There are a few obvious manifestations of McGregor Mania. The voracious appetite for content (we've realised); the mimicking of his look; the strongly-worded rebuttals to journalists who criticise him.
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There is another really weird aspect to McGregor's support that we have noticed lately: fans in this country and beyond claiming McGregor as their father. We have trawled through the rather dark section of the internet that is the replies to McGregor's social media posts and have taken a few examples of this bizarre trend.
Behold it in all of its twisted peculiarity:
@TheNotoriousMMA yes father
— Wizard (@isaacwilson0412) March 17, 2016
@TheNotoriousMMA Beat me daddy
— Lenny (@lennyismyname) March 6, 2016
@TheNotoriousMMA ily dad
— Joey (@Joey_CFC) March 4, 2016
@TheNotoriousMMA Father
— JOSHMAN (@joshhmaan) February 29, 2016
@TheNotoriousMMA daddy
— Allan Luke (@allanluke01) February 28, 2016
What the hell? It turns out this level of obsession is not just reserved for McGregor, but also US rap icons:
@kanyewest Daddy
— 🌻 (@Iphynaya) March 13, 2016
Through a trawl through the archives/this office's quite excellent memory on all things Kardashian, it turns out that Lorde referred to Kim Kardashian as 'Mom', in an Instagram post in 2014. She clarified her reasons for doing so on Tumblr:
omg haha ok so. time to explain this. i retweeted kim’s amazing cover and wrote ‘MOM’, which among the youthz is a compliment; it basically jokingly means “adopt me/be my second mom/i think of you as a mother figure you are so epic” (obviously i love my own mama and she is the best tho) but straight after that i think someone else called out the cover saying kim has no right to look that sexy as she is a mother which is TOTAL trash - why should that stop her? if anything i think she gets even more beautiful and sexy all the time like a fineass wine, and of course has every right to showcase that - but i think our two comments got lumped in and also maybe reporters don’t understand my breed of humour/worship.
Inspired by that - and also this Monty Python sketch - we spoke to a number of psychologists to delve a bit deeper in the Oedipal psyche exhibited in the replies above. None were willing to comment, citing a lack of familiarity with McGregor and the UFC.
One sports psychologist did tell us that he suspects that the general obsession with McGregor is to do with the
age-old example of people requiring a superhuman model that somehow connects with the story of their social class. It's an age old marketing technique use by all marketing companies.
So perhaps McGregor mania can be explained as a kind of paternal longing; of fans attaching themselves to this mighty figure who claims to speak for them. We assume that these fans feel that they are among the 'we' who are not here to take part, but here to take over. Presumably these fans are attaching themselves to McGregor because their own fathers do not wrestle men half-naked in an octagon. Or if they do, presumably they feel McGregor is better at it.
So if there any academics reading this, we strongly feel that this online trend is worthy of an academic paper.
It may be the first academic paper to include twitter handles in the bibliography.
