#having a normal discussion in the youtube comment section and someone had to be rude as fuck to me

[melonisopod]

"Homophobes don't assume that!" well I was raised by them and uh yes they do.

[lucyreviewcy]

Made in Chelsea - S05 E12

Another day, another end of season party.

The Made in Chelsea end of season party is a really fantastic microcosm of how media culture works. Celebrities, in this case, MiC stars are brought on stage to answer intrusive questions about their personal lives. Admittedly, at least in this context they are a) being paid and b) participants in a television series of which their personal lives is the central subject. 

It can be difficult to watch these as a grown up in 2021 because we’re all a bit more enlightened now about the impact celebrity in general and reality television in particular can have on a participant’s mental health. What’s interesting about these episodes is that Rick Edwards does in the open much of what we now do online via comment sections. 

There was a time when tabloid press was the primary arena for speculating about a celebrity’s private life. Cultural studies writer Michael DeAngelis explores the way that tabloid speculation functioned as a form of fantasy in his book Gay Fandom and Crossover Stardom. DeAngelis suggests that before the internet gave fanfiction a much larger audience than it had ever had before, the tabloids offered the opportunity for fans to speculate about the sexuality of their favourite stars. He’s referring in this instance to the speculation in the 90s that Keanu Reeves had married a media mogul named David Geffen. This story paved the way for both fantasy and empathy for gay fans, and given Reeves chronic/iconic ability to never actually say anything certain in interviews (don’t get me started on his “the people we love will miss us” line...) his sexuality has never been clearly and openly discussed by him. Nor should we expect it to be. Would you like someone to come into a meeting with you and go “hey, so, tell me all about your sexuality.” No, not in a normal professional context. 

But Reeves, and our Poshos, doesn’t exist in a normal professional context. For some reason, we expect stars and celebrities to bare intimate details of their lives in public forums. Our fantasy may have migrated online, and tabloid journalism is pretty much a receptacle for scorn and rage tweets, but our curiosity persists. We want to know who our favourite celebrity is sleeping with, and now that we have access to social media, we can just ASK. 

I’ve only recently gained access to Instagram, and a lot of the people I follow regularly do those “ask me anything” stories. One that struck me recently was YouTuber Steph Toms being asked for about the zillionth time if she’s going to have kids soon. Toms has said a few times in her video that this just isn’t something she wants to do in life, but people keep asking her. The thing is, this question is a rude question to ask someone that you know personally unless you are like, their best friend and you know they’re alright with being asked. Asking it of someone you only know in an online context is even ruder. 

But we each have our own parasocial relationships with our YouTubers and celebrities. In the world we’re currently living in, we interact with most of them the same way we do our real friends and family, via a screen. The boundaries between us and them are degraded by social media, and we are emboldened by the relative anonymity of the online world. My instagram is just my cat, so if I asked Steph Toms a really personal question, she’d never know it was me unless she met me and my cat. The internet is a weird hinterland where we’re both closer to and more distanced from our stars. We demand more knowledge but it isn’t really a fair exchange, because they know basically nothing about us. 

To circle back to the original subject of this long, long review: I find it funny that the Made in Chelsea end of season format is so uncomfortable now, given that all Rick Edwards is doing is asking in person questions that we ask celebrities and stars every single day online. My BFF Keanu Reeves (he’s never said we’re not friends so you can’t prove it) doesn’t have social media, potentially because he’s spent three decades being exposed to the kind of questions people apparently feel comfortable asking him face to face and he’s had quite enough of that. What would his twitter even look like anyway? In my head blurry pictures of his motorbikes and observations about the weather that don’t give any hint of his mood. “Sun in California today (sun emoji, picture of blurry motorbike taken from the seat of the motorbike)”. Lucy and Spencer haven’t yet learned Keanu’s skill of saying absolutely nothing in as many words as you can, which is a good thing for the show (because that would really kill the drama) but a bad thing for them (based on how uncomfortable they look on Rick’s sofa.) It’s not old hat to pry into celebrities’ private lives, we just don’t do it on stage with an audience of jeering fans anymore. Maybe, like Spencer, that was the more honest thing to do.

[relaxandlaughatyourself]

Recap of Ika IG Live 2-23-18

Mostly talk about Dem, what happened today, CBB and their trip to LA.

Link to screenshots.

Said she’s been running around all day, eating popcorn and drinking soda now. She’s tired.

Quick recap of CBB.

“Why are people asking if me and Dem are okay? Of course we’re okay. Why are people asking? That’s so weird.”

She’s packing, going to LA tomorrow.

Wants Ari to win, mentions how Mark isn’t playing a bad game, he knows what’s going on.

Dem is going to LA. “He always comes with me. I’m double excited. I’m excited to interview these people but I’m more excited to see Dem.”

She really wants us to send her questions for the HGs. She wants more unusual questions, ones that we really want answers to. We need to step our game up with the questions.

Josh is in the live, they’re going to see him in LA. Dem is so excited to see him. “Josh is out here ruining relationships, I say ‘baby, we’re going to see Josh’ and Dem forgets about me.”

Some asks if her IG got hacked, it did not. She said she would explain what happened today. She says that people noticed that they unfollowed each other and then refollowed each other later in the day. She’s embarrassed to say what happened, it won’t make sense to us. Last night they were talking and they were asking if they could go a whole day without talking to each other. They said they couldn’t see each other on social media either, they had to disconnect totally. So Ika blocked him on all social media and whatsapp so he couldn’t even call her, they wanted to see how they would do without talking to each other. They did the blocking at like 3 in the morning and they lasted until they added each other back when we saw it. She’s proud of how long they went. But she cheated because she went into the demika hashtag. “Thank god for that hashtag.” They didn’t unlike the pics, it must’ve done it when they got the blocks. Dem called Karen and asked her to message Ika to call him cause he was done with that. So Ika called first, but Dem broke down first. But he also cheated cause he took screenshots of her IG before they blocked each other. She knows this sounds stupid. She promises it wasn’t anything. “Dem and I, we’re not ordinary.”

She deleted pics, but she deleted a ton so don’t worry about the ones with Dem. She didn’t love the pics she deleted (she didn’t like how she looked), it’s not that big of a deal, she swears. All the important pics, the ones that mean the most to her are still there. She wanted to clean it up a bit. Said if her and Dem were having issues or broke up, she wouldn’t delete him. She has more restraint than that. If they ever break up or anything, she’s not doing any unfollowing.

She is upset she deleted the fake interview, she’s gonna cry that she deleted that. She didn’t know she deleted it.

Her IG is a business account, the businesses cannot see her sucking face with her boyfriend every two pics.

She adds Dem. He says that he’s been watching the whole time. Dem said he was going to comment “publicity stunt” in the comments.

Dem’s IG account was connected to her account because he has used her phone, but when she blocked him it got deleted, but she has all his passwords. And he has all her passwords. Her email goes through him (?).

Marina is in the live.

Keeps messing up when Dem is added, but they’ll talk to us together in LA.

Discusses Lucian, the designer. She called him last minute that she needed a dress, and he had her come over, he’s so amazing to her and is just a great person, humble. The first time she met him she was amazed at how they treated her not like a nobody. She’s excited about her dress.

A lot of people compliment her on her fans. They say we’re nice, but even when we’re rude, we’re funny.

She doesn’t know if we’ll be seeing her on ET Canada much in the future because BBCAN6 is coming up, but she’ll be on lives and on twitter. Thinking of doing a weekly recap show for bbcan6 on youtube; it will be funny segments. She doesn’t want it to be mean, she wants it to be respectable and clean. She wants to commit if she’s going to do it. “We can do it if I’m not doing the ET stuff.”

She has tea for us. She’s going through her DMs and she has so many, hundreds, in the requests section. But she can’t check everything but she wants to. She’s scrolling through and sees one that says her dress looks good. She usually just responds, doesn’t click on the person. But this one she did. It was one of Dem’s ex’s best friends. She was wondering if it was shade. She didn’t respond. “It’s been a year.” She says they should have taken the time to put up good pics and make themselves look good before coming to her. She says we need to all take the time to do things. New hashtag alert lmao

When something bad happens, she says “they really tried us.” She always says “us” or “we” so she doesn’t feel like she’s in things alone.

Someone did something really shady to her recently. “It’s okay, people will get theirs.”

When she gets to LA she will show us her skin/facial in good lighting. She has two more sessions.

In LA until Tuesday.

She shows us her tattoo on her wrist, and she says it really hurt and she was crying, she told them they were attacking her. She won’t tell us what the tattoo means.

Dem is still using her products.

The packing isn’t going well. Meaning, it hasn’t started yet. She’s planning on starting at 2am so she doesn’t have to sleep and she can sleep on the plane. Dem will stay up with her.

Most excited to interview Brandi. Excited to see Marissa again because Marissa told the producer to bring her back and they called Ika almost right away to bring her back. That meant a lot to Ika. The lady she works with for ET in America is amazing, she lets Ika be herself and she doesn’t try to take over, she lets ika take the wheel and do what’s comfortable. She called ET Canada and raved about Ika; she doesn’t normally do things like that.

She says she likes watching Omarosa, she’s playing well and is entertaining. Really likes Ari, loves that she didn’t make herself a sob story.

His birthday: “I don’t know. We were supposed to extend the trip but we couldn’t. My little baby is busy selling houses in Edmonton so we’ll have to see.”

She and Dem started following this cooking IG account because when they’re together they’re gonna make those meals together.

They decided that March 11 is their anniversary because that is the day they met, “that’s the day our lives changed.”

Never saw Dem in the casting process because she was never in the casting process for bbcan5.

She’s had a lot of fun doing interviews with ET Canada and she has seen growth in her ability.

How to lead into the interview makes her nervous but otherwise she doesn’t get too nervous.

Dem tells her to try to censor herself a bit more. Dem is the type of person where if someone is shady or rude to them, he can play it off and not let them know that he knows that they’re being shady. Ika doesn’t know how he does that. Ika is the kind of person where if someone shades her or is a snake, she wants them to know she feels that way. But Dem thinks that burns bridges and it may hurt her relationships in business. She says he’s right, but she doesn’t know how to just take the shade though it is smart. She does realize it’s hurt her in the past. 

She has to pack and talk to Dem.