»another hopeless cause»

— Laura Makabresku, Consolation.

daggers being phallic have pretty much always been a thing! like in romeo and juliet, where, after juliet finds romeo dead, juliet picks up romeo's dagger and says "o, happy dagger, this is thy sheath" and later capulet says

"O wife, look how our daughter bleeds! This dagger hath mista’en, for, lo, his house Is empty on the back of Montague, And it mis-sheathèd in my daughter’s bosom."

which has an in-your-face sexual interpretation (romeo's "dagger" being "mis-sheathed" inside juliet, said by the man who opposes their relationship on the basis of house) in addition to its actual plot relevance

or macbeth's whole deal with daggers and masculinity where lady macbeth basically says using his dagger against duncan would make him a man. ("When you durst do it, then you were a man; and to be more than what you were, you would be so much more the man"). pair that with how phalluses were often associated with masculinity, and you can see the connection

it's not just a shakespearean concept alone. not at all, but i find those examples particularly apt because... you know

(in fact i'm kind of of the mind that the Act 2 Scene 1 dagger soliloquy in Macbeth definitely inspired the dagger verse in mama)

but even past that... just look at the visual storytelling of LLTBP. especially in the finale of both the US and LATAM tours: the proximity/intimacy between gerard and the clerk, the garish wielding of the dagger before it penetrates the victim, euphoric faces made by victim and perpetrator, a hug or kiss thrown in for funsies, followed by spurts of blood (bodily fluid) until the act is finished? (see this for like... the best example)

baby that's my daggerpenis and my bloodcum.

so if we work backwards (from the blood finale sex scene), if we assume other instances of the dagger's appearance also represents a phallus...

The main character of The Grandmother, 1970.

The human Gentleman

Thank you Barbie <3 I take the ‘could be’ back. I added that after I initially posted it.

This off-white t-shirt that was for sale at some shows during the 2008 Honda Civic Tour was really popular and was usually the one you'd see people asking other fans to grab for them in late spring because their show sold out in their size. This is the shirt that was sewn into a vest for Ryan that season btw:

FBR added this shirt to their webstore in August 2008 and some sizes sold out quickly but then got restocked. I remember some people complaining that FBR's shirt was a slightly different color than the one on tour, but others said it was the same. Idk, it looked like the same general off-white color to me. The band's name was still on the back of the right sleeve:

I liked this design because it was SO different from most t-shirt designs in this era (like in general, not just PATD) and was way more minimalist. A fan created some pngs that we could print out to iron on our own shirts, so I'll add them here if anyone wants them. They used the "Big Noodle Tilting" font and created their own heart:

That fall Hot Topic also came out with an off-white tote that had the same large "reinvent love" design on one side. Then the design of the band name (from the t-shirt's sleeve) got a heart added and was enlarged to be the graphic on the other side of the tote. The inside of the bag was a floral pattern that reminded me of the striped hoodie's lining:

FBR clearly loved how successful this whole design was. The webstore included a bonus sticker in the order packages for P!ATD fans in fall 2008:

The Rock Band Live Tour shows in fall 2008 used the same type of graphic:

And the shows on that tour had a black tote & shirt for sale:

Spencer did an interview with Out.com this season that had this question:

The most popular items at your merch booth seem to be a t-shirt and bag that say “Reinvent Love,” which is such a strong, inclusive message. Tell me about how that became the band slogan. It started out as a lyric in “Mad as Rabbits.” It was the last song we were recording for the album, and as we figured out how to fit it into the end of the song, it took on some more anthem-style cheer. As we went on tour, me and Ryan [Ross, Panic’s guitarist] talked about making a “Reinvent Love” shirt. At first it was just going to be on the Fueled By Ramen web store, just a limited edition thing because it didn’t have our band name on the front, and we didn’t know how many people would want to wear that. It ended up being a lot more popular than we thought it would. We were ending all of the concerts with that song, so that was the last thing that people were hearing. We wouldn’t want to be a part of anything that wasn’t that kind of that message. If there’s going to be some saying associated with our band, that’s a pretty good one. It goes along with everything we want to represent and the way that we feel.

This bracelet was added to FBR's webstore in December 2008 (after the Pretty. Odd. era had basically ended & around the time that Live in Chicago was released):

By the time this necklace got added to FBR's webstore in January 2009, a lot of fans were tired of this theme:

The necklace spawned more fan jokes about what was coming next at that point... my favorite was still the musical toaster:

HARLEY POE - SATAN, SEX AND NO REGRETS

PANIC! AT THE DISCO - PRETTY. ODD.

DEVILDRIVER - STRIKE AND KILL