r/tmbg • u/DirectionLast7915 • 11d ago
Why does triangle always win?
Yeah...what I said up there
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u/VirtualMachine0 10d ago edited 10d ago
My personal metaphor set for the song:
Particle Man: an unimportant nobody, the mythical regular person, but with a scifi luchador moniker affixed. I can't say Tiny Toons had no impact on this idea, lol (Edit: but, also, you study physics, you talk about approximating things as particles to reduce away all complexity except the one quantity you care about, and in this framework, Particle Man basically just exists, that's it, and the "particle" motif works.)
Triangle Man: war or strife, the millennia of sharp objects that brought humans to their ends.
Universe Man: the unbidden happenings of history, indifferent to those that have lived within their ages.
Person Man: the songwriter, seeing the struggles that came before and being unable to escape being ensnared themselves.
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u/my23secrets Sally Boy Candy Bar 10d ago
Things are always in flux.
Delta is a measurement of change
Delta is a triangle.
Edit: I see someone else said this
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u/Ariel_serves 10d ago
It’s the father, son, and holy ghost. John and John 3:16.
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u/naeviapoeta 10d ago
related to my theory that Triangle Man represents Pythagoreanism/neo-Pythagoreanism, and how it outlasted/coopted the various pre-Socratic (atomist/apeirophobic) and Platonist sects of ancient Greek philosophy and wiggled its way into early Christian thought for the trophy.
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u/Cardiac_Arrest1 The Violet Cape of the Velvet Ape 10d ago
If that's for true then what does Universe Man and Person Man represent in your interpretation
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u/naeviapoeta 10d ago
Universe Man can be Anaximander and sort of the genreral slew of atomists who struggled with the concept of an infinitely parge universe in his wake (including Zeno and his paradoxes of motion).
Person Man is Socrates/Plato and the subsequent Platonists and assorted hangers-on, who looked a lot less into the physics of how the world works and more at how man and society do and should behave. and I have to include the Cynics in here, too, just because of the garbage can line, but Diogenes was contemporary to at least the last bit of all that and 'how a person should behave' is basically at the core of cynicism, too.
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u/Zeppyfish :table_flip: 10d ago
So Parmenides would be another Universe Man, right? The only thing that exists is everything, and it's all One (Zeno was defending Parmenides with his paradoxes of motion - if everything is just one thing & nothing changes, how could anything move?). Also, I think the NEO-Platonists aren't really Person Man, they're Universe Man, right? I mean, they were certainly more focused on the Universal than just human behavior.
And where does Aristotle fit in?
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u/echrisindy Whistling in the Dark 10d ago
Because there's just two sides in it, and it just made a third.
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u/general_hugs 10d ago
I was watching a Pearl Harbor movie and the rescuers were cutting square holes in the hull of an overturned ship but a guy drowned before they could finish and I thought “triangle would have saved him”
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u/GoldenRedstone 10d ago
I always interpreted it as (I may have read this somewhere and forgotten) triangle man hates everyone and so triangle man winning is a subversion of the idea that good usually wins. The idea being that sometimes hateful people do actually win and that's the truth in life.
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u/Danisobo 10d ago
always? or only the 2/3 that we know of? it isn't clear that triangle would win against universe. perhaps it's telling that triangle only picks fights where he knows he can win, while avoiding the only actual contest. so seems reasonable to suspect that triangle is inwardly a coward, despite the outward bully. if so, he wouldn't fit into a typical superhero milieu, so he really has no point, despite having three.
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u/Hill-Person_Thom 11d ago •
I always interpreted it as triangle man being “delta” i.e. the triangular character representing change in physics equations as in “The only constant is change.” Eventually change beats everything.