MCR's Possible Rework of The Paper Kingdom: A Theory
Based on my past post, it is strongly suggested MCR was going to release TPK on their own accord back in 2020 before things got reworked as The Swarm tour. Gerard has previously said he would be interested in revising TPK in the future, even if it was as a different medium.
"...it’s going to be this storyline about a support group of parents who are dealing with the loss of their children so they make up this story about the children all being missing in the woods and fighting this witch and that that was what it was about. It was called The Paper Kingdom. And there may be a time in my life where I want to do The Paper Kingdom. And maybe it’s a book, or maybe it’s something else."
I think back in 2020 My Chemical Romance tweaked around the idea of The Paper Kingdom, and instead of being a support group of parents, the idea evolved into a group of parents joining the occult to resurrect their dead children. The concept would still explore grief, acceptance, the loss of a child, and witchcraft with a slight twist added to them.
As we have seen with the Long Live The Black Parade tour, the band is not shy towards reinterpretations of their old material, and the 2020 promotional material for the tour implies a departure from the source material. It is interesting to note how the original concept of The Paper Kingdom revolves around the parent's grief, but we do not know to what extent the witchcraft and fantasy aspect would play a role into the execution of the album. The song "Witch" is featured, but most of the lyrics in the album have since been interpreted as either the children's death or the responses from their parents, with the fantastical elements hiding in the backdrop.
I think the video "A Summoning" actually shows the journey one of the children goes through in the afterlife in order to get resurrected. While the video's main goal is to highlight all the different eras of the band, I think we can pick out some main ideas that actually hint towards TPK. Please watch the video before reading the post if you don't remember much of it as the picture limit is small and I can't show every visual reference.
The video follows a teenage boy as he is repeatedly watched and stalked through different rooms that symbolize death before he is summoned in a pentagram.
The video starts with our protagonist making coffee, grabbing a cloak, taping bags to cover windows, and getting ready for a ritual by lighting candles around a pentagram. Please note the lingering eye at 0:28, I think this implies the boy is currently being watched by an unknown entity.
The boy tapes up his windows, mainly to darken the room for the ritual, but I think it is also to keep any unwanted visitors from peeking in to the house and catching glimpses of the plan. During the ritual, the protagonist uses CDs from MCR's past around the corners of a pentagram and uses a Ouija board in order to communicate with an other worldly being before getting a message from the TV. I think the boy is currently in some form of the after life and has been receiving messages from the cultists to come back to the living world. He gets a message to run, and this is where we encounter doors to different worlds.
All the doors contain symbols previously posted on the band's Instagram page including a candle, the moon, the sun, and a tower. I am unsure at the moment what the symbols symbolize in relation to the video, but candles, moonlight, and sunlight are all powerful forces in magik that often hold properties necessary for spells. To me, this aligns with possible different stages of the ritual taking place.
The next rooms the boy encounters include a vampire bar, a church with Helena and the demolition lovers, and the hospital with the patient's body disappearing under sheets. I think this actually shows the travels of the boy through the afterlife. Starting with the vampires, these tend to be creatures of the un-dead, usually associated with the in-between stages of life and death but not fitting into quiet either category. The demolition lovers also fit this category of swinging between life and death, with the male lover dying in a gunfight, getting sent to hell just to be brought back to life by the devil with the task of killing 1000 evil men. It is not made clear whether the female demolition lover also dies in the gun fight but throughout the lyrics of Three Cheers it is implied she is either alive or in heaven. Finally, in the hospital a sheet with the patient is shown, where he is breathing and he has a pulse. However, when the blanket is pulled back, there is no body and the EKG shows a flatline, implying there was a phantom there, another type of creature that lies in the balance between life and death.
At around 6:10, the boy makes his way to the hospital by walking out of a coffin, again playing around the idea of the dead coming back to life.
Towards the end of the video, the protagonist has to dodge a speeding car, which to me signifies a near-death experience where a person almost has an encounter with death, but remains in a state of living by a small margin.
I think the fact our protagonist is being chased throughout the whole video is significant, as the journey he is making will off-set the natural balance. I think the Draculoids are a stand-in for the witch the children fought in the forest. The original purpose of the Draculoids was to keep the order in Battery City, and keep the status quo against the Killjoys, and similarly they are trying to stop the boy from making his journey back into the world of the living.
The boy wakes up surrounded by cloaked figures in the middle of a ritual, summoned from another world. The final frame of the video appears to be the boy in a stadium, which signifies the return of the band back to the stage, or the boy's arrival to a real world location in the land of the living. At 11:32 paper swords starts playing, connecting the video to The Paper Kingdom.
This frame has me completely puzzled and single handedly breaks the theory. At 1:30 the boy lights an ofrenda with pictures of family members and pets signifying these people are dead. A Ouija board also is generally used to contact the dead, so its usage at the beginning of the video also signifies the boy is not really in the afterlife, and is most likely trying to contact these members of his family for guidance. However, this pokes the question, where was the boy summoned to then? The Ouija board is used at the end of the video as well, signifying that is not the afterlife either. At first I thought maybe this boy could be the older sibling of one of the victims and TPK could open grief to other members of the family, until I saw the point in the video where he gets summoned into what seems like a church and then the stadium.
If anybody has any further ideas feel free to post them!! It is currently 3 AM while I am writing this so I feel extremely exhausted but I just needed to get this off my chest. I will make another post for An Offering and the Instagram posts from 2020 because I think they may serve to provide a bigger picture to the possible plans MCR had for this album.
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