#I think a lot of this fandom maybe subconsciously likes to search for easy obvious answers. well I’m here to complicate it once again

[gemmasdeadwife]

Pre-post disclaimer that I’m absolutely not someone who ships either markgemma or markhelly to the exclusion of the other, or wants one out of the way. I hate that shit and both relationships are extremely important. I do like to speculate about them without that burden of being pressured to pick one and shit on the other.

A lot of people are talking about how Mark and Gemma are now too different for their marriage to ever work again. Which is totally valid and makes sense, and something I’ve thought about a lot myself. It’s such a normal, everyday tragedy for relationships to be broken by trauma, distance, change. But… what if it’s actually the opposite…?

Which I know is a mega fucked thing to say about endless torture! But idk… I think for Mark it could put their struggles with infertility into perspective. Obviously that was huge and traumatic, but maybe there was no need for it to eclipse their marriage- there was so much more to it than that. And I think he’s learning (VERY SLOWLY) to confront his obstacles head-on instead of running away and lashing out at his loved ones. I think it would be hard for him to ever take her for granted again, and if he started to slip that way, it wouldn’t take a lot of reminding for him to shape up.

Gemma of course didn’t really need to change- that’s the bigger part of the problem here to me. Maybe she was a little naïve for getting into the Lumon stuff that she did, but how could she have possibly known? She was just analyzing interesting little puzzles, a welcome distraction from feeling so hopeless. If she did display any naïveté, I think there’s pretty much zero chance of that ever cropping up again after what she’s been through.

The biggest issues still are the trauma and how much they’ve each changed. Is their trauma around each other, and their pedestalization of each other while they were apart, too great for them to have a relationship again? I think it could go either way. For one thing, the trauma is going to be difficult with all of their relationships going forward, including Mark and Helly too. I don’t believe that the deeply traumatized can’t love properly- it just takes a fuckton of work.

Changing over time is also a problem in any long term relationship, though it’s harder when you’re not together through the change, and this is more unusual and fucked up than being apart during a deployment or something. I think they will have to get to know each other all over again very carefully, gently and gradually. It’s natural if there are some missteps along the way. They aren’t the same people they were before the “death,” and they aren’t the idolized versions of each other they pined over through separation, either. And that will either result in falling in love in a whole new way, or else realizing romance doesn’t make sense between them anymore, but remaining family- I think that bond between them is too strong to become nothing, but it could transform.

[stateofirrelevancy]

How do you feel about the posts going around that say the boys (specifically Mikey and Calum) don't look happy to see fans anymore and have "lost the light in their eyes (when with fans)"

OOH MY GOD I have so much to say on this and I’m so thankful you came to me for this question.

I haven’t been very active in the fandom lately just because I moved into my dorm this week and have been busy af every day, so I didn’t know people were saying that stuff about Michael and Calum. That being said though, I’ve seen this exact thing happen before, and I was even part of the problem at one point, so I have a lot to say on this subject.

First of all, I’m gonna be talking about mid sophomore year me and my thoughts on sos “not looking happy” in pics at the time. I’m going to be as brutally honest as I can on my past toxicity because I know those thoughts don’t in any way reflect who I am as a person today. I learned from my mistakes, and hopefully the people spouting this negativity today will learn soon as well.

My past with this problem

In about December 2014, my friend pointed out to me that Calum never smiled in pictures he took with fans. I’d never noticed this before, but when I looked back at all the recent pictures that had been posted with him, I too noticed the pattern there. And upon learning this, I felt a mix of embarrassment and anger. It was as if I felt injusticed on behalf of the fans that met him. And, me being 2014 me, I thought I’d do something about it.

So I made this edit with an accompanying hashtag like #calumsmileproject or something (it’s not that tho lol I forgot what it was). In it, I explained how Calum was being unfair to fans and how everyone reading it needed to repost the picture so it could eventually get to Calum. What goal was I hoping to accomplish? I don’t know. Maybe I wanted him to feel bad. Maybe I thought that for some reason my poorly made edit would inspire some sort of revelation within him that would suddenly transform him into what I considered to be a better man. Or maybe I just wanted the ability to say I started a movement. I just don’t know.

This is honestly so embarrassing to talk about. I want to delete all of this and just say that I disprove of fans like this. Only the friends that followed me on my old insta page know about this because I’ve always been too grossed out with myself to share what I was like not even three years ago. But I want to share this with everyone now because it provides context on why I have such a strong opinion on this topic.

The picture did get a bit of attention. While I didn’t have a huge page or anything, I had a lot of popular mutuals who reposted it, which boosted it a lot. I was also fuming about this “problem” until probably March 2015 when I sort of let it go and forgot about it.

Why I was mad and why I think others are mad today

I personally did this because I relied on 5sos for too much of my happiness. I think everyone practices escapism to some degree, but with sos, they were (and honestly still are) a big part of my identity. So when the slightest of thing went wrong, I channeled all of the anger from my actual life into my fandom life. I took all my frustrations from the real world out on 5sos because I had a lot of pent up anger that I needed to get out and I thought of them as easy targets.

While that’s not the exact same reason others are complaining, nor am I trying to say me attempting to start a movement on Calum not smiling is the same as someone offhandedly saying they’re sad Malum don’t smile in pics with fans, I do think a lot of problems in this fandom arrive from the same roots. I think people subconsciously view 5sos as easy targets to vent about because it’s easy to feel like they’ll never see what you say. Plus, when you engage in rage culture, you’ll likely get responses from people agreeing with you which only serves to make those feelings of frustration validated.

Whether purposely or not, it’s easy to find yourself almost expecting your faves to provide constant happiness for you when you’re in a fandom. And I think that’s what ends up happening when 5sos fans participate in what is ultimately pointless drama.

Why late 2014/early 2015 me was wrong and why others are wrong today

Well let’s get what’s obvious out of the way: no, 5sos don’t secretly hate their fans. That should go without saying.

I think an easy misconception to fall into is that “it’s not that hard to smile in pictures!!” because that’s what I used to think. But we as fans don’t know that the boys have to go through every day. We don’t know what it’s like to be stopped everywhere we go every few minutes with people demanding to take a picture with you. We don’t know what it’s like to come off of a 8+ hour flight only to be mobbed at the airport and to feel obligated to talk to every fan there. We don’t know what it’s like to never feel like you have any true privacy.

Smiling isn’t the only indicative way to sense how someone is feeling. Plus, smiling takes mf effort!! And let’s not forget that often times when they get stopped, it’s with a group of fans, so their minds are likely more focused on getting through everyone than on making each picture perfect. As long as the boys are being kind to the fans they meet, then it shouldn’t matter what kind of arbitrary rules, like them needing to look how we want them to look, they need to be following.

I would be lying if I said I never notice it anymore. If I see back to back fan pics, it’s hard to not think to myself “oh [5sos member] isn’t really smiling in this pic :(” But I have to actively remind myself that just because they’re not smiling doesn’t mean they have some sort of vendetta against fans. 

It’s easy as fans to fall into the trap of wanting to analyze everything 5sos do and think we know what’s going on with them, as if we’re watching a movie and picking out the symbolism purposely written into the script. But the boys aren’t move characters. They’re real, complex humans who don’t deserve to be judged based on inconsequential actions that make up a fraction of their life and even less so reflect their true perception of fans.

Even the people hating on Michael and Calum hopefully know deep down that they love what they do and they love their fans for helping them achieve them. Look at 5sos while they’re on stage. Listen to them talk about us in interviews. Don’t get caught up in searching for secret toxic behavior that isn’t even there.