The year: 2014. I was a young tweenager browsing the shelves of my middle school library and found myself in the magazine section. I noticed a magazine about music that caught my eye because it had the characteristic orange hair of Hayley Williams on the cover. At that time I was familiar with Paramore because their song Decode had sort of randomly always been in my iTunes library for as long as I could remember- in my memories it was free as some sort of promo for the Twilight movies, but I looked it up and couldn't seem to find any evidence of iTunes ever doing that. My dad must have purchased it after hearing it on the radio or something, because at the time I wasn't allowed to buy anything on iTunes, I had to ask my dad to buy any songs I wanted (this led to me utterly abusing YouTube to MP3 to try and avoid having to explain to my dad what songs I liked because for some reason that felt very mortifying).

I was obsessed with the song, and Hayley Williams by extension, so I picked up the magazine. Inside were articles all about pop punk bands. The aesthetic really drew me in- I had a friend whom I considered to be much cooler and more knowledgable about the world than me, and she had put me onto nightcore music and scene fashion, so, like, I knew what emo meant in an absract sense. But seeing those articles in that magazine intrigued me, so I checked the magazine out and searched up some of the bands on the YouTube app on my mom's iPod touch.

After Paramore, the next band I started to get into was Panic! at the Disco. I must have watched every single music video they had ever made, sitting there on the floor of my bedroom after school, and I was enthralled. After watching a music video, I would scroll through the suggested videos and search the "emo" tag on Tumblr. This led to me discovering Black Veil Brides, Sleeping With Sirens, and Pierce the Veil. I saw the music called a variety of things- screamo, emo, pop punk, post-hardcore, etc. A girl in my Girl Scout troop asked me if I liked the band Falling in Reverse and I admitted I had never heard of them, so she handed me an earbud and together we listened to the song I'm Not a Vampire during the Girl Scouts meeting haha. I started calling myself emo, looking up any and every band I happened to see a cool edit of on Tumblr or We Heart It.

Once I started calling myself emo, though, one band became truly inescapable. I couldn't scroll on Tumblr or Quotev for more than ten seconds without seeing their name come up- they were considered the originators, the leaders, of the emo/post-hardcore/pop punk genre as I had come to know it. Tragically, they had very recently broken up, but people on Tumblr seemed pretty convinced this was a short-term hiatus and they would be back making new music again some day. They were called My Chemical Romance, and their most popular album by far seemed to be The Black Parade. If I was going to go around my middle school calling myself emo, I would have to educate myself. I searched them up on YouTube and clicked on the first result, which was the Teenagers music video. BTW this is me being extremely vulnerable and admitting to you that Teenagers was the first My Chem song I ever listened to, and I knew who Falling in Reverse were before I knew who My Chemical Romance were. This is how you know my story is true though because why would anyone ever lie about themself just to make themself seem so uncool?

After that, I'd say the rest is history. I fell head-over-heels in love with their music. At this point, I wasn't super obsessed with the members themselves or the lore or anything like that. I purely liked them because I liked how their music sounded, the aesthetics of their music videos, and many of the lyrics really resonated with me. I listened to all four of their albums- actually I never listened to Bullets all the way through until more recently, sorry- but in those mid-2010s years I only ever got super duper obsessed with The Black Parade. And even still, I never cared to learn the lore or more about the plot or anything, I just really liked the music. Especially the song Famous Last Words. As I went into my teenage years, that song became extremely meaningful to me.

So yeah, I was more or less a "casual" My Chemical Romance fan between the years of 2014 to 2019. I was definitely not capable of being casual about my interests then (or now), but I wasn't a super obsessive fan that knew every single piece of trivia about every member. Honestly, at the time I didn't even know any of the members' names other than Gerard's. I liked their music and I would listen to it a lot, especially The Black Parade. But I honestly did not become an obsessive mega fan until 2019, when I sort of rediscovered The Black Parade in a new context and started listening to the album front to back on nearly a daily basis.

The catalyst for this new (old) (reinvigorated) obsession with The Black Parade specifically was my dad's cancer diagnosis. Listening to the album began to take on a whole new meaning and I gained such a deeper appreciation for the storyline and the lyrics. The story of the Patient grappling with life and death, facing down the fact that he is going to die, and questioning where his soul will end up and whether or not he made anything of his life was suddenly wayyy too real for me. After my dad's death, I listened to the song Cancer religiously. Gerard's vocals and the straightforward, desperate lyrics felt like they pierced right into my gut and flayed me open. It was so painful to listen to the song, but sort of painful in a good way. I listened to Cancer the morning of my dad's funeral, laying on my bedroom floor. I will never forget the way that moment felt.

In the fall of 2020, I moved out of my mom's house and into my freshman year college dorms! Unfortunately because of the pandemic, I had no roommate and most of my classes were online. And unfortunately for me, my dad had just died. So I spent most of that fall desperately depressed, all alone in a tiny dorm room with cinderblock walls and cold linoleum floors and flickering LED overhead lights from hell. One October evening, alone in my horrible, empty dorm room, I randomly decided to put The Black Parade on from start to finish. I had been a little scared to listen to the entire album again after my dad passed away, but it had been just over ten months since his death at this point and for some reason I was really feeling pulled to listen to it. I sat down on the floor, put my headphones on, and just listened to the entire album, from The End to Blood, while I folded my laundry. I did have to take one break- the song Disenchanted really came out of nowhere and pummeled me over the head with the lyric, "You're just a sad song with nothing to say about a lifelong wait for a hospital stay," and I had to take a break to dry heave and cry my eyes out about it. But other than that I listened uninterrupted. IDK if any other autistic people can relate to this, but sometimes you're consuming a piece of media and you just feel something sliding into place inside yourself and you're like oh, okay, this is going to be My Thing now. This has become Important To Me. That's what happened to me when I listened to the Black Parade in October of 2020.

And so, from that point on I guess I became an obsessive fan haha. My autism latched onto their albums like none other, analyzing the storylines and coming up with my own interpretations of the different plots. Here are some rapid-fire favorites of mine:
Song: Disenchanted
Album: The Black Parade
Music Video: The Ghost of You
Member: If I had to choose, my knee-jerk reaction is to say Frank (infer whatever you want to infer about me based on that)
Song To See Live: Sleep (which surprised me since it's not my favorite on the album by a long shot, but it was so so so good live)

My favorite song from each album (+ Conventional Weapons)