bexand replied to your post “profileranon replied to your post “STAGED 2 IS HAPPENING!! I REPEAT...”
He’s joking, he’s got a very dry sense of humour sometimes. A lot of the comments on the petition are also tongue in cheek. Suppose good publicity is bad publicity and bad publicity is good publicity.
blueturkeycroissanttrash replied to your post “profileranon replied to your post “STAGED 2 IS HAPPENING!! I REPEAT...”
Of course it’s not serious! Georgia supported him in all of this. She even signed the petition as “David Tennant’s wife”. Why do you people take all so damn seriously?
Because it is serious. Because whether anyone knows it or not, what happened last night looks like he was having a mental breakdown, and all the fans on Twitter were doing was supporting it.
I know that Michael has a dry sense of humor. It’s one of the things that I love about him, that made me become a fan of his last year. And I will be the first to acknowledge that, because I’m on the autism spectrum, I sometimes have difficulty picking up on sarcasm, especially from people I don’t know, and online. So if I have this all wrong, that’s completely on me and I will gladly admit to being wrong. But in my opinion, what happened last night was just not funny.
Before I go further, let me emphatically state that I am not condoning the comment that woman made. Obviously it was not a nice thing to say and could have been said differently, but at the end of the day, she was stating an opinion--not even of him, but of Staged. Could she have kept it to herself? Absolutely. “Don’t watch what you don’t like. Keep scrolling.”? No question. But couldn’t the same also be said for Michael? “Don’t respond to what you don’t like. Keep scrolling.” He also is in a position of power that she doesn’t have, which means that what he says matters. Every word he says goes out to a large, often impressionable audience, and It. Matters. That is why Michael’s response to what this woman said is what I found far more upsetting.
So let’s say, hypothetically, that this was all a joke. A publicity stunt or what-have-you for the sake of promoting Staged 2. I can understand the intention there, but Michael put someone who wasn’t in on the joke at the center of it, and that is why it didn’t work. That’s the moment where it just stops being funny and starts being mean. And maybe I am taking that in particular somewhat personally, because I’ve had the exact same thing done to me when I was in middle and high school. The bullies I dealt with pulled the same type of stunt, and then immediately reverted to “It was just a joke” when I reacted badly. But Michael is not a high school bully. Michael is a grown adult man with a massive social media platform who should honestly know better than to do something like that.
Again, I am not suggesting that he sit back and take it when he is personally insulted. No one should. But part of being a public figure such that Michael is is choosing your battles. This woman did not call him a “privileged asshole,” as I saw someone say. She said “Staged came across as nothing more than a self-indulgent, pretentious, vanity project.” There are any number of other comments he could’ve responded to that said far, far worse than that. But instead he made an example out of her, unnecessarily and excessively, and then upped the ante even further by creating that petition.
Perhaps most baffling and saddening of all is how far removed his behavior seems to be from the Michael Sheen I became a fan of a year ago. A year ago, he absolutely was sarcastic and dry-humored and deadpan...but he wasn’t mean. I know this year has been hard and challenging for all of us, and I am sure that the people (or particular person) he’s been around incessantly for the duration of lockdown has had a (decidedly negative) effect on him. Yet as I stated yesterday, it’s painful to see how much Michael is struggling, to see the sadness in his eyes in recent pictures and how unhappy he seems, and that this is the outlet he chooses to use to cope with it. I just wish he would think more about the things he says on Twitter, and both how that is affecting him and the adoring fans who follow him.
Because I can guarantee you that there are a lot of dismayed and disillusioned fans out there today trying to make sense of all this, only now they are permanently afraid to say anything because of seeing what could happen if they do.
