it's still very odd for me to see fans talking about wanting new content and getting bored because for me that was never the culture. maybe it's a different story for fans who were here before they broke up. but personally, i've only ever known mcr as being... ours+

in a sense.

i got into mcr in, mustve been 2014 or 15? i was around twelve. by that point theyd moved on to solo projects, and we ('we' meaning the fans at that point) had pretty much accepted that they probably weren't coming back. they'd said as much, we respected that.+

but mcr was still alive. to borrow gerard's words, "mcr is done, but it will never die. it is alive in me, in the guys, and in all of you. because it is not a band, it is an idea."

at the time i was too inexperienced, or perhaps just too young, to really understand what that+

meant. more often than not we made jokes about it, you know, "cries in idea" type stuff. ironically, we were only proving his point.

mcr was done. that much was obvious. but it didn't die. we never let it.

we kept it alive by listening to their songs and feeling heard in the+

lyrics. we kept it alive by making jokes and laughing amongst ourselves. we kept it alive by using it as inspiration for our own art, our own writing, our own music.

the members of the band itself had moved on. so why did the fanbase remain? why did kids continue to find them+

and become fans? why is it that, at the shrine show, when gerard asked how many people were at their first mcr show, /so many hands/ went up?

because in the aftermath of the breakup, we took over.

mcr was disbanded, that much was true. but they meant something, and that didnt+

disappear just because they decided to go in separate directions. that meaning was still there. and we still needed that meaning, or maybe we had needed it in the past and knew we may need it again, or maybe we just knew that other people were going to need it sooner or later.+

so we, the fans, took over. we drew, we sang, we wrote, we talked, we listened. just like gerard said, we kept mcr alive in all of us.

the members had given up the torch, and we picked it up. mcr didn't die, but it was ours now. the most new content we ever really got wasnt+

even new, really, it was just things from the old days that we hadnt seen yet. all the new content came from us, for us. we made mcr zines, covers, drawings, song analyses, patches, just about everything you can think of.

we didn't create mcr, but it had been handed over to us.+

we were, in a sense, my chemical romance.

which is what gerard meant all along, when he said "it's not a band. it is an idea."

and honestly, i'm still not quite used to the idea that mcr isn't just us anymore. i'm happy, obviously, that the members are rejoining us - they were+

the start of all this, we wouldnt be here without them.

so that, i think, is why it's strange to me to see people wanting new content. not that wanting new content is a bad thing! i just havent fully adjusted yet to the fact that it isn't just us making the content anymore.+

we, to borrow gerard's words again, are not in this alone.

not anymore.