Pete’s Writing Reflects his Abusive Behavior
Pete’s book, Gray, his lyrics on Cork Tree and TTTYG, and his lj posts frequently bragged about and romanticized abuse and violent urges, and portrayed his love interests as sexist and degrading stereotypes.
Writing about dark thoughts isn't inherently wrong, but In context, it shows a pattern of behavior consistent with his real life actions.
✿ Gray ✿
Gray is Pete’s deranged semi-autobiography, published in 2013. It recounts the history of a toxic and abusive relationship from around 2004 - 2008 (sound like a familiar timeline?). The love interest is based on multiple people, undoubtedly including Jeanae.
It portrays pete as an abusive boyfriend to a stereotypical dumb, whiny feminist girlfriend. He destroys her phone against a wall after throwing it at her head because she insulted him (very similar to his violent behavior toward Jeanae in real life), and nearly kills a boy who punches him as revenge for abusing her.
Some lovely quotes about her after she breaks up with him for the previous incident:
“She’s drunk and shouting about something intellectual–”Aleister Crowley fucking hated women.”
“She throws her hands wildly into the air, spilling wine everywhere as she shouts about crowley’s ‘avowed antisemitism’.”
“It only hurts a little when I see her like this, but mostly i just feel sorry for her. She’s drunk and embarassing herself. She looks ridiculous.”
It ends with her dying violently in a car accident and him wishing death on all of her family members, which is supposed to represent him being spiritually freed from that era of his life... like it wasn't his choice to date a mentally ill teenager.
I don't believe Gray is fictional. Over the years Pete says less and less of it is true, probably because he realized how insane it was to publish this. It is exaggerated, yes, but too similar to real life to be totally fake.
✿ Song lyrics ✿
Many songs on TTTYG and Cork Tree showcase pete’s obsessive and violent urges toward his girlfriends. Again, not inherently bad, but paired with his real life actions it doesn’t help his case.
'Pros and cons' and 'tell that mick' were written solely by pete. In them he describes “comically dark” revenge scenarios against his cheating girlfriend, such as her dying in a car crash (hm, deja vu…), choking to death, burning to death, or him breaking her window with a cinderblock.
Many of the songs on Cork Tree are likely about Jeanae, meaning he published and profited off of cruel and demeaning lyrics about his teenage girlfriend, putting her and the details of their relationship under public scrutiny. Several reference car crashes(again...) and show the character obsessing unhealthily over the love interest, wishing horrific events on her, and being driven by love to hurt her or hurt himself to get her attention (again, very similar to pete's relationship with jeanae).
✿ 2004 livejournal post ✿
In a post about his girlfriend from 2004, pete says he “wants to kill every member of her extended family” among other cruel things. This is something he repeats in Gray.
Many of these repetitive similarities show that these were frequent and recurring wishes/fantasies of his, not one-off “dark jokes” like he claims. It should not be surprising that someone who frequenty wrote this kind of thing was abusive or toxic in real life.
He/his team clearly understand how some of this comes off now and have tried to cover it up, like when Gray's cover was removed from Amazon and sales were limited right after a youtuber posted a video essay about it, or how he now claims it was completely fictional despite past comments.