Quote:
Originally Posted by Chibi-Chan
I was criticizing her for being unprofessional and immature regarding her job and how she's interacting with the public as if she's talking to her best friends. I guess you're defending her from a perspective a friend of hers would do.
If someone talks about a popstar in a way I would talk about a friend I always get the feeling the person just wants to defend the popstar no matter what.
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Yeah, I totally understand that.
I'm defending Ayu not in the context of "ayu is a pop star, and SHE TOTALLY GETS ME OMG!" which is indeed EXACTLY what gets people talking about pop stars in a "friendly" context. Because most pop stars are deliberately distant, cool, perfect, etc. They're far more rehearsed than Ayu has always been. They're a different KIND of pop star.
I'd feel very weird being forgiving of vague tweets if they came from someone like Namie, for instance.
I only feel the need to defend Ayu here because "unprofessional," talking to her fans as if they were her friends, was always kinda... part of her image. She's VERY inconsistent about this, but her image has always been "she's just like if one of us normal girls was able to wear designer clothes & travel the world." Since the beginning her lyrics have always been "my real feelings" (at a time when that was NOT common in J-Pop, although now it's not so unusual). Girls copying her fashion & buying every makeup product she promoted wasn't an accident, and it wasn't just "I wanna be like my idol," it was just "I CAN be like her." Ayu has always come across more like the class president who didn't really want the job but everyone insisted that she take it, rather than seeming like a distant, perfect, mythical goddess.
Granted, fans who don't see her that way - and given her relatively distant image since.... I dunno, around the "MY STORY" era or so, there are PLENTY of them - are going to probably be much harsher on her when she's unprofessional, which I completely understand.
But for me personally, if I was only interested in seeing her professionalism, I'd only watch her concerts and videos and I'd only read magazine interviews that have been edited and polished. To me twitter is where you see celebrities at their least professional. For some, it's a place where you see these celebrities embarrass themselves with vague tweets made in the heat of a moment without much thought. For others, it's a place where you see celebrities humanized by those tweets. And that humanization makes me feel better. To me it's both endearing to see Ayu so humanly flawed, and encouraging to see that yes, indeed, everyone makes mistakes.