We may never know the full details of what happened at the Met Gala between Swift and Alwyn, but we do know that she arrived that night with her date and former boyfriend Tom Hiddleston. (Yes, there are a lot of mixed metaphors going on here!) There’s no such ambiguity in “Mastermind.” Swift casts herself as a grandmaster toying with her opponent, effectively inheriting the position of power once held by “John.” And while many of her previous lyrics about hands have focused on the effect of a lover’s hand on her, here, it’s reversed: she’s the one wielding her touch to light a fuse. In “The Archer,” from 2019, she switches off between being hunter and prey. In “Dear John,” which she wrote near the start of her career, she’s a mere pawn: “I lived in your chess game, but you changed the rules every day,” she sings. Her romantic interests often turn into adversaries and then back again, with Swift casting herself in various roles in conflict. Here, she uses a hand touch to kick off another one of her favorite metaphors: love as a battlefield or a chess match. (From her 2006 debut album: “He’s got a one-hand feel on the steering wheel/ The other on my heart.”) “Hand” is one of Swift’s favorite words: she’s sung it over and over, often using it as a signifier of a blossoming romance.
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