[ A rather interesting opinion piece for your perusal. -- SD ]
From: https://tinyurl.com/ya7p28p3 (humanevents.com)
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Hollywood Consultant Admits 'Glee' Started the Wokeness Epidemic"
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By Bill Hurrell | January 04, 2022
Where did cancel culture and wokeness come from? This is the question that
consumes many conservative writers almost as much as the question of how
to beat it. While others have pointed to the rise of postmodern critical
theory in universities in the 80's, or to the political correctness wave
of the 90's, I believe these explanations only tell part of the story and
leave a very important question unanswered: why now? Why this generation?
It is not possible to answer this question without talking about the
influence of social media, and specifically the social media used to
propagate millennial fan culture, where social justice warriorism and
cancel culture truly had their testing grounds. Personally, I devoted
considerable space to the culture of Tumblr, the social media site that is
equally responsible for the development of wokeness as 4chan is for the
evolution of the populist right. In examining Tumblr, I believe any
right-winger has to conclude that wokeness is anything but a serious
commitment to equality and justice, but has rather always been nothing but
a way for resentful and self-harming teenagers to pick on each other using
the language of critical theory, without actually engaging with it beyond
one's own narcissistic frame of reference.
But even if this explains the appeal of wokeness to the young (and
particularly the young and female), it leaves one vital question
unanswered: where on Tumblr did the whole business start? There had to be
a first fandom that fell to social justice, and that then infected the
others. What was that fandom, and what might it tell us about the modern
left's nature in general? In short, if wokeness was a plague, where was
Patient Zero?
It is with the aim of answering that question that I write this sequel,
because as it turns out, the woke phenomenon's origins are as shallow,
childish, and risible as it is possible to get. It is difficult to imagine
a movement with more absurdly provincial origins rising to ruin so many
lives. And, once those origins are exposed, I believe it will be that much
harder to take wokeness of any kind seriously.
Why? Read on.
1. God and Man at McKinley
In late September of 2017, a post appeared on Tumblr by a user calling
herself twelveclara. Sounding like a combination between Jonathan Edwards
and Enoch Powell by way of the girl's locker room, twelveclara issued the
following jeremiad to her followers about certain events that took place
in 2011:
"y'all have no idea. none of u understand the suffering we went through.
the hell. the endless war. u come in here and u try to start The Discourse
but u dont get that we already made these mistakes. we already had the
discourse and its done now. its over. its all over and u should let it
stay dead but u wont and that's why we all hate u"
Later on, twelveclara said of the same phenomenon, "its not history, its
blood."
Reading this, you might think twelveclara was describing some horrible
world-historical event - a natural disaster, a plague, perhaps even a
great mass outbreak of violence. You would be wrong. What she was actually
describing was what it was like to spend time on Tumblr as a fan of the TV
show Glee.
No, I'm not kidding. The above are descriptions of so-called "fan wars"
among fans of Glee in the early 2010's, written with the benefit of
hindsight from a survivor. And, ironically, the things that survivor
writes about the Glee wars read like dress rehearsals for eventual
postmortems on the wokeness of our current era. Witness lines like this:
"we fought its wars until it was too late. until it was nothing but a
distorted picture of a parody of reality, a cracked mirror in which our
souls were sucked and encased in glass. "
"u asked for history. theres no history, only rage and pain and regret,
the image of anonymous with a grey face and sunglasses telling u to kill
urself"
"the void could not consume anything more, and the posts on it now, the
social justice "discourse" that is just giant piles of steaming, unsifted,
unrefined shit is from those who refused to learn from us. the history is
here and it followed us and we can never ever escape it."
It is difficult to imagine more salient words about how it feels to live
in the world cancel culture created, and how America will no doubt feel
when we finally escape it.
However, in order to understand the specifics of twelveclara's indictment,
it is necessary to first do a quick summary of the TV show Glee for the
uninitiated. As it happens, I inflicted the show on myself for at least
its first three seasons (honestly, it all started to blend together after
that), and I believe I can therefore offer a decent enough summary of its
plot, characters, and overall philosophy for the purposes of this article.
To begin with, it would be remiss of me not to note that if any show could
claim to be a curse not merely on the United States, but on its own cast
members, it would be Glee. No less than three of the show's main cast died
far before their time. Cory Monteith, who played the main romantic lead
for the show's first season, died at 31 of a drug overdose in 2013. Mark
Salling, who played football team bad boy Noah Puckerman, was arrested for
possession of child porn in 2015, pled guilty to the charges in 2017, and
committed suicide in 2018 before he could be sentenced. Naya Rivera, who
played the lesbian cheerleader Santana, drowned in the summer of 2020
while swimming with her 4-year-old son. A cloud hangs over Glee, to the
point that pop culture sites speak of a "Glee curse." Short of Macbeth, no
other show has acquired Glee's reputation for inflicting bad luck on its
actors.
Which is surprising, when you consider what it's actually about. Glee is a
teenage-oriented drama centered around the members of the fictional
McKinley High School's eponymous Glee club, the "New Directions" (a name
meant to provoke a snigger due to its resemblance to the phrase "nude
erections" . The show's primary, though by no means exclusive protagonist
is the club's faculty adviser Will Schuester (played by Matthew Morrison),
who teaches Spanish at McKinley High and becomes the faculty adviser for
the Glee Club after its previous director is fired for inappropriately
touching a male student. Schuester, as we will see shortly, is not an
improvement on this count, but let that pass for the moment. More relevant
for our purposes is that the Glee club, which Shuester once led to victory
at regional competitions as a member, is now in disarray and an
underfunded haven for social pariahs, the majority of the school's
extracurricular budget going to the cheerleading squad, led by coach Sue
Sylvester (played by Jane Lynch), a woman who can best be described as
what would happen if you threw the Wicked Witch of the West, Agatha
Trunchbull from Matilda, Rep. Michele Bachmann, and disgraced former
Jacksonville Jaguars head coach Urban Meyer in a blender and hit "puree."
Needless to say, when Schuester begins demanding (and receiving) money
formerly reserved for Sylvester's squad, she resolves to bring down the
Glee Club by any means necessary. This forms the main conflict of the
first season.
Why only the first? Because while Sylvester would remain one of the great
antagonists of teen media, perhaps only surpassed by JD from Heathers and
Regina George from Mean Girls, Schuester is at best a dull, white-bread
hero and at worst...well, I'll let Sue herself describe him at his worst:
"You are a fatuous, dim-witted, borderline pederast, who tears up faster
than a gay jihadi in a sandstorm. You have befouled the profession of
teaching by accepting not only one but two Teacher of the Year awards
despite not speaking a word of the foreign language you purport to teach.
Like the storied predators of yesteryear, Will, you pick only the most
vulnerable students to favor while actively neglecting the others."
Yeah. A protagonist who can carry a multi-season TV show, Will Schuester
ain't. Such shows naturally gravitate toward the more interesting
characters, and as it happens, the members of Schuester's New Directions
are far more interesting characters than their hapless leader. And as a
matter of fact, they are far more relevant for our purposes as well, so
let's move onto them.
When Schuester first opens the club's doors, he only attracts the students
who comprise the absolute bottom of the school's social hierarchy. Those
founding members are Rachel Berry (played by Lea Michele), a blatantly
stereotypical female Jewish theater kid with two gay dads; Kurt Hummel
(played by Chris Colfer), a flamingly gay (and hilariously vicious) male
soprano who is frequently the object of bullying by the football team;
Mercedes Jones (played by Amber Riley), an obese black girl with oodles of
stereotypical sass; Tina Cohen-Chang (played by Jenna Ushkowitz), a
stuttering and morose Asian Goth girl whose distinguishing traits rapidly
vanish as the series goes on; and Artie Abrams (played by Kevin McHale), a
wheelchair-bound bespectacled wiseacre. However, this outcast status soon
becomes a transparently ridiculous pose, as the club grows to include
members of the football team and the cheerleading squad, including the
show's initial teen antagonist, the bitchy "Queen Bee" head cheerleader
(and Celibacy Club president) Quinn Fabray (played by Dianna Agron), and
Finn Hudson (played by Cory Monteith), the all-American captain of the
football team and object of the (initially) unsuccessful affections of
Rachel Berry. Along with Fabray and Hudson, the aforementioned black sheep
of the football team Noah "Puck" Puckerman (Mark Salling), and Fabray's
two lesbian henchmen, comically nasty Santana Lopez (Naya Rivera) and
comically stupid Brittany S. Pierce (Heather Morris), as well as back-up
dancers Mike Chang (Harry Shum Jr) and Matt Rutherford (Dijon Talton),
round out the initial roster.
The majority of the show pretty much consists of an obsessive focus on the
love lives and adolescent trials faced by these various teenagers, with
the conflict between Will Schuester and Sue Sylvester vanishing into the
background the more the show continues. Eventually, this first roster of
Glee Club members and their associates would "graduate," to be replaced by
new members, while the show intersperses subplots consisting of the old
club's exploits in college and beyond. As the original cast is pretty much
the group that would define the show's identity, I do not think it is
necessary to inflict the full roster of the second iteration of "New
Directions" on the reader. Enough to note that they exist and move on.
However, there is one final second character who I would be remiss not to
note because he will become highly relevant before this summary is
concluded: Jacob Ben Israel (Josh Sussman), a conspicuously horny
unsuccessful suitor of Rachel Berry's who only sporadically involves
himself with the Glee Club, but eventually takes to interviewing people
around the school with a microphone emblazoned with Hebrew letters while
sporting what is often referred to as a "Jew-fro."
Now, as I don't have time to summarize the plot of each season in
exhaustive detail, from here the reader will have to take my word for it
about what happens on the show. However, before I get into analyzing plot
elements, I do want to draw the reader's attention to two important points
about the cast of characters, which may have been lost in listing them
off. Namely, that the members of "New Directions" are a Diversity and
Equity Inclusion Committee's dream. You have multiple Asian students, one
black girl (who compounds her marginalization by being fat), a lesbian
couple (one of whom is Latina), a gay kid, a Jewish girl with gay parents,
a disabled boy, a Jewish football player, and the lone straight white guy
Finn, who just happens to also be the character who consistently makes the
most mistakes. In other words, from a critical theory perspective,
everyone except Finn in this show is "oppressed" or "marginalized," and
even Finn has to face some marginalization when dealing with his one-time
girlfriend's pregnancy (Quinn, who manages to earn her stripes as a
marginalized person by being a teen mother).
Secondly, and here the reader will have to take my word for it, the
absolute most consistent message that Glee drills into its viewers is that
its protagonists are supposed to be at the bottom of the high school food
chain. They are outcasts, dorks, losers. In fact, one of the show's few
original songs literally brands them "losers" as a point of pride: the
triumphal anthem "Loser Like Me" (as in "You wanna be/A loser like me".
However, besides the fact that the cast routinely bursts into perfectly
choreographed song and dance numbers in the middle of school, this might
be the least plausible part of the show. By the time the first "New
Directions" class graduates, they are not only a decorated Glee club, but
most of their members are either members of the cheerleading squad, or of
the football team, or have had romantic relationships with members of said
squad/team. In any real American high school, this would mark the New
Directions as anything but social pariahs, and yet we are expected to
believe they are marginalized because they...like to sing? Honestly, the
show never really justifies why they're supposed to be outcasts except
with the occasional afterschool special-style episode about subjects like
homophobia or racism. In other words, the "oppression" of the Glee club is
purely a theoretical function of their identity markers, while the actual
on-the-ground social reality they live in marks them as undoubted high
school aristocracy. I think it's safe to say that any conservative should
recognize just who an aristocracy that speciously claims to be oppressed
and is led by a character accused of being a "borderline pederast"
resembles. Glee's protagonists unwittingly stand for nothing less than the
unjustified persecution complex of elite liberal America.
And just like liberal America, Glee cannot seem to muster very much
sympathy for its one cast member who actually experiences consistent
marginalization throughout the series. I refer you back to the unfortunate
Jacob Ben Israel. Israel's crime, in the show's eyes, is daring to lust
after Rachel Berry, a girl who (I must remind you) is both as Jewish and
as much an outcast as he is when the show starts. Rachel, however, has her
eyes set on the handsome straight white male captain of the football team,
despite being palpably of lower social status than him. This hypergamous
attraction on her part is treated with the utmost sympathy by the show,
while Jacob's clumsy and overzealous but doubtlessly sincere attraction to
Rachel is portrayed as either creepy or cringingly funny, as in a sequence
where Jacob is caught masturbating to Rachel's picture in the library.
There are many sequences like this, which all lead up to the impression
that Jacob is something of a teenage Harvey Weinstein, as described by his
accusers.
It would be tempting (and not entirely wrong) to treat the portrayal of
Jacob Ben Israel as antisemitic, and certainly, elements of his
characterization are right out of the Nazi propaganda film Jud Sua. But
given that the show is also extremely charitable toward the (objectively,
much more unpleasant) Jewish football player Noah Puckerman, it seems that
Jacob's real sin in the show's eyes is not being particularly good
looking. In other words, the instant someone who is not conventionally
beautiful aspires to be loved by one of the beautiful people, all of
Glee's vaunted concern for those victimized by arbitrary social constructs
goes right out the window. It is hard to miss the similarity to how
wokeness, despite its claims to want to eliminate bigotry, is perfectly
happy to countenance antisemitism and misandry. Certainly, it is troubling
that the show treats it as perfectly normal that a woman should aspire to
the affections of a social "better," but treats a man in a comparable
position as a contemptible joke. Jacob is the only character in the show
who is believable as a bullying victim, but the show has no sympathy for
him, because he is ugly and "uncool," unlike the Glee Club. This, too, is
an obvious way in which the show enforced the "morality" of
proto-wokeness: one that only cares about "oppression" when it happens to
the supposedly beautiful, cool people who it is socially acceptable to
pity.
Which brings me, at last, to the most pitiless and most unintentionally
sympathetic character on the show: Sue Sylvester. There's no point dancing
around an obvious point about Sue - she is supposed to be a cartoon
villain bereft of redeeming qualities, and the show regards portraying her
as a stereotypical Obama-era Tea Party populist as something that aids
that characterization. In short, the show wants its viewers to believe
that conservatives, like Sue, are cartoon villains bereft of any inner
emotional life short of Darwinian, winner-take-all malice. The irony,
however, is that in portraying Sue this way, the show ended up putting a
lot of uncomfortable truths in her dialogue (something even the show's
proto-woke fans noticed), and turned her into less a monstrous antagonist
than as something of a court jester mocking the pretensions of the
"oppressed" Glee Club. As fictional portrayals of conservatives go, we
could do a lot worse than Sue, and indeed, the fact that she comes off as
so likable despite being written as an ogre is also revelatory when it
comes to the weakness of wokeness: that while it views its enemies as
cartoon villains and treats them with that sort of shrill disdain, it has
real trouble not making them sound cool and correct by accident when it
does this.
But I digress. The point of this lengthy description of the show is to
illustrate something very important: that Glee was propagandizing wokeness
before anyone knew what wokeness was. I don't think this was conscious. In
fact, I think the show was originally meant to be a lot more self-aware,
as the first season carries an implicit disdain for its protagonists that
utterly vanishes in the second season, where characters return to the
screen almost completely rewritten. Kurt, for example, goes from being a
cuttingly accurate stereotype of a catty, bitchy gay man, to a Christlike
martyr whose suffering for his sexuality is implicitly treated as a
metaphor for the suffering of all gay people. What's more, the plot of the
show devolves into incoherence, as episodes become little more than
framing devices for the real point of the show: performances of the day's
hits by the Glee club, a trend which arguably hit its nadir when Glee
tried to do a cove of the K-Pop hit "Gangnam Style." If I had to guess
what caused these developments, I would assume that the show attracted an
audience that was both far larger and far younger than its creators
initially expected, and the company making it realized they could monetize
it as a promotional vehicle for pop music and liberal social messaging far
more easily than as a teen black comedy with singing thrown in. The
intersectional nature of the cast was almost certainly nothing more than a
cynical play to make sure every potential consumer who watched the show
would have their own Glee character to relate to.
In other words, it was not deliberate political scheming that made Glee
into what its best character calls "a symphony of self-congratulatory
sodomy." It was focus grouped cynicism that made the first woke show
exist. And it might have been harmless, as so many shallow shows that are
popular with teenagers become harmless with time. Who, after all, still
harbors a deep-seated identification with High School Musical? But
unfortunately, its attempt to give everyone watching someone to relate to
made Glee the unintended plague ship carrying the ideology that is now
seeking to remake all of American society in the image of high school so
as to forever live out its fans' adolescent fantasies of belonging. And
that is why wokeness was created. For the sake of fictional characters who
became totems to an entire generation's self-regard.
But don't take my word for it: the confession is right there on Tumblr.
2. New Directions Become Old Hatreds
Having come so far, the reader might accuse me of burying the lede. It
took quite a lot of exposition to get here, the disgruntled reader might
say, why couldn't I have just led with this supposed "confession?" Believe
me, I would have liked to, but had I pasted in the full contents of what
twelveclara wrote on Tumblr, or attempted to quote the interview that she
gave after that same post became one of the most viral in the site's
history, any reader not already familiar with Glee would have been
hopelessly lost as to what she was talking about. Now, you too can
understand the full magnitude of just what twelveclara confessed to in
late September of 2017 on Tumblr. It is the skeleton key to the conquest
of the millennial generation, and much of Gen Z, by wokeness - the smoking
gun of where wokeness started. So here, without further ado, is the full
contents of what twelveclara originally and fatefully wrote:
[The Glee fandom is] not history, its blood. i still see it all over this
website. the vague posts. the deactivated urls. where do u think the word
problematic became popular. where do u think the representational anger
started. glee was the hungry gaping void that consumed us all. it said
watch us and find yourself. there is someone for everyone. santana is a
lesbian and kurt is gay and brittany is bisexual and quinn, god knows what
quinn is, she's straight but we have her say things like "you were singing
to finn and only finn, right?" and artie is disabled. mercedes is black
and our outlet for body positivity. we are all oppressed by something and
we are different and we are outcasts and we are you.
and we fell for it. we watched glee and we related to its characters and
we fought its wars until it was too late. until it was nothing but a
distorted picture of a parody of reality, a cracked mirror in which our
souls were sucked and encased in glass. finn outed santana but it's fine
because he had good intentions. sam was supposed to be gay but we're
bringing blaine anderson in for that instead. the q in quinn is for
queerbait. brittany was maybe raped but it was a one liner so who really
knows. will schuester was a horrible fucking adult and should never have
been allowed to care for children. finn, the white straight boy, did
everything wrong but it was narratively presented as right. we turned on
each other. klaine vs kum and finchel vs faberry. santana fought everyone
so brittana stans fought everyone. character vs character, ship vs ship,
blogger against blogger. we fucking hated each other. there was no glee
fandom. there were character fandoms and ship fandoms and that is it and
our mottos were all fuck glee.
we won every popularity contest, every online poll. we voted our fingers
to the bone. we created art and wrote fanfic and made such excellent photo
manips they were published in newspapers. we were prolific. we were
consumers of the hell we created and we just kept producing more in a
fucked up dystopian fandom chain of supply and demand. don't get me
started on the rpf. dianna wore a likes girls shirt on tour and made a
statement an hour later revoking it. some people still say heya is real
but it's like a breath of the wind, a sound so bare i can't quite make out
the words.
u asked for history. theres no history, only rage and pain and regret, the
image of anonymous with a grey face and sunglasses telling u to kill
urself because u thought artie was a dick for calling brittany stupid that
one time. this website is a reflection of the hole glee left when it
finished taking all it could from us, when the void could not consume
anything more, and the posts on it now, the social justice "discourse"
that is just giant piles of steaming, unsifted, unrefined shit is from
those who refused to learn from us. the history is here and it followed us
and we can never ever escape it.
There is a lot to unpack in this frankly astounding passage, so let's not
waste any time. Firstly, what twelveclara is saying is that the usage of
the word "problematic" on Tumblr, which was the undoubted precursor to its
explosion in today's political climate, began to be widespread among the
Glee fandom. Moreover, according to her, the "representational anger," IE
the obsessive policing of how minority groups are portrayed in every form
of media, also began with Glee. Granted, this is one witness, but it is a
witness who attracted an unprecedented 78,098 notes expressing agreement
on Tumblr. That, I think, speaks to the veracity of this account. Which
means that here we have the self-confessed beginnings of the very
intellectual trends that would eventually intrude on all of modern media,
provoke mass phenomena like #Gamergate, destroy franchises like Star Wars
and Masters of the Universe, and prompt the entire collapse of the
entertainment industry thanks to the obvious "get woke go broke"
phenomenon. And lest you think I am reading into it, Slate themselves did
an interview with twelveclara (whose real name is apparently Erin), where
it turned out that since her time in the Glee fandom, she has become (what
else) a consultant with the entertainment industry. That seems like pretty
convincing proof of the existence of a pipeline from the dregs of Tumblr
into Hollywood's boardrooms. And don't worry, we'll come back to that
interview later, but for now, let's get back to twelveclara's post.
Having told us that the label "problematic" and "representational anger"
over portrayal of minority groups among young people began with Glee,
twelveclara then moves onto explaining, with honestly very impressive
eloquence, how Glee provoked all these things: namely, it didn't just
represent every individual group onscreen, it weaponized that
representation. Twelveclara is saying that when she and other young
viewers looked at the characters on Glee, they did not see fictional
characters acting out a plot. They quite literally saw themselves. And
therefore, they took every plot twist on the show personally, because from
their perspective, what happened on the show also felt as if it was
happening directly to them.
Besides the utter disconnect with reality this suggests, a more practical
problem is obvious: when millions of viewers are seeing themselves
onscreen, they will naturally relate most to different elements of certain
characters, because they themselves are different people. Which means that
what might seem like a terrible betrayal in the writing to one viewer
might seem perfectly consistent and even comforting to another. In the
solipsistic confines of one's own room, one can rage against the
injustices of the show harmlessly, but when all the fans are online
talking to each other through Tumblr? The result will obviously be naked
tribal aggression, as one group of fans who feels betrayed will lash out
and attack another group of fans who feels, for just the same reason, that
they have been seen. And both groups will be doing this because they think
they are defending the validity of their own identities, rather than the
writing of fictional characters.
Bad enough that this happened with plot twists, but in a show with as much
romance as Glee, where every potential viewer is liable to find a
different member of the cast attractive, this tribalism will become even
worse. Hence what are called "shipping" wars. In fan lingo, "to ship"
means to pair one character with another romantically. Shipping wars have
a long, proud history in fan culture, starting with Harry Potter, but if
twelveclara is to be believed, they obviously were far worse in the case
of Glee, because every viewer took the choices of their chosen onscreen
avatar personally. So if that character ended up with someone they weren't
attracted to, or if other viewers wanted them to end up with someone they
weren't attracted to, that didn't feel like a reasonable disagreement over
media. It felt like a vicarious frustration of one's own personal romantic
ambitions. And so, once more, rage could be expected to result. Hence the
reference to wars among members of different shipping communities like
"klaine" (a portmanteau of Kurt and Blaine) or "kum" (Kurt and Sam, stop
sniggering), or "finchel" (Finn and Rachel).
If the cause weren't so trivial, this would be even more frightening than
it is - the "representation" on Glee was apparently so significant and so
accurately done that it reawakened ancient tribal hatreds among the
teenagers watching the show because they could no longer tell the
difference between the show and themselves. And again, twelveclara's note
got responses from almost 80,000 individual Tumblr users. That means that,
conservatively speaking, tens of thousands of angry teenagers and young
adults were shouting anonymous abuse at each other every week during the
run of Glee. More likely, given that Glee's pilot episode debuted with 9.6
million viewers, and one post-Superbowl episode commanded an audience of
almost 30 million people, as much as ten percent of the entire US
population could've conceivably been wrapped up in this crucible of
adolescent cruelty. If those viewers had gone on to be Republicans, we no
doubt would have heard more stories about the obvious toxicity involved,
but as they ended up as SJWs, the fact that tens of thousands of teens
were subjected to vicious weekly psychological abuse on Tumblr goes
unremarked by the press, I guess on the theory that all's well that ends
well.
Not, of course, that anything ever ended well for these people on the show
they claimed to love. Rather, every member of this vicarious
wish-fulfillment clique grew to hate the show itself and the writers of
the show, because there was no way to satisfy every single viewer's wishes
while writing characters that were supposed to be recognizably human. The
viewers wanted idealized representations of themselves put onscreen, but
the show had to be populated by actual people, and so these Tumblr users
learned to rage at how media "represented" them because it refused to
reflect the perfection they demanded in their own personal portrayals. The
reality, of course, is that it was not the show that they were raging
against, not really. It was the fact that the show was acting as a mirror,
and every choice that a character made felt like a reminder of the
viewer's imperfection.
And apparently, this demand for personal vindication from the show's
creators didn't even stop when the cameras were off! Twelveclara mentions
the rpf, or "real person fandom," and how they obsessed over whether
Dianna Agron (the actress who played Quinn Fabray) might be gay because of
a shirt she wore. In other words, it wasn't enough that the writers
conform to the Tumblr users' wish fulfillment fantasies: they wanted the
cast to do so in their personal lives, as well. If there is a textbook
case of unhealthy relationship to media, this is it. And no, I am not
exaggerating or reading into this. Twelveclara, or Erin, or whatever she
calls herself, says as much in the Slate interview:
It was at a time in my life where I had just come out-I'm a
lesbian-and Glee started tackling what I had just been through. To see
that represented from a character standpoint is something that really
impacted me personally. It's not like Glee was just a show I was watching
and enjoying; it was like this was me personally, almost, that I was
watching on screen. That was what it was for most of the people who were
in it. Because on Glee they really tried to represent everybody or every
issue you could tackle, every minority.[...]
We would watch the episode. Something inevitably would piss off some
subsection, or some character would fight with a different character, or
maybe somebody would break up or whatever. Because of that, it would just
be a bombardment of their fans on Tumblr yelling at each other, fighting
or trying to claim that what happened was problematic or that it shouldn't
have been represented this way, just nonstop harassment from every side.
If something happened that you were happy about, you couldn't even be
happy about it because here's a whole other section of the fandom who was
furious with you as if you were the people who wrote the episode. It
wasn't just that there was one side to an issue, but all of a sudden there
were 50 different sides to an issue, and every single side had 30,000
people behind it all screaming at you.
Again, if twelveclara is to be believed, individual factions of the show's
fandom could number in the tens of thousands. Think what that says about
how large the fandom as a whole was, and how thoroughly that could have
affected America's entire adolescent population.
Speaking of effects, what actually happened as a result of this? Well,
constantly enraged by the fact that their wish fulfillment wasn't being
perfectly fulfilled onscreen, and even more infuriated that other people
had the gall to be okay with story decisions that felt like personal
attacks, the Glee fandom transformed into a bellum omnium contra omnes. To
fight that war, more than mere personal desire and preference would be
necessary to achieve victory. These things would have to be
intellectualized, and so the Glee fandom cast about and found critical
theory, and absorbed its narcissistic message that basically enabled you
to cry "racism," "sexism," "homophobia," etc at anything because what they
really were after was a way to demand that nothing ever happen on the show
that didn't make them feel personally fulfilled. They threatened each
other with death, this war was so fierce, and when it was over, while they
slunk away bleeding and miserable and full of regret that they had ever
let themselves be driven so mad by a freaking TV show, the damage was
done. They had already absorbed the intellectual patterns of critical
theory and were now determined to inflict this same overly personal,
emotionally toxic relationship to media on every other fandom they
entered. Again, twelveclara in the interview (emphasis mine):
[I]t was almost like the word "problematic" became the bible of Glee. It
was like this is your way to instantly prove somebody else wrong. Then
people were instantly shut down, it was the be-all, end-all of an
argument. I'm sure the most times anybody's ever used that word in history
were probably during the days of Glee. It's sort of infiltrated Tumblr
vocabulary. When everybody left Glee and they went to their new fandoms,
we all took that with us. [...]
Glee gave us all language to talk about the problems we were seeing in
media that we may not have seen before. I would say the sweet spot in age
for Glee at that time was probably like 14 or 15 to early 20s. For a lot
of people, this is the first time they were coming to contact with
identity politics, and this was the first time we were coming into contact
with each other and these other identities. That really is a staple now of
Tumblr in a way I didn't see as much before Glee.
In other words, a group of people who numbered, at minimum, in the tens of
thousands, and could've numbered in the tens of millions, became so
obsessed with a TV show, and with characters they related to, that they
went and indoctrinated themselves with critical theory just so they could
more effectively complain whenever the show did something they didn't
like, and harass anyone who disagreed without consequence. And when this
toxicity ruined the show for them, they then spread this behavior to the
fandoms of every other art form, and even carried it with them into adult
life as participants in America's cultural institutions.
There's no other way to put this: this interview and the Tumblr post that
preceded it form a confession. These girls (and it almost certainly was
mostly girls) were so incapable of telling the difference between fiction
and reality, so desperate to pretend that it was them reflected onscreen
in a glorified teenage music revue, that they went to the trouble of
intellectualizing their discontent through critical theory, and then took
the same mission that animated the wars over Glee on Tumblr into the real
world, and into real professions, in real industries, with real
consequences. And just like they insisted that the actors on Glee live out
their personal wish-fulfillment fantasies, the autonomy of those actors be
damned, they are now insisting that all of us play the parts they have
written for us in a political fanfic while they transform all of the
United States not into a utopia, but into an eternal fantasy high school,
where our new woke overlords, like the New Directions, will be constantly
validated by everyone around them while still being able to claim
oppression.
This is the reality of wokeness: It is not a utopian philosophy. It isn't
even really a Leftist one, though it uses Leftist language to mask its
true intentions. No, what it is, is a sad, pathetic teenage wish
fulfillment fantasy: a reactionary ideology determined not to move
forward, but to restore the power dynamics of high school, the only place
where the woke have ever had any power, or where petty, cruel, emotional
infants like them can ever have any power. But even in the confession of
one of those infants, there is hope, for as soon as these children
experience the high school wish fulfillment fantasy they think they want,
they soon regret creating it. Look at twelveclara/Erin. She speaks of her
days in the Glee fandom as a solipsistic nightmare punctuated by endless
persecution from other people. And are her goals more modest now? I'll let
her answer:
I did my time. Now I just want to enjoy things in peace and have a
critical discussion about them when necessary and not every waking minute
of the day.
Hear, hear. For the sake of America, let us hope that, understanding
wokeness for the pathetic Mary Sue power fantasy that it is, we can
finally laugh in its face as it deserves and return to a world where the
entire West can, once more, "enjoy things in peace."
----------------------------------------------------------------------
===
-- Sean
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