neoplacebo wrote: Wed Jan 05, 2022 5:41 pm
It's like that Honey Boo Boo shit but at a level at which fools throw obscene amounts of money at trumpism in hopes of who knows what. A lot of them have already fallen by the wayside without as much as an inner tube. The current crop of rubes and the ones to come will learn or not.
I had to google this. Don't recall ever watching the show.
Her Name Is Not Honey Boo Boo
Just shy of her 16th birthday, Alana Thompson, a public high schooler, is saving to buy her first car, has dreams of being a neonatal nurse, and is trying to get straight A's. She works after school and on weekends, and spends time going to the pool and the mall with her sister and niece.
But the work she’s doing isn’t typical. She works as a reality television star, and has been doing so since she was just a toddler. And she’d like people, including her peers at school who exclaimed “Oh, it’s Honey Boo Boo!” when she started there, to understand the name she’s known for is not her name: “My mama did not name me Honey Boo Boo. My name is Alana.”
Sixteen is a stark split in teenagerdom, one that comes with the potential for driver’s licenses, the end of high school finally in sight, and what feels like a line between your childhood and young adulthood. But for Alana, whose birthday is August 28, the ties between the past and present are tighter, and more documented, than most. Amid discourse on how we talk about teenage girls, particularly those who have a level of cultural presence and celebrity power that renders it too easy to think of them as icons or examples rather than human beings, is Alana.
As reality-TV lore tells it, Alana Thompson burst onto our screens fueled by “go-go juice” (a mixture of Red Bull and Mountain Dew) and pithy catchphrases. She originally appeared on TLC’s Toddlers & Tiaras in 2012. The show, in part, followed then six-year-old Alana and her mother, June, on the children’s beauty pageant circuit. Later that same year, Alana and family were center stage on their own reality show, Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, the first episode of which shows the Georgia-based group going to the “Redneck Games,” where they participated in a “mud-pit belly flop” and bobbed for pig snouts. The show existed at the intersection of class, economics, and family dynamics — a working-class family (or one presented as such) in a celebrity economy, with plenty of gleeful attention on the way the family’s location and social norms could be amplified for profit with little context for it.
Can't say I really care, though.
