He had to have used this angle and that look intentionally but my lord.
After being reminded below, I don't think we're going to see ye old fake Ilderton wedding in the community center. I think Ilderton will take a pass on that photoshoot.
Whether they decide to go ahead and announce or pull the plug, the wedding photoshoot is in the bag. Maybe they did it in a sunny state while conducting other business since they really don't like the PR couple stuff to take up real time. I'll be looking at the guest list. People who might have been happy to "support" the whole charade as back in the old days with Jessica Dube might think two or twenty times before showing up as credibility value adds for this one.
I still have a feeling it's going to end. The "forced" part of my feeling isn't that they will be forced to come clean, but that even the media and some personalities in the sport will have reached their limit, there will be a cultural shift about what is ok and what isn't, somebody with a public profile will say something, and then the dam will break.
It would have been better if they'd done it awhile go when the narrative would have been controlled by them and the media to portray them as putting up a fence between themselves and obsessed fans.
These days, what the media does doesn't control the narrative. Once that someone breaks, there will be a break from the "obsessed fans" excuse and people will be dropping tweets about what they know.
Until then though, this is a victimless PR hoax so it's not like busting out and announcing Ellen DeGeneres is a terrible person and please share stories. That one was exposing someone who was doing harm. The "harm" here is more general - the contemptuous way fans have been treated and exploited defines two faced, the smarm, how very very very extra they have always been, far beyond what would be required to protect themselves, all has a power trip smell and a mean spirited streak. But it's not towards individual people, it's towards a group of people - fans and followers of figure skating and I guess shipper types. You can't get lower on the pecking order than those two groups in the eyes of many people in Scott and Tessa's level of fame.
Want to add some more to the comment about "They're risking exposure!" below. You know when Scott gets "engaged" to his first partner, five minutes later you google and there's a million articles saying "Scott Moir is engaged, but not to Tessa Virtue." How many news outlets personally covered the Hall of Fame engagement announcement in Ilderton? Those articles came from Virtue and Moir's "team" (pr people). Entertainment media relies on PR output for most of its content. They all received the headline, the angle, the talking points. Always one of them is how fans are obsessed with them.
And btw, considering their latest narrative, just because Scott (or Tessa's) name doesn't appear as a client with a rep they used to share and only one of them appears to be represented, doesn't mean they're no longer repping both. It's just the narrative.
Virtue and Moir themselves are behind the steady stream of articles about how fans just can't believe they're not in love. I've noticed "mystery" has entered the narrative. But the source is Virtue and Moir. They're the ones taking shipper culture and using it to brand themselves. God forbid the fans get tired of it all and just let it be. They will again pump out PR articles about fan obsession.
Shipper culture is endemic on the internet. People ship them, people ship all kinds of performers and public figures in genres I've never heard of, they write reams of fan fiction. VM are Canadian figure skaters - there's not a lot of competition in their lane, particularly since they constantly stoke the fire. The constant flare-ups aren't a natural phenom; it's a cultivated phenom.
P.S. I do think they blundered with this Jackie Mascarin thing. I believe the desire to troll and get a fresh faux girlfriend angle was irresistible and they did not take into account the MAGA stuff, which does not match with their brand. Scott has often presented himself as law and order (until apparently he was arrested once and disliked how he was treated), a by the book person. For people to think this translates to him being a MAGA type doesn't sync with their brand and Tessa's profile. OTOH maybe that was part of it. He's MAGA, she's woke - they can't be together! But that would be pretty disgusting.
I saw that in April Tessa tweeted in support of Scott suspending his account because people were critical of choices he'd made in his personal life. Honey, shut up. His personal life is you. You have marketed his virtual personal life to a fare thee well - yours a little, but his a lot. The entire reality show was built around it. Let's not get snotty because even when fans aren't in the know, they know things don't smell right. They aren't right. You have absolutely no right to be mad about it. That many people don't believe your lies or that they acknowledge something doesn't sit right is none of your business. If they end up down the wrong road that's on you and him. They constantly solicit reaction from fans, but Tessa wants to police the reaction? Sit down.
Instead of fake significant other I think from now on "virtual significant other" is more apt. V&M were early adapters of creating an alternative reality on social media that has nothing to do with their actual reality. But I think the tolerance for that is reaching the end of its string.
ETA back to Tessa. The audacity! Tessa and Scott used their Hall of Fame induction to execute the "First partner" engagement stunt for maximum reaction. Fans react, but not as Tessa wishes. She gets pissy and Scott suspends his account. She climbs on a high horse for fans criticizing his "personal life" when she knows it's not his personal life, it's their engagement PR stunt gone awry with unforseen collateral issues. Does she blame herself and Scott for this thing backfiring? No. It's the fans!
