#but looking back on it. its meaningless. youre not saying anything revolutionary about womanhood

[apuff]

Earlier on tumblr i saw another one of those memes comparing bullets, revenge, tbp, and danger days, essentially stating that the previous 3 are serious and about death in different ways, while danger days is fun japanese dance party. Now i understand where this is coming from but i really don't think it's an accurate interpretation.

My main point with this is that the first 3 are legitimately concerned with death as an existential threat and a primary way through which the conflict of the story happens, and danger days is NOT those things, however danger days is no less serious and philosophically motivated, and has a comparable amount of death. 

In bullets & revenge, it's easy to see. The demo lovers are constantly up against danger, violence, and fighting. Furthermore i feel like the major conflict of bullets is with the vampires & vampirism, which relates to the concept of death in an obvious way. They fight as hard as they can against the vampires, but eventually fail, joining their ranks. They achieve "immortality" but not at the cost of "never dying"- i interpret this to mean they don't age or experience senescence (cause they're undead obv) but they can indeed die through external means (which they proceed to do). 

Revenge is centered around death as well. Demo lover (M) has died and has come back to life at some point, as well as that his girlfriend has died and is dead throughout most of the story. To solve this "dead gf" issue, demo lover (M) engages with death and violence even more, by killing 1,000 evil men. 

(Off topic, but this brings me to a point i've thought about before, that the "revenge" in tcfs"r" is not actually revenge. It's redemption. The biblical kind. Paying for something, especially a person's life held hostage, with a price, usually the price of another life. As far as i'm aware those 1k evil men did not personally slight the demo lovers-that would constitute literal revenge.)

Anyways, what i think is the canon interpretation of the ending is that demo lover (M) realizes after killing 999 evil men, that he's so far debased himself for his ends that he has become the last evil man he must kill, so he commits suicide and his girlfriend comes back. This is a bit depressing, but my ending has him staying alive and his girlfriend dying, so any way you slice it someone stays dead. 

My point is to say, obviously the theme of death, undeath, and killing is philosophically important to tcfsr. The demo lovers are literally dead on the album cover. 

Now I'm sure i don't need to explain why TBP is about death. TBP starts with death ends with death and is about it on nearly every point in the middle barring, like, teenagers and the sharpest lives??

The one interesting thing i DO have to add is this. In bullets & revenge, the conflict centers around death in the way that in nearly every song, they're fighting AGAINST death in some way. They are trying desperately to fight their way back to life and safety. TBP is different. Because it centers SOO heavily on mortality as a theme, death is simply the backdrop, the given, the immutable fact of life. Our main characters aren't dead and supernaturally trying to fight their way back to life, they are a.) going to die as a forgone conclusion, and b.) already a ghost with zero ways to return to life. The conflict centers not around trying to beat death back with knives, but DEALING with its reality, not with it itself, but different perspectives on it and what it means battling it out. 

Regardless, very much about death.

What about danger days?

You'd be correct to say that, unlike those 3, death & mortality aren't a central philosophical pillar of the themes & conflict. It's not even top 5 ngl. I'd say the conflict is more of freedom vs. control. The forces of control (BLI) and of freedom (killjoys) are literally and metaphorically battling each other. But i wouldn't say that every song exactly has this conflict. Some only show the side of killjoy freedom and make no mention of bli control. And i think that's where this misconception that danger days is just fun and not serious comes from. 

In the black parade, when you'd have a song that doesn't directly touch on the conflict and is just a fun bombastic rock song (teenagers), there's still a bit of themes in it (violence- it's related to the patient's and parader's arcs). When you'd have an off-topic song in revenge, it'd be about teen angst (a far cry from murder, killing, and satan). In bullets, the off-topic is about gerard way and 9/11 which is so far from vampires i don't even need to explain. 

When a bombastic party song like those appears in danger days, it actually relates to the themes much more closely. Think of party poison, the origin of the misconception in that meme. It's about having a crazy wild self destructive party. Relates back to the themes quite closely, considering that "kill[ing] the party" and "leav[ing] the party" are also actually metaphors for BLI and society in planetary (GO!). 

Not to mention the japanese lyrics (iirc) are about wanting to be famous, another theme that fits into vampire money and even BLI to some extent. And the fact that it's such a wild party that ends in destruction kinda fits into a thought i've had about danger days earlier: since the killjoys represent individuality and freedom, everything they do exists on this spectrum from being just very principled activists to kind of just unhinged rebels without a cause killing whoever they want because of the adrenaline rush. 

My other gripe with this idea is like…….ALL THE FAB FOUR DIE AT THE END. all of them get shot rescuing the girl. Danger days isn't ABOUT death, but it HAPPENS. In the only hope for me is you, the speaker says, "there, covered in glass, covered in ash, covered in all my friends- i still think of the bombs they built." That's not just some vapid party. This character is mourning their friends while recalling the memory of being covered in the viscera of their bodies. It's kind of silly to act like this album isn't serious just because it sounds more poppy. 

I'd say something that's much more threatening than bodily death for the killjoys is draculoid-ification. Becoming a vampire in bullets means losing your human ability to age and weird undead behavior changes, but becoming a draculoid is more similar to a zombie, or a robot. Anyways, THIS is an existential threat for a killjoy. They lose their souls and simply become mindless puppets for BLI to enact control and violence upon people. Note that this is simply an exaggerated version of how BLI treats PEOPLE, as identical parts of a machine that need to have their individuality and souls erased so they can be better citizens. 

Anyways, rant over. I love danger days & it truly has deep philosophical currents throughout it. The fact that they have crazy dance parties is simply a reflection of the theme of freedom and isn't devoid of meaning.

I NEED TO DO MY MATH BUT I CANT STOP WRITIGN ABOUT MCR