It’s easy to laugh at the dorks rushing to their local stores to fix the displays of the new MrBeast Feastibles chocol♓ate bars, so I will. Hahahaha, losers. Just the dweebiest dweebs ever 🐻to dweeb. But it also seems like the perfect picture of where we are in our relationsh🐈ips to brands, our relationships to content creators, and our relationships to ourselves.
Our connection to brands has grown worryingly close𓆉 in this century. People have always had a certain loyalty to individual products, favouring a certain type of car꧃, or television, or certain type of rotary phone (I assume my grandfather’s generation cared about this). However, recently this connection has grown into footballification - beyond a connection to a brand, it’s a team on which you play, and against opposition you must crush.
The console wars are the clearest example of this. For mostly arbitrary reasons, people decide on a console they prefer, and then decide every game for that console is perfect and every game for their rival is trash. We see it in Marvel versus DC too. Even beyond the rivalry, we see self-confessed comic book movie fans telling yo๊u🐎 the new Ant-Man movie is great… so long as y🦂ou think of it less of a movie and more as an advert fo🐲r the next movie, and switch your brain off, and lower your expectations, and forgive the script and t🅺he special effects, and also it’s nice to see a bad movie once in a while, ꦺit keeps you humble.
This now extends to content creators. Again, fandoms have always existed for individuals in ways that go beyond appreciation for their art. All the way back to BeatleMania and Elvis and beyond, this has existed. But in those days, artists performed and fans screamed. The closest connection would be throwing your underwear on stage. Now, creators talk directly to their fans, not only in terms of parasocial content (the dangers of which we’ve seen recently🔴 with A𒆙din Ross), but direct audience address.
The reason people are fixing the MrBeast chocolate bar di♚splays are very simple - it’s because MrBeast personally asked them to. Their favourite celebrity spoke to them directly. In some ways, maybe that’s typical - when Taylor Swift’s new album comes out, she doesn’t say “ehh, check it out if you’re into that sort of thing”, she says “buy my album now!” - but being asked to purchase and b꧟eing asked to clean up is different.
The display packaging is faulty, the bars themselves poorly designed for their aims as a lofty prestige shelf item. They lean too much and collapse if the box isn’t fully packed, as it inevitably won’t be if people purchase them. To fix this error th𝕴at he has made, possibly by rushing to make money off a cheap business wholly unconnected from his career, MrBeast is imploring fans to tidy up his shelves. He has turned a fault into good publicity, by encouraging fans to seek out his cash grab of a candy bar and not only buy it, but push others into buying it too.
Obviously, this is far from the greatest abuse of power a content creator has ever enacted. I don’t even really have a problem with MrBeast either making this bar or asking fans to fix it. But it’s clear he’s made it to extract further cash from his fans, and that they don’t just go along with it, but put in vol🙈unteer work that will go unnoticed by a millionaire whose side they’ve decided they’re on is a strange indictment of how we engage with pop culture. What could you possibly owe MrBeast that makes you want to organise the chocolate bars he has made purely to make extra money from selling hꦉis fans what is likely an overpriced and inferior product?
You could say that by writing this, I’m just giving MrBeast and the bars free advertising, but that doesn’t matter. It’s not like you’re going to go and buy them after this. These chocolate bars aren’t candy, they’re merch. Edible merch that you can use to show your affiliation with MrBeast’s brand. When you eat it, you’re one of the gang. If you’re going to buy it, you already know about it, and if you didn’t know, you wouldn’t care. There’s a yellow ♚hard hat that retails for $300 because it’s Majima merch from Yakuza - but knowing that doesn’t make any difference to you unless you’re an especially dedicated Yakuza-head who already knew about it.
Is MrBeast’s chocolate any good? Probably not, given he’s an interloper in it for a quick buck, I don’t know, I’m not going to buy it. I don’t like MrBeast. I don’t have anything agꦺainst him, he mostly seems charming, it’s cool that he cured so many blind people even if his reaction was ‘why don’t people love me after this’ rather than ‘wow, healthcare really sucks when you’re not rich’. I’m just not a fan. Never intentionally watched him, only accidentally when clips have come up on other social media sites. So I’m not going to get the candy bar.
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It was the same story with the Prime drink flying off the shelves. Kids weren’t getting it because it was the best tasting energy drink of all time, and it definitely wasn’t because of an energy drink shortage elsewhere. It was because they like KSI and Logan Paul, and their friends thought it was cool. Prime sold out in the UK, bottles were being scalped for vastly inflated prices, and kids were imploring their parents to pay upwards of three figures for the energy drink. Content creators are entertaining, but they don’t produce meaningful, tangible products like a singer or an actor, so they have to resort to cash grabs if they want to make maximum profits, always꧋ demanding more from their young aﷺnd impressionable fans.
We’re nearing a future where you get out of your Adin Ross bed in your DrLupo pyjamas, eat your Pokimane cereal with your 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Amouranth spoon from your Tfue bowl, washing it down with some KSI and Logan Paul drink, brush your teeth with your Nickmercs toothbrush covered in your Speed toothpaste, before packing your Neekolul backpack with MrBeast chocolate and heading off for the day ahea♍d. Just don’t forget to fix the packaging on the Amouranth spoons when you buy one, and make sure your store has all the promo signs up for the Nickmercs toothbrushes. Otherwise, youꦜ’re not a real fan.