emo diaries of an emo gworl

Binderary week 2 book 1! Bound the infamous My Immortal, specifically the equally infamous community typeset by @renegadepublishing. I wanted to make the cover look a mix of classy and fun so as to possibly catch passersby unawares if/when they open it XD.

Some photos of my favorite pages included in the post--this thing is a travesty, y'all (complimentary, adoring). I have to say, reading the typeset version of this is only slightly more incomprehensible than reading the actual version of it on ff.net (which I did! Many moons ago, mostly for the fandom history of it all LOL). The folks who did the typesetting did an excellent job of making it somewhat readable while also making it just. The absolute Most.

Handbinding Project: My Immortal by Tara Gilesbie

This really started over a year ago, with a project started in the Renegade Bindery server: people would format different chapters of My Immortal, without knowing what anyone else was doing, and we would put them together into one file. It was agreed upon that everybody would disregard both good design and good taste. 

(If you click on each image, the caption lists who designed the page in question. I couldn’t include them all here, but every page is basically a work of art. Horrible, typographically hellish art.)

So mcr has always color coded their eras. Gerard likes having a theme, a story, an overarching aesthetic to bring everything together into one cohesive whole. Bullets might not have had as strong a coordination going on as the rest, but looking at the album art, and their promotional material, it's all dark, brooding, fucking painful. Revenge is the epitome of the black, white, and red emo national colors. The black parade gets rid of the red entirely. And then we got this fucking nuclear explosion of color with danger days, but it's so neon and God damn radioactive that it burns your eyes.

Now, in the era of their return, they're giving us soft greens, earthy purples and browns, so desaturated and yet so full of life. Sure, they're the colors of decay. But what follows decay if not growth? The fuzz of moss over bones. Mold on stale bread. And life, living, breathing things.

We're seeing the shades of healing. Of becoming something more than what once was. We're seeing how they've changed in the time since they broke up, in the time since they announced the reunion. We might all be flies swarming the corpse of something dead and gone, but we are part of the natural process of returning something to the earth, of allowing it to decay and be recycled, built back into something just as important as it once was.