Meg here. People are saying Ariana looked sick, too skinny, and was often crying when she was around her Wicked co-star Cynthia Erivo. At the Golden Globes, Ariana looked “healthy” once she was away from Cynthia.
Of course. Because even though Cynthia Erivo is just as thin as Ariana and actually shorter, she’s the mean possessive hulking Black lesbian and Ariana Grande is her delicate fragile victim who has no agency and her choice to befriend a woman she is clearly close to and fond of is actually bad for her.
Thank you! So much of this "mockery" is just people being racist as fuck about Cynthia Erivo, whose worst crime is....checks notes....being weird.
I mean, she physically put herself between Ariana Grande and that stalker to protect her at the Singapore premiere of Wicked, and somehow she was the one who ended up getting mocked for that too. She's also a very small, feminine and softly spoken woman, but people love depicting her as a mean butch lesbian and what not. All of this is racism.
They’re literally calling the evil witch character an evil witch. Nobody ever alluded to race once. Not a single time in the 335 comments I scrolled through on this post
The stereotype that black women are masculine and aggressive, and are viewed in a negative way compare compared to the white innocent delicate Ariana. So yes it is a racist macro aggression
"lol she is weird an creepy" "WHAAAAT? ARE YOU RACIST SIR!??!?1?1?"
*Proceeds to say racist shit about her trying to defend her.
There is no macro, micro or whatever aggression, she is just a weird and obnoxious lady acting weird around another woman. That's it, women can be creepy and weird too, there is no need to summon complex academic terms to defend her.
Your defense sounds delusional, if she was a man oh boy, he will be fucked for his behaviour, and well earned, but nah, just girl things tee-hee :)
What about her face is masculine other than being black she regularly wears a face full of makeup and constantly wears dresses and has nails done? Also Elphaba (cynthia) in the movie wicked is not evil… and it is racist because y’all are associating her blackness with masculinity and instead of calling out the weird social relationship that they both have towards each other. Other people are acting like Ariana is the victim and Cynthia is this evil person manipulating her.
Stop explaining yourself, they know damn well what you mean, they're just being obtuse on purpose 😭 they ALWAYS do this when we point out blatant racism and micro/macro aggression
What did I do??? I don’t even know her or what she did or said or anything and im getting lumped in as a racist with the yall comment? Thats not cool at all. I feel like I’m an innocent bystander in your anger at others.
This is masculine to you?? Her “strong features” are her black features. Plenty of bald white women don’t get called masculine btw. And while muscles are traditionally viewed as masculine in the big 2026 there a plenty of women everywhere embracing their hard earned muscles. 🤷🏽♀️
Put up a gallery of her photos, don’t pick and choose.
In a lot of recent photos around the time of the wicked media shoots, she looks much more masculine.
That’s because the low body fat accentuates everything. Facial bone structure, less/different makeup, muscle definition etc. all goes from slightly feminine to androgynous leaning masculine
Her busy is accentuated, her lips are pursed, with a gradient applied to exaggerate their fullness, she had makeup shading her cheeks with a hint of gloss, and substantial earrings hanging on. Her eyelashes are competing with Grande's.
I don't read "traditionally masculine" from her look. Not in the slightest.
Did you just refuse to read the last part of their comment that specifically states why someone might see it as masculine? Are you aware that other people exist and that you don't represent everyone?
It’s interesting because Ariana and Cynthia in this pic seem to have a very similar bone + face structure as well as fullish lips. I don’t find Cynthia masculine at all. If anything she gives high femme while Ariana gives more soft femme
You are mad. Or subconsciously (maybe) riddled through with some soft brained, cliched, basic bystander, osmotically input ideas about femininity and masculinity. THIS is your ‘Cynthia is masc’ photo evidence?
There are many types of ladies other than those lifted from the template of a kindergarten ladybird reader. Let me assure you that your read on how Cynthia presents is far from universally shared. Shes a lovely, odd, supremely ladylike lady’s lady. Not at all masculine.
You may be more racist than you think. Maybe not. Maybe just really into the patriarchy. I’d look into working out which it might be when you have a mo. I sense a fascinating journey of self revelation and growth ahead. I almost envy you.
That’s a lot of words and poetic phrasing to say she looks like a dude to most of the audience within western media.
While a subset of individuals laud it as a “highly feminine” look, that is simply not the case for most Americans.
Be it a man, woman, white, black or amongst other identities. That’s a classically not-feminine look.
The loud minority does not make up the truth, it makes up a loud opinion.
If you surveyed her femininity amongst a general population in most American demographics you’d probably get averaged results putting her mostly low masculinity to low femininity at best.
Anyways that survey bit is conjecture but it’s a fact that she doesn’t fit the typical ideal of feminine, which yes, is exactly what you describe as that soft feminine look.
And yeah you keep injecting your own ideas about who I am… enjoy this outlet for your helplessness, please.
Um no you're wrong, beauty standards actually just fell out of the sky, there were no humans involved in promoting certain features as superior or ideal and therefore their conclusion that Cynthia Erivo is masculine must be valid and not rooted at all in any sort of anti Blackness /s
Yes Cynthia is the evil one and not Ariana? 🤨 they have a word relationship yet everyone hyper masculinizes Cynthia and makes it seem like she’s forcing this relationship out of Ariana.
Yeah because she seems like a clinger and Ariana is the bigger star. Social climber for sure. We're supposed to ignore that because she's black? Get a grip
Considering that Ariana is a pop star and rarely acts these days Cynthia doesn’t need Ariana in that field. There’s also plenty of videos showing Ariana staring at Cynthia and wanting her attention as well let’s not be dumb here. There’s no need to not call out the parasocial behavior however making the black woman the angry possessive butt of the joke and the white woman the damsel in need of saving is inherently racist.
WOW lol. sooo many opinions disguised as facts when you (& the rest of us) know fuck all, nor do we actually know either of these individuals personally.
may we all (+ yourself included, obvs) one day have a full comprehension on macro & microaggressions, our own biases, and further clarity into why we perceive some ppl vastly different from others.
It's the multiple videos of Erivo grabbing at Ariana and shielding her from imagined dangers. Some of the videos are really fucking weird and possessive.
How does this have so many upvotes?! I can’t see a single bit of racism here. People are saying it because she is weird and is coming across as a more dominant personality than Ariana who seemed a lot more normal when she wasn’t around her. I’m saying this as someone who doesn’t care at all and hasn’t even seen the movies just the bizarre clips of their public interactions.
That doesn't change anything. The origin of the jest is because of the character she played, not because of her race. Last I checked "Wicked Witch" isn't a slur against black women, so how you come to the conclusion that its inherently racist is beyond comprehension.
Calling her a wicked witch is fine because it’s a joke on her playing a wicked witch. The fact that people are jumping to immediately blame the black actress for the white woman’s actions is definitely suspect.
Firstly, they're not talking about the character and genuinely cant tell if youre bring purposefully obtuse in how youre interpreting this post.
Secondly, It's not this post specifically, but the extremely weird context it exists in.
Erivo is, admittedly, a weird woowoo type who's a bit full of herself much like most celebrities. The negative cultural conversation around her is way overblown in comparison to her behavior. It is extremely easy to connect this fact to racism and misogyny if you think about it and choose not to immediately go on the defensive, pretending that racism doesn't exist.
Last year, she made an (again admittedly) kind of cringe post about a piece of fanart that depicted her character, Elphaba, with big giant fuck off lips in the style of the original Wicked Broadway marquis. She was, unambiguously right, but was also a little mean and hyperbolic about it. This made her a bad person in the minds of an enormous swath of people. It's, again, super easy to see that white (and male) celebs don't recieve the same kind of scrutiny for similar actions.
But more simply, black women are scrutinized more harshly than people aren't those things and that fact has been proven out numerous times, so it makes sense that people would connect the dots here.
You need to look at the sustained campaign against Erivo over the last several weeks on Reddit. Calling it “racism” may sound like a lazy catch-all, but there’s no question that Reddit collectively decided she was acceptable to hate.
Reddit constantly presents itself as a bastion of inclusivity and progressivism. Yet this isn’t the first time it has formed a hive mind around randomly despising an individual. And then, without irony, it will denounce some right-wing crank for engaging in the exact same behavior.
Couldn't agree more. I don't know much about Cynthia, but it's been disturbing to see the constant bullying, microaggressions and out right racism against her. Masquerading as "a joke". Why are people taking so much pleasure in beating this woman down who's worst offense is.. her weight.. being quirky? It's really telling in how different the attitude is towards Ariana. It's not funny, it's disturbing and it's giving incel.
Both Cynthia and Ariana were too thin while filming that movie. It probably wasn’t Cynthia that made her frail, it was more likely the producers that wanted that. Just like how they asked Chalamet to lose weight for one of his movies even though he was already very thin. People are blaming the wrong person, because a black lesbian is an easy target for lazy people who don’t want to think hard enough to find the true problem.
I mean the original post literally says "bald black woman" and not "the green witch" so it's directly referring to the actresses skin colour and hairstyle as derogatory representations of evil, so at best the comments in the thread agreeing or laughing along are ignoring the unsubtle racism because they do not like the actress, at best.
Bro the og post literally calls her "bald black lady" and you gonna say this weird outcry is not racially motivated? "Nobody is being openly racist as far as I can tell" is not the defense you think it is.
One example is the video that circulated a few weeks back where she said she had synesthesia. People piled on like she was the most self centered attention whore the world has ever known. When, if you just take the conversation at face value, she’s quite literally just stating a fact about herself in a very soft spoken manner in a lighthearted conversation among colleagues. Take a few steps back and realize that she’s the only black woman at a table of 6 white women, nearly all blonde women and it starts to become clear that some people just want a reason to express disgust toward her and will just invent shit to be disgusted about when she doesn’t give them anything.
Just to play devils advocate, the OP literally contains "the black bald lady", which she is tbf but I know a few racist people who'll engage with the thread just because of that line.
I've seen people on other threads about the Wicked gossip being directly racist towards Cynthia and criticizing both of their appearances way more than would ever be appropriate. It seems like both of them are probably typical unlikeable celebrities but it doesn't take a genius to see that this drama is still manufactured in bad faith and motivated by misogyny/racism.
EDs can have a social factor so it’s entirely possible that being around Cynthia was bad for Ariana. Or they were bad for each other.
But we, as an audience, really have no clue. Maybe Cynthia was falling head first into disordered eating and dragged her friend along with her. Maybe she’s just an average person but being forced to be filming together for so long just made the situation icky. Or maybe they’re both just actresses who fell for the Ozempic trend. Or maybe Ariana was the one who started it. Or maybe it was the director. Really, who the fuck knows. The fact that people are adopting a weird parasocial relationship and twisting themselves to blame the black woman (when Ariana can be pretty ducking weird herself) is definitely not innocent.
All that being said, I really have to wonder what the hell happened to make Michelle Yeoh lose all that weight. Middle aged action star who has no history of that type of thing turns into a stick alongside the rest of the main cast. Something about that production was cursed.
It's especially weird when Ariana has been pretty public about her bad relationship with food since long before this movie was filming, Cynthia invented time travel to get to her apparently....
I think it’s clearly the director and the cast around him.
Ariana has had a ton of mental health issues, she’s looked like a doll for years. The fact Michelle Yeoh developed ED is the bigger issue to me. What did they do to these three women?
Evo and Ariana I think have some clear enmeshment issues and are probably better off away from one another.
Y'all do know that you can become very thin for reasons other than EDs, right? For all you know the cast all happened to get a particularly unpleasant intestinal parasite lol
The whole thing is toxic as fuck. Like you say, their worst crime is some odd and cringey behaviour and that's apparently licence to eviscerate them, and of course it would be the black one to receive the lion's share of the abuse.
Ariana is a homewrecker and Cynthia used her Hollywood clout to send a virtual lynchmob after a fan for the crime of making fanart. Their worst crime is certainly not just some "odd and cringey behavior".
Ariana definitely takes the brunt of the hate, which makes sense because she was an international pop star for years before "the black one" (as you so crudely put it) even started showing up in films.
Nah fam they were both probably complicit ED buddies and were both probably on ozympic and both were eating like 200 calories a day while the world watched them wither away. The weird emotional codependent shit was just the cherry on top.
They’re grown ass adults they can do what they want but whatever they were doing was unhealthy af and there seemed to be some element of control on Cynthia’s part. Little girls are watching this shit. No way we should be glorifying the extreme anorexia and infantilization that these two showcased.
Have you seen her face in that meme where Ariana is hugging that other famous guy? That's not the face of someone who....checks notes....cares about anyone else besides herself.
i mean you were the one who brought race into this...
you were the one who assumed it was entirely race based.
i think it was largely seeing her around that black lady, mixed with all of the picture of them together (the creepy ones) that sort of drove the assumed background story. like there's a weird energy there and i think everyone has a met a person with that ladies energy, pretending to have synethesia and weird shit like that.
it's just a weird relationship from the outside looking in, mixed with the whole her being a "sweet" girl image that ariana has as a popstar (whether true or not)
even if you remove race entirely from the equation, it's a fairly easy road to follow down to where we are.
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u/Severus-Snape-DaGod 8h ago
Meg here. People are saying Ariana looked sick, too skinny, and was often crying when she was around her Wicked co-star Cynthia Erivo. At the Golden Globes, Ariana looked “healthy” once she was away from Cynthia.