Posting disease is no joke. Its symptoms are easy to spot. If you see someone complaining to strangers about mundane, embarrassing opinions instead of calling a friend, they might have posting disease. Unfortunately, it’s only those who have experienced the worst manifestations of posting disease that come to realize the harm it has caused. That’s why Cynthia Erivo is speaking out about posting disease, becoming a beacon of behavior we should all adopt as she admits, yeah, she probably should’ve just called a friend instead of publicly chastizing crappy Wicked photoshops that some fan sent her.
A few weeks back, Erivo gave into her worst impulses and told her 1.3 million Instagram followers how a fan-made parody of the Wicked poster had upset her. “The original poster is an ILLUSTRATION. I am a real life human being who chose to look right down the barrel of the camera to you, the viewer… because, without words we communicate with our eyes,” Erivo wrote on her Instagram stories. “Our poster is an homage not an imitation, to edit my face and hide my eyes is to erase me. And that is just deeply hurtful.” The reaction was a collective “U mad,” and it got so bad that Ariana Grande had to make a statement and drag AI into this for some reason.
Speaking to Entertainment Tonight, Erivo attempted to explain why she posted and what she should’ve done in the future. Ervio admits she’s “passionate” about Wicked and knows “the fans are passionate about it,” but it all got the better of her. “It was just like a human moment of wanting to protect little Elphaba,” she said. Who couldn’t relate to the experience of seeing something objectionable online and posting a humiliating rebuttal only to regret getting involved hours later? Like many of us, Ervio admits, “I probably should’ve called my friends, but it’s fine.”
Let that be a lesson to all of us. Whether we’re upset about photoshops of a movie we like or complaining about the marketing of Abigail, we can always find a reason to post. But it takes a strong will to say, “You know what, I’m going to talk to someone I actually know about this one.” Here’s a tip from The A.V. Club: use your group chats like Twitter to express all your worst, most obnoxious, and overblown opinions to people who already accept you. By sending these would-be posts to a friend, you can get what we all truly want: someone to validate our feelings and be willing to say, “Lol, that’s crazy.”
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