r/iceage_the_band

I'm a 24 yr old woman so I am in the woman-sphere i guess. The amount of insane word salad and just echo-chamber made up "he said she said" misinformation spreading around abt Elias is so annoying as a fan since I was a teen. As a woman, it's genuinely a bunch of nothing-burger Stacy ass women who have never engaged with punk music in their lives just parroting whatever made up shit they heard on a tiktok somewhere. For some reason this baseless amount of negative attention just annoys me to no end every time i see it. I wish people whose interest in music doesnt evolve from whatever album Sabrina Carpenter or Ariana Grande just came out with would just mind their own parasocial business

There's a certain youtuber (if you know who I'm talking about, just leave her be) who I used to watch that mainly discusses pop culture topics, celebrities and reviews tv shows and she has made 2 videos about Elias and Jenna that have gotten views in the 6 digit realm. Her content was pretty entertaining at first but I noticed that while she isn't the parasocial type, she is pretty rigid in her thinking and comes off as being, well... prudish when it comes to things like sexuality, drugs and anything that is outside of normie territory.

She tried to make like her criticisms were fair and in good faith, but it was pretty one sided and sensationalized to a degree. There was the usual fodder that we've all heard by now and nothing really positive to add that would give her viewers a more well rounded perception of Elias and the band.

But a new one (at least for me) that is being touted as factual is that Elias killed a dog, cooked it, and posted the pictures on his tumblr account. A bunch of people were leaving comments agreeing with her. She was presenting this as a truth and imo, that can be seen as slanderous. You can't just accuse someone of doing something like that and not have proof. Especially when you're telling this to an audience of viewers.

And no, screenshots of an old tumblr blog post don't count. There was no further context to these images. There was no blog entry to accompany them. Have any of these people stopped to consider that he most likely found these images and posted them to be edgy or as some sort of crass social commentary? People posted images that weren't their own on tumblr all the time. And if you came from a punk or metal background, seeing weird, dark, or f*cked up imagery in zines, album art and other places was not exactly unheard of.

The pictures were probably originally taken in a country where eating dogs was not seen as a cultural taboo like it is in other parts of the world. I don't think Elias was actually endorsing it.

This is a big reach if I've ever seen one.

If you don't like Elias and or the band for any reason, that's fine. That's your choice. But to go out of your way to find things to misconstrue about someone and paint them as being a monster ain't it.