Why Can’t We Just Be Normal About Things?

Many moons ago, in the cold, cold days of December, I told myself that I was going to watch Heated Rivalry and learn nothing whatsoever about the actors. Not that they weren’t great but I knew the media hype around them was going to be endless and once I got involved I would wear myself out and the special preciousness of a show made just for me would be gone. So even though I saw that Connor…Storrie, I guess, and Hudson….whatever ,were doing cute interviews for Crave or HBO, I was not going to click because my willpower is so much stronger than that.

So anyway Hudson has six concussions from MMA, Connor wore a 1.4M Tiffany brooch to the Golden Globes last night, and I have not stopped receiving (and sending) updates for the past twenty-four hours.

(My fast opinion: I missed Connor's curls but appreciate the Bowieness. Also SUPER into how much jewelry they both accessorize with. More please!)

Despite being a mostly willing participant for the past twenty or so years, celebrity culture still remains baffling to me. Not that we shouldn’t take interest in art and expression and passion and the people who create those things but the way those things are presented as commodities to the public. Modern celebrity culture is presented as normal and is super not and fandom is equally not normal but presented as derangement. (I do not mind being deranged. I, in fact, enjoy it quite a bit. I have perhaps read too much Nabokov today.) Celebrity, as presented, is often about idealization - the people who you aspire to be or the life you aspire to have. You could have all this attention and money if only you accomplish something of worth, etc. Fandom, I think, is more about relationships. This character is important to me and the writer is important to me and the actor is important to me because I want to feel close to the thing that I relate to so much. Fandom and celebrity have become more and more overlapped recently but I do think the distinction is there. (There are dangerous side effects of both, obviously, and I’m not looking forward to them in regards to HR.) So when I ask myself, why do you know that and then why are you telling it to other people it’s something that happens naturally in my brain. It’s a part of pulling apart what art and stories and celebrities means to people, while at the same time I’m still fully indulging my weird obsessive behavior.

Why can we/I be normal about it? I can try to answer for many people based on observation but I can really only answer for myself. Part of it is feeling engaged with the world around us and part of it is that it’s a world that belongs to us and part of it is that joy is a thing you need to cultivate. Part of it is that I don’t _want_to be, not in the way that people mean by normal. It’s like telling a girl who is excited about something to lower her voice and calm down. My answer to that has always been NO THE FUCK I WON’T!!! which feels great to say but probably not great on the ears to hear. Fandom can have the downside of being too stuck on expectations, or the eventual canceling of an internet boyfriend, or the truly unhinged people who don’t care about personal boundaries. I am not here to defend fandom from criticism or let everyone off the hook. But Hudson loves freaky little weirdos and so do I.

As much as I’ve been enjoying the current moment and being swept up in a new fandom and all the joy the show has brought to me, the Little Fandom Switch in my head still hasn’t gone off. It’s one of the many reasons I spend so much time trying to describe what fandom is and what it means. Neurodiversity is genetic and everyone is a fan of something to a degree and really being a fan something is really just about finding pleasure and curiosity in things. But the little fandom switch is about being not normal - it’s about watching an episode so many times that you start to notice chest pimples.

It’s about being willing to break the law about distributing gay smut by mailing a zine you wrote to a group of friends. I think there are a lot of problems with the way celebrities and fandoms are treated within the mainstream culture - but we always frame enthusiasm and obsession as symptoms of some sort of disregulation instead of mediums of expression.

Consider:

The levels at which I am not normal about things is different and that is fascinating to me. So I guess the answer to the question is that I don’t think it’s fair to ask it of anyone in the first place.

• if I had tumblr tags: I know it’s rambly and doesn’t flow and doesn’t have a point I just had to write but I hope someone can take something from it, I feel like I’m just repeating things everyone already knows back to them but also insane fangirl culture is one of my favorite things, we are FREAKS we are DERANGED and we are HERE FOR YOU
• Re: Hudson’s full snake theme - HUDSON HAVE YOU BEEN TALKING TO TAYLOR. WHAT DID SHE SAY. WHEN’S REP GOING TO DROP, HUDSON.
• Being so involved with art and culture all the time creates weird side effects in my life - it happens all the time and always surprises me and other people don’t seem to care very much. A couple of months ago my book club decided to read Pale Fire for this weekend, my first Nabokov, and while in the middle of reading, Hudson Connor was forced to deleted his letterboxd account because of his opinion on Lolita, which was the book a young boy was reading in a 1963 Peter Sellers comedy I watched Saturday night. Art spreads through time and reaches us all individually. I am SO MAD about the LBD drama by the way. SO SO MAD.
• For half a second I thought I was a cool person with a beat on the pulse of modern fandom and then I watched 10 minutes of Destiny of the Daleks and thought “I think they used that cave in Underwater Menace” and it’s like oh yeah, I’m me.
• I’ve spent a good section of this week putting together a Beatles playlist and living in that time of 1963-1964, you can hear them get exhausted over the course of various radio shows. I don’t think I consciously lined this up with my entering into 1963 DND territorybut it feels right to bring it all together. Emmerdale is also Who-adjacent but a decade later in 1973, I’m being inundated with Britishness from a very compact era.
• "All the way with Illya K but I'd go pretty far with Ilya R." I may or may not come back to this.
• something I saw that made me mad to witness:

(I have a whole idea about PMG & David Soul also being best friends finding phenomenal success creating a queer love story that Hudcon could take notes from but it's still roiling around in my brain.)