A Note on GMA, Entitlement and Privilege
Okay, the time has come for me to share the things I witnessed at the GMA concert last Thursday and how they illustrated the glaring problem we have in this fandom with people feeling entitled to Taylor’s attention or being catered to because they have the privilege to spend all of their parents’ money on Taylor events/merch and the extreme selfishness this constant need for Taylor’s attention breeds.
(I first want to say that in spite of all the nonsense I’m about to expose, I had SUCH a good time and felt extremely fortunate for the chance to be there and so thankful to Cee for offering me a ticket and none of the following is about her, she’s a literal angel.)
I got to the line at about midnight, and finally headed home after the concert at 9am. In those 9 hours, almost all I heard from everyone around me was either complaining or comparing how far they had traveled/how much money they had spent/how many Taylor shows they have been to/how many times she’s Noticed them. Just constantly trying to prove they were a bigger fan than anyone else in line as if having more money to spend = loving her more. I’m not exaggerating when I say that every single person around me had a picture of them with Taylor as their phone background.
And it was very clear that all of these people who dropped thousands of dollars to fly thousands of miles for this free, 30 minute set (???) very much felt like they were owed a tailored experience because of it. When they weren’t asserting their superiority as a fan, they were constantly complaining. About everything. The line was too long, they were too hot, GMA wasn’t providing water bottles (because not a single one of these people had the common sense to bring water with them for a 9-hour experience in the middle of summer?), it “wasn’t fair” that VIP pass holders got to go in first (although I’m sure they would have thought it was fair if they were VIP), there were several different line checkpoints for safety reasons and they didn’t like that at all, they didn’t like the warm up guy keeping us excited during commercial breaks, they felt “ripped off” that Taylor only sang three songs and that none of them were Lover. It was incessant, and I did not hear a single positive thing to counteract this complaining come out of any of their mouths all morning. Going to put some direct quotes under “read more” just so this doesn’t get too extremely long.
The audience situation once we were in the actual venue was a stunning display of selfishness (not to mention how everyone left a literal garbage dump as soon as the line started moving). It was a standing room only situation, so of course it was going to be kind of hard to see if you weren’t up by the barricade (which was all VIP people). As a shorty, I had already figured this would be the case and figured I wouldn’t see much. But yeah everyone definitely thought that their ability to see everything all the time and to potentially be seen by Taylor was a higher priority than anyone else’s ability to see or physical safety. There was a LOT of pushing and shoving. And when Taylor was on stage, everyone’s phones went up (once again this was TELEVISED like do you need to record the whole thing on your phone?) and Taylor seeing their sign, or their hand, or their rep room picture with her was vastly more important to anyone there than the ability of anyone behind them to see a dang thing.
Throughout the whole show, the only time the complaining stopped was when we were singing along to the music. I heard *several* people say, “I’m never doing this again, I feel so ripped off" as we were leaving a FREE Taylor Swift concert. That everyone knew in advance was only going to be 3 songs long. And all of those people are, in fact, “doing this again” today at the VMAs, and have posted (and self-reblogged a million times) how much they loved the GMA experience.
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