hi! tv girl has been one of my interests for some time, and i've noticed some reoccuring happenings and characters throughout their music. so i'm going to do a full, in-depth analysis of the story that happens in tv girl's music.

to look at the connections between all of their music, we have to first look at what each song and album talks about.
i'm going to start with french exit, after trung ngo leaves the band, as that's when i consider brad petering to have taken full control of the lyrics.

Pantyhose

this song apparently takes inspiration from a book about a boy wearing his girlfriend's pantyhose in war, as a superstition that gives him luck. i think this is showing the narrator (whom i'm going to refer to as brad, assuming he's the main character in his own story) relating to this, some token of his girlfriend's (either her pantyhose or something else of hers) being a "good-luck charm" to him.

"And when her letter came he didn't cry"
at the end of the song, brad shows his girlfriend leave him, still imagining himself as a boy in war. however, he still holds on to this lucky charm ("Even though she didn't love him anymore / You can't kill a lucky charm"), similarly in the book where the main character is caught in unrequited love. "More than anything, he wanted Martha to love him as he loved her."

sourced from:
https://genius.com/artists/Tv-girl
The Things They Carried (O'Brien, 1990)