Good morning guys!
It's been a while but due to recent events, I felt the need to write a little something. In case you haven't already heard (it certainly feels like the whole world knows), I won a trip to LA to meet 5 Seconds of Summer and attend their convention and one of their concerts. The competition was the following: You had to submit a video of yourself explaining why you want to win. I decided to keep things simple, so I sat in front of my camera and talked for five minutes. These five minutes brought the worst consequences with them which I could have imagined: People started to send me hate messages for the following reasons: I mentioned that I want to become a music journalist, so now people claim that I use this trip to boost my career. False. I want to go because 5sos are so important for the pop punk scene and they've been working so damn hard during the last few years and I just want to tell them how proud I am and how inspiring I think they are in terms of working hard in order to make your dreams come true. In these five short minutes, I dared to make a joke as well, oh no! I said that I'd love to know who does their laundry when they're on tour because I have a teenage brother and I've never seen him do any laundry. This little sentence upset the whole German fandom in gigantic dimensions. I can't quote or show you any screen shots because I blocked everybody who mentioned me on twitter or messaged me on facebook, so there's nothing to see anymore.
All hell broke loose when the radio station called me to tell me that I won and we talked a little before tha. I dared to say that the front vocalist of 5sos is quite tall. First of all he isn't the front vocalist (even though he has the most singing parts) and second I said that he's something around 6'3. Can you imagine how many people are calling me a fake fan now because I was nervous? I got messages from people telling me that Luke is 6 feet tall and not 6'3, so I asked some fans who already met Luke. All of them told me that he is 6'4 tall, so there you go.
Can you imagine how many people are telling me that I stole this from a REAL fan who probably knows at which time the boys were born? I got tons of messages from people telling me that I'm not a real fan because I don't follow every band member on twitter. For the record: I use twitter once a month because I use other networks to talk to people and people on tumblr screen shot every single tweet of the band members anyway, so I always know what's going on. I don't know what gives anybody the right to judge who's a real fan and who isn't. If there's a manual for how to be a proper fan, I haven't read it. I'm a fan of 5sos because of their music. I love how some of their songs are so thoughtful and on point (e.g. Tomorrow Never Dies) while others are just pure fun (e.g. She Looks So Perfect). I love watching videos of their concerts because it's so obvious that this is where they belong. This is what makes them incredibly happy, and it makes me incredibly happy as well to watch them grow and live their dream.
I'm not so sure about how happy it would make them to find out about how their fans treat each other. This is just a suggestion: before you tweet anything, ask yourself if Luke would approve. If the answer is yes, yaay! but if the answer is no, you might want to think about sending it again. I've been a part of this for enough time to see how everybody preaches that this is a "family" and that we should all treat each other that way, but if this is how you treat your family, I'm really sorry for them.
All this grudge and negativity against one person are straight up bullying, nothing else. Please don't try to use the "you don't know what bullying is" card because believe me, I do. I've been dealing with this for my entire time at secondary school, which measured nine years, and I honestly thought I've experienced everything I could during that time. Well, turns out I was slightly wrong. I don't read the comments in facebook groups or on the facebook wall of the radio station because I know that sooner or later my anxiety would go through the roof and I'd cancel this whole trip. This is not how it's going to work though, sorry to disappoint. If these people think that I'll spend my days scrolling through tons and tons of hate, they're wrong. If they think that any of their "you're not a true fan because..." arguments is going to convince me, they're wrong as well. Just because I won't start to scream and cry when I meet the boys I'm not less of a fan. Just because 5sos didn't "save my life" because I did that on my own I'm not less of a fan. Just because I didn't mention everything I wanted to say in a five minutes video I'm not less of a fan. Just because I don't follow every single band member on twitter I'm not less of a fan. Because nothing of the above is what makes you a fan. It's about whether you have a connection to their music. It's about supporting them, but not defending them when they do something stupid (that happens to every band sooner or later). It's about appreciating what they do for us, and giving them something back from time to time. And with "giving them something back" I don't mean mobbing their hotels and hating on people who won something you didn't. There are so many bad vibes and so much negativity connected to this band and it makes me really sad because I enjoy their music so much, but it's almost impossible to get any closer to them because everything is so intense. I understand that people are sad and disappointed because they didn't win, but spreading so much hate about one single person is really uncool. I can only repeat myself: think about how the 5sos guys would react if they saw this shitstorm and then try to convince me they wouldn't care.
Long story short: I won't back off from this trip, no matter how many people will invade my privacy and spam my accounts on any social networks (it only makes me use them less which is probably a good thing since uni will start again soon). So yeah, can we all please be a bit nicer to each other and actually be happy for each other for once, I promise it'll make you feel better about yourself as well. I know that there are a lot of people out there who only wish me really bad things now, but at the end of the day nobody gains anything from this. I'm going to let this whole issue go now, and I really hope that things will calm down again soon.
