Fan service
stanning as praxis
Hi gang! The blossoms are out, the days are longer, I went for a pint after work the other day and the sky was still blue. Spring is nearly here!
Thank you to those of you who have joined us since my Wuthering Heights/Heated Rivalry piece. Before I get to the good stuff, may I offer this: the UK paperback of my novel I Make My Own Fun is now officially out! If you’re based in the UK, you can now join your transatlantic siblings and purchase a much smaller, more conveniently packaged version of my novel for a much nicer price! Isn’t that good? Please do purchase it. I am writing another book and I really like it, and I would truly love for people to be able to read it one day 🙂
Anyway, let’s get on with what we’re all here for, shall we? Let me serve you a steaming hot bowl of gossip. I’ll kick off, as is appropriate, with whatever the hell is happening with Billy Chimple (as we at Emotional Speculation like to call Timothee Chalamet, so dubbed by my dad when trying to remember the guy in “Call My Name”). If you missed it, our Billy is currently undergoing the type of cancelling usually reserved exclusively for female pop stars: unrelenting, uniting all sides of the culture, and - if I’m honest - kind of disproportionate to the crime itself.
Timmy has done his best to distance himself from the girls and gays that made him famous in his latest long, bro-y campaign for Best Actor, including taking part in a televised conversation with everyone’s favourite Reformed Heart Throb Turned Serious Actor, Matthew McConaughey. During this chat, he talked about his passion and commitment to the film industry, illustrating his point by saying that he didn’t want to be working in something like “ballet or opera”, which he would need to “keep alive even though no one cares anymore”. To be fair to him, he realised his offence pretty immediately and tried to course correct, but the damage was done. The pushback was rapid: it started with the international ballet and opera community (natch), bled into the musical theatre world, trickled down into the gen pub and eventually, in a final, bruising blow to Timmy: his fellow celebrities. Everyone from Doja Cat and Jamie Lee Curtis to Eva Mendes and ?? Charlie Puth?? weighed in, expressing their support for the ballet and the opera and their dismay at Timmy’s words.
Before you write me off as a Timmy Apologist, let me say this: yes, he sounded arrogant, but honestly, it would serve everyone to remember that this is a man who climbed on top of the Las Vegas Sphere to promote a ping pong movie. Let’s be real for a sec! I maintain that one of the great psy-ops of our time is that Timothee Chalamet is some sort of brooding, arthouse-leaning cultural voice, when in fact he repeatedly shows that honestly he just loves da movies, and he loves mainstream entertainment, and he is in the business of SHOW! And look, once upon a time, ballet, and opera were the pillars of show biz, but those days are gone. I say this as someone who genuinely loves going to both, but in a world of superhero IP and pop music, ballet and opera are no longer as *pop* culturally and economically dominant as they once were. Am I crazy to think that’s sort of… all he was saying?
Of course, cinema - the primary engine of contemporary showbiz - is experiencing its own crisis of identity/funding/conviction. Timmy could have said something genuinely provocative about how instead of freewheeling creativity we now have conglomerates and scripts made for double-screening, but that’s just not the hill he decided to die on. Time will tell whether this faux pas has scuppered his chances of a much-longed for Oscar this weekend (Academy voting closed just as the drama kicked off) but until then, let us hope the storm passes relatively smoothly for ol’ Billy.
And speaking of storms: has anyone been following the absolute horror show that is the Heated Rivalry fandom’s descent into bigotry? Just me? Well, I’ll fill you in. In the grand tradition of fandoms in the internet age, it didn’t take long for the HR set to rip itself, limb from limb, into warring factions: Team Hudson, Team Connor, the Hudconners, the Concoisers (if you don’t know, theses are people that ship Hudson and Connor romantically and Connor and Francois romantically, respectively).
As anyone vaguely familiar with the concept of a Barb knows, to stan in this day and age is to do battle for your fave against any perceived threat. For the Heated Rivalry fandom, the threats are coming from inside the house. The Hudconners hate Francois Arnaud, Team Francois and Team Connor hate Hudson, and everybody hates Concois (are you keeping up?). The snake is eating itself. Over the past week, each comment flung at their nemesis on Twitter and Instagram became more vile than the last - and I mean, *vile*. I will not be elaborating on the comments themselves, but the actors’ response just about sums them up: eventually, the whole cast stepped in to tell everyone to - and I quote - ‘GTFOH’ with their racism/homophobia/biphobia/ageism/bigotry. And obviously, rightly so! It is a crying shame that not even a show this pure of heart is safe from this brand of Musk-era Twitter brainrot, and I feel sad for the actors having to address it.
If you’ll indulge me in a bit of nerdiness for a second, I do think there’s something bigger to be said about the role of fandom in this particular moment. If the Heated Rivalry stan wars show us anything, it’s that the lines between stanning a show/character and stanning a real person are becoming increasingly blurred. I’ve seen a few takes implying that this is a result of our current media literacy crisis, which, sure, holds merit, but these takes were likely made by people who weren’t on Tumblr in the 2010s. Infighting is a hallmark of internet fandom and has been for a long time. The problem is fandoms have gotten bigger and messier alongside the internet’s own evolution into the dark-sided hellscape it is today. Across the board, we are dealing with a different beast to the fandoms of yore, at once more authoritarian and more anarchic. Contemporary fandoms consider themselves a celebrity’s protector against a type of parasocial objectification - and at times, outright keyboard violence - that they grant themselves a free pass for.
And what of the original internet fangirls? Well, many of them have grown up, remained fans, and they now run media empires and work in the music industry. They’ve parlayed their time in the stan trenches into that thing that every fangirl wants: legitimate, credible proximity to their favourite artist. Nowhere is this more explicit than the fact that Harry Styles, who on previous album cycles did one (1) magazine interview and a pre-recorded chat with Zane Lowe, went on Brittany Broski’s Youtube show Royal Court to promote his new album. Brittany Broski has been open about her time in the 1D fandom - she bought the merch, she had the Tumblr account, she read (and maybe wrote?) the fan fiction - and now here she is, listening to track 8 on Harry Styles’ new album before anybody else, next to the man himself, dressed in her own personal elf ears. It’s great for Brittany, of course, but it’s also brilliant for Harry because a) he showed some actual personality for the first time since X Factor, b) he was in about the safest environment he could be, PR-wise (such a longstanding fan isn’t going to grill him about his dating life), and c) by taking part in this very public display of fan service, he performed an impressive optical illusion, making the iron curtain between him and us seem, momentarily, like a flimsy little veil.
I think it’s going to be interesting to see how a generation of artists who have grown up adjacent to contemporary fan culture will engage with their fans. In the early stages of Heated Rivalry promo, both Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie went on record to say that they were prepared for the “freakiness” (read: horniness) and any potential “hate” that comes with having an intense fanbase, as Heated Rivalry the book already did. Hudson Williams even spent time researching fan theories about his character on Reddit before he was cast to inform his characterisation - a different type of fan service, but still one that takes seriously the contribution fans make to a cultural phenomenon beyond the traditional (cold hard cash).
Finally, the world is actual hell, but thankfully the good people at TMZ are still breaking the important stories. Leaked exclusively this week, it’s the headline the internet can’t get enough of:
Travis and Jason Kelce’s Mom Donna is renovating her modest Florida home!… TMZ has learned
Sometimes something happens in pop culture that reignites the embers of the Good, Old Internet, and this week it was this perfectly ridiculous non-event. Did I read the story? No! But did I laugh at lots of silly little posts on the computer making fun of TMZ for writing it? Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. I have nothing of value to add here, but I’ll leave you with this platonic ideal of a meme:
That’s all for now, folks. Thanks, as ever, for reading, and I will be back shortly with more goss/lukewarm takes/rants about things I can’t stop thinking about. I promise not to write about Heated Rivalry every time.
xoxo