#so sick of all these poser bitches like. cool i guess that being eMo or ScEnE is accepted now but i did not get bullied for years on end

[takaokas]

-_-

[horce-divorce]

I saw someone bitching about how "kids who listened to MCR and claimed to be emo were fucking posers," in the year of our lord 2020!!!!! and honestly I'm pissed!!!! I'm not here for that any more than I'm here for gatekeeping lgbtqia2s labels, I don't ACTUALLY want to go off on all the ways that's fucking wrong because there's too many to goddamn list but here we go I guess

**cw for homophobic slurs & discussions of mental health/addiction/ableism**

first and foremost tho if you got the shit kicked out of you for being emo/gay BECAUSE you listened to MCR, guess what.... I don't care that "actually they're pop punk" that's not what I'm fucking talking about, asshole???? This is exactly like the "X group can't reclaim queer/fag/dyke :/" No emo is absolutely not a slur lmfao but it IS a label that gets applied unwillingly to people and it DID get applied to us for the sake of hurting us. Think about nonbinary/trans fags and dykes who readily admit that maybe it's not the most PRECISE label, but it still fits like a glove by now; reclamation of those terms MEANS SOMETHING, it's not just arbitrarily choosing a fancy cute aesthetic, and I refuse to believe that you can tell someone's done that by judging ONE thing about them- whether that be "you can't be a dyke bc ur bi" or "you can't be a true emo bc I like mcr." both are false :)

emo at one point did have a specific meaning, sure, but that had already ceased to be clear by the early 2000s so WHY we are still complaining about the ambiguity of the term 20 years later is BEYOND ME.

guess what a lot of us actually experienced early-aughts emo in different ways because where you live and who you are and your community changes EVERYTHING about that situation!!!! even back then there were the True Emos and goths who wanted to kick the shit out of babygay emos like us, scene kids who hated us because they Weren't Emo but got lumped in w us anyway (as if that have them a bad name somehow), and then the normies and preps who hated us all regardless!!! We couldn't fucking win no matter what we did!!! we were dumb weirdoes who liked DND, black nail polish, AND maybe we wanted to suck dick, so what!!!! EVERYONE hated us and THAT'S EXACTLY what made us emo!!!! Either we were emo for how gross we were or we weren't emo enough to be good enough for the real emos. Fuck everybody!! Fine!!! Im a fuckign gayass emo!!! Fuck you!!!!

Being labeled emo in 2004/5 in the rural midwest communities I grew up in has been very similar to being bisexual or trans or anything else "in between" in these places, ACTUALLY. (Again, no, it's not a slur lmao. I said SIMILAR.) At least in queer spaces this ambiguity and the VERY purpose of labeling YOURSELF is not lost on most people. Evidently it is still massively lost on cishet emos, though.

I'm not mad at MCR for "talking shit" about emo BECAUSE EVERYONE FUCKING DID THAT. we did that to ourselves just as much as we talked shit about ourselves for being gay, until we came out and were like actually, yes, yes homo. There was enough crossover with MCR and "real" emo bands, and MCR fans/new emos and the existing emo community, that the fact that so many of us found solace in the middle of that venn diagram WAS A COOL THING. It wasn't ever ABOUT who was a REAL TRUE EMO and who was a poser?! The whole point, for us, was rallying against anyone who thought being OURSELVES meant we were being fucking posers. We weren't. We didn't actually ask to be labeled emo initially! We fucking didn't! We were just dumbasses who would wear vampire fangs to school and pour fake blood on ourselves to sick out our normie classmates cus WE liked that shit and we DID NOT CARE for ANYones approval, and MCR was one of those things!!! but it became clear after a while that NO ONE ELSE CARED ABOUT THAT DISTINCTION, and we were gonna get shit for being emo whether we ACTUALLY WERE OR NOT.

I actually agree, what we were doing was WAY more punk in it's own right than anything else. But it wasn't punk exactly, either (some of my friends were as close to punk as this town was gonna see, but at my 2nd high school the punks didn't want the emo kids, either). This was 2004 and it wasn't the 80s/90s brand of emo and it wasn't goth and it wasn't scene. It was dark and gritty and honest and brutal and romantic and a lot of it was very very gay. It had less to do with fitting a mold or a style and more to do with what allowed us to be true to ourselves. So much of it was a refuge to those of us who were hurt and oppressed and traumatized, people who desperately needed communities to talk about our struggles so we could survive.

This SAME GUY talks about what a welcoming space for mental health and lgbt kids emo has been, but then will turn around and berate people for being posers bc we liked MCR. (Also, this dude like, loves Kill Hannah and wears makeup and shit- don't get me wrong I'm all for that- it's just that's PRECISELY the shit that the Classic Emos fucking hated us for and said MADE US POSERS. It's LAUGHABLE, the hypocrisy. shit changes, my dude. words evolve! they can mean two things at once!! He is my age- by the time he was discovering what he considers to be REAL emo, I know, I know for a fact because I WAS THERE, no one thought that was real emo at the time. Fucking no one. No one!!!!! Maybe preps who didn't care either way. He can pass it off as fact on tiktok now bc it's been 20 years but I PROMISE you, even if he experienced pure emo acceptance wherever the fuck he lived, that was NOT reality for most of us who chose to dress like that, and nobody could agree if Kill Hannah was "real" emo either.)

Even 15 years ago when I was young and emo was starting to gain popularity, it had already begun to embody a much bigger umbrella and imply many different subsets of style and music related community that were bound by similar ideologies and similar styles, not by anything definitive. And this MATTERS TO ME as a trans bisexual queer man because emo as I knew it was the first refuge that allowed me to be any of those things!!!! and emo as I knew it involved mcr heavily whether elitists who bitterly miss their Myspace fame are ok with that or not!! Dude can be mad, but it doesn't change the reality so many of us lived!!! For me and many of my friends our lgbt identities are inextricably linked with our experiences being labeled as emo, whether we chose it ourselves, or not, or both. And for many of us those formative experiences had a hell of a lot to do with MCR, too.

Also, I'm not gonna sit here and hear trash talk about MCR puking on thier fans like we weren't the same kids wearing "PUKE ON ME" shirts to The Used (who came w the exact same stigma and bullying despite also being Not Emo). Gerard was incredibly sick during that period and he's never shied away about how bad it was and how much work he had to do to get out of that. He was not proud of it. They never glorified it or wrote it off. It wasn't puking on kids for the sake of being gross like Bert McCracken. It wasn't partying. It was not part of the culture. He was deathly ill with his addiction and being open about that is something that has saved other people's lives by encouraging them to believe they can get help, too!!! To dismiss everything they've done for the mental health of their fans by talking about puking on them reeks of ableism to me tbh and it's not like the rest of this little rant helped that case. (Stigma against addiction is ableism and as a disabled person I will fight you to the fucking death for it. You can't laud emo as a safe space for mental health and then turn around and talk shit about someone's fucking horrific struggle with addiction. For fucking shame.)

I think what is or is not "really" emo is actually an interesting discussion in terms of how the music genre spurned all these subgenres and aesthetic styles and what diverged from there. Historically, THAT discussion has value. I just think it's utterly silly to try and argue that it's not an umbrella term at this point in history. And I do not think it holds ANY fucking value, to anyone, anywhere, to point fingers among fans of different bands and styles of dress in the same fucking neighborhood and play high horse about who's a poser and who isn't. fuck's sake, this dude is almost 30. I liked his other content (he's on witchtok and talks abt the intersection of his style vs his practice, which I love!) but I am so not fucking cool with grown ass adults my age continuing the same petty infighting we engaged in when we were 15. that's bullshit my dude

tldr: don't listen to washed up emos on tiktok, you're not a poser for liking mcr or any other individual band, and I'll meet any motherfucker who disagrees in the alley