Celebrity Deaths

At the risk of sounding like a heartless bastard, why does everyone care so much about the death of Paul Walker? Apart from the sadness of someone so young passing too early in such an ironic way (a car crash from the star of the Fast and the Furious franchise), is this really the most tragic thing that happened? Of course we are sad for his family, especially his young daughter, and we wonder how the neverending saga of his franchise will continue, but was everyone out there a closet Paul Walker fanatic and never told me? Where were all these people when his non-Fast and the Furious movies bombed? Was everyone secretly clamoring for more Paul Walker behind my back? I'm sure he has his fans and Lord knows he was an especially attractive specimen of man, but I feel like the blowback of chatter surrounding his death is overdone. People die everyday and while this is sad and deserves respect, I just don't feel it warrants this kind of outpouring.

Unless you were a true fan - then outpour your little hearts out. I swear I'm not heartless. This just feels like people jumping on a bandwagon to me. If someone is deserving of this attention now, they should have been deserving before - and by the absolute lack of media focus of him, he wasn't. It feels hypocritical and false to pretend he was a icon of the acting world now when no one really cared before. That said, on a personal level of course this is sad - to those who knew and loved him. Not to unknowns on Facebook.

Update: I just read this piece over at, where else, Pajiba and it really explains all this unease about the retconning of Paul Walker's fame/appeal much better than I can. Those writers just get me, man.