http://www.scotsman.com/news/hannah-mcgill-skeptical-about-cumberbatch-fans-1-3974064
Hannah McGill: Skeptical about Cumberbatch fans
Skeptics have a problem with Sophie Hunter and Benedict Cumberbatch.
HANNAH MCGILL
15:39Saturday 12 December 2015
THE great clash that finally destabilises civilisation may not occur between ancient religions, political movements or sheets of ice, but between rival factions of Benedict Cumberbatch fans.
I’m not even sure if “fan” is the right terminology. There’s liking an actor’s posh growly voice, appreciating his interesting taste in screen roles, maybe even admiring the unusual arrangement of his facial features – and then there’s giving over a considerable amount of your time to online speculation that his wife is a paid fake, they never really married and their baby is a doll.
Not only am I not making this up, but the Cumberbatch followers who subscribe to these notions are numerous enough to have a collective name. They call themselves “skeptics”, and they are locked in ever-deepening conflict with “nannies” – their term for those Cumberbatch enthusiasts not given to querying whether his wife Sophie Hunter really lives in his house or what their baby is made of.
Over-investment in celebrity private lives is nothing new, of course. Lord Byron’s groupies clustered outside his house and followed him on holiday. A fan of the author Sinclair Lewis who in 1930 offered to do “everything – and I mean everything” for him received a sharp cease-and-desist from his wife Dorothy, signed “Mrs Sinclair Lewis to you”. Early Beatles devotees wept when the band members wed. But the potential offered by the internet for researching celebrities’ lives, coming to bizarre conclusions, and connecting up with similarly-inclined people to egg one another on has cranked things to another level.
In her 2011 memoir Your Voice in my Head, the writer Emma Forrest recounts that during her relationship with actor Colin Farrell, they were grimly addicted to reading horrible online gossip about their relationship. That was only the babyhood of the weird strain of fandom that has now attached itself to Cumberbatch, and other male celebrities including One Direction members, Robert Pattinson from the Twilight films and Jamie Dornan from 50 Shades of Grey. With its preoccupation with falsehood and fakery, it has more in common with extreme conspiracy theorising than with any existing form of groupie behaviour. Just as so-called “truthers” try to rationalise disturbing world events by claiming that every horror from Columbine to 9/11 to the Bataclan has been elaborately staged in the name of extending gun control or promoting the New World Order, so these new celebrity obsessives cope with the fact that their beloved is out of reach by declaring every visible aspect of his personal life to be fake.
A selling-point of an internet-enabled world used to be that it brought us closer to those we admired – we could peep into their lives, maybe even communicate with them directly. Now it’s being used to place famous people yet farther away: on the far side of great far-fetched myths about who they “really” are. Maybe it’s just built into fandom that making stuff up about them, however cruel or mad, feels safer than accepting that they’re just ordinary people after all.
TFOE: Besides this incredibly inaccurate and biased article, I wonder when there will be an article written about what the antis do to the skeptics. Not all nans are so “innocent” nor are they mature (writing articles only the nans care about? Like…that’s pretty sad as they think it will scare us into submission because they are so big and bad and powerful and they have their Prince to protect as if he cared the private life he’s chosen to mix with his public life is being analyzed without rose colored glasses).
Lol. If this keeps up, soon I’ll have more articles written about my blog than SH about her career before BC.
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