Selena Gomez, Taylor Swift and Suki Waterhouse are among the celebrities who miss the point when they "police" shows that reference them

The Daily Beast

In the past two weeks, Gomez slammed The Good Fight for referencing her organ transplant in a storyline about cancel culture, while Waterhouse called out Gossip Girl for referring to her as "Suki Nobody" in a recent episode. "Obviously, Gomez’s acknowledgment of this scenario exists in a slightly different context than if she were to call out a music critic for panning an album or accusing her of lip-syncing," says Kyndall Cunningham. "For one—and I can’t believe this needs to be said—words spoken by fictitious characters within an imaginary world are not equivalent to words spoken by actual human beings with the ability to affect reality. Nor are the people who create dialogue for these characters necessarily endorsing or condoning the sentiments their characters express when they say things that may not be nice. The same misreading occurred last week when model-turned-actress Suki Waterhouse, in several now-deleted tweets, called out the writer of an episode of HBO Max’s Gossip Girl in which a character refers to her as a 'nobody' in comparison to her movie-star boyfriend Robert Pattinson. While she was correct in pointing out the show’s inconsistencies with its feminist messaging, she missed the crucial point that this was uttered by one of the series’ 'mean girls,' automatically classifying the remark as petty. This also brings to mind the Taylor Swift versus Ginny and Georgia incident that happened earlier this year that resulted in the racist harassment of its Black star on her social media accounts, all because the musician was briefly reminded of her self-acknowledged 'long list of ex-lovers.' That being said, the Gomez joke, which was more so just a pop-culture reference, was not a slight to the singer, her fraught medical history or the work of organ donors, but a historically correct remark in a discussion about what kinds of jokes equal a cancellable offense, which her young fans and Gomez inadvertently confirmed for a second time."