This season's batch of queens strikes me as a more amateurish bunch than the average Drag Race season, and it's bothering me.
I mean, looking at the roster and their ages, it's not really a younger group than normal. But the level of polish and professionalism seems pretty low overall. I don't get the sense that very many of these queens have a fully developed concept for their drag.
Not a lotta queens in this bunch that I'd bother to see in person. Which makes it so perplexing that Ru is keeping them all around for so damn long.
I've noticed this for a few seasons now. And I wonder how much social media plays a role.
I was rewatching some of the older seasons at the start of quarantine, and I noticed that while a lot of the looks from the earlier seasons would be considered pedestrian by today's standards, the average queen up to about season 7 I'd say was a lot more well-rounded in their capabilities. And that's probably because back then, if you wanted to get noticed as a drag performer, you had to have a name. Which meant you had to come up in pageants, which often meant you had to be part of a house. Or you could come up in the club circuit, doing gigs. But that meant that you had to get booked, which meant you had to be somewhat talented with a crowd. A lot of newer queens on the show seem to really lack these fundamentals. And my working theory is that a lot of newer queens have reverse engineered the drag circuit by building a social media presence based largely on aesthetic, and then using that to break into the business.
I dunno, and it's not all bad. I think social media has brought awareness to and helped a wider range of drag get representation on the show. And that's always a good thing. But, yeah, a lot of these girls just aren't entertaining, and lack that "drag professionalism" that you would find in queens who really had to "pay their dues" to get a spot in the business. So much of what constitutes "popular drag" these days is just aesthetic (and I remember a time when "aesthetic" was an insult for just the pageant queens, just sayin...)