Kandy Muse is getting candid about her relief at not taking home the crown during season 13 of RuPaul’s Drag Race.
The drag queen opened up in conversation with Trixie Mattel while the two put on their faces for Trixie’s YouTube channel this week.
“It was wild because when we left filming…everyone, myself, the queens, everyone thought I was gonna be like, fan favorite number one at the time. And I was like, okay, I believed it,” she recalled. “The response was the complete opposite. I was so confused. Why? And I was like, what am I doing wrong that people are not getting?”
Kandy was called a bully throughout her season by fans of the show, due to her outspoken opinions and attitude.
“Am I coming off too strong? Are people not used to seeing someone as real as me on Drag Race?” she wondered in the video. “I always tell people, if you watch the show back and see how much the girls actually loved me, doesn’t that tell you something? That those girls like me enough to want me to still be there, so why do you dislike me?”
As any consumer of reality television knows, shows are always edited to fit a narrative, even if that means turning people into two-dimensional versions of themselves to make up the cast of characters necessary to create on-screen drama.
But fans love being taken for that ride, and the backlash Kandy sometimes faced as the season aired led her to have no interest in being named the winner, for fear it would only get worse.
“The reality is I didn’t want to have any chances of winning the show because of the backlash that I would have received,” she said, speaking about her final lip sync. “So I was like, you know what, not that I’m going to throw it, I’m going to go up there, represent for my country, pull out the flag, and have a good time, but like, I don’t want to come anywhere close…to winning Drag Race because the backlash would be insane.”
“When you lose, every conversation starts with, ‘You were so good, I wanted you to win.’ When you win, every conversation is about did you deserve it,” Trixie observed.
And Kandy’s experience seems to back that up, as she says everyone has been super nice to her since she came in second.
“And every time I have a show, my shows are sold out. My shows are packed,” she said.
Sounds like a win to us!
