In Defence Of Being Totally, Stupidly, Borderline-Obsessed With A Celeb You’ve Never Met

When I was eight, I wholeheartedly believed that I’d marry one of the Weasley twins.

It didn’t matter in my mind that I lived on a different continent, or that they were eight years older than me. Frankly I wasn’t even fussy about which one I married, I just knew that if I didn’t marry them then my life was devoid of all meaning and existence could collapse.

Then at age twelve I dedicated my entire existence to Gerard Way and firmly believed that nobody on the entire earth could love him as much as I did, ever, end of story, full stop. And fuck, do not get me started on the awakening I had from watching David Bowie in Labyrinth because frankly I still haven’t recovered from him spinning those glass balls.

me at my hormones.

Recently I was fortunate enough to have a chat with wildly talented playwright and musical theatre performer Yve Blake, whose new, massively high-energy musical, Fangirls, examines the assumptions that people make about young female enthusiasm — and how there’s a double standard.

Dudes can rattle off statistics for NRL players going back years. They can tell you how many minutes they played in a round game in 1998, exactly what their win-loss ratio is and the percentage of tries or goals they’ve scored. They get all snivelly when their team loses and OH POOR DIDDUMS.

But when a girl memorises a boy band’s discography or the score of a Broadway play, that’s not given the same kind of reaction. When she cries at a concert, it’s hysteria, not dedication. The word for unhealthy obsessiveness, not adoration, is fanGIRL.

And I’m calling a big fat bullshit on that.

not having a bar of it.

Adults are definitely not here for people who love celebs so much that they’d “simply die” on the spot if they found out that their ~one true love~ was even in the same city. We’re expected to contain ourselves — expected to keep those screams of adoration for the bedroom, not in public.

But, dubbed ‘fangirls’, there’s a whole host of teenagers who are fanatical in their dedication and adoration for musicians like Harry Styles to the point where they’ll scream bloody murder at the mention of his name. Instagram even has fan pages, each feed brimming with edits of photos, location updates and even a memorialised record of when the celebrity ‘likes’ one of the page’s photos.

And one of the stars of Fangirls even has a few of those pages dedicated to him! Aydan stars as the dreamy heartthrob that everyone wants to climb like a tree, and given that he had a cheeky stint on The Voice we’re confident he has the vocals to back it up. Instagram certainly seems to agree.

It’s fucking wild how people get into it, and the reactions from onlookers range from confusion to terror in the face of a thousand girls screaming their lungs out, tears pouring down their faces, screaming “OH MY GOD I’M PREGNANT NOW”.

same.

Speaking to Yve, it was super clear that not only had a lot of research gone into the project (backed by the Rebel Wilson Theatre Maker Scholarship & the 2017 Belvoir Artists’ Workshop), but also that she knew exactly how to make the audience feel like a giggly, excited teenage girl — yep, even with the dads that come along.

Yve herself was blown away by the response to Fangirls, saying, “It was amazing to see young and old people, all generations and all walks of life, come up and tell me that it meant something to them.”

Because even though the concept of hysteria has been around for centuries (shout out to ye olde doctors who tried to cure hysteria with a wank), it’s only really been since the advent of social media that the so-called hysteria reached this visibility level.

“Every generation of people that I speak to has their own equivalent of Harry Styles,” says Blake. From The Beatles and the Rolling Stones through to Hanson and NSYNC*, she’s right in saying that there’s been one for every decade.

Yve notes that, “The internet has provided this level of access to the celebrities that we worship, to create a false sense of intimacy. And the immediacy with which we can access information about the people adds complexity.”

check it out yourself.

But even then, that kind of passion paired with immediacy can have hugely far-reaching benefits. Yve spoke of the Rainbow Project, an initiative she’d found while researching where a pair of teenage girls dedicated themselves to making Harry Styles concerts a safe place for people who identify as LGBTQIA+.

At a London arena concert, the Project organised for thousands of tiny coloured pieces of paper to fall from the ceiling, with a note written on the back instructing whoever picked it up to hold it up to their phone light and be part of the rainbow.

“It was like a perfectly proportioned rainbow flag in the whole arena,” said Blake. “14,000 pieces by two 18-year-old girls. And I don’t believe that those are the first images that come to people’s minds.”

pride on a huge scale.

It’s not always people making shrines to Harry Styles’ vomit on the side of the road (which is a real thing that happened, and yes, it’s super gross).

“Of course there’s some behaviour that isn’t acceptable, and the show deals with that too,” Blake says. “It deals with the good and the bad.”

Ultimately though, everyone has one of those stories about going above and beyond for a celebrity. For me, it was going to concerts and truly believing that the hot drummer would spot all 5’2 of me right in the back of the room (behind all the tall people) and fall in love on the spot.

Spoiler alert: he absolutely did not and I’m still bitter, okay. But Blake says there are two ways to consider those stories — the cynical side and the enthusiastic side.

“One way to go is ‘how embarrassing’, and the other way to go is, ‘how incredible is the purity of that emotion?’”

it’s wholesome as heck, okay.

So in answer to the question posed at the top of this page: hell yeah it’s fine to borderline-obsess over a celebrity. Just don’t be a dick about it, and channel it in a healthy way.

My conversation with Yve ended with a loud discussion about our top five musicals at the moment, gushing over Taylor Louderman’s vocals in the Broadway adaptation of Mean Girls and getting excited about how inventive the Beetlejuice score is.

It made me keen as hell to go check out Fangirls for myself, because if the musical is even remotely as close to Beyoncé level energy as Yve herself, it’s gonna be an absolute belter. It’ll be showing at Sydney’s Belvoir Theatre from October 12 to November 10 and you can grab your tix HERE

Our chat may not have been about an individual celebrity, but we fangirled, and it was fucking lovely.

Try it sometime.

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