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Performative Fandom. In particularly the NYKNICKS floor seat celebrities. Most are like Taylor Swift - she’s a celebrity and clearly not a fan but she will get her floor seats because celebs go to big games especially when the big games are in NY or LA. It’s Timothee Chamalet who since I barely know this stuff so many here may not too is like a big Hollywood Act. At first I thought he was loud annoying Hollywood guy whose there because he did videos like this Courtside. Which to me looks like he’s performing for the camera. Turns out he’s an actual fan and won some contest for free tickets as a teenager tickets
Some reason this has been living in my head for a few days as a feeling that’s not how real fans celebrate. Perhaps theatre kids it’s so natural to perform that it’s how they celebrate. Where it’s more an internal joy. Something just doesn’t feel natural to me here.
The other thing is it’s the blackification of celebration. Where you need to do things loud and visually to show how much it means to you. Yes I am now the old man who yells at clouds.
The other interesting sports related thing is the bifurcation of the ticket market for sporting events. With the rise of television, growing wealth inequality, and the ease of air travel very big events have seen their ticket prices skyrockets. The interesting opposing side is a lack of pricing power in similar but slightly lower tier events. True events have ticket prices going to infinity (World Cup/NBA finals) far above the rate of inflation (wealth has grown much faster). Supply being inelastic means prices go up a lot. But we can build a lot of supply of second tier events. World Cup has added teams to the tournament so there are both more total games but realistically only the same amount of seats for the top teams playing and championship games. This has led to much higher prices on big WC games and empty stadiums for other games. The one example that really stood out to me was College Football Playoffs. Championship game tickets were a 3k minimum ticket price watching team 1 and 2 play each other. The semifinal game say watching teams 2 and 3 play you could scalp tickets for $30. People are going because they want to be at the game that will be an event not for the quality of football. Which ties into television because watching the game is just better on tv now.
The games that are in the public conscious as the “Event” have high prices. The Knicks final being in NYC pulls in global wealth. The NC College Football game pulls in all the money in our Northern Indiana province which is a fairly wealthy province. These are far more than just games - also networking opportunities and serve a coordinating function of getting an entire group of people to all be at the same place at the same time. For a Knicks level event if you buy tickets at 15k get-in price even the nosebleed seats will be hedge fund manager sitting next to some rich kid from third world country or minor celebrity. For IU NC College Football it’s some dude who owns a 20m a year car parts company sitting next to a HVAC roll-up guy. I think if I were in an Econ PHD you could write an interesting paper on the modern ticket pricing market and what it means for a game to be labeled the “Event” for a population group.
I guess you could also draw a parallel with the SF escorts charge $4k an hour to ticket pricing. People supposedly have less sex now, but when they are it costs more. It’s just more enjoyable to jerk off to a porn star than put in the work or pay to have sex with a 6.
I'm not a big sports guy, but I have seen several in the past make comments that Chalamet, specifically, seems like more than a superficial fan of sports. IIRC he's shown up on a few serious sports commentary shows in the past, and not just basketball either, but at least college football as well.
I don't feel qualified to vouch for the merits here, but Chalamet might be a bad example for "theater kids don't like sportsball."
Chalamet should get a retroactive Oscar for Call Me By Your Name, because to this day people still believe that that gay softboi persona is how he really must be. He really can't shake it.
He's always been a white goober who loves sports and he arguably cost himself an Oscar talking like MJ without realizing people won't tolerate that shit from actors.
Apparently a bunch of art hoes felt "betrayed" by Chalamet's decision to start a relationship with a vapid airheaded bimbo* like Kylie Jenner.
What this "betrayal" amounts to is that said art hoes constructed a parasocial delusion of what Chalamet was "really" like based on the roles he'd played, then felt disappointed when the real thing didn't love up to the fantasy they'd constructed in their heads.
Newsflash: actors not same people as characters they portray. Like most heterosexual men, even soulful actors who can convincingly portray gay characters want to date hot rich girls with big tits, not annoying they/them quirk chunguses with green hair.
I just realised that the Gen X/Millennial equivalent was feminist writers feeling disappointed by Johnny Depp marrying archetypal grippy-socks-grippy-box BPD art hoe Amber Heard, twenty years his junior. Re-reading this piece is a cringe-inducing insight into Millennial feminism and this author's warped, pathetic worldview, no matter how much she might claim that its overwroughtness is intentional and tongue-in-cheek:
Probably the feminist Ryan Gosling meme contains a hefty dose of this fantasy too. Sorry ladies: the Goose can have any girl he wants, and he, too, wants to date a hot Latina. See also the absurd attempts to portray Harry Styles as "queer", which he obviously isn't under even the most expansive definitions of that famously ill-defined term.
Nerdy, socially awkward male screenwriters get a lot of stick for indulging their Manic Pixie Dream Girl fantasy, but in their defense, at least they're usually content to invent fictional characters to fulfil this fantasy for them, rather than conscripting real-life women into doing so and berating them when they can't perform a job they never agreed to carry out. If there's an instance of a professional male journalist getting paid to describe the anguish he felt upon learning that his favourite shy nerdy Twitch e-girl was in fact a fake gamer girl getting railed by Chad Thundercock™ every night, I'm not aware of it.
*Their words, not mine.
**The author's inference that Depp himself was "down with brown" because he portrayed a character who dated a black woman is, obviously, nonsense: as far as I can tell, Depp has never been romantically involved with a non-white woman.
**Oh no, we wouldn't want people getting confuzzled, would we? That would be totes not amazeballs, fo' shizzle.
I remember a decade ago when Benedict Cumberbatch, that darling of late 2000s / early 2010s Tumblr fandom, got married, older versions of the same woman were equally if not more despondent. And he got married to a very appropriate and posh intellectual English theater director type in her thirties. So it seems to me it’s really more about the man being off the market than who he’s with.
I bet a lot of them were just disappointed that, whatever the creators of Sherlock would have their audience believe (or not wink wink), Cumberbatch is not, in fact, a homosexual, and nor is Martin Freeman.
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