if my chemical romance are this determined to not make any new music, could they at least give us the actually unreleased songs? i dont mean the stuff on the new version of danger days, thats just basically the mad gear and missile kid ep (which is already available so idk why people are treating it as like a new thing). i want proper final studio versions of sister to sleep, someone out there loves you, and emily PLEASE. maybe piano jam if they really love me.
Long live the white parade! (a deep dive into the LLTBP lore)
Hello pussycats! By popular demand, I’m presenting my deep‑dive into the lore of the Long Live the Black Parade tour. As with most of my essays, this one’s going to be on the longer side😅—but only because I want to stay thorough, objective, and cover every angle.
My hope is that this sparks a friendly, stimulating conversation rather than the usual knee‑jerk defenses of “Gerard is a babygirl.” or worse "get out of the fandom!!"
So, without further ado… let’s begin!
Well, as many of you already know, the Long Live the Black Parade tour has very little to do with the original Black Parade.
This time around, Gerard* decided to build a fictional country from scratch—explicitly white—and then layered it with heavy Russian-coded signifiers: wheat imagery, Cyrillic-adjacent language (keposhka), visual cues pulled straight from Eastern bloc propaganda, he hired Russian soldiers and asked for English speakers with “Russian accents” to work.
*I say Gerard specifically because Nate Piekos—the designer of Keposhka and a longtime collaborator—has never mentioned the other members being involved in shaping the lore. Only Gerard and him. And given that G has always been the architect of MCR’s universes, I feel confident in stating that this was his idea.
I took the time to slog through a few articles breathlessly praising MCR for “critiquing fascism” and calling it all revolutionary or whatever— and honestly, it left me more irritated than impressed. Not just because the claims are faith projections, but because they highlight a real crisis in media literacy.
I’ve watched every single stage of this show since it began, and nothing I’ve seen even remotely reads as revolutionary, innovative, or genuinely critical. What I’ve witnessed is spectacle dressed up as resistance— a performance of rebellion that cashes in on the aesthetics of critique without ever delivering the substance.
My Chemical Romance gives an electrifying performance and anti-authoritarian political commentary with “Long Live the Black Parade”
Maybe they surprise me in the second leg of the tour🤷🏽♀️. But let's put a pin to that, since we're gonna circle back to it later.
Commie Chic, Capitalist Cash: The Long Live Tour
The show opens with Kephoska rules on the screens, literally instructing the audience how to behave. Then we’re introduced to the cast: the marching band (with TUCKER RULE 🤤), the clerk, Marianne, them.
We’re told to stand for the dictator and they sing the “Draag National Anthem.”
It’s important to emphasize that the lyrics are displayed on the screens, allowing everyone to sing the anthem together. Additionally, MCR are not introduced as “MCR” but rather as the Draag National Band.
Following this, Gerard begins performing The End, and from that point everything proceeds in a relatively normal fashion.
When Gerard hits Welcome, the cameras don’t pan to the audience. Instead, they spotlight white Draag citizens. And that choice is telling.
It signals a shift: the song’s meaning has been rewritten. It’s no longer about us—the fans and the shared catharsis. It’s about his fiction, his newly constructed universe. The parade has officially stopped being ours (I’ll dig deeper into this later.)
We're followed by an “election”—once again framed as parade/festival background music—where the masses vote on whether to execute people.
That alone already collapses the supposed critique, and I hate to be so scholarly about this but; fascist regimes do not function like that. This would be spectacle democracy. This is hunger-games-core type of narrative.
This entire segment is led by Gerard, using a fake Russian accent that comes and goes, while actively praising the dictator, particularly calling him: handsome.
On some dates—like Arlington—he explicitly states the crime as “questioning the vitality of the Great Immortal Dictator.” He also throws out lines like “we gotta give people what they want,” only to contradict himself on other nights by saying “it doesn’t matter what we choose.”
Only once a person survived the execution, and "won a car".
So this is the Hunger Games logic I personally hate—not just because I dislike The Hunger Games, but because it turns what it was meant to be a state violence critique or setting and turns it into a a fun show!! It's literally giving Mettaton from Undertale lmao (but mettaton is a fictional villian yo!!).
That decision, to make a spectacle out of the execution it automatically reminds us that this isn't about reality, this is about the fiction he created that happens to be inspired by the soviet era.
Then we go back to “I Don’t Love You” through “House of Wolves” (no notes, peak song).
And then comes the so-called “revolution” LMAOO.
This is the exact moment white american defenders latch onto to explain—sorry, whitexplain—why this is actually a bold revolutionary critique and not just fascist aesthetics repackaged for theatrics.
After “House of Wolves,” the clerk (Charlie Saxton) hands Gerard a paper. Gerard refuses to take it, refuses to “agree,” refuses to “follow it”—we’re not told what it says because the act is wordless.
And he gets slapped for refusing to comply.
And this is taken as: OMG GERARD IS NOT A NAZI!!! YAAAAY!! Everybody clap!! Give him a hug and a kiss on the forehead!! He’s such a revolutionary man!!!
That's the revolution some of y'all brag about. That's the only moment in which we're shown resistance. THE ONLY (we could also add the jacket moment later, but that's it).
Then “Cancer” begins.
Before “Mama,” Gerard removes his uniform jacket.
I have to highlight that “Mama” is staged almost entirely as spectacle—pyro, a man on fire, guest singers stepping into Liza Minnelli’s role. I could go deeper into how women function in MCR’s worldbuilding, but honestly it often boils down to: gowns, gowns, beautiful gowns.
I loved "Mama" tho. Don't take it wrong.
During “Teenagers,” the clerk reappears. Gerard “gets a call” that’s meant to be so funny. Lemme quote Ra'jah O'Hara bc: I’m not gagging, lmao. The clerk puts him back in uniform.
Advertisements flash on the screens.
Once again: every Draag citizen shown is white. And I'm gonna repeat this bc i feel like it’s always worth clarifying: NO COUNTRY IS WHITE BY DEFAULT, not even his so beloved soviet Russia.
Let’s be real: Gerard is a hardcore capitalist—he ain’t no comrade here, yo.
And this is just my opinion, but his fascination with Russian history feels way less about communism, socialism, or the rise of the working class, and way more about the allure of powerful figures. It’s not the revolution that grabs him; it’s the spectacle of authority. (I could dig deeper into that, but I’ll save it for later.)
Then we reach “Disenchanted,” and for reasons that genuinely matter, the image behind the song is the face of the Great Immortal Dictator.
Screenshotted from: ded_center on YT.
The song about watching your heroes sell crap on TV—about disillusionment, distance, disappointment—is paired with a dictator’s image. And of course that’s not accidental.
Because nothing he ever makes is accidental. And even tho it’s “just a stylistic choice”. It’s still a choice.
And this is lowkey upsetting to me bc TBP is different from the rest of MCR’s discography. Let me explain:
Bullets is about “me”—Gerard’s life, his interior world collapsing with a collective trauma (9/11).
Three Cheers is about “them”—a love story, characters, so there’s some sort narrative distance (even tho some songs like Helena are deeply personal).
TBP is about “us.” The band and the fans. It’s a shared identity. And we are invited to join and relate.
That’s why it’s so unsettling to watch him simultaneously lean into audience participation (executions, sing-along anthems, lyric prompts, decodification of keposhka, merch including flags and symbols of power) while trying to erase the meaning TBP had to people and replace it with something new.
And I would be fine with a reinterpretation. Truly. Matter of fact I think it'd be great. But this particular reinterpretation is a series of weird decisions.
Because when you place a dictator’s face behind lyrics like “Bring out the old guillotine / We’ll show ’em what we all mean,” the meaning shifts. Radically.
During “Famous Last Words,” the stage catches fire. There’s a countdown. Fans speculate it’s a time loop: when it hits zero, “The End” starts again.
The band members are kidnapped by Draag forces. Gerard is stabbed to death by a clown—played by the same actor as the clerk.
They have an interlude played by cellist Clarice Jensen, and then we move to B-stage. In this stage: they're finally My Chemical Romance.
Gerard slips back into speaking normally, the theatrics vanish, and the band launches into their “older songs.”
This could have been the perfect moment to acknowledge, explain, or even hint at the meaning behind what we’d just witnessed. But instead—nothing. It’s as if the entire spectacle never happened, erased in real time.
So now that we’ve actually laid it out, I want to ask the real questions:
What is this story about?
If you think this is about resisting THE CURRENT FASCISM OF THE WORLD, I must ask: do you think it was truly necessary to center figures of power like a made up soviet dictator to convey that message?
How does it feel to hear “Welcome to the Black Parade” or “Disenchanted” while watching a parade of white faces—or a single white man in power—looming behind it?
If this is about Russian occupation (which I don’t agree with), why do you think Gerard is always wearing a German flag on his arm?
And it’s very telling that the moment you google this, you get an AI-generated summary claiming the show “forces the audience to confront their role in authoritarianism.”
And that's just straight up misinformation because: no one is confronting anything.
Fans are drawing fanart of the dictator. Fans are making lore edits. Fans are buying this fictional regime’s flags.
This isn’t confrontation. It’s consumption.
And when you compare this to projection-heavy analyses like the Michigan Daily piece, or nostalgia worship like in the NME article: it becomes obvious how much work the audience is doing to invent critique that isn’t actually there.
The Michigan Daily even goes so far as to draw analogies with ICE!!! But let’s be real: when I asked Nate Piekos about inclusivity, he blocked me. So this couldn’t possibly be about ICE. (You can scroll down and find that whole thing).
Also if it was: there would be p.o.c included in the first place!!
On top of that, they claim this whole spectacle is about “dethroning empires” or something along those lines.
Yet what have we actually witnessed? No fictional dictator has been dethroned. No power has been meaningfully questioned. If anything, the narrative plays out like one of those Nazi‑sympathizer films where the audience is nudged to feel sorry for the poor nazi soldier simply for “following orders.”
And yes, I bring Nazism into this conversation deliberately, because:
Gerard is literally wearing the German flag for no discernible reason.
The titles he uses—like “great immortal dictator”—echo media tied more to Hitler than to Lenin.
The costumes in The Black Parade, draw direct inspiration from Hussar uniforms. We could also name: british, prussian, austrian and french. And you can google all of them, but they resemble more the German and the Prussian ones.
What angers me most is the ignorance in blending blatant capitalist spectacle with communist imagery, then slapping the label of “fascism” over everything. It doesn’t just read as EXTREMELY ignorant—it feels like a window into Gerard’s worldview: power fetishized, history flattened, and ideology commodified.
And that's why when I made that long ass video, I took the time to revist all of his early work because this is not a mistake that just occurred now. This is a pattern that he has.
So I’ll ask again, plainly:
If this is anti-fascist, why is everyone white?
If this show is meant to critique the current political climate: why they’ve never addressed it in the B-stage?
Why is the merch celebrating the Draag regime instead of opposing it?
Because this story would be hella different if the merch sold was something like: FUCK FACISM. FUCK DICTATORS. or something along those lines.
Also: how could anyone seriously frame this as a “critique of fascism” while mixing Leninist imagery with Nazi aesthetics—and then turn around and sell tickets for $2,000? Are we out of our minds? That contradiction alone exposes the hollowness of the claim. You can’t posture as revolutionary while commodifying the performance at luxury‑tier prices.
And I hate to be the one pointing this out, but just so we’re clear: Lenin wasn’t racist. His politics were rooted in class struggle and internationalism, not racial exclusion.
So why does this world‑building reads as poc-exclusionary, white supremacist? Oh, because someone made the conscious choice to erase people of color from the narrative!
(Another reason why I believe he blends Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia history together.)
That absence isn’t accidental—it’s a design decision. And who has a history of creating exclusively white or racially insensitive world-building? ohhh, right.
This is where the show’s “plausible deniability” comes into play.
If fans want to read it as anti‑empire, great. If they want to fantasize about being citizens of Draag, that works too.
And if, in the second leg of the tour, they decide to “murder the dictator” and make their disdain for fascism explicit, that move would instantly erase most of the valid critique some of us have been discussing. But that hasn’t happened yet.
As it stands, the fans who attended this tour were left with exactly what I’ve been unpacking here—plus a tribute to Bob Bryar.
Either way, the merch sells, the tickets sell, and the ambiguity protects the show from critique. But when the imagery being borrowed is stripped of its historical context and repurposed in a way that erases marginalized voices, it stops being revolutionary and starts being exploitative.
And this the commercially bulletproof narrative Gerard profits from (apart from MCR).
Whether you see it as rebellion or roleplay, you’re still buying in. And that’s the genius (or cynicism) of it: the show doesn’t need to take a real stance, because the ambiguity itself is the product.
Because if we're anti-empire and this is anti-fascism: why were fans hyping up the mayor of Belleville like he was some kind of K‑pop idol? while that man shamelessly used MCR’s likeness to boost his own following—bragging about his “closeness” to Gerard and Mikey just because he went to the same school.
The fandom has been so busy engaging with this lore and churning out media about this fictional “white country” that they barely blinked when a MAGA politician was brought onstage to hand over the key to New Jersey.
Yes, the mayor of Belleville, Michael Melham, "was" a MAGA and a vocal RFK supporter.
(I cannot include more images but these are his reposts, he’s also extremely transphobic and supports Trump and anti-vax. The only reason why he legally changed his “political affiliations”, was to secure mayorship. But don’t be fooled: bc he definitely aligns with Trump and other fascist like Milei and Meloni)
Honestly, I might have brushed it off if the stunt had been tucked away in B‑stage—followed by a clear statement that this wasn’t about the mayor himself and that they disagreed with his politics. Or, at the very least, they could have chosen another representative. After all, this moment should have been about MCR and what the band has accomplished together, not about giving a platform to a MAGA mayor.
But the fact that fans were perfectly fine with this man disrupting the main stage—while Gerard refused to break character for even a second—is absolutely wild to me.
And I’ve said this repeatedly but at some point, intent stops mattering when impact takes over. And that was impactful af, because they literally platformed a MAGA and that man went on days on facebook gaining followers thanks to MCR.
So, in conclusion: when fascist aesthetics are reproduced without clarity, when whiteness goes unquestioned, when power is aestheticized instead of dismantled, and when audiences are invited to participate rather than resist—what you have is not critique. It’s spectacle.
Let’s call it what it is: this is a show that borrows Soviet history for aesthetic purposes.
And the fact that fans are enjoying it, reproducing it, and defending it as “deep” doesn’t mean it’s working. It means it’s doing exactly what propaganda has always done best: making power feel exciting, ambiguous, and fun—while accountability disappears completely.
And that is basically the foundation of EVERY story Gerard has ever written or promoted.
I know this post might stir up some heat if it gains traction, but I sincerely ask that we keep the comment section respectful. Everyone is welcome to discuss, debate, and share their personal opinions about the show—just let’s do it with kindness.
last weekend’s request from my patrons btw! they wanted to know how i think reconditioning works and specifically how the ministry might have gone about turning ray’s character against gerard. so i imagined a classic drugs & audiovisual hypnotic programming combo taking place in a repurposed dentist chair whenever the band is on the road. 4 ray i think the goal would be to sew distrust and fear… i tried to imagine a sequence that would inspire some type of primal dread and came up with g as a ventriloquist dummy and the dead fawn flashing back n forth. someone else told me they imagine reconditioning would involve an active practitioner which i liked the sound of bc it gives me blade runner voight-kampff or baseline test vibes and of course could potentially involve #her. many possibilities…
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