sorry to like...use your ask to dump my fandom meta thoughts somewhere but your last two anons/your blog today really have me thinking about a theory i’ve lowkey had for a while now about swiftie behavior and why this fandom is so toxic sometimes, which largely comes down to two observations: 1) “being a cupcake” is seen as such a huge crime and people are labeled cupcakes so easily during arguments that fans, just like first anon described, will go out of their way to criticize taylor in every situation even when they don’t truly feel it’s warranted bc they “don’t want to be an annoying stan” or, if they can’t bring themselves to actually care about the latest drama or get mad at taylor over it, will feel bad and annoying for not doing so bc they think that makes them a cupcake and everyone loudly hates cupcakes. and 2) there’s a segment of fandom, gaylordom in particular for whatever reason, that genuinely act like the polar opposite of cupcakes - bran muffins, maybe? - i.e. always assuming the worst of taylor and her intentions in every situation and criticizing seemingly everything she does no matter what it is. imo this is a rather small section of the fandom BUT they’re also rather loud and active and often the same people who talk with that ‘this is simply how it is and anyone who doesn’t think so or sees it a different way is a blind cupcake idiot’ tone that seems to be what your anons are stressed out over, and for people who spend most of their time within or around that part of fandom it’s easy to feel like that’s the overwhelming opinion and they must be stupid or blind for not seeing it, even if it’s actually a minority opinion in reality.

(especially when people like......very literally say things like ‘everyone disagreeing with me needs to admit deep down they know i’m right and they’re just mad i criticized taylor’ or ‘literally the only people who think this is okay are stans, if you’re not angry you’re a blind stan who can’t take taylor being criticized’ every time someone doesn’t share their outrage at whatever taylor may have done this time. like it’s...very easy to personally internalize language like that especially for younger fans, or to feel, like your anons were saying, manipulated or potentially gaslighted by it or even by more general absolute statements - people talking as if their opinion or subjective view of a situation is simply fact - even if that was not the intention. people speaking in very concrete absolutes about something you strongly see as nuanced or simply don’t see the same way they do can make your brain feel like you’re going crazy or somehow not understanding the topic properly, and in the context of personal disagreements that often feels intentional regardless of the other person’s actual intentions.)

so my thesis is that despite having a reputation online as the most defensive fandom who will blindly defend anything their fav does with no criticism, a huge chunk of swifties are actually weirdly hyper-critical, not only of taylor but also of each other and themselves as fans. (adding to my theory is the term ‘critical swifties’ which seems to be brandished as a badge of honor by some fans and, afaik, is not a classification that exists in any other fandom where being Critical and Objective is not such a high collective priority.) which is how we’ve ended up with a bizarre, seemingly unique fandom culture where everyone is constantly trying to police both themselves and each other into reacting to whatever the latest drama is in the Acceptable way, including modifying their own opinion on a situation based on what the popular opinion in their corner of the fandom is and, if they feel unable to do that or don’t understand how other people came to their opinions about something, becoming genuinely stressed out or upset about their perceived failure to be the Right type of fan because, in the critical circles of the fandom, a lot of people have internalized the idea that not criticizing taylor when everyone else is - even when you truly don’t feel she deserves criticism or don’t even understand the criticism - means you’re being an annoying cupcake, and being an annoying cupcake means you’re stupid and everyone hates you.

(i would imagine that in much less critical circles of the fandom, like wherever the actual genuine cupcakes hang out, this probably happens in the opposite direction i.e. fans who disagree with anything taylor does feeling stressed out for being negative haters or whatever, but i don’t spend time there so idk. this is all just based on my own observations of fandom interactions/fan self-policing, and everywhere i hang out in fandom tends to get very critical, overly so at times imo, of both taylor and fellow fans.)

anyway i just truly think this fandom has an extremely unique internal culture where having the Correct (often at least somewhat critical and thus Objective) opinion on everything is given great importance and being viewed as a cupcake or defensive stan is The Worst Thing Ever and something many fans will overcompensate (or, more accurately, over-criticize) just to avoid. and while i have theories about why the fandom might be this way to begin with - like fans collectively internalizing, re-weaponizing and still desperately trying to escape the very strong ‘swifties are the worst fandom ever, you just can’t stand your precious queen being criticized bc you live up her ass and are too blind to see she’s objectively evil’ branding other fandoms gave them for defending taylor, often against genuinely false claims, when she was stan twitter public enemy number one - i mostly just find it a fascinating (albeit also toxic and often annoying) phenomenon to observe and theorize about, and i think it’s an interesting lens to look at fandom drama through so maybe other people will find it an interesting theory on fandom behavior too.

(also i’m sorry for this fucking essay, can you tell i’m studying to be an anthropologist and genuinely love shit like this lol)

yes, i did indeed save this very thoughtful ask for a time when things weren’t so heated... but i am posting it now because i love it, and this is the nuanced anthropological critique i personally love to see about taylor or the fandom at large.

i personally agree with basically everything you said - i think you hit a lot of points that i try to make when drama explodes here. like, individual blogs are stating things “as fact” because as bloggers we assume that the readers know we are not actual experts and we don’t have an obligation to post every thought with a disclaimer. and as readers, it’s our responsibility to remember that, and also remember that bloggers can’t word everything perfectly. for exxample, if you criticize taylor very harshly for this grammy thing, people draw this conclusion that you only said it because of x, y, or z... but in reality, people draw the conclusion simply because they disagree. and on the flipside, you could choose not to criticize taylor for this and get called a cupcake because, well, your readers disagree, basically.

it’s a very very goofy self-perpetuating culture here, yep.

my only disagreement is that this is specific or worse in the gaylor fandom. because i used to have a non-gaylor taylor blog, i saw this same mentality with all ships or subsets of the fandom. the same shit happened with tayvins whenever drama popped off during the 1989 era (which is to say: constantly), and that meant there were tons of little warring subsets-within-subsets of the fandom because fans felt they had to take a ‘side’ during every one of taylor’s scandals or problematic choices at the time. which is silly.

that’s why i try to assure everyone that it’s okay to be neutral or reserve judgment on any taylor scandal. and just because a certain opinion is popular doesn’t mean it’s factual or the ‘right’ opinion, and having a certain opinion doesn’t make you a cupcake. 

meta on media consumption as beholding, and the creation of the conservator role, based on conversations with @hdtvtits​. content warning, as always, for addiction, compulsive / obsessive behavior, aggressive hoarding, and implied terminal illness, all of the eldritch variety. also allusions to real-life hollywood dramas, though nothing remotely specific is discussed in this post.

foreword: this is just the first part of a bunch of meta i’ll likely end up posting on why levi is what they are and why their beholding manifests the way it does, because like... for secrets and the underbelly of film production i have a lot to say but a lot to source as well. but there are a few things i want to address in this post, namely: what the eye feeds off of, whether or not levi is feeding the eye in their media consumption ( and how ), and how it ultimately serves the eye’s purposes to have this be levi’s method of feeding. this probably won’t even be my last post on the subject as i keep sort of logicking out the way that beholding works and how it can manifest. it’s important to me though that it exist and function outside of just what happens in the institute ( which is proven in the statements ), mostly because fear entities are global and primal and jonny said that the story really is britain-centric. now, media consumption isn’t particularly groundbreaking; it addresses a more american culture, but that’s still western-centric and sort of ‘typical’ of europe and america, though i will say that european filmmaking as an institution is... different. it has its own history and quirks. hollywood is its own beast. someday i’ll make a post on levi’s judaism and how that interacts with beholding and manifests as more than their aesthetic, because they haven’t even used their ayin hara on this blog yet though it’s a ( minor ) power they possess, but that deserves its own post. ANYWAYS. with that said.

what does the eye feed off of? the eye doesn’t just function based off a primal fear, it has a drive that it imbues its servants with: “it is the manifestation of the fear of being watched, exposed, followed, of having secrets known, but also the drive to know and understand, even if your discoveries might destroy you.” i think that most of the entities function in a similar way, with the things they inspire and feed off of on the one hand, and avatars with a desire to evoke that fear in the other; i.e., avatars create food to feed their entity, and if they don’t, the entity devours them instead. that’s pretty basic knowledge. ( i also have stuff to say about entities consuming themselves because every time claire says autocannibalism i go absolutely hog wild about it but that’s for another day. ) there are, then, multiple ways that an avatar can go about gathering fear for its entity, but what sets the eye apart from others, i believe, is that it doesn’t need to directly cause the fear it consumes -- though i think that it finds the fear of being watched more filling than just watching other people be afraid, it can still ‘survive’ off of that. this is where eye shit starts to get confusing and it’s why these posts are so longwinded and involve me talking myself in circles, because the eye both has a specific fear that it’s linked to and can devour other people’s experiences of fear that it did not cause, yes even before the apocalypse. that’s just how jon feeds for the majority of the series. for a good long while, he’s not going out and getting statements himself; and even when he does, he’s double dipping on both the fear they convey to him about their experiences ( knowledge gained ) and the fear that this man is pulling information out of them ( secrets exposed ). 

but that’s jon and we’re not talking about jon, we’re talking about levi, and my ever-evolving thesis on voyeurism in / and media. 

so what does an eye avatar need to do, exactly, to eat? it needs to accumulate knowledge, that’s the baseline that it can survive off of -- knowledge of the other entities is best, but i don’t know that it’s a requirement... and i don’t know if it’s not! i am going to make the call that eye avatars can survive off of just hoarding information because the eye isn’t super picky and wants to know everything anyways, but not feeding off of fear for a long time is going to leave the avatar really weak. and for an eye avatar to develop its powers and grow, it needs to take statements directly, or else give other people the distinct feeling of being observed against their will. the more people it feeds off of as a result of its own actions, the more powerful it becomes. that said, i don’t think this is common, which is why watchers ( heads of institutes ) have set up these systems where they’re generating food for themselves on two axes simultaneously: fear of people who give statements, and fear of people who have to work at their institutes ( either taking statements or working directly under the eye ). that just sort of accumulates power upwards within eye bureaucracies, though the archivists who take and sort the statements are also going to become remarkably powerful if they lean into their role.

( also side note: these systems work for the english, american, and chinese institutes, but there are ways for beholding avatars to thrive outside of them, and again someday i’m going to post about oral traditions and the ability to craft stories in different regions of beholding that feed the eye. but i need to do research first and we’re talking about levi! )

here’s the thing... levi is not an archivist. levi is not powerful. levi does not have a strong connection to beholding. they worship it, but fanaticism does not equal feeding, sadly, and the role they’ve been given is not one that pushes them to go and gather statements for themselves. they have taken read and statements at afi, because wyatt was raising them into an avatar, but, though conservators and archivists can overlap in the real world, they ( in my word of god for this blog’s canon and the monster i made up ) are two very different things under the eye. essentially, conservators serve archivists ( and watchers ) by witnessing, recording, and playing back statements that archivists can then maneuver through. the more experienced the conservator, the more they can shift the camera, allowing the archivist to comb through statements in detail and pull the knowledge that they want from them. remember that the beholding grants knowledge, not understanding, and while that may be fine for the eye, sometimes its ‘human’ servants need to put the pieces together in order to advance its plans.

the conservator is a relatively new position within beholding, because it does function like a film camera. i think that, in other times, places, and cultures, there were similar avatars who filled a similar role, but it wasn’t the same. the conservator really is a miskatonic / american experiment to help the institute delve into the information it already possessed. for one example of how conservators are useful, consider what happened with sasha: the archivist had his voice recordings of her, because it can’t effect magnetic tape, but jon the person still had her wiped completely from his memory. that wouldn’t happen to a conservator, because all of their memories are converted into (meta)physical tape stock. they are a lockbox that cannot be opened or altered unless you’re a more powerful beholding avatar. ( the limitation here is that they only have so much storage space, they will need to expunge some memories to store more; though those memories can be kept in physical containers, film stock obviously degrades and is a very unstable and extremely flammable medium; their body will also internally decompose to make room for more data and that is a painful process that eventually renders the conservator just a storage without any ability to function beyond sitting still and replaying witnessed / read events. )

we’ve established that levi feeds normally. they take statements, they are present in an archive, they’re hearing the scary stories. finally, finally on to why levi consumes media and how levi consumes media, because the one is intrinsically linked to the other. let me start by saying that just watching television or films does not a beholding avatar make. yes you are watching, but the distinction is in whether you are passively or actively viewing. and the power that is drawn from someone zoning out and being addicted to passively consuming media does not go to the eye. that is neither a fear of being observed ( for the one watching or for the actors / writers, because nobody is going to care about an audience that doesn’t form an opinion at all beyond basic emotional reactions; uncritical consumers are milk and honey to them ) nor a pursuit of knowledge ( passively accepting knowledge is, according to elias, far less effective in raising up eye avatars than letting them learn to ‘see’ on their own ). all that power goes to mx media ( @hdtvtits​ ) or, if you don’t like crossovers, Just Definitely Not the Eye. it’s when you start performing analysis that the eye takes interest -- which is why the eye continues to thrive in academia ( au where i write meta on just how bad that gets, historically, but again there are things we don’t get into until we research thoroughly ). the more you lose yourself in compiling information, to the exclusion of everything else, the more you appeal to beholding. and when you start unveiling secrets, which there are plenty of in film and film production, things kept private from the audience, ‘movie magic’, then feeding can begin.

this may come as a surprise, but levi does not have a response to whether or not they ‘like’ movies. if you ask them, ‘did you enjoy that movie?’ they will not say ‘yes’ or ‘no’, they will just start launching into ripping it apart. levi probably started out enjoying movies recreationally, but at some point, they became not just unwilling to but incapable of watching films without analyzing -- and what separates this from normal people who are conscientious and engaged viewers is that this is a mania that spans hours. their ‘digestion’ of a film is obsessive and has a physical component because it is eldritch in nature. i can’t stress enough that levi isn’t just a pretentious film buff who says ‘oh i can’t consume media for pleasure or uncritically’, though they may have been at some point in their college career! they have a physical and metaphysical makeup that drives them to frenzy over what they watch. the instant they finish a film, they’ll begin a rapid accumulation of knowledge of anything they can dig up: the who, what, when, where, why, how. if they do have an emotional response, it’s incredibly removed, and their way of processing it is to drill into how and why the film made them feel that way. 

if they try to avoid this step in the process -- if they just watch a movie, turn it off, and attempt to go to bed -- they will start to weaken immediately. watching the movie isn’t enough for feeding. if it was, the eye wouldn’t take any interest at all. it’s the genuinely out-of-control driving impulse to keep researching and researching until there is nothing left about a piece of media that isn’t known, shredding through academic papers and script drafts and director’s notes and interviews and everything they can get their hands on, that stems from and feeds beholding. they do not settle for what is put on the screen. they will even cold call creators in a fit and try to get them to talk about the production ( which is, yes, invasive -- beholding is an eldritch entity, it is not healthy or good and does not inspire healthy or good habits! ). 

they may not even be capable of enjoying a piece on its own merits; it’s all about the world it opens up to them, it’s about stuffing themselves with information until they can’t breathe and overstimulate and pass out. then recovery from that can take days as they process what they learned and sort it all out in their mind. they don’t really do much with this information; just knowing it is enough. if an archivist or watcher wants to take action about it, they can ask levi to spit it back up for them. but ultimately, despite the impact that this has on their health, this is still low-level feeding for a low-level avatar. unless it’s a truly gruesome movie or has an exceptionally shady production background, it’s not really the fear that the eye is looking for. levi is feeding one half of beholding, the half that wants them to consume knowledge and secrets. if levi didn’t take / read statements as well, or go out and witness live horrific events, they would probably starve -- their body would eat itself processing knowledge.

and i will talk about the component of parasocial relationships, anxiety that stems from being an actor / director / content creator in general and having your work and your image spiral out of control as it’s ripped apart and dissected by consumers, because that is beholding territory as well. it’s just not actually what levi does, but because it relates to the media-beholding relationship, i’ll have it on this blog.