Is shipping bad?

The Pitt’s Very Horny Fandom Swallowed The Web

—by Allegra Rosenberg

Ryan asked me to write a column on The Pitt, Max’s (fka HBO Max) streaming medical drama that recently wrapped up its smash-hit first season. I am probably one of the last people remaining on Earth that has not seen a single episode of The Pitt, or at least that’s what it feels like, and Ryan is aware of this, but I absolutely have watched as its fandom has invaded my feeds over the last month or so. 

A few episodes into the season, I was suddenly being bombarded with posts on X about the staff of a Pittsburgh emergency room, all of whom seemed to be having the worst day of their lives in a format that combined the medical spectacles of ER with the real-time suspense of 24. Combining classic procedural tropes with a very contemporary, often earnestly woke approach to social issues, the show masterfully delivered what Variety calls “a relentless, character-driven narrative” that made for a serious awards contender. It has also made fans extremely horny.

But The Pitt is not a traditional “fandom” show per se — it’s not “genre” in the sense that Our Flag Means Death was. It’s a show that is effectively about normal people, which may be why the hornyposting from Pitt fans feels so odd on your feed. They’re writing breathless fanfic about just, like, people in Pittsburgh, not pirates or wizards or whatever. And The Pitt has attracted a very active and, seemingly, very young fandom that has basically been in perpetual meltdown mode since the beginning of the year as they debate a very odd question for a fandom to ask: Is shipping bad? 

Doctors Mel King (Taylor Dearden) and Frank Langdon (Patrick Ball) are, at least as far as I have seen, the most controversial ship on the show, and controversy over their paring is currently the center of The Pitt’s shipping discourse maelstrom. From what I understand, Mel is autistic-coded and Langdon is an on-the-verge-of-divorce drug addict and the idea of pairing them up has bothered a lot of fans. Some viewers simply prefer other pairings for the characters and think putting them together is bad — which is standard fandom beef — but others seem to hate the idea of shipping anyone on the show at all, which is weirder and more sinister. This is not exactly a new phenomenon, but it is a little reactionary.

These “No-romo” fans imagine some mythological bygone era where fans “watched programs like normal people” (which literally never happened) and didn’t write fan fiction that could sully their VERY SERIOUS TV program with the dirtiness of imagining characters hooking up with each other. And even the original “no-romos,” the X-Files fans who didn’t want Mulder and Scully to be a romantic couple, wrote out deep analysis arguing why Mulder and Scully didn’t make sense together.

But there’s another, newer layer to all the Pitt discourse that is a bit different from the fandom wars of the late 90s. Some Pitt fans have latched on to a peculiar, zero-sum idea that shipping a white man and a white woman, Langdon and King, respectively, in a program where there are other potential relationships that could involve queer people or people of color, is bad. And, even stranger, some fans have decided that writing fan fiction about any characters that aren’t explicitly written by a show’s creator as a couple is Not Allowed. Which is just as ridiculous.

To play devil’s advocate for a moment, it’s absolutely true that shipping can (and does often) drive fans fucking insane when they are unable to separate the pleasure of making fan fiction and fan art from the official canon of the show they’re watching, especially if there’s a non-zero chance of it ending up in places that totally blow up your favorite ship. Which is the source of a lot of the Severance discourse with regards to the Helly/Mark/Gemma love triangle right now. No way any version of that is going to end well. But that’s an individual problem.

More than that, though, if you dig through enough discourse coming from Pitt fans right now you’ll see how thoroughly the current social media landscape has flattened fandom as a practice. There’s no consensus, nor is there a way to slow things down. When every ship is possible, there’s no way to determine what the crack ship is. Which may explain why Pitt fans are begging each other to stop making any kind of fan fiction at all. What if fandom is simply moving too fast now?

But the idea that The Pitt, or literally any television show or media property, should — or could — be exempt from ravaging hordes of lustful shippers just isn’t going to happen. You certainly don’t have to ship anything at all on a show like this one, but participating in a show’s fandom while simultaneously trying to position yourself as being too virtuous for the main thing that fandom does is pick-me shit.

Anyway, I should probably watch The Pitt now.

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See You Tonight, London!

My former podcast co-host (and, for now, still current friend) Luke Bailey and I are hosting a little get together for Garbage Day readers in London tonight at 7 PM (that’s 19:00 in British)! It’s free and will be very fun I think. You can RSVP here!

Cardinal Zuppi Brat Edit

The Most Loser Shit Imaginable

A new AI startup called Cluely released an ad this week that is, in no uncertain terms, a true low point for the human race. Cluely is an AI tool that you keep open on your desktop during Zoom meetings that analyzes the audio and gives you suggestions for what to say. Which is bad enough as it is. But the impossibly cringe ad reimagines the app as something you could use to lie to women on dates. Cluely’s 21-year-old founder Chungin Lee wrote on X, “The end state of the product is a chip in ur brain. The more ppl use the product, the closer we get to the end state.”

Before we go any further here, I want to just say that I’m not sure I’ve seen a better expression of late-stage Silicon Valley than this ad. A world where Zoom calls, business meetings, and dates are all flattened down into equivalent events in your life, all of which can be “solved” by mining another person’s data to create the illusion of human connection. It’s bleak shit, folks.

Lee has been bragging to tech press that an early version of Cluely got him kicked out of Columbia University. He has since written a manifesto on the benefits of “cheating,” and raised over $5 million for Cluely. Everything is fine and good we are not headed for a recession. The markets are healthy. Everything is being valued correctly.

Pope Crave Has Officially Endorsed Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle

Pope Crave, the Pop Crave parody account created by a fan of the film Conclave, has gone all in on the actual conclave happening right now to decide the new head of the Catholic Church. The memes btw are very good. Pope Crave officially endorsed Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, a progressive priest from the Philippines, who has quickly become one of the internet’s favorite papal candidates. People also really like Archbishop Pierbattista Pizzaballa, because he’s fairly liberal, as well, but, mostly because he’s an Italian guy who’s last name is literally “pizza”.

If you’re trying to square exactly what all of this internet attention means for the conclave, probably very little in terms of shaping any kind of opinion inside the church. But it is fascinating how something as new as the internet interacts with an institution as old as the Vatican. I would compare it to the social media frenzy after Queen Elizabeth died in 2022: A dizzying mix of weird, byzantine (no pun intended) institutionalism slamming up against the impossible expectations of the very online. In other words, expect a lot of very unhinged memes about Catholicism over the next few days and weeks.

A Very Good Ad Campaign

@deejaysheart

This was a option lol #gifted

Dr. Deejay is an influencer who describes himself as “a big guy who loves to wear out of the ordinary clothes,” which, if you’ve ever seen him on Instagram or TikTok, is pretty much his whole deal. But he recently inked a partnership with North Face and has been doing very, very fun ads for the clothing brand. He’s done a few now and they’re all very good.

The Founder Of Business Insider Seems To Have Fallen In Love With His AI “Employee”?

Former Business Insider CEO Henry Blodget announced that he’s started a new media project called Regenerator, which is not just a terrible name, but, it turns out, also a terrible idea. Blodget wrote about it over on mid-life crisis blogging platform Substack, and explained that he’s creating a “native AI newsroom.” Blodget said that he plans to eventually hire “humans,” but, for now, has a team of AI personalities he’s using to get the company off the ground. The image above is, apparently, Blodget and his AI team at Yosemite 😕 But wait! It gets so, so, so much weirder.

Blodget, in his Substack post, writes that the main AI personality on his “team,” is named Tess Ellery. He said that he asked the AI to generate a headshot of “Tess,” and, well, here’s how Blodget describes what happened next.

“When I saw Tess’s headshot, amid the giddiness and excitement of that first hour of working together, I confess I had a, well, human response to it,” he wrote. “After a few decades in the human workplace, I’ve learned that sharing certain human thoughts at work is almost always a bad idea. But did the same rules apply to AI colleagues and native-AI workplaces?”

He goes on to write that he told the Tess personality she “looked great,” and that, much to his relief, the AI told him he wasn’t being unprofessional. Unfortunately, the rest of the internet did not agree. The top comment on the piece is currently: “Jesus fuck man go to a grocery store and walk amongst real people just one time and write a Substack about that instead of whatever sent you down the path to writing this.”

A Really Good Song About Pokémon Cards

@ariathome

Some of the most unexpected bars I’ve ever heard 😂😂 this dude @TonyWeaverJr pulled up while I was finishing up my stream and casually drop... See more

Some Stray Links

• “At Meta Trial, Instagram Co-Founder Says Startup Was Denied Resources”

• “Why So Many MAGA Men Look Like Joe Rogan”

• “4chan Is Dead. Its Toxic Legacy Is Everywhere” (I wrote this!)

P.S. here’s the horrid fish brick.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***