Celebrity Culture + Fan Culture

If you're of the right age, then you'll remember when you saw Justin Bieber's "Baby" music video for the first time, or heard the song for the first time, and remember his entire rise to the place that he's at right now. You'll probably also remember when One Direction's members all auditioned separately for The X-Factor, were put together in a group by the show and then finished third and promptly exploded all over the world within the year.

For my generation (I'm 20), these occurrences coincided with the beginning of Internet culture - in 2010/2011. That was when places like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram started to gain popularity, and throughout the years, more platforms have become more popular and we have recognized their importance in building a career for a celebrity, especially as the years have gone along. There are even full-blown celebrities that exist purely on the Internet at this point (think Zoella, PewDiePie or Philip DeFranco). Justin Bieber and One Direction came to be when we were all becoming teenagers and started having crushes on boys (or girls, or whatever, but boys for this scenario) and they were the first real heartthrobs for us. They were created with the rise of the Internet, and so the Internet became a more and more vital part of their careers that they used to promote their latest works and events, as well as to connect with fans and make them feel loved and special.

If you're anything like me, you grew up on the Internet. I think that mine was one of the last, if not the last, generation that actually grew up playing outside and with physical toys and remembers the steady integration of Internet into their lives until it was just there all the time and no one can remember when it wasn't. My sister is 14, and she's basically always had some kind of device, whether it was an iPod Touch or an iPad or an iPhone (she has just the tablet and the phone now - and I say just). I remember discovering YouTube and spending hours watching videos of my favourite creators (which I still do) and scrolling through my Twitter and Instagram feeds when I was 14, and then later, my Snapchat, Facebook, and Tumblr feeds (pretty sure I had Twitter before Facebook, tbh).

I've always had an obsessive personality, in that it is very easy for me to find something I like and think about only that thing for a very long period of time. Some of my obsessions have stuck; like Ariana Grande, Fifth Harmony and the general concept of YouTube, and some of them have come and gone, like Jack & Jack, R5, The Vamps and many other bands/humans that I no longer want to know everything about all the time. The Internet is where I discovered fan culture for the first time and it gave me the ability for me to connect with other fans that liked the same things that I did, because for some reason my friends and I (at the time, but still now) had totally different interests and I was also too shy to actually show them this thing that I loved in case they thought it was lame and made me feel bad for liking it, whether they meant to or not. So, instead, I found my community on the Internet and bonded with strangers over something that we all loved a lot. Being on the Internet in fan culture during the last 5 years meant that I got to watch Justin Bieber and One Direction blow up all around the world and watch the number of followers they had on their social media platforms rise everyday. With that, I also got to watch the two fandoms fight each other, as well as many other fandoms fight each other, or watch them tweet endlessly to get awards for their favourite people, and even sometimes defend them against the media when bad stories were written and published about them. The one commonality between all fandoms, no matter who they're created for, is that they are the reason that you are at the top, and that they have the power to drag you right back down to the bottom. Not that they would, because there's always a big enough sect that loves them and holds them up there no matter what they do, even if it's ridiculous to do so.

Since the rise of Justin Bieber and One Direction, there have been many, many more bands come onto the teen music scene (a term I'm using to refer to the kinds of pop-music-sounding bands that get covered in J-14, M and Twist magazines); people like Fifth Harmony, Bea Miller and Madison Beer, as well as more boy bands (the actual topic of this that I'll get to in a second) like The Tide, Forever In Your Mind and PRETTYMUCH. In each of their careers, social media played an increasingly important role in their rise to the top. Some groups will probably never blow up and be able to play MSG or The Staples Centre or anything like that, because that's just how the industry works sometimes. Not to say that they won't have any success at all, just that they won't have that much and won't become as famous as Justin Bieber or One Direction in that literally everyone in the world with access to the Internet knows who they are.

Now's the time for the little aside that is the reason for this entire piece of writing in the first place. I follow this YouTuber called NerdyandQuirky (her name is Sabrina, she's great, go watch her), and last week, she went on a paid #spon #ad trip to Los Angeles and while she was there (this was the #spon #ad part of the trip) she went to a concert for this band named PRETTYMUCH. She posted a lot of it on her Instagram story and on her Snapchat story, and I watched them and didn't really care because I had never heard of them before. Later that night, I got bored so I decided to Google them because Sabrina seemed to be having a really good time and I trust her judgement, so I looked them up. Turns out they're Simon Cowell's new group and are being advertised as "the new One Direction", considering that he was the mastermind behind them as well. I found and have been listening to their one song (they've only been around for about 6 months) for about 3 days on loop as of right now, and I'm pretty sure everyone I live with is ready to kill me because I've been blaring it throughout the house for that entire 3 days.

As these boys are my new obsession (and mostly fascination), I've been teaching myself everything there is to know about them and watching a bunch of their YouTube videos and such. I was thinking about them this morning (which is basically all I've been doing all weekend, but in a more critical manner this time) and was thinking about the comparison between them and One Direction. I realized that every group that's mega-famous right now (Ariana Grande, Fifth Harmony, etc) took about 5 years to get to this point. I remember when they were small little artists on X-Factor or Nickelodeon and now are mega-superstar singers that tour the world for their millions of fans. It took One Direction a little less time than that because they just had that little thing about them that everyone loved, but roughly it's been about 5 years for everyone else.

For One Direction, social media was a growing part of their career because it grew in prevalence at the same time they did, and so progressively, it became more and more important for them to utilize in order to promote themselves and their music and merch, etc. For PRETTYMUCH, who have only been around for about 6 months, social media is something that will probably become absolutely essential to their rise to fame, and is already something that they're utilizing. YouTube videos, Instagrams, Snapchats, the whole deal. I'm pretty sure that Simon Cowell dug all of these kids out of the Internet and found them because they already used it to expose themselves (he put them all together like he did with One Direction) and so it obviously is and will continue to be vital to them for exposure. In an age when a lot of artists are being discovered because they have millions of YouTube subscribers and followers on Twitter, I think it's important that artists that haven't started like that to utilize it as well, whether it's to gain new fans, keep their current ones engaged, or both.

I was also thinking about the fact that everyone keeps comparing the two groups together. They are similar, in that it's 5 boys that Simon Cowell found and made a group with that can all sing (I will admit PRETTYMUCH has to work on it a little, but it's still the beginning so I'm cutting some slack here). PRETTYMUCH dances, One Direction didn't (and doesn't, if we're going with the "hiatus" thing), and that's pretty much (lol) the only difference. I mean, PRETTYMUCH isn't British, but that's kind of irrelevant. I don't know how much of a comparison you can really make between them, because I think the fact that One Direction was on X-Factor means that they had a lot of exposure worldwide before they actually did anything outside of the show, whereas PRETTYMUCH is definitely starting from the ground up. They have Simon Cowell behind them, so realistically, they'll probably be okay as long as he believes that they can go somewhere and they show him that they can go somewhere. They performed at the Teen Choice Awards' Teen Fest on the day that I'm writing this, so clearly they're okay already. Give them a year, an album and a small tour across the US and they should be ready to set themselves up as the next big thing for 14-16 year old girls everywhere to obsess over (I say as a 20 year old female who also loves them - your inner boyband fangirl never truly leaves you).

PRETTYMUCH is only one small example of what this whole post was supposed to be about. They are the whole reason that it even exists, because they got me thinking about it in the first place. I think my final summary thought on this is that celebrity culture is just weird. The only common denominator between all of these people that we love and celebrate and follow everyday is that they're talented at something and worked hard to be recognized for it and be able to do it everyday of their lives. Other than that, they're all completely different. They all do the thing they do differently from each other, and are from totally different places and backgrounds and family dynamics. Yet we all, as a society, picked these people and say to them, all the time, "You are good at [talent] and we love you for it, so here's all my money and support so you can keep doing it". Imagine how different the world would be if we didn't pick a certain celebrity to elevate to the top, or if an A-lister was at the bottom of the proverbial fame pyramid. That would be weird.

My Love for Psychology

I'm a people person. Sort of. Apparently, I have good people skills and I work retail, and most customers like me. The ones that don't are the ones that have argued with me about getting something that they want that they don't necessarily deserve. I'm also a social work student, and that line of work generally means that I'm going to be spending the rest of my life working with people.

As such, one of my favourite school subjects is psychology. I'm planning on making a minor out of it, and I've taken as many psych courses that I am allowed in order to fill almost all of my elective slots. They just interest me a lot.

The entire study of psychology is about learning how the brain works, whether it is on a more medical level, such as the study of actual psychological disorders (depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, etc.) or on a more abstract level, like thinking about the actual reasons behind why we do things. I've taken both of these classes, and loved them both. Learning about the way that people work and why they choose to do certain things really interests me.

Another thing that I love to do is people watch, and I do it all the time. I go to school downtown, so there's always a million people around doing a variety of things. A lot of the time, my friend and I will grab food in the food court at the mall near campus, and because she takes forever to eat, I usually end up watching all the people around me fight for tables and talk to their friends and just go about their business. I walk a busy underground path from campus to the train station, and there's always a thousand business people in there because it snakes underneath the financial district with access to all the office buildings above it. There's restaurants and shops down there, so people go get lunch or go shopping or run errands or are also trying to get somewhere. Most business people are the same - in the morning or the evening, they're rushing to the office or the train station, respectively, and in the middle of the day, they walk slow as turtles carrying their lunches because they really don't want to go back to work. They all stand around and chat with each other in the middle of the hall and actively avoid the eyes of the many homeless people that are panhandling and trying to make eye contact with them because the $300 suit/watch/shoes they're wearing indicates that they do have money, but never money to give. Granted, I don't give money to homeless people either, but being a teenage girl, I'd really rather they didn't remember me giving them money and harass me for the rest of my life.

That got a little offtopic, but the basic point of what I'm trying to say is that people fascinate me, and we all do so many different things for so many different reasons, and learning about those reasons really fascinates me. I was talking to one of my friends last night and she was telling me that the reason that she likes psychology is because she wants to know how her mental illnesses work. That's a large part of it for me as well, because learning how my anxiety works is really interesting to me. In case anybody is wondering, it's basically a combination of nature and nurture - having the chemical imbalance in your brain that makes it possible combined with specific environments that trigger it creates the anxiety/depression/etc that you feel.

One of my favourite psychological facts is that you are capable of having the chemical imbalance in your head to have something but may never be put in the kind of environment that activates it. For instance, you could have a chemical imbalance/genetic predisposition (because that might be closer to what it is - my memory is fuzzy) to be a psychopath, but never become one because you grow up in a loving family home. If you've noticed that most psychopaths grew up in homes that were incredibly crappy to the nth degree, there's a pattern there and it is not a coincidence.

So, yeah. I just think that psychology is really cool, and as much grief as it causes me trying to study it, I still love it and think that it's cool. That's it, really.

My Relationship with Hockey

This feels like an incredibly random post that is coming out of nowhere, but I've been thinking about it a lot and I need to write it out to get it out of my head before I go crazy. I can only talk it over to myself so many times before I go insane.

I'm Canadian. We like hockey. Like, a lot. I grew up on hockey, and I grew up in a hockey town. Really, only the part about me growing up in a hockey town is true. Saying I grew up on hockey makes it sound like I played as a kid and watched all the games and have been watching it all my life, etc. None of that is true. I didn't grow up playing hockey beyond gym class, and I really only watched snippets of games. What I mean is, I grew up watching hockey with my family. It's always been a family activity. My dad used to play in college and when he was growing up, and he played pick up with his friends when I was a baby. He has gear and posters hanging around the house, so it's just always been there. I know the basics of how the game works (get the puck into the net more times than the other team, etc.) and sometimes I'd catch highlight reels on the news of games that were on the night before. Recently, as I've gotten older and started using social media a lot, I've been using Twitter and Facebook to keep up with it. But I've never been die-hard. I never sat through every game and watched them all to the best of my ability and all of that.

This part is about to give away what town I'm from. If you know anything about hockey, you know who Auston Matthews is. 19 years old, 6'2, 215 lbs player from Arizona. He played in Switzerland for a couple years, came back, was drafted first overall by the Toronto Maple Leafs, and scored four goals the very first time he ever played in an NHL game. The very first night he played, way back in October, it was the only thing on Twitter and all anyone could talk about in any kind of news for days on end. I follow the local news outlets here, several of them, and all they were tweeting and retweeting were pictures and videos and gifs and reactions of this kid doing amazingly well. Everyone was obsessed with the whiz kid. He blew my fucking mind. I knew enough about hockey to know that that was a rare occurrence, if it wasn't made obvious by the Internet. It was all the highlight reels and the interviews and everything everywhere. All this kid. So, I started paying attention more. Before, if I came across a piece of hockey-related news, a highlight reel or something, I'd watch and then move along. Now, I was looking for them. I paid more attention because this kid was blowing my mind. Even I knew he was something special.

Every year, they play a special game outside on New Year's. Because this year is the Leafs' 100th anniversary of existence, they played here, on the soccer field they use for the Toronto FC. They called it the "Centennial Classic" and they made it a two day thing. NYE, they had a game with Leafs and Detroit Red Wings alumni that was a lot of fun, and they had the current team there too, walking around and getting to talk to the alumni players they grew up watching, and on New Year's, the current Leafs and Red Wings teams played. New Year's is my cousin's birthday, so the game was on at their house and we watched it as a family, as we always do, and it was so much fun. You get this indescribable adrenaline rush of nerves and excitement and hope and faith and fear and a million other things watching hockey, and it might be my favourite part of the entire game. After I got home and went on Tumblr,  I was just looking at pictures and videos and things of the players, and screenshots of their Instagram comments (because they honestly roast each other so hard it's so funny) and I got really into it. So then I started paying more attention.

A couple of weeks later, the All-Star Game happened. It's a complicated process to explain, but basically they have four divisions in the NHL, and they took players from teams that played in those divisions and made four teams with them, one for each division, and then they had a skills competition, and they have a tournament between the four teams, where two of them play each other and then the other two play, and then the winners of those games play each other, and then you ultimately come out with one winner. Auston, the boy who started this story, played for the Atlantic division team, and I did the same thing I did Centennial Classic weekend. I looked up pictures and videos on Tumblr of the game, and got really into it. Then, later that week, the Leafs started a four game road trip in Dallas and played the Stars. I didn't watch that game, but they lost horribly. Then, two days later, they played the Blues in St. Louis, and I saw on the morning news that they were going to be broadcasting the game on the radio, on a popular local sports station. So I thought about maybe listening, because I thought the game might not be on TV. Then I found out that it would be, but all the TVs were going to be occupied, so that was of no help to me. The game started at 9 pm St. Louis time, and I wasn't going to listen with my radio because my family are usually already asleep by then. Then I realized that the station probably had an online streaming function, which they did, so I listened to that for a little, and then the Blues started crushing my Leafs, and so I switched to watching it live, and then they lost and I was crushed. 

Two days later, Saturday night, they're playing the Boston Bruins in Boston. Now, this is a very big deal, because of playoffs and points and things I don't really want to explain, but also for morale, because they've lost the last three in a row (they lost to Philadelphia before the All-Star Game) and everyone's feeling pretty negative. I swear to God, that game was fabulous, but I almost died several times, screamed a lot, and had an adrenaline rush that lasted a full five minutes at least after it was over. They won 6-5 in regulation time, somehow, but they had a 4-1 lead and one of the rookies scored their first hat trick to get that lead, and then they coughed it up and Boston tied it, and then it was 5-4 Leafs, then Boston tied again, then it was 6-5 Leafs with a 1:30 left and they kept it that way.

I'm writing this after the disaster that was the Leafs/Islanders game on Monday night. I was on Tumblr while watching this, because that is where I have located my hockey community of Leafs fans, and I read an ask someone sent to someone I follow about how their friend has never liked hockey even though they love it to bits and suddenly in the last week has acquired jerseys and tickets and calls the players by their nicknames (because they all have nicknames) and how they felt really weird about how their friend was suddenly so into hockey and it made them uncomfortable because it felt like they were just jumping onto the bandwagon and didn’t genuinely love it. And I read the response that was written, about how they should just ask their friend about why they were suddenly into hockey right now and maybe it was just because you being into hockey your entire life made them be into it and etc. I don’t have a friend like this, one that’s super into hockey and now suddenly I am, so it didn’t make me feel bad about that. It just made me feel weird because I was suddenly very self-aware (and I knew this the whole time) about how weird it was that suddenly I was reblogging pictures and gifs of hockey players and teams I liked on Tumblr and structuring my entire life and schedule around when the Leafs would be playing so that I could watch games and staying up probably later than I should be to watch games and then sit on Tumblr afterwards and read people’s liveblog posts about them. I started watching game recaps, both by the NHL and sports fans, and reading stories about the team and following hockey-related Twitter pages and all this stuff. And I feel like a fake fan. Because I kind of am. I just got into it now, halfway through the season, for apparently no reason that I can really figure out myself if I’m being honest. I’m aware that everyone starts somewhere with their obsessions, and before you know it, it’s been ten years and you’ve been loving it all your life. I’m not there yet, obviously, so right now I feel stuck in “fake fan” territory. And maybe I’m right and maybe I won’t make it to next season and get bored over the summer and move on, or maybe I won’t even make it to the end of this season and in two weeks be telling all my friends about how weird it was that I liked hockey this much at all.

I probably won’t do that though. I’ve loved hockey all my life, on some weird level. It’s always been a background thing for me, something that was always there that I always knew I would enjoy, and always did enjoy when I did end up watching it some days. It’ll always mean family to me because it’s something that I enjoy doing with them and associate them with. Maybe I’ll fall off the wagon of watching every single game in a row and structuring my entire life around the Leafs’ schedule. But I don’t think I’ll ever stop loving it altogether. I’ve started teaching myself more about the background and how playoffs and points and stats work, and like I said, I’ll probably never be an expert in that and maybe never even fully understand them, but I’ll always love them.

Basically, in summary, hockey's always been part of my life and probably always will be. Whether I follow it this closely in future, Lord knows. But it's always going to be there. I'm Canadian, so I really have no choice there.

My Experience with Anxiety

I've always thought that I had some kind of anxiety. I've never been diagnosed, and I've only been vocal about in the last year or so. I've always known that other people had worse anxiety than I do, and so I've never actually talked about it before. I always felt bad, complaining about the anxiety issues that I had because I knew it was worse for others, and so that made me feel like I had no right to complain about anything.

Regardless of this, I always knew that my anxiety levels were most likely higher than they should be, so I basically took on "having anxiety" as a part of my identity. Then, last week, I was on Tumblr and I found this social anxiety test and I took it, out of curiosity. I've always grappled with whether I had social anxiety or not, or if it was just a more general kind of anxiety. I wanted to know, and Internet tests are probably better for just a rough, general idea than for an actual diagnosis, obviously, but still. I figured it would be interesting.

So I took it, and the results stated that I didn't have any social anxiety. I've never been more in shock and confused in my life than when I read those results. For some reason, despite the fact that I've never been sure about whether I actually have social anxiety or not, this shocked me. It felt like anxiety was entirely erased as part of my identity because this Internet test was telling me that I didn't have any. This test is one of those where you have to rate your feelings about different situations, and I hate those because I never know how to answer them in a way that properly shows the amount of anxiety that I have about them. So it's hard to get a straight answer and you could take it a million times and get a million different results based on how you rate things, because the answers you give will probably never be the same.

I actually retook it again before writing this and I ended up with a higher score this time that indicated that I had moderate social anxiety, so my levels are probably somewhere around mild to moderate anxiety. If I really think about it, I feel like a lot of what I consider to be anxiety is just my subconscious beating on me about something stupid that I did during the day that day as I lie awake at night, unable to sleep because my brain won't turn off. I think that I always just labelled it as anxiety because that was the closest term that I knew for what was actually happening in my brain. Maybe it is what's happening in my brain, but just not in relation to socializing with others. I work retail, my entire job centers around talking to strangers on a regular basis, and I'm pretty okay with that.

Honestly, I think it has more to do with paranoia than anything else. I'm always so in my head about everything and worrying about everyone and everything besides myself, and I get so caught up in everything that I just end up internally yelling at myself for a week after something bad happens because I feel so personally responsible for the entire situation, whether it was actually my fault or not. I really struggle with the ability to forgive myself for things and just push them out of my mind. I dwell on things so much that it kind of morphs into feelings of anxiety, mostly driven by paranoia, that a similar situation will happen again and it'll be my fault, etc etc. It's also just a lot of me overthinking almost everything that comes out of my mouth and thinking about everything I do and say to everyone that I meet. My brain seems to have a scale of severity for these events that determines how quickly I forget about them/stop thinking about it every moment of the day, and honestly, I wish the lowest level of "forget about it almost immediately" applied to everything, but, alas, it does not. It gets worse when I'm alone and not occupied, because then all I have to do is think, and that's never fun for me, because depending on the day, I can get to a pretty dark place pretty quickly.

Just to quickly sum up my experience with anxiety, it could only be described as "confusing and damaging". Confusing, because I never know anything about it, and damaging, because it's gotten its hold on me and crushed me for a few days at a time before, and those times are never fun.

Riverdale: Thoughts + Discussion [SPOILERS]

Recently, Netflix released a new show in partnership with The CW (or that's what I'm calling it anyways, since it's shown on both places) called Riverdale, which is a modern day adaptation of the classic Archie Comics that everyone read as a kid.

This time, though, there's a twist.

This version of Archie and co. is darker, way darker than the comics ever were (to my knowledge, anyways, which is limited). In this version, the main storyline (supposedly) is the suspicious and mysterious murder of a character named Jason Blossom. Jason is only shown alive for about the first minute of the first episode, and the next scene is a local Cub Scout leader named Dilton Doiley finding his twin sister Cheryl sitting soaking wet on a waterfall.

The story, according to Cheryl, is that she and Jason decided to go for a nice canoe ride (dressed in all white, a stark contrast to their fiery red hair and pale skin) when one of her lace gloves fell in the water. He reached in to get it for her, the boat tipped with his weight, and they both got washed away by the current. Clearly, she managed to pull herself out while he continued to be pulled down the river. Originally, his murder is treated as a missing persons case, as they don't know he's dead and begin their case by combing the water for him. Later in the episode, two characters named Kevin Keller and Moose Mason, out on a romantic encounter by the river in the woods (Kevin's gay and Moose is closeted/not admitting to himself that he's gay/bisexual/not wholly straight) find Jason's waterlogged and freezing body washed up on the shore. They call Kevin's dad, who happens to be the Sheriff, and the case is now being treated as a homicide.

You find out later, after the case is changed to a homicide, that Cheryl was actually helping Jason to stage his death and that he was supposed to have drowned and washed away forever because he wanted out of Riverdale and didn't want his parents to ever come after him. He apparently told Cheryl that he would get settled and contact her in a month, and that never happened, obviously, considering that now he's actually dead. The thing is, the autopsy showed that he was shot in the head about a week after he "drowned", so they're not really sure what happened in that week. He clearly never left the woods, since he washed up in the same river he "drowned" in, but no one actually knows what he was doing in that week. Was he kidnapped? Tortured? That's what they have to figure out, and that's the main storyline driving the show. It's also all we know about that storyline, since the two more recent episodes have been basically devoid of any reference or information about Jason Blossom's murder.

Considering this is the maybe the first homicide to happen ever in this tiny town, everyone gets suspicious of who could have committed the crime and why they would have done such a thing. The media has a field day. Alice and Hal Cooper are the editors of the local paper and have a wonderful time digging up information on this very secretive case (this is mostly Alice, including her bribing the ME for the results of Jason's autopsy and then publishing them in the paper, much to Mrs. Blossom's anger - she punches Alice in a later episode). You find out later that Jason and the Coopers' eldest daughter, Polly, were involved in some kind of crazy whirlwind romance that landed Polly in a mental hospital after she suffered a mental breakdown, apparently due to Jason. That would be the reason that Alice is having such a fun time exposing Jason's murder all around town.

Alice and Hal's other daughter, Betty, as well as Archie, Jughead Jones and Veronica Lodge, who moved to town with her mother after her father was arrested for fraud and embezzlement (or some other white collar crimes), are the main four characters of this show. Archie has some kind of weird... romantic relationship (???) with Geraldine Grundy, who is a very young lady on this show, but not that young. She's the high school's music teacher, and she and Archie had their.. thing over the summer, and much to Archie's dismay, she tries to discontinue it when school begins. Much to her dismay, however, Archie actually really likes her and wants to continue whatever it is that they had/have.

All of the core four characters have some kind of personal issue they're dealing with in addition to trying to figure out what the f*ck happened to this town after Jason was murdered. Betty is suffering under her mother being crazy overprotective of her after the situation with Polly and trying desperately to not repeat it with her other daughter. Veronica's suffering under the "she's the new kid AND the rich kid" issues. Jughead's writing a story about the Jason Blossom incident and all its aftermath, and is generally a loner around school. The football players (who are stupid and I will get to that later) are perpetually making fun of him, but he's Archie's best friend (they start the season arguing but fix their issues pretty quickly) and Betty and Veronica are pretty fond of him too.

Basically, the town is messed up. Cheryl's queen b*tch, the mayor is corrupt, Veronica's mom is continuing to commit the crimes that landed her father in prison, Jughead's dad is part of (and may be the leader of) the local gang, and Ms. Grundy, who seems very innocent, is actually very creepy and manipulative and potentially a criminal based on consent laws and such.

There have been a lot of thoughts about this show circulating on the Internet. In the first episode, Betty and Veronica audition for the Vixens, the school's cheerleading team, led by the lovely Cheryl Blossom. Cheryl is less than impressed with their audition, and so Veronica kisses Betty in order to up the shock factor. This doesn't impress Cheryl either, but they end up both making the team anyways because Cheryl wants Veronica on the team, but not Betty, and Veronica goes on this slightly scary rant about how she and Betty are a package deal. Lo and behold, they're both on the team. Many people have been talking about the presence of queerbaiting on the show. Queerbaiting is "a term used to describe the perceived attempt by canon creators (typically of television shows) to woo queer fans and/or slash fans, but with no intention of actually showing a gay relationship being consummated on screen", and can be done in one of two ways (or maybe both): "introducing a character whose sexuality, early on, seems to be coded as something other than 100% heterosexual, or by indicating - be it ever so slightly - that two same sex characters might possibly be attracted to each other" (fanlore.com). Basically, they showed Betty and Veronica kissing, and then a whole lot of other interactions between the two of them that indicate that they may have some romantic chemistry between them that goes beyond their current platonic friendship. Both of the actresses that play Betty and Veronica have come out in interviews (one of which you can read here, but I've seen others) and said that the relationship between them on the show would stay platonic and that there were currently no plans (if any ever come to fruition) to have their relationship advance any further than it is right now.

Hence, the queerbaiting accusations. Getting people who sexually identify as something other than straight to watch the show because of this relationship between these two characters that could be something more, but isn't, and yet still seems to be fueled by a lot of tension between the two of them. I definitely see why this is a valid criticism, and I agree with it. It's really not fair for the showrunners to (intentionally or not) have this relationship between the characters and still make it seem as though there's nothing there, when there clearly is, and they just don't want to pursue it for whatever reason.

There's also been a lot of discourse surrounding the whole Ms. Grundy situation and her relationship with Archie. My stance on it is very simple: it needs to go away. If you're caught up, you'll know that in the most recent episode, Alice finds out about their relationship through Betty (there's a whole story about why she told her mom) and then a huge and unnecessarily dramatic confrontation ensues involving Alice, Betty, Archie, Ms. Grundy and Fred, Archie's dad. Grundy basically agrees to quit her job and leave town forever and never come back (she's probably coming back tbh) if Alice doesn't publish the story in the paper she runs, apparently for the sole purpose of smearing everyone's name in this town that messes with her or her family. Betty also tells her mother that she'll tell everyone she broke into Grundy's car and went through her stuff and did all these horrible things, and then people will think she's "crazy" like Polly is, which will ruin Alice's reputation. So, she doesn't run the story, and Grundy leaves (for now). 

Basically, the relationship is illegal. Apparently, they're all sophomores in high school, which makes them about 15 years old, and the age of consent in the US is 16-18 depending on which state you live in, so either way, it's fundamentally illegal, and makes Grundy a criminal considering that this means Archie cannot legally consent to any activities that they partook in, regardless of whether he was consenting or not (and boy do I hope he was). She's also manipulative, and manages to manipulate Archie into keeping the fact that they heard a gunshot on the morning of Jason's supposed murder a secret because they were together at the time that they heard it (it was 6 AM on July 4th), even though Archie really feels like it would be the right thing to do to tell Sheriff Keller and Principal Weatherbee what he heard. Eventually he does, and leaves her out of the story, but she still gets annoyed. 

It felt like the one thing that everyone agreed on about this show was that their relationship was gross, Grundy was manipulative and creepy (she's been shown ogling other teenage boys around Archie's age) and she needed to leave/be arrested/both. Now she's left, which basically solves this issue, but seeing as Grundy is an old woman in the comics, I don't really understand why this was an element that was included in the show??? It was incredibly unnecessary and weird, and did not achieve the "forbidden romance" vibe I'm assuming they were going for. It was creepy.

Those are the two main issues that people have with the show and reasons that they cite of why they won't watch it when people are asking/talking about it. I do watch this show, despite these two issues, and I think it's a good show overall. The acting is pretty good (Luke Perry and Madchen Amick play Fred Andrews and Alice Cooper, respectively, and they're basically legends), the dialogue is pretty good, and the relationships that the characters have with each other are fun to watch. It's a fun show to watch, in my opinion, and I like watching it. 

Overall, I think it's a good show, and has the potential to go places. Maybe in future they'll actually address the queerbaiting aspect, as that's a major issue a lot of people have with the show, and then it'll be better for it. Hopefully.

Why I Hate Confrontation

I'm a self-proclaimed loud mouth, but I hate confrontation. I hate having to stand up to people. This doesn't really make any sense, considering the fact that I have such a big mouth and basically communicate exclusively in sarcasm and dry jokes. But I hate when people call me on my shit, for some reason.

I think it might be because it makes me self-aware of what a crappy person I really am. The kind of person that I really am, or that I think that I am, is always floating around in the back of my mind, but when people call me out on my shit, I'm suddenly very aware of how crappy I can be. I also hate being the centre of attention for negative reasons, and that obviously also comes as a part of this. I have a huge mouth when it comes to making fun of other people, but as soon as someone starts calling me out for it, I just shut down and walk away, feeling ashamed of myself.

That's probably why I hate confrontation so much, to be honest. I hate the feelings of shame and guilt, as I'm sure most people do, but I'm also one of those people that stays up late at night and lays in the dark, thinking about all the shitty things I've ever done. I've done some crappy stuff and carried the guilt around with me and then confessed and apologized, and for those things, I don't feel any guilt anymore because I have nothing to be guilty about. Everything's out in the open, and I'm not lying. It's just the shame that persists that I would even do what I did in the first place.

I also often act before thinking about what the potential consequences could be, and I feel like that is a huge contributor to these feelings, and is also obviously very much something that is my fault. I say things I shouldn't just to get a laugh out of someone or because I think it's going to be funny and it actually isn't. I think that maybe it connects back to all these crazy, anxiety-ridden feelings I have about my friends all thinking that I'm really annoying and that they don't actually want to be my friend at all. I get so self-conscious about that sometimes, and have such social anxiety surrounding it, that I guess I try and be funny in a rude way to make them like me, even though it probably just portrays me as a rude and bitchy person that I am on the inside. The thing is, I don't want to be that person. I don't want to be someone that everyone looks at and thinks "Oh, she's such a bitch." But I feel like I made myself into that person by saying the things that I do.

The other thing about me is that I love watching drama unfold for other people, and I love gossip, but only when it's not about me or any of my friends. When drama and gossip involve my friends, especially my high school girlfriends, damn does shit get crazy fast. Grade 12 was maybe the most dramatic year of my life in terms of how much shit was going on behind the scenes between my friends for a number of different reasons, and in those situations, I get really annoyed because people won't just talk to each other. I've always been a huge proponent of communicating with people and letting them know how you feel so that you can avoid unnecessary issues, but that year, my friends and I did none of that. It was horrible.

I just cannot handle drama when it involves me. It always seems to get way out of hand very quickly, and always seems to result in a row of confrontations and issues, but they never seemed to happen in person. They always seemed to happen over Facebook or over text, and that just made them worse because you can't convey tone properly that way, and so messages were taken incorrectly and it just makes everything way messier. Confrontation and talks like those with your friends about problems you're having are messy enough, but then to add on the additional element of texting just makes it one hundred times worse than it could be.

Confrontation just makes me more self-aware of my faults and causes a lot of issues. In a world with high levels of digital communication, they can just get really out of hand because of the lack of context that comes with body language and adds unnecessary levels of complication to things. On top of this, it's just a personal thing for me that makes me more self-conscious of my faults, like I said, and how much of a crappy person that I can be, and that's definitely not my favourite thing in the world to have to think about or acknowledge.

Being a Fake Fan

What does it mean to be a fake fan?

I've spent a lot of time on the Internet, more specifically on social media, and even more specifically than that, in fandom. I joined my first fandom when I was about 14, and now I'm 19 and I'm probably in about 13 or so fandoms at any given moment. I have a few core fandoms I've been in for years (Teen Wolf, PLL) and some I just recently joined (Marvel, This Is Us), and they're all very different from each other (Marvel and Teen Wolf consist of teenage girls yelling and crying on the Internet, This Is Us is more of a family show, and PLL is almost dead). I've never been called a fake fan, not to my face, or ask box, but I'm sure at least one person has looked at my everchanging Tumblr blog and wondered what the hell it's turned into, because it probably isn't what they followed me for.

My Tumblr blog is the centre of my fandom. I follow things related to my fandoms on all my social medias, but Twitter, Instagram and Facebook are also places where people I know in real life can see the things I'm doing and judge me for them, so those places I generally just follow official accounts and like pictures and occassionally leave comments. So Tumblr is where I focus my fan energies, to allow myself to freak out about anything and everything that I love dearly, because it can be mostly anonymous and no one I know in real life knows about it except for my best friend.

So back to my original question: what does "fake fan" really mean? Does it mean that you don't know what you're talking about when it comes to a certain show/book/movie? There are new people that discover things every day and are still in the process of learning about the thing that they just discovered, and they shouldn't be shamed for that. Is it someone that's a bandwagon hopper, like when a certain sports team starts to do really well and they start to like them because everyone else does? Maybe, but that seems very specific and I'm pretty sure "bandwagon fan" is the term used to describe those types of people. Also, I've done that a lot in my life, because when my local sports teams are doing well, specifically hockey and baseball, everyone in the city and the surrounding area gets really into it, even if they weren't before.

Being a "fake fan", whatever it means, is something that I'm afraid of being (even though it apparently means nothing). To me, it basically feels as though it encompasses someone who shows up halfway through something and acts as if they know what they're talking about when they really have no idea what's even going on. I think that's what it means to me. Right now, I feel like one of those.

Basically, I've been getting more into hockey these days, and I've actually been watching games instead of catching the occasional highlight. However, I know nothing about stats and what makes a good player and when the referees are making bad calls and stuff like that. So when I'm watching, I am commenting on how the players are playing (to myself, because I watch these games by myself out of extreme self-conciousness) and am incredibly self-aware of how ridiculous I sound because I literally don't have a clue what I'm talking about. I like to think I'm a fast learner though, and when I get interested in something, I try and learn as much as I can about it as fast as possible, so I've been teaching myself some of the basics I didn't know before, like different penalties and what the stats mean and other things like that, but I feel like I'd have to watch for a really long time in order to learn what makes a good player, because I didn't play growing up or anything like that, so I have no idea, really.

But does that make me a "fake fan"? I definitely have periodic obsessions that take over my life for about a week, but then they chill out and I either get over them in six months or love them steadily for a long time. Hockey's been around my entire life, as a background thing that I love a lot because it means so many different and important things to me, and right now I appear to be going through a periodic obsession. My week of hardcore loving it is over now, and it's settled into something that will hopefully be around for a while because I'm finding myself really enjoying it.

So I don't think that it makes me a fake fan. I am a fan, albeit a new fan. But I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I think there's a stark and definite difference between someone who qualifies as a "fake fan" and pretends to know what they're talking about when they don't, and someone who's new to something that's trying to teach themselves because they genuinely enjoy it and want to learn things about it. The former is definitely incredibly annoying, and the latter is just someone discovering a new love. So based on the above, I don't think that my love of hockey sparking right now, halfway through the season, makes me a "fake fan", but rather just someone discovering a new love for something they already loved. Hopefully.