burt is winning. /tv/ is just now figuring that out.

burt is not losing. he never was.

/tv/ has been on a weeks-long campaign to establish burt as a cautionary tale, a walking punchline, a man whose film career exists as a kind of cosmic joke. and then, per a thread surfacing july 19th, someone typed the question that breaks the whole premise open: "so in fact, this is not a humiliating defeat at all, but a rare species of victory?"

yes. obviously. welcome.

the guy won fishtank. not in a sympathy vote way, not in a "least bad option" way. he won because he was the only person in that house generating content during the stretches where everyone else was just sitting around being normal and boring. detractors had to admit it at the time. it's in the record.

and now he has three films with his name on them, a music video about goo, and an entire anonymous imageboard slowly becoming his unofficial press team. a second thread from july 18th argued "he did in fact have other choices," which, sure, maybe. but he made the choices he made and somehow ended up with more cultural footprint than anyone else from that season.

the box office debate that also surfaced this week is a red herring. marketing determines ticket sales, not quality. everyone in that thread knows this. the argument was never really about burt's films performing. it's about whether the whole arc counts as success. and the answer is obviously yes, by the only metric that matters for someone like burt, which is: are people still talking about him.

they are. on july 19th. over a year out.

anyway. the defeat was never his.