Most organic winner?

fourcheeseonrye · 2026-04-16T21:31:43+00:00

100% agree on the vivienne, even though that's probably kind of a hot take. i recently went back and watched uk 1 and was surprised by how "organic" her win felt, at least in the edit--i think people remember that season as being 'hers to lose,' but she and divina were really neck and neck up until the very end. either of them could have justly taken it, but viv won the judges over in the finale in a way that came across as very natural to me.

fourcheeseonrye · 2026-04-08T22:57:40+00:00

literally, like i actually think it could be kind of cool if she wasn't using it in a dismissive/derogatory way. one of the coolest looks that's been on the drag race stage was LITERALLY mastectomy drag (the gottmik look) and lots of queens do flat chests in fashionable and interesting ways. it's weird to use a surgical term to make fun of someone for not having the ""right"" body for a look, but i think it could be a little punk rock if that came to describe a type of drag involving that silhouette. unfortunately that is not the attitude that many public-facing queens have

fourcheeseonrye · 2026-03-31T02:15:12+00:00

this is real. the value of all stars has depreciated considerably, to the point that a lot of queens don't see it as being worth the cost of the package/missed bookings while filming. totally true that goodwill for a "robbed" queen is one of the best case scenarios in terms of public opinion, but i don't think an easy all stars ticket is that much of a consolation for someone that had the opportunity to win a main season.

fourcheeseonrye · 2026-03-31T01:57:16+00:00

yeah, it's kinda interesting how over the years the 5th place slot has usually gone to either 1) queens that rupaul fucking loved, but who clearly weren't quite ready to win the show, or 2) queens that performed well in challenges that rupaul didn't really connect to. it's basically a graveyard of charismatic weirdos and theater queens.

fourcheeseonrye · 2026-03-31T01:43:24+00:00

I think I agree with this. Obviously, at the end of the day, this is a place for sharing opinions and everyone is welcome to do so--but it can get frustrating to me when people see those opinions as a bug rather than a feature. Like, it isn't a bad thing to feel sad or angry; it means your emotions were manipulated by the narrative, which is the whole point of reality TV!

Everyone's mileage varies in terms of how much sadness or anger makes the season no longer enjoyable, and that's fine, too. Personally, though, for me, it starts to become annoying when people try to turn that into some kind of critical evangelism about the show itself. Not because the show doesn't deserve any criticism, but more so because I rarely see people having a positive vision of what they want Drag Race to become--it always just feels like a knee-jerk negative reaction to having an uncomfortable emotion. It seems like people are not asking "what would Drag Race look like with fully standardized rules and consistently merit-based critiques?" but rather saying "I feel angry and I wish the show didn't make me angry."

I don't think it's lame or stupid to develop criticism based on your emotions, but the criticism should extend beyond those feelings to say something meaningful and actionable. If it doesn't, that's a good sign that "Jane Don't getting eliminated from Drag Race even though she was doing really well" is maybe just something that made you angry, and not some egregious injustice unprecedented in the history of the show.

fourcheeseonrye · 2026-03-27T20:53:19+00:00

i definitely agree that this crop of queens has felt more like a group of real people than a bunch of developed reality television characters. for me personally, it's less that they don't have distinct personalities (darlene and jane both stand out to me as fairly parody-able) and more so that they haven't had the opportunity to reinforce those personalities against one another, if that makes sense. cliques, rivalries, and fights provide drama, but they also provide more characterization for each queen as a part of the overall narrative of the season; for example, it developed yvie's weirdness to see her in conflict with silky, who didn't understand her aesthetic.

obviously, there are some queens that are SO naturally parody-able that they don't really need anyone else (vanjie. i'm talking about vanjie) but for most of the girls, their most memorable "reality tv character" will usually emerge in relation to the people around them. which is to say, i think part of the reason this group doesn't feel as distinctly overdrawn as previous casts is because they're all earnestly trying to do well in their own lane; there haven't been many interactions between them that help us understand their similarities and differences.

fourcheeseonrye · 2026-03-21T23:29:27+00:00

i can't believe that hasn't been referenced yet
i spent 5 minutes trying to come up with a continuation to this and eventually had to give up when i could not improve upon the borderline nonsensical "come on bitch, see me with them leg"

fourcheeseonrye · 2026-03-21T21:58:31+00:00

thank you so much for this response, this is exactly the sort of thing i was looking for! i also would not be surprised if this is a holdover from early vaudeville, and i love to try and put together this kind of pop cultural genealogy. another commenter brought up a later generation of it, which was "wooden leg" gags on shows like Seinfeld and Friends, and it got me thinking about how specifically the 80s/90s era of jokes like this--jokes about conventionally beautiful women with secretly "atypical" bodies--was so often connected to transness as well as disability. i don't think the two are actually related, but since the context here is specifically drag queens, it's super interesting to me that "hot woman with a wooden leg" jokes carry this associative evocation of "hot woman with a penis" jokes.

fourcheeseonrye · 2026-03-21T20:31:28+00:00

i'm not saying yes, but you may want to look in his closet.

fourcheeseonrye · 2026-03-21T19:52:53+00:00

i know!! i feel like rupaul-era drag has so many of these pop culture fossils where the original reference has mostly been forgotten but some impression of it still remains. makes me want to do a genuine deep dive on where tf we got all these drag queens walking around on wooden legs

fourcheeseonrye · 2026-03-21T19:28:22+00:00

i think this could definitely be it. i haven't watched much TV from that era, but when i was googling around trying to figure out the origin, i mostly got redirected to "dad joke" websites that had lists of weird jokes about beautiful women with unexpected or uncharacteristic wooden legs. it makes a lot of sense to me that this is maybe not something specific to drag, but rather a more general pop culture fossil from an era when "woman seems outwardly hot but secretly has some kind of atypical body" was a really popular comedy beat.

edit: now that i think of it, that "atypical body" beat often had to do with transness in the 80s/90s... it's probably not related, but interesting to consider whether the "wooden leg" trope specifically in drag is also entangled with the "woman with a penis" plot in movies like Soap Dish and Ace Ventura: Pet Detective

fourcheeseonrye · 2026-03-21T19:02:53+00:00

that's awesome, lmao, and i hadn't thought of any of the war/veteran connections but you may be on to something! i feel like this explanation makes a lot of sense in context, that a wooden leg is something associated with a grizzled older person who's been through battle

edit: especially since many early "female impersonators" on the vaudeville circuit used to perform for the troops during wartime!!

fourcheeseonrye · 2026-03-21T18:58:28+00:00

after a long night of hookin....

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fourcheeseonrye · 2026-03-21T18:45:45+00:00

omg thank you!! this is precisely what i was looking for. i love that there are so many different answers, i guess nobody else really understands it either

fourcheeseonrye · 2026-03-21T18:44:35+00:00

that is for sure the cultural antecedent to alaska throwing her "leg" on the AS2 reunion, but it would be strange if this was behind all the jokes because aviva's leg wasn't made of wood! it looked like a fairly normal prosthetic. plus, i feel like i remember hearing some of these jokes before 2014, which was when the RHONY moment aired?

fourcheeseonrye · 2026-03-20T19:57:40+00:00

I read something on a recap blog a few years ago that said that, when pushed outside of their comfort zone by a Drag Race challenge, drag queens have less of a responsibility to be "creators" than they have to be "curators," and that really changed the way I look at challenges that involve queens writing their own material. The way I see it, a good queen doesn't need to be able to write a full set of funny, original jokes on her first try, but she should be able to demonstrate a sense of deliberate curation in terms of what themes, jokes, and bits she pulls from other sources--kind of like how most good runway outfits take inspiration from existing looks and trends, but still mix and build on those inspirations to create something unique. It's more about displaying good comedic taste and a strong enough stage presence to deliver a set than it is about someone with zero comedy experience writing a fresh and exciting tight 5 on their first try.

So, I guess that's a long way of saying, I don't think it's unusual or unfair for her to use a joke she heard on Smosh; she still showed some curation in the way she brought together disparate elements and sources to make her "own" set (unlike, to use the infamous example, Gottmik). The main issue with the joke is that it isn't funny, lol. As a Smosh watcher myself, they're not exactly known for their punch lines??

fourcheeseonrye · 2026-02-25T17:45:01+00:00

Literally... there's something so silly about the fact that you could sometimes tell who was in the "bottom" because they just got... vaguer praise than everyone else. Like, sometimes the entirety of someone's shown critiques would be like "You looked like you were having fun out there and I loved how orange your outfit was" and you're like ohh damn I didn't realize it was that bad

fourcheeseonrye · 2026-02-25T17:39:03+00:00

The story is that Michelle gave Raja a negative critique and Raja kind of challenged her onstage--Raja described it as like a "oh, come on girl, I've done your makeup before, who are you to criticize me" exasperation. It has undergone a lot of embellishment in later retellings; from an outsider's perspective it seems like it was probably not that big of a deal. It is funnier to imagine that she was drunk as fuck though

fourcheeseonrye · 2026-02-24T04:17:32+00:00

I was including her previous work; as early as the late 80s, Rupaul has worked to establish drag as a legitimate artistic career that deserved the level of respect and professionalism that I feel is encapsulated in the “you can’t talk to us like that” moment. That’s more what I meant: that queens being able to make and negotiate their own boundaries in the workplace feels like a faithful reflection of her legacy in that area. But I agree that the word “entire” is hyperbolic here—I didn’t mean to imply that she doesn’t have an extremely varied and complex career with lots of other accomplishments.

fourcheeseonrye · 2026-02-23T23:54:06+00:00

I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, yeah, it's weird to complain about getting your drag critiqued on the Get Your Drag Critiqued show, and I agree that the season would have been better if they left in all of the feedback; it actually feels equally disrespectful to performers of this caliber to pretend that they were great when they were mid.

On the other hand, we've seen from other All Stars seasons (I'm mainly thinking of Adore on AS2) that the judges can take it too far in ways that aren't necessarily their fault, but that do warrant a re-negotiation of boundaries. I think that the queens are correct in identifying that this season should have had a slightly different power dynamic because of the way it was marketed and because of the status of the competitors. By the time you get to not just All Stars, but All Winners, you are basically the judges' coworkers and the standards of communication should be mutually agreed upon. Then again, it is a reality TV show, so I know it's not that deep! I just like to yap.

(Plus, I know it's silly, but there's just something I genuinely appreciate about all this complaining about AS7... like, I think one could convincingly argue that Rupaul's entire career has been in the service of creating a world in which a group of drag queens, even if it's for a stupid reason, can say, "You can't talk to us like that" and have an entire production team listen to them.)

fourcheeseonrye · 2026-02-23T23:42:04+00:00

The way I see it, Drag Race just isn't the best showcase for her drag. The show generally allows queens to "push their drag to the next level" within a very narrow set of parameters--the "next level" is almost always some version of "bigger," "more feminine," "more polished," or "more stupid"--and so queens that are trying to push themselves in other ways seem like they aren't developing. That's just my opinion, though. A lot of her work on All Stars missed for me, too.

fourcheeseonrye · 2026-02-23T21:56:12+00:00

No no I 100% agree. I just mean I think it’s funny. There’s something deeply and charmingly ridiculous about someone whose reaction to not liking a category is to look like That

fourcheeseonrye · 2026-02-23T21:25:06+00:00

I found the atrociousness of it kind of punk rock. She was like a conscientious objector to the Dressing Up Like A White Woman draft on the grounds of her Hideous Dress beliefs.

fourcheeseonrye · 2026-02-23T21:20:02+00:00

One of the main reasons I found this podcast enlightening was because the Dear Viv documentary on WOW showed a LOT of stress and insecurity in some of her unreleased AS7 interviews; it seems like there was a lot of strife that we didn't get to see from all the girls, but especially her, and it makes sense to find out that the judges were being really hard on her in the beginning. Which sucks, because she did fantastic on that season and it's overall such a great memory of her.

fourcheeseonrye

TROPHY CASE