#been a while sinfe i wrote a massive fucking rant but here we go

[girlgerard]

i’ve been thinking a lot about gerard’s character they developed in the last leg of this tour and the way i believe it really solidified what we might have coming for us in the future.

it’s really sweet, if you look in the comments of some of the videos from brisbane and osaka, you can see people who’ve obviously been my chem fans for at least 15 years saying things like ‘i’ve watched every video from this tour and this is the first show where i really saw the spark come back’ and ‘that’s the gerard way i remember’ and other cheesy shit like that. and the thing is they’re totally right!

this whole tour developed more fluidly in intensity and meaning than in any of their previous gigs. mcr has always been a band to change with their time and creative drive, but this was a different type of transition to me. you could see as characters started to be built, from gerard DIY’ing his own costumes in europe to increasingly meaningful outfits with whole backstories in the USA all the way to one consistent character with a uniquely terrifying stage presence in the last leg.

that last character, at least to me, is totally gripping. she’s unexplained, she’s scary as hell, she’s near-undead, she has this commanding presence gerard hasn’t really done since early-mid black parade. in every single performance they’re so in-character and it’s such a BLAST

importantly, this character also showed up in the shortest, least-publicized part of the tour. imo she wasn’t meant for cameras, really.

to me it’s so clear that she’s a result of gerard earnestly solidifying where they might want their next artistic endeavors to go - that kind of serious direction, maybe even that character specifically.

he’s talked about how he always has stage characters that reflect his music and, broadly, things they’re working through in their life. the revenge stage character was a mix of both demo lovers which can have a ton of different interpretations, the patient was a joan-esque personification of grief and existentialism, party poison was a pop-art way of dealing with your own artistic/literal death. it makes me wonder why this character, the only truly consistent character this whole tour, came about, and if it’s related to gerard’s nightly diatribes on war and later-tour statements on (presumably) queer/trans rights.

it also makes me think that we have a lot coming in the future. a character that solid and a direction so suddenly bottlenecked into such a specific concept, such a mychemicalromance concept, especially out of a tour that was originally supposed to be a casual celebration of music, i think points towards something new.