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sigynpenniman · 1 year ago

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WHAT IF ALL OF THE FEMALE TOUR CHARACTERS ARE ACTUALLY STAGES IN THE LIFE OF ONE WOMAN?

Disclaimer: I'm not 100% sure I'm the first person to have this theory/idea. We stand on the shoulders of giants etc

So, I've been getting really into the various tour date anniversaries, and it's brought something to the front of my mind that wasn't before: the order the outfits appeared in, and the fact that most of the outfits are roughly in historical order, for the vintage style of each garment.

Acknowledgements about possible issues with this theory at the bottom.

There's a segment in Shakespeare's As You Like It which goes through the seven ages of man. As listed in the play, these are: the infant, the schoolboy, the lover, the solider, the justice, old age, and eventual oblivion. So, what if Gerard's outfits are the ages of woman? Cheerleader > nurse > lady/wife > office worker > eventual oblivion. Nashville > Detroit > Riot > Firefly > Ring of Fire.

I'm allowing a bit of wiggle room for slight anachronism in the styles of the various dresses as I think Gerard and Marina were more concerned with the overall look & impression of the outfits than with being 100% historically sound.

So, let's take just the dresses (and Alpharetta), and go through - in the order these outfits appeared on the tour.

The Cheerleader

Let's imagine a woman born around ~1945. Maybe 1944 or 1946. She'd be 16 in ~1960. And she's a cheerleader!

The Nurse

She gets a bit older, and becomes a nurse. Nurses in the 50s and 60s tended to be young and unmarried. Our hypothetical woman would be 24 in 1968.

This is just about right for our Prettiest Nurse In The Whole World - the dress pre-dates the shift for nurse attire from dresses to scrubs, but could easily be a later 60s silhouette (straighter, slimmer fit compared to the "new look" fluffier skirts of the 50s and earlier 60s).

The Lady/ The Wife

I think this both overlaps with and leads into Riot. This is her when she's off duty.

This is very easily a late 60s look. It was also common in the 50s and 60s for women to quit working upon getting married, or even be forced from their jobs upon getting married. There were parts of the world even where nurses were not allowed to be married. Perhaps Riot is not only the nurse off duty, but also a transitional outfit, symbolizing who she's becoming, as she ages into the next phase of her life - the wife. Maybe she has kids, even, in this space. And then...falls off the radar a bit. Perhaps the fact that we lose track of her for a bit in the "timeline" is in itself relevant.

The Office Worker

The office worker takes us through multiple outfits, and a pivotal point in history. Through the late 60s and 70s, it became increasingly acceptable and common for women with children to re-enter the workforce. So, we assume she has kids, maybe, and when they're 6, 7, 8 - old enough to go to school - she goes back to work, perhaps in the mid 70s. You know what looks quite 70s?

Good old Alpharetta.

From here, I think, we follow her through her career. Firefly is sometimes called the teacher, but there's no particular reason to assume that. The only real evidence is Gerard's joke "you get this at the end of class," and I don't know that they meant anything in particular by that. So what if Firefly isn't a teacher, but just a further evolution of office worker?

This could easily be a very late 70s or early 80s office worker fit. Our hypothetical woman would be in her 30s at this point, which feels quite right for this look. Which takes us toooooo Auckland.

This still feels quite 70s, actually. There was obviously quite a bit of shifting and minor changes to what we call the Dead Secretary over the course of ring of fire, but if you assume you're looking at an office worker's wardrobe from the late 70s onwards (and we accept that Brisbane 2 was just for the sex appeal), it all follows fairly smoothly. And so we move on to

Eventual Oblivion

When the Dead Secretary Dies.

If we assume that the prevailing theory that the character from Ring of Fire is implied to have died on 9/11 is correct, that puts this fit in 2001, and makes our hypothetical woman 55ish years old. It's hard to think of 2001 as vintage, but it is to some extent - and the skirtsuit here is actually a bit more 2001 than it is modern, with its shoulderpads and pantyhose. This is very much what a 55 year old woman with a closet slightly out of date might have worn to an office job in 2001 (if we discount the gloves, which, Character Choice). I've seen it recently pointed out that the outfit changed and then stopped changing - and it DID! It stops changing when the contacts come out. The outfit stops changing when she dies.

Obviously, like I said, it's not perfect. I'm allowing some stylistic wiggle room with dates and clothing eras. But when you look at the feminine outfits overall, there's a striking order to them - they seem to be traveling forward in time, aesthetically, from the 50s to the 2000s, in a fairly consistent way.

But wait, what about -

Joan of Arc: I don't count Joan of Arc as part of any tour "canon," plot or concept. Joan of Arc is her own thing, we know Gerard loves Joan of Arc, she stands alone.

Houston - Houston is the one real non-canon/non-fitting dress here. Interestingly, it does actually fit nicely in the chronology of the outfits over the 20th century - the Manson girl fit would be late 60s/early 70s, which slots in just fine after Alpharetta. I'm not sure, though, if it makes sense as an event in the life of our hypothetical woman - she would have to be in her 30s at the time, and already have had a number of phases of her life, which seems doubtful for a Manson girl - but frankly, who knows. I do think, as much as I risk sounding like I'm disregarding things that don't prove my theory, it's important to remember this is Gerard we're dealing with, and while they most certainly have a concept or story they're working off of, they also will Do What Ye Will depending on the vibe of the moment. The whole Manson girl thing fits nicely into the overall theme of disparaged and victimized women, and fits well into the overall vibe, so I don't think its existence disproves the previous theory. Gerard very well may have just wanted to do a Manson Girl fit and thus he did - we may never know. Or maybe I'm completely wrong about everything I've said!

I don't know if this is what was intended to be the "story" of the tour but it sure does work nicely and I have to admit I am sort of obsessed with it now. It fits nicely, the chronology is fairly clean, and it feels like something Gerard is always trying to do - to tell a story.

#mcr #my chemical romance #gerard way #gerardposting #meta #long post #meta theory #swarm tour meta #idk y'all this might be crazy rambling. but i think i'm a genius #this is all the brain i have to spare for the week

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dirteater69 · 1 year ago

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i watched wendigoons analysis of no country for old men earlier today and it got me thinking of themes in stories reflected through characters, and i started thinking about the themes of the killjoys fic im currently writing and how they reflect through the characters, so im gonna write some of it down now before i forget. im only on the third chapter and there will be at least ten when im finished, but this is based on what i have written and planned currently so i hope it makes sense. the main themes are pretty vague in my mind, but im thinking it will be along the lines of how real people shape themselves into characters+how real events are mythologized, how ideologies and hopes affect people, heroism and villainy, how committing and experiencing violence changes someone, what normalcy means, clinging onto or rejecting social norms in times where they have kind of lost all meaning.

in this post i will mainly write about how these themes reflect in the characters of jet star and party poison (at least how i write them) and their relationship and thoughts about each other.

party wants to be the hero and shapes themselves into that character: they are the leader of the killjoys, they are very charismatic and a good fighter, later on they become an important figure in zones society in the wake of the analog wars and lead many battles. they end up being seen as a hero by many and their actions in battles and other things about them are talked about around the zones as myths or folktales.

the thing is, deep down, party does not see themself as a hero. they feel that they have something at their core — whether that’s queerness, inability to conform to other social rules, committing violence — that makes them unable to embody the ideal of a hero that they have in their head. they feel that because there is something ‘wrong’ with them, they don’t deserve to get the things they want. this manifests most obviously in the story in their romance with jet, where they think that they can never, or should never, be in a relationship with him because they would taint his (perceived by them) normalcy and moral purity with their wrongness and strangeness; however, this is only part of the fact that they dont believe themself deserving of a good life at all.

they are the first of the killjoys to ever kill someone: it happens when they are all escaping battery city, and party ends up accidentally killing one of the bl/ind guards chasing them down. though this action may have saved all their lives, party still feels immense shame and horror at having done it. the night after, their first night in the zones, they have a nightmare where they are eating the body of the man they killed, and jet appears to kill them in a way reminiscent of putting down a sick animal. at their core, party believes that they are a villain and a danger to the people around them.

of course, in the middle of a horrible war, the zones needs a hero. that is what party shapes themself into: a loud, confident, violent leader of the zonerunners to take down bl/ind once and for all. there’s a sort of split in party’s identity, where on the outside, they are the hero of the zones, but on the inside, they believe themself to be a morally corrupt fraud who is going to ruin everything good and beautiful they touch. combined, this makes for an absolute monster of a martyr complex: if they die for a good cause, then the world will both be better because the thing they’re fighting for (the freedom of the zones, the destruction of bl/ind) has succeeded, and because the evil that they bring into the world simply by existing is gone.

one other thing i want to touch on with party is how they deal with social norms. before beginning life in the zones they knew they were nonbinary but didn’t really have a safe way to express it besides going by they/them around kobra and later, when they met, the other killjoys, but when they enter the zones they begin to present more femininely. in the first chapter, party and ghoul (who is transmasc, and who i have a ton of other thoughts about) have a whole conversation about gender, which might be one of my favorite parts that ive written so far, and it ends with them swapping pieces of the school uniforms they had to wear at the school in battery city, with party wearing ghouls skirt and ghoul wearing their pants. i haven’t written any more in that vein yet, but i want to explore party’s gender more in the fic. they are definitely very open to rejecting gender norms, at least when they have the opportunity, and it’s an extremely joyful experience for them to present the way they want, but it still sort of claws at them. to them, gender nonconformity doesn’t fit with that idea of heroism that they have. when they present more femininely, they almost feel like they’re betraying the people in the zones that believe in them, like they’re ruining the hero.

this is where we get to their perception of jet star. i mentioned earlier how they feel like he’s too good for them to pursue him romantically, but there is so much more to that. to party, jet is the ideal of heroism that they feel they should be; more so, he represents the ideal of american masculinity that they betray when they present femininely. they piece together true and half-true things about him to create a version of him in their mind that they can compare themself to, furthering their idea of themself as a villain. when they decorate the masks and ray guns of all the killjoys, they make jets red, white, and blue. this idolization also ties into the shame that they feel about the violence that they commit. there is of course the nightmare they have of him killing them for having killed the bl/ind guard, but there is also the fact that while they are a very active fighter in the analog wars, jet mainly works in the medical tents. they destroy things, he fixes things. (never mind the fact that the destruction they commit is against bl/ind) this idolized idea of jet eventually ends up clashing with the real him in a scene late in the fic, where they have a whole breakdown at him about how bad of a person they are, including how they’ve ‘ruined’ him by simply being his friend. he doesn’t have a clue what they’re talking about.

but what is actually going through jet stars head throughout all of this? well, while party is eager to show themself as a hero, jet tries to portray himself as the ‘everyman’, the regular person in a world of chaos and absurdity. this is how he’s been coping with the trauma he’s experienced at the hands of bl/ind: he is sent away from his family’s farm in zone 8 to a ‘reformation academy’ in battery city, and ends up staying there for several years before escaping with the other killjoys, but throughout those years he thinks of it as something fleeting and temporary; surely, he’ll get back to zone 8 soon, to return to his normal life. he’s not actually some kind of crazed desert rebel like the rest of the killjoys, he’s just a regular american farm boy who’s been thrust into a strange situation by forces beyond his control, and as soon as he gets the opportunity he’ll return to that life. even when beginning life in the inner zones, surrounded by the stranger aspects of zone culture, this is how he thinks and portrays himself to others — or, at least, tries to. it’s related to how he deals with trauma. while party thinks of the bad things that they’ve been through as yet another thing that makes them wrong and unfit, yet another thing that makes them the villain, they at least acknowledge that it’s happened. jet just tries to suppress those thoughts completely.

however, his entire idea of returning to a normal life in zone 8 falls apart once he sees what’s happened to it. when he travels to zone 8 for the first time in years, it’s entirely under the control of bl/ind, unrecognizable from the wholesome farm society he remembers. his plans for a normal life — and, furthermore, his thoughts of himself as a normal person — begin to fall apart when he sees the place representative of his old life destroyed. party is with him in that scene, and though he has to break through all his layers of emotional repression for it and it makes him almost feel physically sick, he manages to explain some of his issues to them. one of the things they say in response is something that will be very relevant to both their character arcs: “normal isn’t a thing anymore”.

jet is soon embroiled in the chaos of the analog wars along with the other killjoys, but he still clings to some ideas of normalcy. whereas party is an avid fighter, jet stays out of battles until it is absolutely necessary for him to join, instead helping out in the medical tents and administering first aid on the battlefield. though he isn’t explicit about it, he does kind of look down on the zonerunners most active in the fighting, especially the ones that don’t show any shame or remorse about the violence they commit and sometimes even delight in it (cough cough, a certain bomb-building thrill-chasing black-haired city-born adrenaline junkie with no regard for social niceties, mayhaps?).

of course, the main exception for this is party poison, because love makes you ever the hypocrite — and it is love that he feels for them, though he doesn’t realize it, and certainly wouldn’t admit it for the majority of the story. party falls for his front of the normal, well-adjusted american farm boy, and he falls for their charismatic hero persona in turn. while he does help people in his role as a medic, and sees it as far more preferable to shooting peoples brains out with a blaster, bl/ind goons or not, he finds his unwillingness to fight kind of cowardly. this ties into many other things he believes about himself, like shame about not having fought back against bl/ind when they were taking over zone 8 and he still lived there, as well as the idea that he can’t truly be useful to his community. the latter relates heavily to his issues with normalcy and his own identity: he’s spent so much effort on trying to make himself as palatable as possible that he’s almost cheated himself out of an identity, trying to appear normal to the point where he feels like he doesn’t have any real good traits or talents left. party is the opposite of all of this for him. they are loud and unapologetic about who they are (or, who they want people to think they are), they don’t have any qualms about doing what they have to in order to save the world, they are the ideal of a true zonerunner and hero.

circling back to jet, the thing about him is that he is not as normal as he tries to make himself seem. throughout the story, he slowly gets more comfortable showing small, strange parts of himself to the people around him. he seems to have taken party’s words to heart, at least partially: normal isn’t a thing anymore. it’s only small things, he still deals with some heavy repression of trauma and trouble facing a lot of his own feeling and desires, but its a start. he has his own quirks and absurdities, his own traits that make him a unique and fucked up person. i don’t have every part of those developments planned out, but i know that at least some of it will be in relation to gender, like growing his hair out and presenting more femininely in other ways. he would have a lot more inhibitions to let go off before really being able to face his thoughts about his own gender than party would, just due to the environment and pressures he’s been raised with. (a full exploration of jet’s gender would not really fit in this fic just with the story outline I have planned, but i might write a continuation that goes more into detail. my hc for jet’s gender in the music video era is a he/she transfem, though this fic takes place many years before that and jet still thinks of herself as a cis guy for most of it.) the point being, jet is not actually the one of the killjoys who is the most normal; he is just the one who’s the best at pretending to be.

when jet and party actually acknowledge their feelings for each other, they both have to break down a lot of emotional barriers to do so, and it’s a large part of them beginning to reject the characters they’ve resigned themselves to. party has to realize that they are not an inherently horrible person and that they do deserve to live a good life, that jet is not an untouchable object that they’ll ruin by being close to. jet has to accept that he’s allowed to love someone he’s been taught he’s not allowed to love, that just because he’s in a relationship unlike the ones he’s ‘supposed’ to want doesn’t make it any less real. it heavily involves them letting each other off the pedestals they’ve put each other on, and loving the real person underneath the persona. that is actually an interesting thing that is true for both of them: while they fixate on the fronts that the other puts up, it’s the real person underneath that they fall in love with. jet idolizes the heroic leader that party tries to be, but falls in love with their kindness and vulnerabilities. party envies jets projected normality and righteousness, they fall in love with the strange quirks that make him who he is.

their emotional journeys won’t have full resolutions in this fic, but if i finish it i will probably write a continuation in which the analog wars have ended and there is more focus on the characters emotional development. it would show more of that theme of them letting go of the roles they’ve placed themselves in: party realizing that they don’t need to act a specific way or have a certain personality to be a hero, they just need to help people; jet letting go of his attachment to normalcy. they don’t need to be perfect heroes, they don’t need to follow specific norms or rules. they just need to be who they are, and that’s some fucked up kids stuck in a fucked up situation just trying to make the best of it.

of course, even with those emotional issues resolved, they still struggle. I mentioned at the beginning the theme of real events being turned into myths, and that would certainly be relevant to the killjoys, especially to party. during the analog wars, the image of party poison as a hero and leader of the zones spread quick and they were mythologized into an almost godlike figure. (this is true for the other killjoys as well, but not to such an extent.) this image comes to haunt them even when the wars have ended: wherever they go, they are expected to live up to this idea of themself that they have long since let go of and never even really fit in the first place. the mythologizing is to the point where certain people who preach about the figures of party poison and the killjoys don’t even know what they actually look like.

there is also the fact that while the analog wars have technically ended, there are still attacks occasionally made by bl/ind, and the killjoys have to defend themselves with violence whether they like it or not. the ‘end’ of the analog wars also brings along some other questions about the themes: how do the killjoys deal with the absurdity of their lives when they can no longer blame it on existing in an active war zone? how do they rebuild their lives after all that non-stop violence? again, this is if i finish the fic im currently writing.

im not sure how to end this post but it’s been fun to write and i hope other people might enjoy reading it. i might write a similar one about how the same themes reflect in fun ghoul and kobra kid, but i dont know.

#read my meta analysis of my unfinished unposted fic boy #danger days #mcr danger days #party poison #jet star #danger days the true lives of the fabulous killjoys #ttlotfk

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