Friday, November 30, 2012

What's it called when you're past caring, you were tired/mad but now
you don't even have the energy to feel anything about it at all anymore?
That go ahead and shoot me feeling? Scott looks like that.

I'm having internet issues which is hobbling the "edit" feature, so I'll just do new posts and combine them later.

Here's what I think - Tessa is a stubborn girl but who knew she'd be stubborn about being an asshole. Here she is, the budding businesswoman who fails to understand the difference between and among "lying" "manipulation" and "business", not to mention "our sport" and thinks that the two former are permissible if it's done in the arena of the latter.

I feel sure she doesn't intend to let fans or anyone or anything deter her from what she's decided. She won't be controlled. The thing is though, it is TESSA (and Scott's a big boy, and Skate Canada, and the rest) who is trying to do the controlling. It's Tessa & Co. who make up lies, fuck with people's heads, act out a lie at a major figure skating competition, drop little manipulations into the conversation to make people think they're crazy. SHE's being controlling.  Photos like these? Controlling.

Not controlling would be keeping her mouth shut and refusing to answer whatever questions she doesn't want to answer. Not controlling would be behaving like an adult and not a game playing idiot. Being a strong-minded woman who didn't want people telling her when or what to talk about means not letting people force her when to talk about something she doesn't want to, or insisting she address things when she'd rather say "Next" or "I don't talk about that. While we're skating, we'll talk about skating."

Nobody is trying to control Tessa. The business woman is running little social media games or having them run, that aim to control other people, manipulate them, use them for whatever the hell she thinks her ends are - in this case I'd simply guess the aims are "You can't tell me what to do."

Nobody's trying to. She's the one.

I also think that Scott knows perfectly well how crummy and ridiculous this is. He is, though, married to somebody who claims she was able to reduce her cell phone contacts to just seven people during the Olympic season (I tried to add that up once and either she's not talking to Scott, Marina, Meryl, Charlie or she's not talking to her family, because there's no way that number works).  Somebody like that can cope with criticism by simply tuning it out and refusing to let it into the bubble, whether she's right or whether she's wrong. She's not going to know either way if she is able to not think about it or deal with it.

However, I think standing up for your right to mind fuck people is truly asshole. And these are people doing it because they feel superior to fans. Look at them.

P.S.

Here's what I love. When Scott bid farewell to facebook, he directed us to www.virtuemoir.com for updates, which as we all know was the same as the famous P.T. Barnum trick of having the exit sign in Latin ("Egress"). The people went through the door thinking it was to another attraction but they found themselves shut out of the tent.

Scott didn't have the decency to say hey, I'm not a social media guy, but I do appreciate the support, and your enthusiasm at events is a real boost to Tessa and me.

But it felt socially awkward to do it like that, so to protect his OWN discomfort, he uses the panacea of "check out www.virtuemoir.com" which had not been updated in weeks and weeks and has certainly not been updated since. The photo which is a "pic-of-week2.jpg" became a pic-of-month to ease the once-a-week pressure and still there's jackshit.

It's not like they don't have time. Look at that boating, posing, event-attending, hanging-outy collage there. The camera is always clicking. They're Olympians. When they train, when they're at the rink, when they're with family and friends or at Skate Canada stuff, people get out their cameras. But not one of the photos made it up as a photo on their "web page".

But they have priorities. Getting their rocks off by pretending they're such big deals (look - a blog is after them!) they need to hunt up new mind-fucks and lies and make sure tumblr gets it is a priority.  Paying even lip service to a web page that has no agenda but to serve as a reasonable place for fans to see a few current, skating-related photos and event schedule is too much for them.

It's sad because the pattern of the past year isn't that being jerks is a collateral effect of what they're doing. They actually WANT to treat fans badly. So we get the point, they make sure that the only benign means of communication (the web page) is neglected and the facebook (which rapidly became corrupted) is shut down. They resent having to be decent to fans on ANY platform. What's wrong with them? The web page doesn't have to show their personal life? What is WRONG with them? Why do they insist that all of on line media engagement be a set up? What are they proving to themselves about themselves?

2 comments:

  1. They did update their website yesterday. Take a look at the new photo the chose for the homepage and the one they added to the gallery...

    ReplyDelete
  2. That's a public domain photo. They switched out the old one (which at least couldn't be found anywhere else) but it's from a performance every fan has already seen. Very special.

    ReplyDelete