Fandoms, and fan bases, are what you make of them, as the celebrity in question or members of the fandom. You have to tend to them like a garden: pulling weeds, repotting when things grow, pruning what gets out of control, watering the things you want to keep. Then you can look over it all proudly and know that you did that. You created that wonderful thing. If you just leave it, it'll grow out of control and fill with pests. Hell, people have turned their fandoms into global movements for good, that do charity work and fundraise and are activists and protect each other. Supernatural is a really great example of that.
If Sebastian truly wants privacy, but he doesn't know how to balance a private private life with keeping his personal brand relevant, he has worked with more than enough people who've managed it to get advice from.
Mark Ruffalo, Benedict Cumberbatch, Chris Hemsworth, RDJ, Tom Hiddleston, Tom Holland (Bless him, bless that boy), Scarlett Johansson, Elizabeth Olsen... SO MANY PEERS SEBASTIAN! Even Chris Evans has done a better job than Sebastian, even though there are some proper suspicious things going on there too.
They've all offered exactly the amount of their personal lives to their fans that they want to, and have also maintained strong and recognisable personal brands. And most of them are significantly more famous than Sebastian. No shade, but outside of his fandom he's basically just "Oh, the guy that plays Bucky in the MCU?" which, lets be frank, is a brand but not one that screams longevity in the industry.
His current PR strategy; calling for privacy and then doing pap walks while his girlfriend baits his fans on her IG stories and no-one says shit that helps maintain order in the fandom, is obviously stupid. Sure, it keeps his name in the mouths of fans, but it's not helping outside of that, and in a lot of instances the way his name is in fans mouths (that feels like a very weird concept. Don't explore that) is negative. Which yes, is attention, but it's not the kind of attention you want.
I'm 40, I've been on the internet since it started entering homes (AOL and chatrooms full of perverts while my brain was still developing! WOO!) and I've seen some crazy shit. Let me explain. And probably get mocked relentlessly.
I'm a fan of Hanson. These days that's more cringe than it ever was. Isaac is Maga and it seems antivax, Zac is... Well, Homophobic, transphobic, pro-gun, racist and sexist per his DL pintrest that was outed, and Taylor is very clearly quiverfull but still seems like the least problematic of the three. Wild. Anyway. Hanson fan, since Mmmbop. Proudly. And so I grew up as the internet grew up and as they grew up. It was such a weird time, genuinely. But they have built a solid fanbase that is way more respectful than a lot of them, and they did that in the early days.
You see they were kids when they started touring. Isaac was 17, Taylor was 15 and Zac was 12. They'd been performing for a fucking age before that, but this tour was huge because they were huge. And because they were minors they toured with their parents and siblings. The Hanson clan is large, and Isaac was the oldest, their youngest sibling at the time was Mackenzie I believe (eventually it was 7 Hanson kids and 2 parents, the brood was brooding), who was a toddler. And fans did fan shit. They stalked the family on tour, taking pictures of everyone and putting them online on fan pages (nothing much has changed!) to the point that these literal children had to step up and tell the fans to stop.
They were fair game, they said, but their family wasn't. Expecially their siblings. It wasn't right, or fair, or appropriate. And for the most part fans listened. It took a hot minute. Some never listened. But most of the fandom heard the message. Pictures were removed, and fans acted like a sort of police force online, stepping in to stop others from crossing the line the brothers had drawn in the sand.
They lived in their normal family home in Tulsa, no gates, no security, and fans would just show up. Steal grass. Steal rubbish from the bins. Try and peek in windows. Scream. Swamp the family when they tried to leave the house. It was brutal. Genuinely terrifying, even from the outside. Eventually the family moved to a bigger more secure home. And again the brothers addressed the fans. Now, this was somewhat less successful. Many fans still make the pilgrimage to Tulsa, still try to spot their faves. But again, stalking them became something shameful, something most fans turned their backs on. Because the band stood up, and said enough.
Sebastian walked away from social media, leaving everything still up (including the comments that he claimed were a big part of the reason he left), because he wanted privacy, and that created an access and information vacuum. There were other ways he could have gone about this issue, and this wasn't the best choice. Then Annabelle posts nothing directly about him, which is absolutely fine, but baits with pictures that have a mans elbow, or shoe, or hand holding a phone in it. Why? Attention and engagement. Fans go and look at the posts because they want to work out if it's Sebastian, and that boosts her engagement rate, keeping her on peoples screens and her name in peoples mouths. It's so blindingly obvious once you pause. But she rarely, if ever, links herself to him directly. Again, that's very deliberate. It maintains the "We want to keep our relationship private" narrative and gives plausible deniability for everything else. Like pap walks.
Now, as I said, outside of the MCU Sebastian isn't very well known. And Annabelle? Significantly less so. People know her based on who she's romantically linked to over anything else. So the likelihood of them being organically papped is low. Not being mean, just honest. Especially when neither of them has any big deal work going. So Sebastian being papped going to the gym, or walking the dogs, or buying some shit... That's not accidental. It was arranged, or at the least there was a tip off. I could be generous, and say they didn't know and it was just his team, but I don't think so. Because a team could be quickly fired if the client found out they were deliberately going behind their back like that. It's not worth the risk.
So he has co-signed pap walks. Remember, New York and Malibu aren't exactly celebrity ghost towns, loads of people more famous than both of them move through the cities every day without being papped. Sure, they may get spotted by a fan and have their picture taken that way, but not papped. And normally if they are, it's around somewhere that's a known celebrity hangout. Paparazzi don't just camp out outside a random gym and hope famous people show up. They need to know. Otherwise it's a complete waste of their time, and if no-one shows they wont make any money. And lets be honest, the paparazzi game runs on tip offs and staged walks more than organic photos in the wild. Because attention, attention, attention.
So if you do what many fans have done, and think about it, it feels incredibly hypocritical to claim you want privacy and then to call the paparazzi on yourself whenever you aren't getting enough attention. Or you need to sell a narrative. And noticing hypocrisy like that starts to make fans feel used and manipulated. And if they're sane, they start to turn their backs on that celebrity and that fandom. Because fans don't want to be used, or manipulated, or to support a hypocrite. Especially when everything that person is doing feels so forced, and so unhappy, that you can only assume they're not doing it to improve their life in any meaningful way, but to get attention or money.
And losing fans, means more desperate behaviour from the celebrity and their team trying to keep attention and relevance. Which frankly just makes things worse. And for a while now Sebastian and his team have been on a tear that is going badly for them.
I like to believe that Nepo was supposed to join Harry on the pap walk, but she saw the temperatures and was like “yeah I’m not going out in that heat 🙄😒” and that’s why harry is happy doing that pap walk alone 😂
okay besides two back to back pap walks which is funny af. He looks real good. He looks so good when he got some meat on his bones and not looking emaciated.
