The Raven Locks is an album musical by indie band The Dirt Poor Robins, released in three parts from 2013 to 2017. It follows Roderick Thorne, a haberdasher and wig-maker, and his katabasis to find the spirit of a woman he fell in love with moments before her death.
The Raven Locks contains examples of:
- Accidental Murder: Sable, the woman Thorne fell in love with, was killed because she stole a pair of gloves from Thorne’s store while he was distracted. He saw her, instantly fell in love, and tried to talk, but she thought he noticed that she stole something and ran out. He chased her, eventually leading to her being hit with a car.
- Back from the Dead: Though it is unclear how much of the journey leading up to this point was meant to be taken literally, the show ends with Thorne finding Sable alive, and acting like she had never met him.
- Death Is Gray: The tortured spirits of the afterlife are referred to as the “Grey-Folk”, for their complete lack of color.
- Villain Protagonist: The climax of the story comes in Act 3, during the song Irony, where Thorne is confronted about his sins. Though he has acted antagonistically, mainly sexist, at times during the musical up until this point, Irony explicitly confirms the idea that Thorne has made the world worse by existing.
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Word of God:- As the album itself makes very few specific references to the plot, almost the entire story of The Raven Locks had to be discerned from a FaceBook livestream by the creators.
- There are also more specific instances, like the discography page
which confirms Thorne’s Mad Hatter Disease, something that was left somewhat ambiguous in the original work.
