I didn’t know anything about her before the show, but her Wikipedia entry is wonderful reading. When it comes time to film their commercials, the queens are coached by Suzanne Paul, a British-born New Zealand legend due to her ubiquity in infomercials. The gall of her! After four episodes of nothing but snide reads in confessional and in the werkroom, it’s a bizarre, jaw-dropping aside. The cherry on top of this delusion sundae comes when Etcetera says she’s not a shady queen. If Etcetera were as elevated and iconic as she makes herself out to be, she would have won every challenge instead, she has mostly been safe, save for one week in the bottom. This particular strain of shit-talking (the delusional one) grinds my gears to no end. The clear standout is Art Simone, in large part due to an instantly iconic read of Etcetera that hinges on the fact that she’s nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns out of drag without resorting to transphobia.Īs the queens begin preparing for their branding challenge - they have to design their own yeast spread, a reference to the iconic Australian Vegemite, which is a delicious, thick, salty black paste made from yeast concentrate by-product - Etcetera begins to make it very clear, as usual, that she feels she’s miles ahead of these girls. Unlike in their Snatch Game, the Down Under queens do justice to this beloved challenge, delivering a handful of transcendent reads, though perhaps not as many good ones as the general savagery of these queens may suggest. Kita is upset about her frenemy’s exit too, not least because she feels the Australian queens are acting as if the New Zealand queens are just filler - a perception she and Elektra do little to stymie come the reading mini-challenge. She keeps making jokes but is also openly bawling. This is either genuine sadness or fake sadness, and I truly can’t tell. After last week’s big elimination - another cause for consternation among fans, it seems - Karen, who sent Anita packing, is a mess. I know you didn’t come here to be lectured on online bullying by a guy who, less than 24 hours ago, got in an argument at a bar after pushing in the queue, so on with the recap. That being said: What do I know? I’m just some bitch with a dream and a laptop. ( Moll is a Down Under stand-in for slut, whore, etc.) Even if it’s in the interest of the “overall good” or whatever - like, you think more POC queens deserved to be in the top seven - it’s still a pretty cheap mode of “advocacy.” There are thousands more tangible, useful things you can do to support POC communities than telling some random drag queen to go kill herself! Sometimes I wish I had a direct line to people who feel the compulsion to bully real people online, just so I could tell them to take a deep breath and reconsider the need to call a complete stranger a disgusting, dirty moll. I can’t quite remember the image - it was basically like “When the first-ever all-white top seven becomes the first-ever all-white top eight,” which is pretty funny - but given how toxic the Drag Race fandom’s parasocial relationships with the contestants are, it’s not hard to imagine the vitriol being directed at Art. I mostly saw one meme in particular being shared. racist bile flung toward any POC queen who wins a lip sync over a white queen), Art said she has been inundated with abuse over her return. crown to Lawrence Chaney.) In a genuinely ironic twist on the usual kind of fan backlash that Drag Race elicits (a.k.a. Ho-NEY! The real-world backlash to Art Simone’s reentry into the competition was wild, unlike nearly anything else I’ve seen on social media in regards to the show over the past few years (save, perhaps, the groundswell of support for Bimini after she lost the Drag Race U.K. If fans were already less than pleased about the elimination order of RuPaul’s Drag Race Down Under going into last week’s episode, by the end of it, they were pushed to the breaking point.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |