Interestingly we have been consuming similar media in a way. I watched “Sister Wives” for the first couple of years in an on and off way, and then through Reddit (honestly) I randomly came across it again and found out two of the wives had left. Then another. So I started from the beginning again, to see if I could see it coming (spoiler alert: the only shocking thing is that they stayed together so long).
You see the older kids start to disappear as they turn 18 and become able to say yes or no to filming. And that makes me pretty happy for them. I probably had waay too long of a discussion with my youngest sister about the show tonight, and how they ended up where they did, and she was shocked to realize that Robyn’s kid are actually as old as they are - she thought they were all minors still.
Anyway, with what happened with the Duggars, it really soured me to non-competition reality shows. Kids should get a say. Their lives are being shared! I mean, TLC is really a boon to all of this - Jon & Kate Plus 8 as well - and I think the pressure to have story lines and justify another season is always there.
Mormonism comes into play with the Browns as well - interestingly, only Kody and Janelle didn’t grow up in Mormon fundamentalism, but they were still LDS. It’s a religion that ties your spiritual eternity to a single man’s, and I think that becomes a struggle for true believers to leave, not to mention the patriarchal dominance. (It’s interesting to think about how The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives fits in to this - TikTok became their vlog, and when one’s behavior stopped “fitting MomTok” the whole show started).
I love that Rainbow Rowell is kind of writing fanfic about her own books, except . . . The books are sort of canon actually? Fascinating meta twist.
All to say: I remember when there was a HUGE fan-ish divide between the people that wrote fanfic and those that wrote RPG. The Kardashians didn’t even exist yet! It seems so strange to think how cautious people were thinking that these people really existed and what would happen if they stumbled across themselves in a story - and now people are putting whole “stories” of them and their families online.
Interestingly we have been consuming similar media in a way. I watched “Sister Wives” for the first couple of years in an on and off way, and then through Reddit (honestly) I randomly came across it again and found out two of the wives had left. Then another. So I started from the beginning again, to see if I could see it coming (spoiler alert: the only shocking thing is that they stayed together so long).
You see the older kids start to disappear as they turn 18 and become able to say yes or no to filming. And that makes me pretty happy for them. I probably had waay too long of a discussion with my youngest sister about the show tonight, and how they ended up where they did, and she was shocked to realize that Robyn’s kid are actually as old as they are - she thought they were all minors still.
Anyway, with what happened with the Duggars, it really soured me to non-competition reality shows. Kids should get a say. Their lives are being shared! I mean, TLC is really a boon to all of this - Jon & Kate Plus 8 as well - and I think the pressure to have story lines and justify another season is always there.
Mormonism comes into play with the Browns as well - interestingly, only Kody and Janelle didn’t grow up in Mormon fundamentalism, but they were still LDS. It’s a religion that ties your spiritual eternity to a single man’s, and I think that becomes a struggle for true believers to leave, not to mention the patriarchal dominance. (It’s interesting to think about how The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives fits in to this - TikTok became their vlog, and when one’s behavior stopped “fitting MomTok” the whole show started).
I love that Rainbow Rowell is kind of writing fanfic about her own books, except . . . The books are sort of canon actually? Fascinating meta twist.
All to say: I remember when there was a HUGE fan-ish divide between the people that wrote fanfic and those that wrote RPG. The Kardashians didn’t even exist yet! It seems so strange to think how cautious people were thinking that these people really existed and what would happen if they stumbled across themselves in a story - and now people are putting whole “stories” of them and their families online.