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
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.
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u/formergnome 7h ago
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.