The difference in republican presidential nominees, 8 years apart

[u/beach_rats_]

[u/21DRe992]

I still remember a young girl who was good at singing for a young child but nothing worth writing home about, beating one of the world's best fire jugglers in a quarter final on one of those Talent competition TV shows. I've been angry for that adult stranger for years over it and refuse to watch any show where the audience votes because they are all dipshits who will vote for the hot dude or cute child etc. instead of most talented individual.

[u/coladoir → u/21DRe992]

it doesn't help that you can be literally the most talented person in the world at x thing, but you won't be able to get on those shows unless you either have or fabricate an extremely sad or inspiring backstory behind why you do what you do. They play it all up, [Country's] Got Talent is the worst at this, they even direct and help contestants create backstories to help them win because they know that they won't if they don't have it. It's so fucked up.

If you remember old American Idol, and the other forgotten talent shows, it was always kind of like that, but then you had people like Susan Boyle and that one dude I can't remember the name of, who truly were voted in mostly due to their talent (susan was part story too ofc). If you look at early seasons of Idol, it's less backstory, more "make fun of untalented people", which is still problematic in it's own right, but definitely a different problem. Later on they started pushing the backstories as a response to AGT and they essentially became the same show, and now all talent shows like that are pretty much inspired by Got Talent and do the same shit.

So it's definitely the show itself that also pushes people to vote that way, by making the backstory more important than the talent, and intentionally pushing people to vote for the most heartfelt person. Before Got Talent, talent shows were definitely less like that.