- The actual rake he's been hunting for years either was eaten or got away. The singer is trapped in the leviathan's stomach with an innocent man who looks vaguely (by the light in a whale's belly) like the rake; the singer simply refuses to accept the idea that he's failed in his quest.
- The theory is as it sounds: the female voice in the song does not belong to the Mariner's late mother, but to an evil spirit (possibly a demon) pretending to be her in order to drive her son to madness.
- In addition to the higher-pitched female voice, the mother's vocal parts have a quiet, almost raspy whisper backing them and echoing the words. It is not especially noticeable but is slightly louder in the second female verse and as the mother addresses her son directly. It gives a subtle Voice of the Legion effect typical to demons.
- As well, while we don't know how old the rake and the mother were together, but it seems unlikely a rake would've stuck around in any one place/with any one woman for very long. If the son was three when he met the rake, he can't have been more than a young child when his mother died. And what mother would spend her last words to prompt her own son- a young child, no less- to dedicate his entire life to an overly colorful revenge scheme? On her last breath, even. It would take a pretty evil person to do that.
Which leads me to one of two conclusions:
- The mother we hear is NOT the boy's mother, but rather a demon impersonating her for the purpose of corrupting her son's spirit. A demon would know to take advantage of someone's emotionally precarious position in order to drive them to evil and reap the person's soul while it was on fertile land, so to speak. And the young boy was lost, impressionable, and emotionally devastated without his mother; his mind would be easy to manipulate. If the demon could alter minds at all, the mother's last words may have been entirely different, maybe comforting her son. The demon would have tampered the memory and inserted the revenge scheme in its stead.
- Alternatively, it IS the mother, somewhat... who herself became a restless demon/spirit for a different goal (revenge at any cost) but to essentially the same end. The rake not only ruined the woman's life, he ruined her very decency along with it.
- I've always found it sort of weird that in the second female verse the spirit says "always your mother will watch over you..." If she really was his mother, and he knew that, wouldn't she use first person? To me, that sentence comes across as promising that it is defiantly his mother that is watching over him. Sort of like the spirit still has to convince him of this fact. It could just be for songwriting and tempo, I guess, but it bugs me.
- Colin is specific to a fault when it comes to the chronology of both songs, I've figured out that it works very well together: at 18, the Rake seduces the three-year-old Mariner's mother, bankrupts her and gives her a fatal case of tuberculosis before fleeing. Then at 21, he marries and has four children, the last of whom, Myfanwy, is stillborn and her mother dies in childbirth. By this time he'd be about 25, assuming the pregnancies happened in quick succession, although it's possible that Charlotte and Dawn were twins. Presumably, his lack of desire to remain a father after his wife dies causes him to kill his children, and then he kidnaps Margaret. Although his children's ghosts haunt him at the end of The Hazards Of Love, it is never mentioned that he dies, so he could have gone to the sea and eventually become "the captain of [a] ship...known for wanton cruelty." Meanwhile, the Mariner is 18 when he overhears the confession in the church where he works that reveals the Rake's location to him, and he spends 20 months sailing toward him, making the Mariner 19 or 20 when they meet again, and the Rake 34 or 35—and that's where they have the duel to the death in the whale's belly after being swallowed! (copy-pasted from when I wrote it on the Just Bugs Me page)
- It may have even been that same shipwreck that sent ol' Sweeney pitching on the waves in the first place. He was actually the lone survivor. (Dying in a whale's stomach two hours after the wreck does not count as surviving.)
- Leslie Ann Levine, by the Word of God takes place in the the world of We Both Go Down Together. We might have stumbled onto something huge here.
- I know I didn't post this, but I've developed this exact same theory. Weird. o.0 Great minds think alike, I guess.
- Or she was freaked out when she first met William and learned what he was, and the world he belonged to, but nine months later she's cool with it. Or she lives in a human settlement where they have long accepted (and feared) the magic and creatures of the forest.
- The last line of "Sons and Daughters" is Here all the bombs fade away. On the same album, we have a song called "After the Bombs."
- "Sons and Daughters" actually fades into "After the Bombs," which makes this even stranger. Also, when you have "The Crane Wife" playing on repeat, the last line of the album is "Until it all starts over again." At which point, it all does start over again.
- I can't imagine that that was their intention, as After the Bombs was an iTunes only bonus track. There were in fact five different versions of the album, each with a different final track, and one with none at all.
- Now that I think of it, we have "When The War Came" as well...
- "Sons and Daughters" actually fades into "After the Bombs," which makes this even stranger. Also, when you have "The Crane Wife" playing on repeat, the last line of the album is "Until it all starts over again." At which point, it all does start over again.
- There is fanfic. And it's awesome.
This mentioned combination most common in the types of inter-racial marriages involving Japanese citizens. Often there's the element of economic inequality involved.
The bride on the cover of the album is wearing Manchu-style clothing whereas the groom is wearing a business suit, which, applying the recent history between the two countries, is apt. The crane referred to is most likely a red-crowned crane, which migrates between the two countries. Oh, and her wedding dress is white with a red splotch where the arrow struck her.
So here's my WMG - William gives up and doesn't try to escape the fortress and the water not just because he's got a code of honor that won't let him renege on the promise that he made in "Annan Water," but also because his beloved and their gestating child are both dead. He's made an enemy of his own mother, and his beloved Margaret is dead, taking with her their hope for a family. He's lost the will to fight anymore. "The Drowned" is William trying to get her to wake up by calling her name, trying to get her to respond. He realizes that she's not going to wake up and he's going to die sometime around when he suggests that they declare themselves married there. The times when we hear Margaret's voice alongside William's is easily explained as her spirit still lingering because he's going to die soon, and him slowly drowning and losing his grip on the mortal world (and sanity).