Respect for Performers' Personal Lives

Hey, all!

This is going to be a somewhat more serious post, inspired by something a friend of mine posted on Tumblr a few days ago. It seems that among certain Phantom Phans, there are a few who are more focused than they should be on how "sexy" or "attractive" the actors are, or who project the allure of the characters onto the actors who play them. My friend's post was mainly directed at a few fans of Ramin Karimloo who don't seem to understand or care about the fact that he's married and has children; they continue to post on publicly accessible forums or YouTube videos about how sexy he is and how much they want him. Apparently, some have even made nasty comments to his wife.

Certainly, POTO isn't the only fandom where this sort of thing happens -- not by a longshot. And don't get me wrong; I understand how it is to have a crush on a celebrity, and I've been there numerous times myself. But to go on and on about how you want to spend your life with a celebrity who's already in a relationship, especially when you go so far as to insult or threaten that celebrity's significant other, crosses a line. Like I said, I've had crushes on celebrities before, including some who were involved with POTO, but I'd never take it to that extreme. It's fun to imagine dating or marrying someone famous, but when all's said and done, I think it's much more satisfying to pursue a real relationship, preferably with someone you can meet and talk to without having to call their agent or get backstage at a show first.

A trend I've also encountered is "shipping" of actors with each other. "Shipping" generally takes the form of fans speculating that two fictional characters should date/marry each other, but apparently, that can also cross into real life. Some POTO Phans continue to insist, for example, that Ramin Karimloo and Sierra Boggess should date, even though Ramin is (as I mentioned before) happily married, and Sierra is engaged to fellow stage actor Tam Mutu. And I remember that in the wake of the 2004 movie version of POTO, lots of Phans were saying Gerard Butler and Emmy Rossum should date, even though there's a pretty huge age difference between them. Responding to those fans' notions, Emmy said that she considers Gerard to be more of an "older brother" figure, and not someone she'd consider dating.

A related (and rather troubling) thing I've noticed is when people start baseless rumors about celebrities. I once saw a thread on a POTO site that will go unnamed, where a few people were speculating that Michael Crawford and Sarah Brightman were having an illicit relationship while rehearsing and performing in POTO. When someone else stepped in and asked them to either offer some actual proof or stop that kind of chatter, those members said they were only kidding around.

No. Not okay. It's bad enough when there's gossip among high school students about who's sleeping with whom, but when that crosses over into people making up rumors -- on a public forum, mind you -- about celebrities having affairs, it can cause some very real trouble. It can cause some headaches for the actors who those "fans" claim to adore, what with the potential for awkward questions from the press or higher-ups taking those rumors seriously and not hiring them. It can also severely damage the online reputations of people who go around creating those rumors; remember, once you post something online, it may never truly vanish even if you delete it, and might affect your career or personal life in the future.

Well, that's my rant for today, although sometime later on, I may get more into the apparent preoccupation with "sexy" that some people (and not just Phans) seem to have when it comes to POTO.


I remain your obedient servant,
I.A.E.

A Frighteningly Fun Project

Greetings, Phans!

Well, I finished my latest semester of college, and this was an especially fun one for me. One of the main reasons why is because I took a class on horror literature. In that class, we studied some well-known and influential works of horror, from Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (widely considered to be the first Gothic novel), through the famous ones like Stoker's Dracula and Shelley's Frankenstein, up to modern works like Stephen King's The Shining, and even some urban legends dealing with ghosts or spirits encountering people in Hawaii.

POTO, sadly, wasn't a part of the curriculum. However, for an end-of-semester project, all the students got to give PowerPoint presentations on the horror-related subject of our choice. No prizes for guessing what I picked. I presented a very brief history of POTO, from the novel to the many film and stage versions. It had to be brief, since every student had a 10-minute time limit for presenting.

I think the presentation went pretty well; my professor congratulated me on researching my subject so extensively. (I neglected to mention that most of that research had been done for fun, long before the project was assigned.) Also, I found out that one of my classmates had been in the technical crew for Palikū Theatre's production last fall. She shared some secrets, including the fact that the makeup designers were originally going to try an even more horrific disfigurement for the Phantom but couldn't get it to look right, so they settled for the "leprosy" look I described in my reviews (which, in my opinion, was still very effective).

A lot of the other students' presentations were also great fun. There were slideshows on just about every random horror-related topic you could imagine, from The Exorcist to doppelgängers. And now, the semester's over, and I'm preparing for a summer vacation that just might be even more epic than my last one.

Feel free to comment if you found ways to bring POTO into some of your school projects in the past! (I will say that this presentation certainly wasn't the first time that the Phantom's tale has found its way into my schoolwork. I even referenced the story in my SAT exam once, and from what I can recall, I got a pretty respectable score for it. Yay, I suppose!)


I remain your obedient servant,
I.A.E.