#gen ahkbs tag

[enneamage]

Ash has somehow managed to put his foot in it again, but he’s getting backlash from all sides so there’s not much to do except zoom out a bit.

This seems to have sped along discussion around Lovejoy’s political identity—what are their politics, really? The answer to “what do you think of billionaires” is something that could have deeper consequences with the music scene than just blowback from post-mcyt fan types.

[enneamage]

I agree with what you said about the Ash thing but I think there is also another layer to it. He said "I'm upset that you'd think so little of me". That sounds pretty parasocial since can he honestly say that any fans truly know him to the extent that they can infer his intentions on the people he follows? This is his first time in the public eye and it sucks that he had to go through a bit of baptism by fire, but maybe it is better now than later. I think it also means that all of the positivity that goes his way has a price tag of being held to a higher standard, and he is only finding that out now. It may have burned him enough to be a bit more guarded than he has been. To be fair, the bigger they get, the more likely something like this was going to happen eventually. Hopefully in the future he taps into the resource he has that has already been through some of this.

Or he could just pull a Mark and only post cat pics on his Insta... Cats + internet = nobody gets hurt

There’s a lot to unpack here, which is a disappointing thing to say about a situation that the majority of people agreed could have been either silent or a simple one tweet “whoopsie, problem solved.” That tweet/thread very quickly became The Problem Object as soon as it came into existence and made the issue way more weird and provocative than it needed to be. It accidentally revealed a lot more about his attitudes than the starting issue, and it’s even more damning because unlike the weird mystery twitter follow you can tell he meant it. That’s not easily undone.

The thread was unambiguously aggressive, even without the initial tweet. (Can anyone get me thread screenshots for posterity? Some of those one-liners have to be seen to be believed. The ‘unlike you losers I have a life’ overtones are wild.) Even the tweet that got to stay up is pretty bad. Never try to scold a crowd unless you are absolutely sure you have the moral highground. It was a bone-headed move to take a self-victimising tone in this situation and I think it’s going to leave a lasting scar on his reputation even if he deleted it all after.

I’ve mentioned Ash before as someone who has made a brand for himself as a loveable, jolly-looking mime. There’s something to be said for celebrity in general being a game of fill-in-the-blank using the glamorous context clues of their job and surroundings, easily moving into idealisation from there. It was perversely funny to watch people play the usual ”parasocial” card but backwards—“We don’t know you. We’ve never even heard you talk.” Some of his cartoonish celebrity mystique, the blank canvas that people were projecting benefit of the doubt onto, now has a massive awkward paint splotch on it that portrays him as someone who doesn’t know how to emotionally manage social justice/ social media issues. That’s a dangerous kind of person to be in the public eye, so something needs to change.

It's not just Ash’s own reputation that he’s playing with when things like this happen, it’s the things he’s attached to as well. This was irresponsible, and he’s probably going to get a slap on the wrist from a PR professional assuming Lovejoy has one. It’s something to adjust to but frankly he can’t back out of it now, you don’t get to speak in a large forum as a public figure and not get treated like a public figure.

[enneamage]

Just coming back to the space after a while all your links to the ash situation dont go anywhere (except the last one ) can you point me to what happened if you can ?

They seem to be working for me, but I can give a summary since the main thread was taken down. The abbreviated story is that an account Ash followed for an unknown reason was moving towards TERF talking points, and between that and the ‘radfem’ in bio it looked like she was an open TERF the whole time. People started to contact him saying that he was following a TERF and asking him to unfollow, naturally questioning his motives/beliefs. Apparently some people were angry in his DMs and ‘threatening to cancel him’, which he posted a tweet snapping back publicly for.

He went on to delete the tweet but made a thread that was arguably just as bad expanding on the themes of the tweet, how he’s busy with life and can’t be asked to ‘babysit’ everything that goes on online, how he was disappointed that anyone would think that he would believe in something like that, he explicitly said something along the lines of “this is not an apology because I have done nothing wrong,” a whole lot of defensiveness. He also started to reply to one-off tweets argumentatively, just a lot of moves that you don’t want to make as a big account acting impulsively.

He went on to nuke that thread as well, and the tweet that stayed up is him acknowledging that he was tweeting while worked up. Most people agree that it wasn’t a good moment for him.