Hi! I think if I had to describe this article, I would use one word. Dishonest. Not in the sense that Nic is lying. I’m not saying she’s not actually Irish or anything. But more in the sense that she seems to be omitting a lot of stuff and seems overall dismissive of the real questions the fandom has been asking for months now. The question I’ve had for Nic since the beginning of all this has always been: Who is this for? Who was this article for? Is it for newcomers who never heard of Nic before and wanted to get to know her? Is it for the fans? In your analysis you said it seems that the article was about the fans instead of for the fans and I agree. But who’s the target audience? If it’s the general public, I don’t think they would have a level of interest that would encourage them to read about an actress’ fandom. If it’s for the fans, the article omitted too many elements of the puzzle, leaving fans more frustrated than ever and talking to us as if we were not in the room when it all happened. Fans are still left with no answers. I would go as far as to say. We still don’t really have a confirmation of her dating J. The only one saying they’re dating is the journalist. (The Luke Dunn was f*cking hilarious) So we’re in the same place where we started. What other questions does the fandom want answers to?
One thing I always hear from fans is, “I want the old Nicola back”. Let’s quickly break down who was the old Nic.
She used to enthusiastically posts her projects. She used to post behind the scenes of her projects. If she couldn’t show us her projects, she would make small announcements about how she’s excited to finally show us her projects. She always did activism. She’s always been outspoken about her beliefs (this is why her saying she lost followers because of that sounds absurd, cause anyone that follows her already signed up for that). She interacts with her costars and showed support.
Now the new Nicola. She takes sponsorships and a lot of them. She still does activism. She platforms J a lot. She barely promotes her work. We get one announcement and that’s it. No more bts. There’s this weird blurring of the lines between her private and professional life going on. Such as. Nic posts J a lot, but not necessarily private pictures. She shares his projects almost as if she worked on them. And here’s how the blurring works. She has shared the projects of her costars before like Louisa’s or even Luke’s play TSOT. Since these are people Nic has worked with before and that we know the craft of, we have a professional investment in them. We see this as Nic hyping up her co-workers, which is nice and everything stays in the professional realm. When Nic shares J’s professional life, we don’t have that professional investment like we have with Louisa or Luke. We don’t know his craft. We might not like his craft. So we don’t really know what to do with it. Should we care for him because he’s Nic’s partner? We’re no longer in the professional realm, but in the personal one. We follow artists for their craft, not for the personal lives. J becomes a source of frustration, cause we don’t know what to do with him. I’m gonna sound harsh here, but people always say. “These celebrities are not your friends” “They’re strangers to you” Which is all true, but the feeling is mutual. We don’t know each other. I have no personal emotional investment in Nic. I like her cause she plays well. If I’m not getting that. I have the right to complain. She’s breaking the social contract between a celebrity and a fan. So this is why this article came off as so dishonest. We’re not unfollowing because we dislike her stance on Palestine 🇵🇸 , we already knew her stance. We’re unfollowing cause we’re not getting much acting lately. We got a lot of advertisement. A lot of personal things we don’t know what to do with. She comes off as this poor victim who lost everything due to her stance, meanwhile I’m thinking. Really Nicola? There’s nothing, absolutely nothing else that may or may not cause this drop in followers? No other behaviour from your part that may have turned off people? So anyway. Looking forward to your thoughts.
thank you for this ask, genuinely. you’re asking the right questions. i’ve been sitting with the same discomfort for most of this year, long before this article showed up. so no, this isn’t a sudden reaction.
the real question is still who is this for? seen as a product, the article doesn’t feel dishonest. it feels unanchored. like it’s trying to speak to everyone at once and somehow hoping that counts as clarity. spoiler: it usually doesn’t.
i’ve written before about broken narrative contracts, about reaction being dressed up as strategy, about ambiguity creating more noise instead of less. this article didn’t invent those issues. it just stacked them neatly into one text and called it a day.
here’s the thought i can’t quite let go of: what if this article wasn’t meant to answer anything at all? what if it was meant to test the water?
under pressure, some media texts function less like explanations and more like diagnostics. you touch several sensitive points, then watch where people push back, where trust cracks, and what quietly stops working. not elegant. not comforting. but revealing?
(of course, i only see a fragment. we don’t know the contracts, constraints, or internal chaos behind the scenes. what looks incoherent from the outside might simply be several pressures colliding at once)
🤔still, the awkward part is what happens after. even once the confusion is obvious, very little changes. the same blurred signals repeat, with the same expectation that the audience will somehow recalibrate on its own. history suggests otherwise.
so i’m left with two options. either this is far more complex than it looks, and we’re watching a slow, limited recalibration. or we’re giving it more credit than it deserves, because it’s easier than accepting that some of these choices might just be messy and reactive.💀
my guess? it’s a mix. some intentional decisions, some reactive ones, some compromises that aged badly almost instantly. no villains, no masterminds. just inconsistency slowly eating away at trust.
which brings me back to your point. fans don’t feel entitled. they feel disoriented. and disorientation is very often mislabeled as hostility.
this article doesn’t close anything. if anything, it confirms that the issue isn’t one headline or one group of fans. it’s structural. a set of signals that no longer line up.
maybe it was an attempt to take inventory. maybe to buy time. maybe just another reactive layer on top of the last one.
i don’t know. but the fact that we’re still asking who is this for? a year later probably says more than any answer we’ve been offered so far. 🤷♀️
‼️that’s just my working hypothesis. curious what others think. how did this read to you?