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Complexes, loneliness and fear in the mansion: the 'reality' that shows the true face of stardom on TikTok

2022-01-12T03:17:25.562Z


Netflix has just released 'Hype House', an eight-episode documentary series set in the mansion where more than a dozen social media stars coexist and create content while wondering how much is real in their own lives


"An irrepressible fear gradually invaded my body, and at last an incubus settled in my heart, the weight of an absolutely unmotivated alarm."

Almost 200 years separate the anxieties described by Edgar Allan Poe in his story

The Fall of the House of Usher

and those of the young

streamers

who star in the Netflix documentary series

Hype House .

, who, unlike the mysterious central character of the Gothic tale, have at least one of the evils that oppresses their chest from their monumental abode: the fear of being canceled, a neologism with which the loss of popularity is described of the famous caused by criticism on social networks. "You lose followers, you lose a lot of sponsorship because they want to leave you bare", the

youtuber

and

tiktoker

Alex Warren says smugly on camera in the second episode, where the voracious mechanics of a reality show are defined, if it does not have a TV format.

Big Brother

contest

, it's because you don't need it. Although they do not lack the confessional of rigor and, as Warren points out, a sword of Damocles hanging over each head, which the audience can act on whenever they want.

Divided into eight half-hour chapters, Hype House is set in the mansion of the same name in Los Angeles, which has been, since December 2019, the headquarters - and, in the case of several members, also the domicile - of more than a dozen content creators . With a good handful of defections and transfers during its short existence, during the Netflix recordings there are figures such as Thomas Petrou (23 years old, 8 million followers on TikTok), Nikita Dragun (25 years old, 14.2 million), Kouvr Annon (21 years, 13.6 million) or the artist formerly known as Chase Hudson (19 years, 32.4 million), whose gradual disinterest in the project is another of the dramas that backbone the documentary. Hudson was, along with Petrou, the co-founder of the house. However, the friendship between the two is resented by the events:The rule that Thomas Petrou imposed on the participants was that they had to generate material for the networks every day, but his colleague stopped doing it for months to build a career as a singer of

pop-punk

, under the name Lil Huddy.

Lil Huddy and Charli D'Amelio, one of the most powerful couples in the TikTok universe.Jerritt Clark (Getty Images for Machine Gun Kel)

Friendships mediated by business are another of the great themes that are drawn in the series, more eloquent in its limitations than in what it really shows: the failure of

Hype House

When it comes to representing how all these streamers are in nature, it is relativized in that, drowned in the spectacularization of their private lives and in a continuous reputational management, not even they themselves seem capable of distinguishing themselves from their characters. In the series, effectively constructed for the enjoyment of both the group's authentic TikTok followers and the ironic viewer, the shadow of monetization looms even in the most intense moments and the harshest revelations of its protagonists. You never know if their being vulnerable is an honest trait or calculated gestures of humanity to hook their followers.

"When my personal relationships go awry and become an obstacle to my business, I get angry," says Nikita Dragun at perhaps the high point of the documentary series, when the massive party she organized in the mansion is addressed in July 2020, when California was going through one of the worst health situations of the pandemic. The party was for the birthday of youtuber Larray, a close friend of his and a member of Hype House at that time, who attended despite having tested positive for coronavirus. The crossing of accusations between Dragun ("They can

cancel

you for a bullshit like that!" two stars.

Nikita Dragun, TikTok star, photographed in Los Angeles in October 2021.JOCE / Bauer-Griffin (GC Images)

In another move that would delight any fan of political communication, Larray, the only African-American in the house and in an image crisis because part of the black community accuses him in networks of contributing to the whitewashing of the project, forces Dragun to apologize for, repeatedly, having done

blackfishing

on their social networks

, a name by which the practice of darkening the skin in images to appear black is known.

Caught in time

The successive dances for TikTok that the protagonists of

Hype House

record and are reproduced in a loop end up having an almost allegorical function in the narration of their lives. One of the most interesting plots of the series is that of the

youtuber

and

tiktoker

Alex Warren, whose partner, the also tiktoker Kouvr Annon, repeatedly questions the veracity of his demonstrations of love, upset that he records and broadcasts absolutely everything. In contrast to the hooligan style of the videos he makes, low-key pranks (for example, he shoves a duck into his girlfriend's room) and physical challenges, Warren is one of the more subdued characters in the series - it takes time. concerned about stagnating popularity and declining views. The content seems to have become outdated for the public, but the

streamer

, who has been basing his image and personality on that concept for years, has serious problems reinventing himself.

Content creator mansions have long been a phenomenon in the

streamer

world . Thomas Petrou himself was a member of Team 10, while Hype House has lived, in turn, an intense rivalry with

Sway House

as a result of Chase “Lil Huddy” Hudson being unfaithful to his ex-partner, Charli D'Amelio, the person with the most TikTok followers in the world (130.1 million). D'Amelio, who is only 17 years old, was a member of Hype House with his sister Dixie until May 2020, when both left the house because, according to his representative, having stopped being fun and "become a business." In Spain, the most notorious case has been that of the mansion that, until recently, Ibai Llanos shared with other streamers such as Reven, Ander or Illojuan.

Thomas Petrou photographed like a star on the streets of Los Angeles in October 2020.fupp / Bauer-Griffin (GC Images)

A debate was also generated around Ibai about the working conditions of content creators, when, in the summer of 2020, the Bilbao

streamer

stated in an interview in

El Mundo

that he had not gone on vacation for six years.

Regarding this, the

El Salto

journalist Layla Martínez expressed, in a tweet, her concern that she lived "in a house set up by her bosses to produce content without stopping from there, [in] endless days and without hours", comment that was received with hostility by Ibai himself, some of his fans and also his then boss, the owner of G2 Esports Carlos Ocelote.

In

Hype House

, despite the fact that the exhaustion of several of its protagonists is evident (one of them, Alex Warren, suffers an injury and the first thing he says is that "having a loss causes you to lose followers"), the issue is never discussed explicitly, beyond seeing how the members of the house, some recently out of high school, feel overwhelmed by having gone from anonymity to having to manage that millions of people observe them and analyze their actions.

Precisely for this reason, it is delicate to judge some aspects of the series. The inhabitants of the mansion are, in essence, children who have woken up rich and spend their money simply on what a child would spend it: buying sumo wrestlers, video game machines, parties with friends or a sir take a fox home. Children entertained by brands that give them the opportunity to live a kind of parody of the experiences of millionaires while promoting a way of life, with everyone (other children) watching, with all the possible excesses and with a simulacrum of power that they assume delighted. "I want to convey wealth," Nikita Dragun says to his makeup artist in one scene. In another time,Dragun resolves a discussion on social media by bragging that Netflix is ​​doing a series about her and her peers. It remains to be seen if there is a second season or if, as they repeat that the protagonists of

Hype House

, there is cancellation.

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2022-01-12

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