As of the 24th of February, Ukraine has been at war for 1,462 days – exactly four years. For millions of war-stricken Ukrainians, this day dates yet another year of being surrounded by inexplicable pain and death. For thousands of others, however, it means posting “Ilya is soooo babygirl” under the Heated Rivalry hashtag, dedicated to the Crave series of the same title. It is incredibly baffling to even type these two sentences in the same paragraph, and even more so to see both play out on social media.
This long into the war, it is expected for the general public’s outrage to have dimmed, yet it is something entirely else to be witnessing blatant glamourisation of Russia on both streaming services and the big screen. Many will argue that this is not the case with Heated Rivalry – after all, the show presents Russia as deeply homophobic and unsafe for Connor Storrie’s closeted character, Ilya Rozanov. Ilya’s father, a police officer, is also depicted as abusive and representative of everything wrong with the country. The one detail, however, that Heated Rivalry conveniently omits is Russia’s military actions taking place in simultaneity with the show’s plot. The 2014 Sochi Olympics are for the characters another chance at exploring their relationship, without a single mention of the Russian invasion of Crimea which was happening at the same time. Portraying homophobia as Russia’s greatest sin while their tanks are rolling into Crimea is not only ignorant, but also harmful. Protest against a country committing war crimes cannot end by simply not depicting it in a positive light. Bad press is still press, and promoting it in any way through popular media is still promoting it. Heated Rivalry makes for a fascinating case study, but it is not the only show guilty of this; there has been a concerning resurgence of media centering Russian characters or even Russia as a backdrop. Ponies, Anora, or the most recent Idiotka, are just some of the examples.
The issue becomes even more apparent upon noticing that online backlash towards the creators of Heated Rivalry only began when the show’s official Instagram account announced Israel as one of the countries where the series will be available for streaming. Whilst the public’s condemnation of this is very much a good thing, the fact that it only took a mention of the genocidal state for the viewers to boycott the series, while its very premise centers around another genocidal state, is a curious thing. This can be easily tied to the myth of multi-tasking when it comes to social media activism. Studies show that our brains struggle to devote attention to more than one task at a time, making any efforts at juggling many at the same time, fall flat. The act of picking and choosing what’s worthy of reposting an Instagram infographic takes very little, unlike devoting a significant amount of time to advocating for more than one cause. The reality of much current social media activism around Palestine boils down to yet another case of the internet hyperfocusing on one single world tragedy, until – like clockwork – a new bloodshed turns people’s heads. This appears to have been the case with Ukraine.
The Palestinian and Ukrainian situations are not perfectly comparable however. As Writers Against the War in Gaza write, “the Russian invasion of Ukraine provides a useful point of comparison to Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.” It is almost as if the social media portrayal of the two completely switched places at some point during the last few years – the genocide in Gaza, initially disregarded by the public and clouded by Zionist narratives, has only recently received the recognition it deserves. Meanwhile, the war in Ukraine, which once took up front pages, has somewhat decreased in its social media coverage. This is not an issue of a decline in urgency of the latter – BBC reports that the official death toll in Ukraine has now surpassed 55,000, with the actual number possibly reaching 200,000. Rather, the problem seemingly lies in the performance of activism being louder than activism itself. One of the most obvious examples of this is Brittany Broski’s recent engagement with Palestine, including speaking out on the genocide and posting a picture of Palestine Cola. This came to some as a shock, as the influencer stayed silent on this very issue when the news broke in 2023, leading to her facing significant backlash from disappointed fans. It is clear to see that the public’s engagement with military conflicts comes and goes as quickly as influencers’ media presence after the truth of their political affiliations comes out. One might wonder if the intentions behind speaking up on important topics actually matters, as long as they are brought to people’s attention. But when a performance of morality replaces morality itself, can it really be considered valuable?
Upon scrolling through the TikTok comment section under a video of a Ukrainian influencer explaining how the power outages cause people to freeze to death in their own homes in winter, I was met with hundreds of comments from people being utterly shocked and in disbelief that something like this could be happening. When your self-proclaimed activism involves fighting for one cause while living in complete ignorance of the other, neither of the issues is being granted the attention it deserves. Trying to apply a system of gradation to bloodshed is beyond cruel, and adopting the persona of a holier-than-thou protester when you cannot spare the same amount of attention to other causes is simply reprehensible.
This is not simply a problem of responses towards Palestine and Ukraine. It involves all the humanitarian crises happening in the world that do not receive any exposure from the media which apparently cannot take on more than one issue at a time, often on a shockingly surface level. In the end, behind each headline is lives lost, lives deserving respect and more than a flashy infographic.
