My Chemical Romance, Fanfiction Subculture and the future of Gen Z

[Sneed IV]

My main introduction to the internet was back in 2014 through reading fanfiction of my favorite cartoons, shows and movies online, so that's the lense through which I started experiencing wider culture in the Western world outside of my own local/national perspective. Decided to vent a bit because it is through this subculture that I first saw a lot of the fucked up shit modern youth is getting up to and the things that worry me about my generation and our future problems.

I understand that the average fanfic reader doesn't perfectly map onto the average IRL teenager, but I still feel like the things I saw in my time reading online either maps onto or every closely parallells real issues youth are facing today.

Back in this age I was hanging out on AO3 a lot and my experience is exactly the same as what I imagine a lot of people feel like browsing Steam for gaming content: most of the media is either dogshit or just not really made for you and your personal interests, so you gotta put in the effort to find some diamonds in the garbage. In 2014 we were nearing the end of the old Goth/Emo culture and its influence on youth culture of the time, which had its peak in the 2000's, so you could still see lingering remnants of that zeitgeist all over the site and in the works posted. Still a whole lot of people unironically talking about songs like "Bring me to Life" and referencing MCR's Black Parade.

As an AO3 user I posted my own work and developed my skills as a writer through fanfiction. All the way through public education my teachers talked to me like I was a genius child destined to be the my generation's Dickens or something, but really, I was just above average because I practiced with creative writing a lot and actually got useful feedback from other users. Overall I'd still say I'm an above average writer, for as much as that's worth (not much), so I at least got something out of all the cringe and retardation I had to endure scouring for cool shit to read.

Anyway, the people posting these fanfics through these years were roughly my age, which means they're all about 20 now, which is insane to think about. So I've been thinking a lot about the disturbing trends I saw back then and how they affected these fellow zoomers of mine.

First, I have seen a lot of works about depression, suicide and self harm. They usually fall in a spectrum from cringeworthy tryhard edgelord-ism to actually concerning shit. Seems a lot of people my age have a very casual attitude towards injuring themselves, and feels a lot more concerning than the older millenial Emo thing about cutting your wrists. Maybe it's just me not living through that age personally but the way emos described cutting their wrists to "ease the pain", it just felt like nihilistic circlejerk faggotry. But when I used to read fanfiction with self harm - including the comments said works got - it always felt like these people took it a lot more personally. Talking about how they related to feeling trapped and filled with dread and pain in their personal lives and feeling like harming yourself was the only relief. Tangentially related, a very casual attitude towards suicide, and feeling of personal hopelessness.

Second, a lot of people my age seem to be very ragefilled and lacking in temperance. A lot of works revolve around the world being unfair and shitting on obvious self inserts (this relates a lot to the previous point - "The world hates me and I so do I"). Seems to me a lot of young people feel like not only they face hardship, but they face it specifically due to malicious intent. Usually they blame their parents/family, but the more ideologically minded blame groups of people like men, society at large and older generations at large. I don't think it's a controversial take to say Boomers and millenials did fuck up gen Z in a lot of ways, but we're not talking being shit at parenting like Milennials or destroying society with retarded policies like Boomers. We're talking about people who feel like their personal lives and failings are the fault of the world at large, that hate themselves for being born, hate the world for having them be born, and hate other people for allowing it to be so.

Third, there's an insane amount of paranoia, loneliness and lack of social trust. It's obvious kids writing the things I read had a lot of problems, but most of them also felt socially alienated and isolated. They talked often about not being able to trust their family or peers to be able to help them and support them through their issues - in case of the family because they just didn't understand it, and in case of their peers because they had very few of them, and those they did help were often complicit in their torment. It appears that young people today just have fewer functional relationships: fewer friends, fewer family members involved in their lives, and just overall fewer people they feel like they can rely on.

Fourth, everyhing I've said is immensely skewed towards girls. AO3 and the whole fanfiction space is probably one of the few major "niche" internet spaces that have a huge female following. From experience I'd say girls make for 2 in every 3 avid fanfiction readers/writers, maybe more. There's internet anonimity of course, but I've spoken to at least a few authors of these darker fanfics and none of them are male. Overall I'd say boys have a much more healthy relationship with the internet than girls do and navigate it with far less detriment to their mental health. I really do not envy being a girl in this day and age. This one gets me the most because out of all the things I've said here, this is the only part that's bled into my own personal life - none, not one girl from my high school that I still keep in contact with is mentally well at present. All of them suffer from at least one mental health problem, usually mild depression or anxiety.

All in all, I think young people today are dealing with a lot of issues regarding mental health/personal identity that older generations didn't have, at least not to this degree. I'm very firmly a Zoomer and I'm 22 now, so make no mistake: a lot of these kids are now politically active, and your ass is gonna have to share a planet with them. And one day they'll compromise the political leadership of your country. I see a lot of people talking about the cringe coming out of Gen Z - TikTok influencers, billion+ genders, etc - but not a lot of people talking about their struggles, so i figured I'd raise some awareness about just the things I've personally sensed.

 

[Esau]

The Black Parade is a really good album. Why would it be wrong to talk about it unironically?

 

[Sneed IV]

The Black Parade is a really good album. Why would it be wrong to talk about it unironically?

Just felt very old by internet standards. I think most people are under the Impression the early 2000's were more of a millenial space, which is largely true, since gen Z were mostly toddlers back then. But the whole Emo subculture persisted well into the 2010's and is also a Gen Z thing, which I think a lot of people don't realize.

Black Parade was released in 2006, and hearing young teens discuss it among themselves even as late as 2016 just gave me pause for thought. It's probably a bit because the social climate seems to move so fast now, but it's just easy to miss that Gerard Way's work is very influential even with zoomers, not just millenials. Even today, in Anno Domini 2022, Way's Umbrella Academy is very popular in the fanfiction space.

I don't think it's unfair to say Gerard Way is Gen Z's J.K. Rowling

 

[gang weeder]

Teenage girls are the most mentally unwell age + gender combo, generally speaking.

That said, I don't think it's anything new or shocking that Gen Z is fucked up, nor are the reasons why particularly difficult to identify. Total breakdown of social fabric do be like that.

 

[Syaoran Li]

The Black Parade is a really good album. Why would it be wrong to talk about it unironically?

Meh, I think if you're going to go for dark and angsty edgelord music then just go all the way and listen to some old-school goth music.

 

[Ultrapenguin]

If you're a guy reading and writing fan fiction, then you're certainly a little bit of a weirdo. That's definitely a chick thing.

Although speaking of gen Z stuff, multiple times now I've seen things that seem to suggest that folk your age assume millennials, despite mostly being a decade or less older in most cases, somehow view themselves as vastly different or look down on the Zs? That's a weird assumption.

I don't know what kids in their early-mid 20s expect a bunch of people in their late 20s and early 30s to do about the situation. Millennials aren't old enough to be your parents, they're old enough to be your older brothers or sisters; shit, I know for a fact a lot of younger millennials are still living with their parents.

Guys like Josh and similar clearly do their best, a lot of the opposition to stuff like the gender cult among millennials is specifically because it preys upon the kind of people you're talking about, but society has become so stagnant and centralized at this point that you either participate on their terms, or you don't participate at all.

The millennials you see that have a mind of their own are usually isolated and lack economic power and the ones you see who are economically successful are often so cowed from walking the line 60 hours a week that they don't have the will or energy to do anything of significance about the situation.

Point is if you're Gen Z at this point you're almost as well equipped to cope with/address the situation as millennials are, unless what you're looking for is moral support.

 

[SwanSwanson]

I remember being younger and disliked the "weakness is strength" culture there was. It was always prevalent and bothersome in more introverted peergroups. Now this ideology is running society.

 

[MadDisaster]

Meh, I think if you're going to go for dark and angsty edgelord music then just go all the way and listen to some old-school goth music.

There's room for both. MCR has its appeal, although I personally lean more towards the 70s/80s goth bands. It's easy to see that they took inspiration from them in some ways - The Damned and Dave Vanian, or The Cure and Robert Smith maybe more than Sisters of Mercy or Bauhaus. I don’t think Gerard Way could manage a convincing Andrew Eldritch even if he tried with someone else's vocal chords.

 

[Syaoran Li]

If you're a guy reading and writing fan fiction, then you're certainly a little bit of a weirdo. That's definitely a chick thing.

I initially rated you disagree because it honestly depends on what kind of fics we're talking about. If it's stuff like angst, "shipping", anything relating to bands or celebrities, or coffee shop AU's, then you are absolutely right. It's one of those things where it's context dependent.

Some guy who reads and writes angsty brooding romance fanfic is a weirdo, but a young guy who just reads and writes shit like "What if Chris Redfield and Solid Snake teamed up to fight Dracula" just for fun is a little more understandable, even if it is kind of spergy and cringe in its own right.

And you got guys like me who'll read fanfic just to laugh at the more ridiculously awful stuff.

I'll go into more detail but it's long-winded and spergy as fuck so I'll just spoiler it.

Spoiler: TL;DR sperging

The more guy-oriented fanfics tend to be more adventure-oriented stuff and your fan sequel-type stories, as well as the "What If Batman became a vampire?" type of fics, Alternate History, goofy parodies and comedies, or your "Dude, who would win in a fight between Chris Redfield and Solid Snake?" Death Battle sort of shit.

If a guy told me he liked to read or write any of the types of fics that I just mentioned and he wasn't a complete and total sperg about it, it honestly wouldn't be that big of a deal. Yeah, it's a bit cringe and a little spergy, but it's otherwise fairly benign and as long as it's kept in perspective and you know it's just for fun, then no harm no foul.

Fanfic tends to more of be a chick thing because so much of it is dominated by more female-oriented genres and subgenres as they get more attention and views and it becomes a self-perpetuating cycle.

IIRC, a lot of that is because the more female-oriented fanfics like the shipping or the angsty AU's tended to be what got published and circulated more often in fanzines back in the 70's and 80's, and as a result, more women got into the hobby and it just sort of stuck.

My own dumb spergy ramblings on fanfic aside, you are otherwise spot-on with the rest of your post.

There's room for both. MCR has its appeal, although I personally lean more towards the 70s/80s goth bands. It's easy to see that they took inspiration from them in some ways - The Damned and Dave Vanian, or The Cure and Robert Smith maybe more than Sisters of Mercy or Bauhaus. I don’t think Gerard Way could manage a convincing Andrew Eldritch even if he tried with someone else's vocal chords.

Oh, I agree completely in all honestly. I was just yanking the chain of @Uriah since I honestly find it a bit surprising that he'd be a fan of a band like MCR.

 

[Esau]

Oh, I agree completely in all honestly. I was just yanking the chain of @Uriah since I honestly find it a bit surprising that he'd be a fan of a band like MCR.

I became an MCR fan because of Wendigoon's old video about TBP, which you've might have seen already. Forgive my laity, I don't know much about music: I just found that MCR had what I expected from Sabaton

Usually I just listen to an assortment of well known foreign musicians (EX: Zemfria, Miki Mastsubara) and anime OSTs.

 

[Syaoran Li]

I became an MCR fan because of Wendigoon's old video about TBP, which you've might have seen already. Forgive my laity, I don't know much about music: I just found that MCR had what I expected from Sabaton

Usually I just listen to an assortment of well known foreign musicians (EX: Zemfria, Miki Mastsubara) and anime OSTs.

Hey, I don't know that much about music either. It's alright. I never got into MCR myself to begin with but I had friends who did. So I do remember when Black Parade came out and how popular it was for a while.

Oddly enough, I haven't seen that Wendigoon video yet.

 

[LinkinParkxNaruto[AMV]]

I don't want the world to see me. Cause i don't think that they'll undersand, when everything's meant to be broken i just want you ro know who i am

 

[Haim Arlosoroff]

First, I have seen a lot of works about depression, suicide and self harm. They usually fall in a spectrum from cringe-worthy try-hard edgelordism to actually concerning shit. Seems a lot of people my age have a very casual attitude towards injuring themselves, and feels a lot more concerning than the older millennial Emo thing about cutting your wrists. Maybe it's just me not living through that age personally but the way emos described cutting their wrists to "ease the pain", it just felt like nihilistic circlejerk faggotry. But when I used to read fan-fiction with self harm - including the comments said works got - it always felt like these people took it a lot more personally. Talking about how they related to feeling trapped and filled with dread and pain in their personal lives and feeling like harming yourself was the only relief. Tangentially related, a very casual attitude towards suicide, and feeling of personal hopelessness.

People know things are bad, they know things aren't fixable on the local or individual level because they're social-fraying or recession-based, but where can you find a group that primarily exists to help you manage individually and help you fix collectively? There isn't one, just beginner tracks for vast political machines with their own stuff to advocate like destroying the middle class or starting a race war. How are you supposed to ignore all that mess and just live a normal local life with a house/spouse and not let it affect you? These things show up in your living room like living directly across from a T junction at the end of a highway with poor signage. People just feel a terrible dread, they don't have much and they can't even protect that. You can't build anything up, or at least you feel you can't.

​

People have no hope today, things are getting more expensive and leftism is wholly conquered territory by Jeff Bezos Diversity-Destroys-Activism, Bill Gate's Microsoft National Broadcasting Company, or George Soros institutionalized civic decay. The Right-wing is hardly going to accept populism for much longer, Trump just rustled the base up, they rightly know the false Washington pretend divide works for elections and even Dim Fool and his new beanie-pop will show up to vote. So you cannot even pretend to belong there really because unless you have acquired enough stuff to feel defensive about it sooner rather than later you're going notice they're hardly picking fights to help the bottom 50%+ median wage-earner or below.

​

Women like to over-socialize because they're over-socialized, so long as they're sharing their feelings at each other then the catharsis of doing so will largely keep their rage in a cage. When they stop, that's when the problem really starts to take off. The problem being that people internalize that they're fucked up—especially women—rather than that the world is fucked up. People need to cultivate a firm understanding of disgust, some people confuse it with fear and become tenderqueer leftoid race-reductionists and others confuse it with anger and become rightoid boomer-waffen Jan 6th protesters. Which are pathetic versions of proper disagreement with late-stage manufactured-consent centrism and the failing democracy within America, but at least they aren't internalizing it completely. Things are bad economically, fewer people are succeeding and the median wage stagnated while prices on housing skyrocketed.

Clearly in my over-politicizing, I'm still working through the issues myself. I don't properly know which issues are personal, and which need to be fixed socially. I just know there is a combination, and we are suffocating and the average zoomer never even had a chance at a normal life. Too many contestants, too few prizes. People are giving up, the professional left reduce the problem to race, and the right signal their wealthy status as if that will stop the immigration wave that they only pretend to hate. People aren't getting homes, wives, or kids. We're getting immigrants instead, and they aren't having kids either because the social rot is real. We wouldn't be offering them a place to replace real Americans otherwise.

​

Just drugs, loose sex, and shooting yourself once you can't work anymore. That's what a larger and larger percentage of Zoomers can live for.

Second, a lot of people my age seem to be very rage-filled and lacking in temperance. A lot of works revolve around the world being unfair and shitting on obvious self inserts (this relates a lot to the previous point - "The world hates me and so do I"). Seems to me a lot of young people feel like not only they face hardship, but they face it specifically due to malicious intent. Usually they blame their parents/family, but the more ideologically minded blame groups of people like men, society at large and older generations at large. I don't think it's a controversial take to say Boomers and millennials did fuck up gen Z in a lot of ways, but we're not talking being shit at parenting like Milennials or destroying society with retarded policies like Boomers. We're talking about people who feel like their personal lives and failings are the fault of the world at large, that hate themselves for being born, hate the world for having them be born, and hate other people for allowing it to be so.

What are they supposed to be? What is a good friend if activism is the only reason they're talking to you? What is a good boyfriend when girls are tense and unlovable in their petty and vindictive attacks on the closest boys in range for offenses which might have not even happened to them specifically? What is a childhood when your liberal parents need you to emote their words back to them for their social media accounts? Society is fairly broken down into groups which hate the current systems because they know things could be better politically fighting against groups which hate the concepts of family, love, and marriage themselves because the old systems hurt them so and they can't see how they could work instead. Compressed into two political parties which couldn't give less of a shit about the rising emotion in their new bases, what a mess.

​

I don't think the more ideologically minded blame groups of people, I think the more easily impressed are press-ganged by the press into political actions manufactured by powerful elites which then becomes a problem in itself. It isn't their fault, but there are no political solutions to the western modernity question. We must look inward and elsewhere.

The problem is that everyone's touch-starved in this hyper-online world of ours. Nobody has friendships, they have allies in meaningless struggles which are the only reasons to meet up and socialize anymore. Because of the hyper-morality of activism they've had to learn and internalize more rules and more normalization of extremes. Its deeply mentally unwell to be forced to do that when you are still trying to figure yourself out and figure out how to get along with others. Little wonder these people are so fucked up. They are in a deep psychological state arising from suppressed feelings of envy and hatred that cannot be acted upon, frequently resulting in some form of self-abasement. Its called ressentiment and that doesn't mean resentment. While resentment can occur in any situation of social interaction (including, of course, interpersonal interaction) in which you feel assailed by others, ressentiment tends to be induced by more durable, intense, and, on occasion, abstract sources, including social–structural features. Against your fellow prisoners or against the prison, in other words. The problem is though that we live in a social-media panopticon democracy—so while the system is itself part of the issue—its still mostly each of us choosing this sort of mode of living.

​

Which is why I hate Real-name Social Media, you should be able to re-invent yourself over and over because identity is sometimes an attempt to fix into molds as much as it can be a permanent sense of self via labeling.

Third, there's an insane amount of paranoia, loneliness and lack of social trust. It's obvious kids writing the things I read had a lot of problems, but most of them also felt socially alienated and isolated. They talked often about not being able to trust their family or peers to be able to help them and support them through their issues - in case of the family because they just didn't understand it, and in case of their peers because they had very few of them, and those they did help were often complicit in their torment. It appears that young people today just have fewer functional relationships: fewer friends, fewer family members involved in their lives, and just overall fewer people they feel like they can rely on.

Our subcultures and society's methods and technology is shifting faster and faster. Those born before 1995 like I was, have a grounding mentally that zoomers never will. They cannot stop themselves and ask what it is that they truly want from this or that interaction. They are always being viewed days, months, or years later and so must appear objective and reasonable to the most people instead of enjoying a private chat with a friend.

​

There is nothing in the boomer to equate this except that zoomers spend their lives on a stage that they leave horrifyingly alone if they even know that leaving is an option. There is no other analogy for the boomer to see the tragedy of zoomer's lives and their 'friendships'.

There is only the simple fanaticism, where you know the rules even when you see the problem of them. So they join extremism, because like a monkey denied their mother it is better to hug a wire cage with a towel around it rather than a bare wire cage. That is the hard truth at the heart of the modern man, and it should terrify the calm centrist because it is their doom.

Fourth, everything I've said is immensely skewed towards girls. AO3 and the whole fan-fiction space is probably one of the few major "niche" internet spaces that have a huge female following. From experience I'd say girls make for 2 in every 3 avid fan-fiction readers/writers, maybe more. There's internet anonymity of course, but I've spoken to at least a few authors of these darker fanfics and none of them are male. Overall I'd say boys have a much more healthy relationship with the internet than girls do and navigate it with far less detriment to their mental health. I really do not envy being a girl in this day and age. This one gets me the most because out of all the things I've said here, this is the only part that's bled into my own personal life - none, not one girl from my high school that I still keep in contact with is mentally well at present. All of them suffer from at least one mental health problem, usually mild depression or anxiety.

I don't say this to be mean or self-serving. I have a happy marriage, even at its most frustrating it has a deep meaning for me. Girls universally need a nice boy to cry against, someone who will not judge them and genuinely likes their goofy nonsense. Women need someone who absolutely makes them drop their emotion and moral masks with, and be their true honest mess beside. Over time, they will be stronger for having a boy rather than being alone in their socially-imposed self-sufficiency. Women are more moral after they are made to vent, then when they sit with a socially-acceptable mask on pretending. They can't know their own opinions sometimes—boys too—until they've undone the repression and looked at the mess of it all.

​

Women need to be able to feel these things with someone else, even just publicly because then they have to process their thoughts rather than further repress them. The repression—while hurtful to men as well—is particularly bad with women. They are all alone, that this forum of yours might be the only outlet for expressive for them. I am sad for them, I hope their expressions help them work their issues through. Modernity is a sickness, and I hate it. None of us like being alone, and modernity is so commercial and cold in its social exchanges.

​

Women have less allowable expression if they want to be accepted, they feel a greater weight on them to repress themselves to fit in and belong. I'm not sure I should speak about this but I think its universal enough, my wife is sometimes frustrated by motherhood. If I didn't give her a chance to vent about our children—especially when our first-born was our only child because her motherhood was entirely figured-out as she went along—then she probably would be a much more dark and moody person. I could go further, but she's an excellent mother because she worked out her emotions at me and punched a pillow a few times and having thought things through and processed her feelings into proper intuitions she can now very confidently act motherly even when she is absolutely pissed off at the children over messing up even the ceilings of multiple rooms.

​

You have to give women permission to be hateful and frustrated. Its cathartic, and afterwards they know where and when they went too far. They are just human, and they are not themselves at their worst. It doesn't mean anything beyond their need to vent with another person in order to feel relief and process their very strong instincts, intuitions, and emotions. Women need friends—or I suppose today psychologists—to let them unbalance themselves one way angrily and then the other way guiltily until they've walked around their issues from all sides. They need to socially work through what women bred men to be able to internally do themselves through careful mate selection since the dawn of man's sapience. They grow as people only when they truly process their lives socially amongst a group, I've seen women change their opinion seven times in a conversation because they were actually being honest and sincerely expressed how their lives were going. They are much more grounded now, and more socially right. I wish the right-wing knew this, and supported it.

 

[Zbk3VmLfujjzjxBd43tL]

I'm almost a decade older than OP (if he actually is 22) and I remember MCR fanfic being common and often mocked (i.e. shit like the dudes in the band fucking each other because half of it was yaoi or whatever) like 15 years ago. I thought I encountered that sort of thing kind of late because living in a rural area far away from the "hip" coasts and cities all the trends (including emo) hit years later, but if OP is correct, apparently it lasted even longer in certain spaces? If that sort of thing left a legacy, it would've been on Tumblr which was huge in 2014 and was an absolute cesspit. From personal experience, seems your MCR fan/emo/scene type in the 00s was into Tumblr (or adjacent if they were male) in the 10s.

But I think looking back (and it's scary to me I can look back), the people who made Tumblr a cesspit and I'm sure wrote those cringy fanfics were probably people who needed help. OP raises some good points about it. It's really a reflection on how bad things are in society (the people in charge don't care about us, and we just argue over who to blame and dance to their tune). Arguably the internet has made worse by letting this sort of thing fester instead of people getting kicked into shape by society like older days--maybe in some cases that's for the better, but in some cases I'm sure it's for the worse. That old comic about the kid who thinks he's a cat before and after the internet was funny a decade ago, but today it's rather scary.

Just felt very old by internet standards. I think most people are under the Impression the early 2000's were more of a millenial space, which is largely true, since gen Z were mostly toddlers back then. But the whole Emo subculture persisted well into the 2010's and is also a Gen Z thing, which I think a lot of people don't realize.

Did it? I thought it was mostly old shit by the start of the 2010s, a victim of the Recession and death of Myspace along with emo as a whole and its successor the "scene kid" shit died by like 2014-15. It was different (but related) music, fashion, etc. Hell, scene kids even had some fruity anti-self harm charity they'd always promote. I'm probably a bit ignorant on this although I knew a few people involved and was mostly there to laugh at all the stupid bands who'd pop up every month or so (remember "crabcore"?).