I would like to know the MCR lore please and thank you.
new jersey based cartoonist gerard way is commuting through new york city for an interview at a popular animation company
a few miles away from ground zero gerard watches the second tower fall and messages everyone he knows like quit your job join my band
bullies his little brother into learning bass
MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE is formed. main players are gerard, his brother mikey, and two guitar legends named frank iero and ray toro
gerard has since gone on record saying that the powerlessness he felt in watching an attack happen on american soil inspired him to create something. he could not just stand by and do nothing. he had to find a way to connect with people and overcome that fear.
together MCR releases their first record:
I BROUGHT YOU MY BULLETS, YOU BROUGHT ME YOUR LOVE
the only album that isn't particularly concepty. very Hardcore.
skylines and turnstiles was the first MCR song ever written, the first lyrics of which spell out the message the band so badly wanted to communicate-- "you're not in this alone."
the entirety of the song is about 9/11
the biggest throughline in bullets is complicated & toxic relationships, often using monsters like vampires and zombies as mataphors and motifs
"vampires are a standin for alcoholism" is kind of a reocurring thing in MCR lore as a whole
the one thing about this album that is pretty definite story-wise is the tale of the demolition lovers, highlighted in the last song on the album
the demo lovers are on the run from the authorities, likely in some sort of bonnie and clyde sitch. in the end, they are gunned down in the desert and die in each other's arms.
this final note leads into...
THREE CHEERS FOR SWEET REVENGE
it's 2004. MCR releases their second album, widely regarded now to be a cornerstone of the early 2000s scemo movement & aesthetic
black button downs with blood-red ties. red eyeshadow, nude lips, and THICK guyliner. catholicism.
you've seen it. i know you've seen it.
ignore the blonde guy back there.
three cheers chronicles the story of the demolition lovers. they are on the cover. you have seen them.
the man awakens in purgatory, searching for his lost lover. there, he meets the devil, who tells him that if he wants to reunite with her, he must bring him the soul of one thousand evil men.
after all that killing, the man begins to lose sight of himself. he kills 999 evil men when the devil appears to him once more, and tells him that with all this blood on his hands, the last evil man he must kill is himself.
a few years pass. this album is a big hit with The Freaks but at the moment MCR are not exactly "big" outside of alt music circles. everything changes in 2006, but a little bit before that...
gerard fucking way, at this time severely mentally ill, believes wholeheartedly in suffering for ones art
posts the whole band up in a haunted mansion that has certifiably driven several past residents insane
gerard suffers from chronic nightmares in this mansion where he witnesses his loved ones dying over and over. he records himself recounting this and puts it in a song called sleep.
the band have designated "heavy rooms" where they scream and yell and cry and get out all their demons. gerard leaves deranged post it notes all over his. one of these notes reads "we are all a black parade"
mikey's mental health gets so bad in this place that he becomes violently suicidal and has to check himself into a clinic
allegedly, gerard writes "famous last words" about mikey's struggles.
before he leaves mikey is insane about a song they're working on called disenchanted. there are stories of him just whispering it into his bandmates' ears at night.
this whole experience just sucks for everyone, but unfortunately for me wishing better for them, we get one of the greatest rock albums of all time out of it.
chronicles the story of a dying cancer patient looking back on his life and realizing he was kind of an asshole.
he committed war crimes, drank his sorrows away, and treated his lover like shit.
as he lies there dying in his hospital bed he realizes he is burdened with regret and wants to redo everything and change.
a core tenet of this album is that death comes to you in the form of your fondest memory. THE BLACK PARADE is a manifestation of this--as you might have heard, when the patient was a young boy his father t
the parade he saw as a child returns to him, cloaked in black, and guides him toward the afterlife.
he maybe resists death and his allowed his second chance. up to you!
when MCR toured this show, they did not tour as MCR--they toured as The Black Parade. i was there. in 2007. they came on stage and said "we are the Black Parade."
this tour was, i shit you not, a full theatrical performance unlike anything you would ever see in that era.
the album begins with the patient about to flatline. they wheel gerard out on a hospital gurney.
seriously, please watch this
just watch the first like minute if you don't wanna watch the whole thing. PLEASE.
you need to understand the above wasn't some special thing they did for this taped live show. they did this EVERY night. i saw this happen.
the show ended with huge amounts of black and white confetti falling from the ceiling, the same confetti from the music video for welcome to the black parade.
THEATRICS. i called gerard a cartoonist at the beginning of this writeup. but at this time he had also written and published an original comic no one besides MCR fans had heard of or read.
that is certainly not the case any longer.
point: gerard way is a storyteller. and it shows in this tour.
at the beginning of this era, gerard sheared his long beautiful hair short and dyed it platinum blonde to give off the effect of being sickly. the people who don't know them from the revenge era usually know them from this one.
you've most certainly heard the song that skyrocketed them to stardom. i don't know what else to say about it. it is lauded for a reason. i did not know at the time of it releasing that i would become an anthem of my childhood heart and soul, and a whole generation of misfit alt kids with scars on their wrists. but it is The MCR Song for a reason, and that is because it is definitive--dark, heavy, black-coated music... about how you cannot lay down and die, motherfucker. the world is hell! your heart will break! GET THE FUCK UP! FIGHT, YOU BASTARD! YOU HAVE TO FIGHT!
that is, above all else, what MCR writes music about. remember that.
rather unfairly, this is also around the time the media started painting them as a suicide cult brainwashing troubled teens into suicide and self harm.
the (sort of) last song on the black parade contains the lyrics "i am not afraid to keep on living."
here is my show last night singing those lyrics. you should listen. skip to 2:40 for the good part. i am there amongst the sea of voices, my whole body shaking with sobs as i struggle to get the words "i am not afraid to walk this world alone" out.
beyond the Concerned Parents, much of the rock scene rejected MCR due to their unabashedly authentic, earnest, and yes, emo selves. at the time, MCR could not be defined as emo--but emo would eventually reshape itself as a genre around them.
MCR was also unapologetically queer in a time where it was not safe to be so. gerard and frank would kiss with tongue on stage and wear makeup. gerard would sing about kissing men and wearing dresses. they are all married with wives and children, and while gerard is nonbinary himself, they've said time and time again that this weaponization of queerness was literally to get dudebro homophobes to leave their show.
these people would shout the f slur at gerard and he would limp his wrist and say thank you honey. it ruled. it was 2006, that was not something you did.
the biggest and most important culmination of the pushback that came with MCR's stardom is coincidentally my favourite post-reunion MCR performance of all time.
here, they play reading & leeds, where an incredibly rowdy crowd of hard rock, hypermasculine dudebro types throw rocks and bottles on stage the whole time. all the while, gerard smiles down at them like a playful trickster god on high, singing i wouldn't front the scene if you paid me and give me all your poison and you're running after something that you'll never kill and fire at will.
eventually, they would officially "kill" the black parade (the band) off at a final show in mexico. this would lead into another tour where they played as themselves, titled "the black parade is dead!"
things go quiet for a few years. and then...
DANGER DAYS: THE TRUE LIVES OF THE FABULOUS KILLJOYS
gerard: please let me write a comic. i have to write a comic. i need to write a comic. i must write a comic.
gerard writes a comic, and everyone is cool with passing it off as a rock album.
CALIFORNIA: IN THE DISTANT FUTURE YEAR OF 2019. five years prior, the analog/helium wars decimated the landscape and shifted control into the hands of Better Living Industries (BLind for short) a dictatorship localized into the bounds of futuristic Battery City. resisting this monochromatic, controlling government are the Fabulous Killjoys: colourful outlaws in sick ass sentai costumes that roam the desert and fight for liberation.
the sound is completely different. gone are the emo/gothy undertones and romantic, dark aesthetics. we are punk rock as shit, now, and we're going to blow up the government.
gerard dyes his hair bright red. he does this a month after i do the same. that has nothing to do with the lore, it still just makes me lose my mind to this day.
asshole stealing my drip. we even had the same fucked up haircut.
anyways, here's where we are now:
the music videos tell a cohesive story. the album tells another one. a comic releases alongside it all, telling a third one. they all kinda sorta interpret the story in different ways, but it is still the most high concept and well-built world that MCR canon has. this era's aesthetic was so delicious that mentally ill transgenders on tumblr are still RPing it and writing fic to this day.
at this point, MCR reaches a strange kind of impasse where they are simultaneously at the peak of their career and less relevant than ever. they're entrenched in celebrity culture. mikey is cheating on his girlfriend. gerard is anorexic and drinking. shit's not the greatest.
at the same time, a lot of their former fans are not crazy about the new sound / aesthetic
an MCR song gets on glee. this is, in large part, considered The End for a lot of people.
US politics are important here: Obama's in office. things are looking up. the culture of the country is shifting. and that begs the question... why did the world need MCR?
the world needed MCR because the world was at war under a republican president. the world needed MCR because the twin towers fucking exploded into flames. the world needed MCR because the future was bleak and scary, and they had to do something. and they did something. and the something was done.
They work their solo careers. They live their lives. They have kids. Gerard becomes a pretty legendary comics writer.
A year later, on an album containing some unreleased music / b sides, they release their final song, on an album titled May Death Never Stop You.
It's the only song MCR has ever written where the message could not more clearly be "Give up. It's done."
I choose defeat. I walk away.
as gen z grow up and discover music, a beautiful second wave of my chem fans enter the space. overwhelmingly, we learn in time that MCR's greatness is not a product of the cultural moment or nostalgia--i begin to see hundreds of tiktoks of teenagers in the mid 2010s lamenting being born in the wrong generation because i missed seeing MCR live.
the elder emos comiscerate. the g note meme is born.
watch a couple compilations. notice how all the teenagers are wearing the same MCR shirt? that's because it was the ONLY official merch available for ages after they broke up. whenever i see that shirt, it's like an arrow in my heart. it's a signifier of someone who came in late, and there is nothing more beautiful than that to me. the music is good. intragenerationally, you understand that, too.
the way brothers have cited one of their biggest inspirations ever to be the smashing pumpkins. mikey went on record saying once that the smashing pumpkins is everything they wanted to be.
people begin to overthink this.
the timeline of the smashing pumpkins is as follows: they were together for 12 years, broke up for 6, and then got back together.
mcr was together... for 12 years.
if they got back together after a 6 year hiatus, the year would be... 2019.
2019, the year that the killjoys raised up their lasers toward the oppressive and fascistic government.
45 begins his 3rd year in office.
This is, in case you didn't know, going very poorly.
Halloween. The MCR socials... change their pfp.
more symbols trickle in on their insta story. something is being teased/promoted. we expect it is likely just a re-release, or some more unreleased music, or a merch thing for the spooky season.
some people can't help remembering a little while back, though... when one of the jonas brothers said that he heard MCR rehearsing in the same venue as them. how odd that was, considering MCR broke up.
when frank was confronted about this, he rolled his eyes and answered in the same negative he always did, obviously tired of hearing it all these years.
"man, that rumour's like a broken clock."
out of fucking NOWHERE, the MCR reunion is announced.
they do this on halloween night--when the veil between the living and the dead is thinnest. remember this.
i don't want to try to put into words what the energy of this show is like. all i can do is BEG you to watch the multicam cut of it. i am begging. i am pleading.
six long years of no MCR. six long years of new fans mourning what they didn't get.
and look. just LOOK at that sea of fingerless gloves and black t-shirts. look at that sea of people dressing like they did when they were teenagers, alongside teenagers who weren't there to see it but are now living their dreams of doing so.
look at gerard's dad getup. look at how much healthier and happier he looks. look at how overjoyed everyone is to be there.
the medley at the beginning. the curtain falling. im not okay (a secondary emo anthem to wttbp) heralding the dawn of a new era.
the audience chanting mikey's name as he plays the final bassline of the kids from yesterday.
ADDITIONAL LORE: MCR more or less always plays the same song for their encore--helena. this is because the last line of helena is meant to be their parting words to their audience, so long and goodnight.
they do not do this here. the final song they play, aptly saved for last, is welcome to the black parade.
the final words of which, are, of course
take a good look at gerard's california 2019 getup
any witch worth their salt will tell you that's a sigil on his arm. specifically, it's a witches' wheel, which can be translated.
the way a lot of witchcraft works is through intention. you put an intention to an object, and the magick flows through that intention.
when translated, this wheel spells out my chemical romance.
another part of spellcasting is the idea of 'charging' a spell. there are many ways to do this, depending on what you're trying to manifest, but to put a sigil on your body with a clear intention and wear it to a massive gathering of energy, like, say, a room full of people all singing the lyrics to that intention in perfect unison...
well. that's damn near ritualistic, in fact, i daresay it's...
after several smaller teasers throughout the week, the official MCR youtube releases this video. i will not explain it to you. i am demanding you watch it, given everything i have just explained.
this is the video that announced the reunion tour. a 13 minute long love letter to the fandom, told through the eyes of one of us. rife with easter eggs, theatrical as can be, and, most notably of all, ending with this:
the sigil, charged. glowing with energy from the fandom in that california venue, who used their passion and power to revive my chemical romance from the dead.
my chemical romance will tour in 2020. barring extenuating circumstances, there is nothing that will stop them from playing their music for us one more time.
it turns out being in a fascist government means that sometimes a deadly infectious disease will spread unmitigated and shut down the world.
it turns out that when the killjoys said "die with your mask on" they were a little too on the mark.
it is still not safe to go to concerts, but the world does not care about public health or disabled people, so they keep doing them anyways.
mcr reunites, and releases a new song called the foundations of decay. it could not more clearly be about their legacy.
the branding for the new tour is themed around this concept of decay and rot. flies specifically are a huge theme. before each show, the beating of fly wings in massive numbers echoes like static throughout the stage speakers. the fans collectively name this "the swarm"
what this tour lacks in cohesive theming it makes up for in sheer fun. gerard wears a different outfit every night. he does a lot of drag. they spraypaint messages on the drum head--some nonsense, some sentimental. you should watch the strange aeons video about this where she goes through all of them, as well as all the funny shit that happened on the tour.
the vibe of this reunion was very much 'let's have as much fucking fun as possible.'
it was. it was fun. and it was fun enough that they took all the money they earned from these massive reunion shows, put their heads together, and said let's fucking do it again.
PRESENT DAY: THE GLORIOUS NATION OF DRAAG
randomly one day in november 2024, MCR announces A FUCKING STADIUM TOUR, appropriately named "long live the black parade"
curiously, the theming of this tour looks decidedly... not black paradey.
the strange, not-quite-russian lettering is a fucking conlang unique to this era. it starts showing up in all the various promotional videos they release.
"It has been seventeen years since The Black Parade was sent to the MOAT. In that time, a great Dictator has risen to power, bringing about "THE CONCRETE AGE”; a glorious time of stability and abundance in the history of DRAAG. His Grand Immortal Dictator wishes to celebrate our rich and storied culture, fine foods, and musical entertainments by welcoming you to these great demonstrations of power and resolve. And lending voice and song for the first time in six thousand two hundred and forty six days, their work privilege ceremoniously reinstated, will be His Grand Immortal Dictator's National Band... The Black Parade. Long Live Draag"
here in the nation of Draag, the Grand Immortal Dictator has revived The Black Parade from the dead, forcing them to play their album in its entirety, wear their silly little outfits, play their silly little nostalgia anthems.
all the while, intending to use them as a mouthpiece for his pro-war, oppressive propaganda.
the stadium show is HIGH THEATRICS. only one venue knows the storyline of it so far!
LUCKILY FOR YOU I WAS THERE!!!!!!!!!!!!!
last night, me and 30 thousand other emos watched as the black parade danced for us, corpses reanimated. gerard shambled and slurred his way across the stage, all the while being watched like a hawk by an imposing government agent who handed him documents and told him what to say and do.
every audience member was given a sign that said yea or nay. at one point, we were asked to vote on if we should allow 4 new elected officials into the government.
the audience overwhelmingly voted yes. gerard commanded their execution, and they were shot on the b stage in front of us, their corpses dragged off by the MOAT.
throughout the setlist, the band begin to fight back. gerard resists the government in increasingly big ways, refusing to be their zombified mouthpiece. when this reaches a head, they pull the band off the jumbotron and start playing quiz shows and ads for groceries.
during mama, the curtain pulls back to reveal military tracking & specs. blueprints for a missile launch. the whole stage flashes red and begins to burn. new lyrics are added, and gerard presents the imposing suit man with a dagger.
during disenchanted--which had not been played live in 17 years--the stadium was bathed in a sea of blue light from fans taping paper to their phone flashlights in tribute to the underloved song. all the while, a Draag politician speaks of duty and justice and obligation to one's country.
we're taken to a launch station in the middle of a wheat field. as famous last words is playing, we watch the missile be fired.
the carnage that ensues is the sole background to a lone acoustic guitar that's been on stage the whole night, untouched. ray comes out and begins to play it, and it's hard to tell what it is at first until the rest of the band joins in--
an acoustic version of The End. the first track on the album, which we have already heard. it is a funeral procession, and gerard understandably always sings it bombastically and high-energy to welcome the audience. this time, his cadence is mournful and slow, desperate and wailing.
the show begins anew. we listen to the same song, once more.
the suit man has, for reasons unbeknownst to me, changed into a pierrot-looking clown costume. sensing resistance, he gives chase to gerard, who at this point in the song is singing the lyrics SAVE ME! GET ME THE HELL OUT OF HERE!
all the while, there has been a chalk outline ominously carved out in the middle of the stage.
the clown and gerard fight. the dagger from before stabs gerard, punishing him for his insolence. bleeding out on hands and knees, he drags himself to the chalk outline, singing lyrics to another song--we'll carry on. We'll carry on.
he collapses into place, freed of the dictator's control, allowed to finally rest. the rest of the band members are dragged offstage by uniformed men. subversively, mikey--who has thus far been the kenny mccormick of MCR lore--escapes. ray is dragged off, shredding wildly the whole time. he refuses to stop playing until he cannot any longer.
the clown dances around to Blood, which is a hidden track that was at the end of the black parade. it is a perfect fucking song for a clown to dance to, especially when that clown is covered in the blood of the guy he just murdered. at the end of the song, he rips his shirt open to reveal a bomb strapped to his chest, and kills himself in a satisfying blaze of glory.
all the while, that same confetti from the original black parade tour is falling down around us all.
when i saw the black parade tour in 2007, i cannot explain how i knew this, but i had this feeling... they're holding back.
my father said to me that night, commit to memory everything you just saw here. you will never see anything like that again.
my dad was fucking wrong.
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