The Love Yourself Albums Theory – It is a Puzzle!

Quick Author’s Note:

Welcome back ARMY to BTS G Theories,

Today I’m going to take you through my theory that the Love Yourself Album Series is one big puzzle and what it all means.

Please see here the list of assumptions I apply when I’m analysing the albums and their song lyrics, and here to read my overarching theory

Now, let’s get it.

Background

When I first learnt about BTS Love Yourself series, I had a million questions: Why are there three Love Yourself Albums? Why do only some songs have a Korean and English title that mean the same thing? Why not do it for all of the songs? Why do some songs that are in the first two albums appear in the third album? Why is there an intro and outro track in the first two albums and not in the last album? Why have four flowers on the cover of Love Yourself 承: Her and then not explain what they symbolise? Why create an entire Smeraldo Flower folklore for one song? Why this why that…why… why?

My research didn’t reveal anything that sat well with me. Therefore when I realised that Namjoon was coding messages into his lyrics, I asked myself… what if it was one big puzzle?

My Approach to decoding the Albums

Step 1: Assume it is a puzzle

With this lens, I re-looked at the album covers refreshed and observed they all fitted together perfectly, exactly like a puzzle:

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We can observe there are four album covers for each of the three albums. There is a general agreement out there that each album is meant to represent one alphabet from “LOVE”. After my analysis of Trivia 承: Love, I definitely agree with that, however, I think it goes much deeper than that.

In conclusion: The numbers four and three hold some type of significance.
And coincidentally (or not?) 3 + 4 = 7, their magic number.

Step 2: Consider if there is a pattern across the three albums

Next I investigated the track list.

I listed down the songs in Love Yourself: 結 Answer (because it contained the most number of songs), and then mapped the songs from Love Yourself: 承 Her and Love Yourself: 轉 Tear to the songs in Love Yourself: 結 Answer.

It looked like this:
(Sorry for the spacing between the screenshots – I can’t work out how to get rid of it!):

My Observations

Seven things of interest can be observed.

Notes to the above table

1. Four songs from each of the first two albums appear in CD 1 of the third album. The songs are:
   • First album: Intro: Serendipity, DNA, 보조개 (Dimple) and Outro: Her
   • Second album: Intro: Singularity, Fake Love, 전하지 못한 진심 (The Truth Untold), Outro: Tear
     
2. Four songs from the first two albums that appear in the third album are Intro and Outro tracks, and curiously there are no Intro and Outro tracks in the third album. The songs are:
   • First album: Intro: Serendipity and Outro: Her
   • Second album: Intro: Singularity and Outro: Tear
     
3. The Four songs that are Intro and Outro Tracks in the first two albums lose their prefixes in the third album (e.g. Intro: Serendipity in the first album simply becomes Serendipity in the third album).
   
4. Three songs from each of the first two albums appear in CD 2 of the third album, and in alternating patterns. The songs are:
   • First album: Best of Me, 고민보다 (Go Go) and Mic Drop
   • Second album: Magic Shop, Airplane Pt 2 and Anpanman
     
5. Four songs from the first two albums do not appear in the third album. The songs are:
   • First album: Pied Piper, Skit: Billboard Music Awards Speech, Skit: 망설임과 두려움” (Skit: Hesitation and Fear) and 바다 (Sea)
   • Second album: 134340, 낙원 (Paradise), Love Maze and So What
     
6. Seven songs from the first two albums do not appear in CD 1 of the third album. The songs are:
   • First album: Best of Me, 고민보다 (Go Go), Mic Drop, Pied Piper, Skit: Billboard Music Awards Speech, Skit: 망설임과 두려움” (Skit: Hesitation and Fear) and 바다 (Sea)
   • Second album: Magic Shop, Airplane Pt 2, Anpanman and 134340, 낙원 (Paradise), Love Maze and So What
     
7. If we group the four songs that appear in the first two albums and in the third album, in each group, the fourth song becomes the fifth song because a song with a “Trivia” prefix is inserted in its placed.
   
   In other words, a “Trivia” song becomes the fourth song in the two groups in Love Yourself: 結 Answer, like a wildcard.
   
   For clarity on this point, I’ve created a visual aid for you below:

The exercise of mapping the track list of songs in the first two albums to the third album reveals a pattern and neatly sorts songs into clear specific groups.

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The Love Yourself Album Songs – Grouped

As it is a lot to take in and it may be hard to see all of the patterns, I’ve therefore added some colour to the list of Love Yourself Album songs:

As you can see above, the songs follow a certain type of order and pattern

(And please don’t worry about the songs that I have not coloured in, they (except for the remixes of DNA, Fake Love and Mic Drop because they are just remixes) have a part to play I promise!

Ladies and gents and all those in between, there is logic to this madness.

There are a whole lot of four and three patterns and clean groupings of songs for it to be a coincidence.

Thus there must be a puzzle waiting to be solved to reveal a cross-album narrative or message.

Step 3: Follow the signs to the starting point

At this point, I went cool cool cool cool cool cool… no doubt no doubt… what now? Where do I start?

Looking closely at the track list, I noticed that that (Outro) Her is followed immediately by (Intro) Singularity in the third album.

The prefix “Intro” implies the beginning of something, and the prefix “Outro” implies the end of something. In addition, if you watch enough BTS videos, you will notice how BTS love talking about how the end of something is just the beginning of something else.

With this in mind…

I realised that the reason why
Serendipity and Singularity have the prefix “Intro”; and
Her and Tear have the prefix “Outro”;
is because they are being used to mark the beginning and the end of a section/part within Love Yourself: 結 Answer album.

Hence, given:

• the above pattern and logic;
• that Intro: Serendipity is the first song in the Love Yourself Album Series;
• that Intro: Serendipity is the first song with an “Intro” prefix; and
• Namjoon the puzzle master is the sole BTS author for this song…

everything points to starting at Intro: Serendipity.

Intro: Serendipity is the beginning and the first chapter of the first story in the Love Yourself Album series.

First story? What? I hear you ask.

Well, my logic is: There are four flowers in the album covers (see picture below), so logically they must represent four things.

Given BTS are musicians who are dedicated to their art, communicate thoughtful messages and explore social issues through their songs (Bapsaeee!! Anyone?), each flower must represent some type of message or a story.

Therefore, there are four story lines in the Love Yourself Album Series and each flower represents one of the stories.

This, is the very reason why I set up this blog. My goal is to put the pieces of the puzzle together and reveal the story lines.

Step 4: Consider what Namjoon would like

So far, we have identified the beginning and end of Part 1 and 2 of the first story in the Love Yourself: 結 Answer album.

However, if I was a genius like Namjoon, I would want everything to be symbolic and clean. Therefore, I would expect the story line to comply with the magic number four and three in some shape and form.

With this in mind, I identified that this group of songs:

• contains four songs from the first, second and third album
  (excluding the “wildcard” songs inserted as the fourth song in Part 1 and Part 2 with a Trivia prefix);
  
• contains a very high concentration of songs written by Namjoon only; and
  
• best of all, cleanly cuts the Love Yourself: 結 Answer album into three distinct parts.

Thus, I settled on analysing this set of songs in three distinct parts and discovered the beautiful story of:

Namjoon’s, Yoongi’s and Hobi’s journeys of self-love. Or in other words, their journey of learning to love themselves.

NB: Namjoon’s journey includes details of his (romantic) relationship with his lover.

There you go ARMY, this is the next piece of the puzzle! I hope you found my post insightful!

We will be analysing Serendipity in my next post.

Thank you for all your support and please do subscribe, follow me on Twitter and share my post if you agree with it!

x G

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Disclaimer:

As per my first author’s note, please, no hate!

I do not have a shipping or individual bias, I love all seven members equally. I don’t write my blogs because of a particular personal desire for one of them and I analyse songs with consideration to the author’s perspective (and Namjoon just happens to be the main author of most songs).

I also couldn’t care less if they are straight, gay, intersex, a skrull, a mutant or if they could lay eggs. I love them wholeheartedly (as a sister who would love her younger brothers) for their individual selves.

These are my theories based on my interpretations of their amazing songs. Please enjoy.

x G