Member Since: 3/30/2011
Posts: 5,259
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For the majority of her career Taylor Swift has successfully evaded backlash and kept up a well-maintained public image. During the Red era she began to take some flack for her rapid turnover of boyfriends, but this was relatively harmless and Swift successfully turned it around with SIO and BS.
Then came the 1989 era. The album saw her reach new heights of success and fame, and 2014/15 saw her reach audiences she never had before and grow to a level of mainstream celebrity very few ever achieve. The beginning of the era was generally defined by people reacting positively to her - I knew lots of people who didn't like or didn't really know her previously who were warming up to her.
2015 saw her face some minor controversies, but no one really cared about BB/Katy outside of StanLand, and the beef with Nicki was fairly small and cleaned up quickly. However, the extreme success of the era, along with her display of power against apple and an absence of bad press about her, seemingly pushed her ego too far. She started taking her "clique" of famous models and actresses with her everywhere, and began to resemble the archetypal, clique-y cheer squad captain figure so much of her career had been against (see: YBWM video, Mean, BTR, general quirky-nice-girl aesthetic).
None of these were big enough issues to cause a backlash in their own right, but they built up in the subconscious of the GP until, in 2016, there was a suitably dramatic and exciting scandal allowing the GP to direct all their vague feelings of uneasiness toward Swift into one concise verdict - that Taylor Swift is a mean girl.
I was initially one of those who said that the whole thing would blow over, but it's 2017 now and it's time to admit that Taylor has taken a major hit to her public image. The question now is can she make her comeback? Or is her reputation beyond real repair? How will her next album do?
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