause of the bullying could be just as your described so it's just as valid in the end
"The main girl, Miku, is hiding her true self. You use bandaids to stop things from spilling out, so her ripping that bandaid off is her revealing her true self." I took this paragraph from my friend when I showed her the song.
Everyone seems to be talking about their different interpretations of the song, so I guess I'll pitch mine in. I think the song is complaining about a poor education system, and how broken it is, in terms of how little it actually helps some people, and how little can be done about it Some things you learn in school will sometimes have little to no practical application later on, but you're still forced to cram it for the sake of not "failing" and being left behind in everything else. For example, I'm pretty convinced the early line *"Green peppers are bitter for both. Major discovery."* is satire, as if she's saying 'How is this tidbit even applicable?' And yet it's just become standard for everyone to follow these broken practices, not just because everyone is doing it and you'd look weird if you don't, but also anyone who disobeys it will be shunned by the system itself and possibly denied some career options later on. I suppose that through this lens, school could be considered "oppressive", and the final line of the chorus *"Save everybody!"* exemplifies this. So we all have to just suck it up and go with the flow, due to both peer pressure and the looming threat of strings cut, all while not gaining as much as we really should be. But then again, it might just be that this song is being portrayed through the lens of a 14 year-old who just really doesn't want to go to school.
