# SideQuest > **One-line reading.** A comic heartbreak song about false centrality: the speaker built his whole emotional plot around someone who never cast him as the main character — and the song lets him be genuinely hurt *and* a little ridiculous about it, at exactly the same time. > [!info] Album & credits > **Release:** *SideQuest*, released **Friday, March 28, 2025** at midnight (Big Loud Records) · programmed & sung by **Jagwar Twin** > **Written by** Roy English, Andrew Goldstein & Michael Morgan (all credited composer + lyricist) · **Produced by** Jagwar Twin & Ryan Daly > **Engineering** — Ryan Daly (recording, mixing, programming); Roy English (second recording engineer) · **Mastered by** Dale Becker, Noah McCorkle, Katie Harvey & Adam Burt > **Sound & tuning** — Roy says the record is tuned to **444 Hz** ("healing frequency") and scored on a bespoke *"medieval synth"* built for him by teenage engineering. > **Full lyrics:** [Genius](https://genius.com) · streaming > **▶ Listen:** [Visualizer (YouTube)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQ7EXbbPiNk) This is the funniest heartbreak song in the catalogue, and quietly one of the most disciplined. It takes an entire relationship, files it under *optional content*, and scores the humiliation with RPG vocabulary and astrology jokes. But under the swagger it's doing the thing the project does constantly — orienting a whole self around a false center — just, for once, at human scale, and played for laughs instead of cosmos. ## At a glance - **Era / release** — March 2025, deep in the medieval *"Jagwar World"* / *"Realm"* rollout. The [[dumbledore]] EP preceded it in February; [[MAGIK]] rides alongside. Heavy paratext, sword emojis, the recurring sign-off *"a loyal servant of the Realm ⚔️."* - **In one line** — He thought he was the main quest. He was the side quest. - **Who speaks** — [[Roy]] at his most vulnerable *and* most comedic. Not the seer, not the shadow — just Roy, wounded and cracking jokes to survive it. (The Crowd shows up only in the mix, echoing his demotion back at him — see below.) - **Key symbols** — [[Concepts/The Jaguar]] (deflated) · the side quest / main quest (RPG geometry) · the zebra (black-and-white thinking) · astrology / *"the signs"* · [[Concepts/The Realm]] (the campaign skin). ## The song, mapped Verse–chorus pop-breakup, built end to end on game / RPG vocabulary. Following its own section tags (Spotify order). The whole thing has **three argument moves**: state the false-centrality thesis (choruses) → narrate the betrayal and the wrong-direction cost (verses) → puncture his own persona and turn the blame inward through comedy (Verse 2). | Section | Short excerpt | What it does | |---|---|---| | **Intro** | *"(You a little baby)"* · *"(I was the side quest?)"* | Two parenthetical asides set the taunt/self-mock frame **before a single full line lands.** The official YouTube visualizer transcribes the first as *"(You are little baby)"* — the wording is genuinely unsettled. | | **Chorus** | *"Thought I was your main one, but I was the (side quest)"* | States the thesis. Note the verb: **thought**, not *was*. The plain asymmetry follows — *"you said that you loved me / you didn't love me like I loved you"* — and it exits on the signature *"s-s-s-side quest"* stutter, the hook literally tripping over itself. | | **Verse 1** | *"Baldur's Gate, you played me well, I never saw it coming"* | The grievance in questions (*"how many times did you walk away?"*) plus the game-reveal (*"I never knew you would play the game"*). Introduces the recurring *"Baldur's Gate… underneath your spell"* couplet and closes on the load-bearing cost: *"sent me in the wrong direction, wasted all my time."* | | **Pre-chorus** | *"Thought I was your main one, but I was the (side quest)."* | Single-line hinge — the thesis restated bare. | | **Chorus (2nd)** | *"Hey, engagement (side quest)"* | Repeats the thesis and adds the one outlier: **engagement** — the lone platform/algorithm word in an otherwise wholly intimate lyric. | | **Verse 2** | *"The biggest cat that you've seen this far / Jaguar Swaguar, 'til you broke my heart"* | The **deflated-Jaguar verse**: persona inflation, punctured mid-line. Then the astrology wordplay (*"I should've seen the signs… 'cause you're a Libra / nothing's black and white… 'cause you're a zebra"*), then it **recycles Verse 1's back half verbatim** — same *"Baldur's Gate"* couplet, same *"wrong direction."* | | **Chorus (final)** | *"…whoa (side quest)"* | Full restatement, with the *"whoa"* variant. | | **Outro** | *"Thought I was your main one, but I was the-"* | Cuts off mid-sentence. **Twice.** The thesis is never completed — the song formally enacts its own interrupted, optional-content status. It won't even finish saying *side quest.* | > [!note]- Advanced reading — the sing-back production layer (the crowd that echoes his demotion) > The recording carries its own crowd. Parenthetical background-echoes — *(side quest)*, *(my best)*, *(all my time)* — have the record answer its own claim back to itself. It's one instance of a project-wide production device: the mix stages a chorus of voices singing the hook back, the same trick heard across *Long Time Coming*, *Loser*, *Pay Attention*, *I Like to Party*, *City of Angels* and others. Here the effect is quietly cruel — the crowd he thought he was central to is now echoing his demotion in real time. ## What it means A few claims that cut across the whole song. - **False protagonist, not demotion.** This is the interpretive engine. The hook is *"thought I was your main one"* — not *I was.* The song isn't about losing a status he held; it's about discovering his **assumed** centrality was never real. He mistook optionality for destiny — and, crucially, the song implicates his *own* assumption. It never proves he was entitled to the lead. The wound isn't *you wronged the main character*; it's *you didn't know what story you were even in.* - **"You played me well" is an epistemological gap, not only manipulation.** If he was never the main one, being *played* also means: *you understood the game structure and I didn't.* The other person knew where he fit; he didn't — which is exactly why *"I never saw it coming"* keeps repeating. The shock is a **map correction.** He thought he was moving toward the center; he'd been routed through optional content the whole time. - **The false center is the point.** *"Sent me in the wrong direction"* is load-bearing: the grievance isn't only lost love, it's having oriented a life around a **false center.** That's the catalogue's recurring concern — misorientation, false geometry, the wrong god / wrong audience / wrong mirror (see [[Concepts/Source vs Reflection]]) — rendered personal and comic instead of cosmic. It does **not** need to be about Lucius to matter. - **Deception vs. asymmetry, held open on purpose.** *"You didn't love me like I loved you"* (asymmetry, no malice) sits right against *"underneath your spell"* / *"you would play the game"* (manipulation). The song refuses to settle which it was — and that refusal is emotionally true, because after a betrayal, unequal love feels indistinguishable from being played. The tension **is** the song; don't resolve it. - **The comedy lets him be hurt without being automatically right.** The *"s-s-s-side quest"* stutter, *"Jaguar Swaguar,"* the Libra/zebra dig — the lightness is a **coping mechanism, not proof of shallowness.** The song metabolizes humiliation through wordplay. And *"I should've seen the signs"* turns the accusation **inward** — hindsight shame, not just accusation. That's the tonal key: he knows the wound is real *and* a little embarrassing at once, which is what keeps him sympathetic instead of self-righteous. ## The joke, and the medicine Two things worth holding side by side, because together they *are* the personality of the release. **The joke is autobiographical inversion.** The astrology dig has no astrological content whatsoever — Roy admits in the release post that the subject isn't even a Libra, *"but no other sign rhymes with zebra."* He then re-inflates the humbled cat with a wink: *"Jagwars eat zebra for breakfast."* On TikTok he ties himself directly to the song's gag — *"I'm a Gemini, but I identify as a Libra"* — and on Discord doubles down: *"i go by 12 signs."* So the zodiac joke lands on *him* too. It runs cleanest as **maturity-cliché-turned-insult**: *the world isn't black and white* becomes *YOU are the black-and-white one — you're the zebra.* He even literalized the bit in the rollout by riding, and posting, a real black-and-white horse named **Big Bear** (*"the beautiful and sweetest black and white horse I got to ride"*). The zebra line is older than the song, too — Roy had posted *"nothing's black and white unless it's you and you're a zebra"* a full year earlier, so it's a long-standing Roy phrase, not fresh 2025 lyric. **The medicine is the campaign inverting the song's own premise.** The lyric is the wound; the rollout is the cure. Where the song says *I was the side quest*, Roy spends weeks telling the audience the exact opposite — *"You're nobody's sidequest ❤️‍🔥⚔️"* / *"youre no ones sidequest!!"* — and, in a perfect live beat, fires that off on Discord and then, two minutes later, catches his own over-earnestness: *"oh shit haha."* He also universalizes it into a life-philosophy at the opposite valence of the lyric: *"Whole lifes been a series of SideQuests"* / *"ive been on so many sidequests to get here… so grateful for all the lessons,"* which hardened into the recurring tagline *"Every SideQuest leads us somewhere."* The song files a relationship under optional content; the campaign reframes optional content as the whole point of the journey. And the deepest inversion of all is aimed at the ex. He doesn't attack her — he *thanks* her, and frames the whole thing as a gift: *"Thank you to the girl who SideQuested me. You gave me a gift and we both ended up where we were supposed to be. You're an amazing person."* The breakup that named itself *demotion* gets re-filed, by its own author, as necessary routing. That warmth is real, and it's why the song never curdles. > [!note]- Advanced reading — Roy's own gloss turns the breakup into doctrine > On Discord (April 2025) Roy re-reads the song's wound as a Heart/Mind reflection principle, converting a breakup track into a magik/manifestation teaching: *"i absolutely love that sidequest brought those things out. Its wild how the way you think about yourself will create everything around you"*; *"if you think you're the sidequest youll be the sidequest"*; *"and people come along to reflect who we think we are back to us"*; *"our souls need to learn certain things. and that's why we're here."* On this reading the false-centrality was **self-authored** — the geometry was never imposed from outside; he wrote himself into the wrong role. That's Roy's own authorial framing, and it dovetails exactly with why [[Concepts/Source vs Reflection]] is the primary connection: *the mirror throws back the story you brought to it.* > > He also logged an [Alan Watts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Watts) line as the release's epigraph — *"the attitude of faith is to let go, and become open to truth, whatever it might turn out to be"* — captioned, of course, *"Alan Watts, a loyal servant of the Realm ⚔️."* That grounds Watts as a named influence and threads the same *let-go / you-are-it* doctrine straight through the [[MAGIK]] era. In the same post-release stretch Roy stacked more of it over the SideQuest sound — *"We rise by kneeling / we conquer by surrendering / we gain by giving up,"* and the deadpan *"ADD isn't real ⚔️"* — tying the release to a whole surrender/let-go argument. ## Characters - **[[Roy|Jagwar Twin]]** — the sincere, wounded, *funny* Roy-register: vulnerable, not solemn. The narrator is Roy at human scale — not the seer who sees everything, and not the shadow. Just Roy, hurt and cracking jokes to survive it. - **The deceiver / "you"** — a **human lover.** Explicitly *not* Lucius and *not* the Circus. Roy names her publicly only as *"the girl who SideQuested me,"* thanks her rather than attacks her, and insists she's *"an amazing person and not a Libra."* She stays un-named and un-investigated here — by design. That's how he framed it, and the page keeps it that way. - **Michael Morgan** — a credited co-writer *and*, per the release post, *"the inspiration."* Two different people sit behind the song, then: the muse who *sparked* it (Morgan, whom Roy thanks by name — *"Thank you Michael for the inspiration"*) and the ex it's *about.* Don't collapse them. - **[[Sir Lucius]]** — **deliberately absent.** SideQuest is this guide's canonical example of a song that carries *no Lucius mapping* — the counter-example that keeps the whole Heart/Mind frame honest by proving it isn't force-fit onto every track. (More below.) ## Symbols - **[[Concepts/The Jaguar]] — deflated.** *"The biggest cat that you've seen this far / Jaguar Swaguar, 'til you broke my heart"*: the project's emblem of seeing and consciousness, brought down to human, wounded scale — still swaggering, but humbled enough to rhyme through the embarrassment. This is the catalogue's rare **comic Jaguar**, and it's valuable precisely because it keeps the symbol from being *only* grand. - **The side quest / main quest (RPG geometry).** The governing metaphor: optional content versus the main storyline; false centrality; being routed away from the center. *"Baldur's Gate"* names the game outright (Roy also nodded to *"the council of Balder ⚡️"* in a rollout caption). - **The zebra.** Black-and-white thinking — Roy's own gloss (above) makes it explicit: *"we call anyone who sees the world strictly in black and white a zebra… and guess what, Jagwars eat zebra for breakfast."* Convenient rhyme-bait for Libra, and literalized by Big Bear, the real black-and-white horse. - **Astrology / "the signs."** Doubles as (a) the zodiac (Libra) and (b) the omens he *"should've seen"* — a hindsight-shame pun. Autobiographically inverted: Roy is a Gemini *"who identifies as a Libra"* and *"goes by 12 signs."* - **"Underneath your spell."** Light enchantment / magik imagery, kept intimate — romantic thrall, not cosmic entrapment. - **"Wrong direction."** A faint maze/labyrinth brush (see [[Concepts/The Labyrinth]]) — but emotional misdirection, not spiritual entrapment. - **The Realm / medieval Jagwar World + the sword ⚔️.** *Not* in the lyric — the **campaign skin.** The rollout's paratextual symbol-set (*"a loyal servant of the Realm"*), scored by that teenage-engineering *"medieval synth."* See [[Concepts/The Realm]]. - **444 Hz.** Roy says every JT song, this one included, is tuned to the *"healing frequency… that works within your DNA"* — a production-level symbol of intended benevolence quietly running under a breakup song. - **"Engagement."** The lone systemic/algorithm word in an otherwise-personal lyric — a possible (unresolved) whisper-seam to the wider [[Concepts/The Circus|Circus]] / [[Concepts/The Algorithm|Algorithm]] system. Read it as a whisper, not a thesis. > [!note]- Advanced reading — resonance vs. allegory (the hard guard) > The game-world / role vocabulary genuinely resonates with the catalogue's interest in systems, roles, illusion and agency — but here it's **structural, not allegorical.** The deceiver is a human lover, not Lucius and not the Circus. *"Wrong direction"* lightly brushes the maze vocabulary of [[Concepts/The Labyrinth]], but stays intimate: emotional misdirection, not spiritual entrapment. The one possible seam to the wider *Circus / Algorithm* system is the outlier word *"engagement"* in the second chorus — the single systemic term in an otherwise-personal song. Whether it's the platform word, a relationship-engagement pun, or simply a mishearing is unresolved; if it's a mishearing, that lone systemic-seam reading dissolves entirely. The discipline of this page is to *not* over-build the cosmic reading onto a song that is, on its surface and by design, about getting friend-zoned by an RPG metaphor. > [!note]- Advanced reading — the counter-example that keeps the whole frame honest > SideQuest earns a structural job much bigger than its subject matter. It is this guide's canonical instance of a song that carries **no Lucius mapping** — proof that the [[Sir Lucius]] / Heart–Mind frame isn't quietly force-fit onto every track. During an adversarial keystone review of the interpretive apparatus, SideQuest was cited as evidence that the catalogue *maintains its own counter-examples and guards* against imposing the Lucius reading on resistant songs. The deceiver here is unambiguously a human ex; the geometry is emotional, not cosmic; and the page holding that line *is* the load-bearing move. A frame that can't point to its own exceptions is just a machine for confirming itself — SideQuest is the exception that proves the frame is doing real work elsewhere. ## Connected songs - **[[Concepts/Source vs Reflection]]** — the **primary** connection: the false-center / misorientation theme in personal, comic miniature (and *not* a Lucius mapping). Directly reinforced by Roy's Discord gloss — *"people come along to reflect who we think we are back to us."* - **[[Concepts/The Labyrinth]]** — a light brush only: *"sent me in the wrong direction"* as emotional misdirection. Resonance, not allegory. - **[[Concepts/The Jaguar]]** — SideQuest is the key **counter-instance** that keeps the Jaguar symbol from being only grand; the one place the great cat is allowed to be embarrassed. - **[[MAGIK]]** — thematic sibling in the same 2025 *Realm* rollout; it's the [[MAGIK]] material where SideQuest's Alan Watts epigraph is logged, and Watts's *"you are it"* doctrine threads both. - **[[dumbledore]]** — the immediately prior 2025 EP (February), same medieval-Realm campaign and *"loyal servant of the Realm"* framing. - **[[The Watchers]]** — filed as another track on the same *SideQuest* EP (it interpolates Rockwell's *"Somebody's Watching Me,"* 1984). A release-shared sibling, not a thematic one — and a partial answer to the "what are the other tracks?" question below. ## Lyrics ``` [Intro] (You a little baby) (I was the side quest?) [Chorus] Side quest Thought I was your main one, but I was the (side quest) I was doing (my best) You said that you loved me You didn’t love me like I loved you Thought I was your main one, but I was the S-s-s-side quest, side quest [Verse 1] How many times did I tell you I loved you? How many times did you walk away? I never put anyone else above you I never knew you would play the game Baldur’s Gate, you played me well, I never saw it coming Had me underneath your spell, I never saw it coming Sent me in the wrong direction, wasted all my time (all my time) [Pre-Chorus] Thought I was your main one, but I was the (side quest) [Chorus] I was doing (my best) You said that you loved me You didn’t love me like I loved you Thought I was your main one, but I was the (side quest) Hey, engagement (side quest) You said that you loved me You didn’t love me like I loved you Thought I was your main one, but I was the- S-s-s-side quest, side quest [Verse 2] The biggest cat that you’ve seen this far Jaguar Swaguar, ‘til you broke my heart I should’ve seen the signs, I should’ve known ‘cause you’re a Libra Nothing’s black and white except for you, ‘cause you’re a zebra Baldur’s Gate, you played me well, I never saw it coming Had me underneath your spell, I never saw it coming Sent me in the wrong direction, wasted all my time (all my time) [Chorus] Thought I was your main one, but I was the S-s-s-side quest, whoa (side quest) I was doing (my best) You said that you loved me You didn’t love me like I loved you Thought I was your main one, but I was the (side quest) Hey, engagement (side quest) You said that you loved me You didn’t love me like I loved you Thought I was your main one, but I was the- [Outro] Thought I was your main one, but I was the- ``` ## Source notes - **Grounded (Roy's own words, released music, public posts).** The March 28, 2025 midnight release on Big Loud Records; the credits (writers Roy English / Andrew Goldstein / Michael Morgan; producers Jagwar Twin & Ryan Daly; mastering by Dale Becker et al.), Spotify-verified in June 2026; the official *"visualizer"* on YouTube. The **keystone paratext is Roy's Instagram release post**, which supplies almost everything unique here: the thanks to *"the girl who SideQuested me… you gave me a gift,"* the zebra/Libra explanation (*"no other sign rhymes with zebra… Jagwars eat zebra for breakfast"*), Big Bear the black-and-white horse, the 444 Hz tuning claim, the teenage-engineering *"medieval synth,"* and Michael Morgan credited as *"the inspiration."* Corroborated across the TikTok caption run (Mar 12 → Apr 8, incl. *"I'm a Gemini, but I identify as a Libra,"* *"You're nobody's sidequest,"* and the pre-release countdown), the public Discord #the-circle channel (the reflection-doctrine quotes, the *"oh shit haha"* beat, the 444 Hz corroboration, the year-earlier zebra line), and the Alan Watts / *"loyal servant of the Realm"* epigraph reel. - **Strong readings.** False protagonist rather than demotion; *"you played me well"* as an epistemological gap; the deflated Jaguar; the sing-back layer as quiet cruelty; humor-as-survival and the inward turn of *"I should've seen the signs"*; the deliberate open-holding of deception-vs-asymmetry. - **Resonance (tradition / interpretation).** The RPG vocabulary's brush against the project's systems / roles / illusion themes and the [[Concepts/The Labyrinth]] maze imagery — flagged as structural resonance, never as a claim that this is a Lucius or Circus song. - **How we'd be wrong.** If *"engagement"* turns out to be a mishearing or a plain relationship pun, the one systemic-seam reading dissolves — kept as an open thread, not a load-bearing claim. And the real ex stays un-named and un-investigated by design: Roy identifies her only as *"the girl who SideQuested me"* and stresses she's *"an amazing person."* > [!note]- Advanced reading — the open questions and the text history > **Is it a single or an EP?** This guide's internal source list catalogues *SideQuest* as a **5-track EP** (Shazam reported the title track as *"Track 1"*), while every analysis treats the title track as one song. This is *partly* resolved: **[[The Watchers]]** (writers Jagwar Twin, Ryan Daly, Ryan Spraker, Rockwell; it interpolates Rockwell's *"Somebody's Watching Me,"* 1984) is confirmed as another track on the same EP — so at least one of the other four is now named. The remaining ~3 are still never named anywhere. Whether any of them relates to the [[Lucius Lullaby (album)|Lucius Lullaby]] arc is an internal open question, not established lore (and The Watchers, at least, is confirmed *not* on Lucius Lullaby). > > **The intro asides** — *"(You a little baby)"* / *"(I was the side quest?)"* — could be taunt, sampled aside, comic insult, or phonetic artifact; the official YouTube visualizer's own lyric block hears *"(You **are** little baby),"* against Spotify's *"(You a little baby),"* so even the wording isn't settled. Don't overbuild it until it's confirmed. > > **The text itself was corrected against Spotify (June 2026).** The canonical readings are *"Jaguar Swaguar"* (**the animal**) and *"the biggest cat that you've seen **this** far"* — superseding an earlier Shazam-pass variant, *"Jagwar Swagwar / thus far,"* which had pulled the deflated-Jaguar reading toward *the project-name itself getting its heart broken.* A phantom line, *"playing games with my head,"* was floated from that same pass and is confirmed **not** in the released song at all. So the old *"is it the animal or the project-name pun?"* question is now closed to **the animal** — worth recording so the superseded variant doesn't creep back in. > [!note]- A footnote for the completists — SideQuest in the wider game vocabulary > The song title also surfaces, harmlessly, inside the project's broader game lexicon: *"SIDE QUEST"* / *"SIDEQUEST"* (alongside *"I'M THE FINAL BOSS"*) turn up as thematic candidate phrases in the [[Hall of Mirrors]] web3 puzzle's brute-force lists. That's a note that the title *sits inside* the same RPG-flavored vocabulary the project plays with everywhere — **not** evidence that SideQuest is itself a Hall of Mirrors answer. Filed here purely so it isn't mistaken for one. ## Read next - [[Concepts/Source vs Reflection]] — the false-center theme at full, cosmic strength; SideQuest is its comic miniature. - [[Concepts/The Jaguar]] — the emblem SideQuest is allowed to deflate. - [[Roy]] — the wounded, funny register the song runs in. - [[MAGIK]] — the sibling 2025 *Realm*-era track, and where the Alan Watts thread lives. - [[Sir Lucius]] — the figure this song pointedly *isn't* about, and exactly why that matters.