// KOTAKU — GAMING
Billionaires And Corporations Are Not Your Friends
Over the holiday weekend, pop princess Taylor Swift and football star Travis Kelce got married at Madison Square Garden in New York City. The richer-than-god pair filed permits with the city to close off streets surrounding the venue during a holiday weekend, affecting nearby local businesses that typically rely on Midtown Manhattan’s heavy foot traffic for patrons to pass through and make purchases. Meanwhile, the blockades made navigating the densely populated area much more difficult, all so Swift and Kelce could exchange vows in one of the most widely-known music venues in the world.
The huge reception featuring some of the wealthiest folks from music, film, and other industries was blocked off from public viewing, but that didn’t stop Swift mega fans from flying out to New York City during a historic heat wave in hopes of being “part” of the event from blocks away.
“It’s our version of a royal wedding.” Taylor Swift fans gather outside Madison Square Garden for the pop megastar’s marriage to Travis Kelce. #TaylorSwift #TaylorSwiftWedding #TravisKelce #Swifties
In a lot of ways, this is the end result of Swift’s mythologizing of her own love life across her discography with references, both overt and covert, to her past relationships. Fans view her wedding as if they’re finally getting the closing chapter of a decades-long series they’ve kept up with since day one. In their eyes, this is akin to one of their favorite books getting its final entry and the writer holding some kind of exclusive “launch” party. As fans say in the above video, they view this as the equivalent of a royal wedding, and given that consumerism rules America with the iron grip of a monarchy, it makes sense that two incredibly rich people with multimedia empires would be viewed as such. Though anyone who flew up for the wedding was kept away by barricades and security, the couple still plastered electronic billboards with “JUST&T MARRIED” around the venue so even those who weren’t allowed in Madison Square Garden were allowed to be “in” on the story.
I’m not a Swiftie, but I am a fan of some of her music, am a gay man who the algorithm knows likes pop music, and have several hand-to-god stans in my close friends and family. As such, even when I’m not actively keeping up with her work, I’m usually aware of the discourses surrounding it. So while I’m living in New York City and aware of the very tangible effect Swift and Kelce’s wedding is having on the locals, I do get to hear Swifties flipping through their rolodex of prewritten defenses for the two’s elaborate displays of wealth, almost as if they’re reloading saves in a dialogue-driven game in an effort to find the “right” one that will exonerate their faves of any wrong doing.
Swift has dealt with plenty of bad faith criticism over her career, so her most stalwart defenders have a few pre-saved arguments loaded up into a clip, regardless of what is actually being said about her. Usually those arguments fall back on accusations of sexism, claiming that no one cares when a man flaunts his wealth, but that folks are ready and eager to pearl clutch when a woman does it, as if no one has ever criticized a billionaire like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk before. They’ll use her altruistic use of her money as a shield for criticism about her private jet’s carbon footprint. Ultimately, there are a lot of Taylor Swift fans who revere her in a way that is frankly delusional for a person to feel about someone they’ve never met, but that’s also the relationship the singer has cultivated with her fans by involving them so deeply in her life through her music.
But why are we talking about this here on Kotaku? Because as much as people want to ridicule Swifties for their undying devotion to the figurehead of what is ultimately a billion-dollar corporation, this level of devout corporate loyalty is what allows companies like Xbox and PlayStation to spin objectively bad news in ways that will make their biggest suppo