Obviously, you can never say for sure, but I think the problem was that it seemed like it was staged for publicity - and not only that, but really flagrantly and obviously and poorly staged for publicity. It made it annoying to see news about and it made it impossible to take it seriously and the whole thing felt really, really awkward and embarrassing.

And I think there's also an element of like... Taylor Swift had a playbook of publicity tricks that she'd been using for a long time, and it had worked pretty successfully, and then to see those exact same tricks used in a context where it was so totally unsuccessful and awkward, it makes it much more dissonant. So there's that context as well. And I think it was when people were generally starting to feel that she was too overexposed.

But mostly, it was really badly done for publicity.