You might remember season 13 as the shorty season. And you’d be right. This is when Tyra let everyone who wasn’t model height feel like they’d actually have a shot at modeling. No one knows why.

Fun fact, the winner wasn’t the shortest winner of America’s Next Top Model as she was half an inch taller than Eva Pigford. Imagine that. Pigford is now known as Eva Marcille by the way, which I still have no idea how to pronounce. I’m going with ‘Mar-silly‘.

The winner of the shorty season was named Nicole and she wanted chapstick.

Oh wait wrong winner Nicole. Short Nicole (though still taller than Eva) was a rather kooky character. She told the panel the following (and I quote)

“I bring a rusty wheelbarrow to school instead of a backpack”

I don’t get why, I totally brought a rusty wheelbarrow to school instead of a backpack too! Here is those two things pictured next two each other:

I can barely tell the difference.

Anyway, the shorty season was well underway and they walked runways with models who were actual model height which looked ridiculous:

And there was this drag queen on a horse or something:

But that is not important for this entry, but what happened after all this, is. The 6 remaining girls got to go to another country ( like in every other season). What’s the international destination Tyra?

Wait what?

But in addition to being a cheap bitch for not taking the girls out of the country, Tyra got a lot of flack for quite a controversial photoshoot.

Yeah. That one.

The story behind this shoot is that ‘hapa’ means ‘half’ in Hawaiian (you know the language they speak international location they got to go to) and it refers to people being of mixed ethnicity. At least that’s what Tyra said. The internet is a little divided about what it means but it was originally a derogatory term.

But you know, Tyra isn’t the best with linguistic details. Like that time she thought ‘predatorial’ was a word.

Not a word Tyty.

But I guess it’s better than the time she made up a word that means nothing:

According to Tyra, Pot Ledom is ‘top model’ spelled backwards, and that is true in the same sense that predatorial is totally a word.

So, err, no.

Anyway, to a lot of people it seemed like Tyra put the girls in blackface, but according to Tyra she didn’t put people in blackface because she didn’t paint them black to just look black. She painted them to look ‘hapa’ (whatever Tyra wants that to mean).

She later gave the worst apology I have ever heard about anything.

“I’m sorry to anybody that watched ‘Top Model’ and was offended by the pictures because they didn’t understand the real story behind them”

So basically “Sorry that you’re too dumb to understand guys!”.

But great Tyra, thanks for that completely passive aggressive explanation. It’s not like she told some white chick to be black by painting her skin, putting a fro on her and labeling it ‘African American’

Oh.

This is a picture from a shoot from Season 4. The pictures weren’t uploaded to the UPN site, and I’m guessing it is because they caused controversy at that time as well. But the internet was less intense of a thing and so this one went by without too much noise (you could just be very offensive back then apparently).

Because the shots weren’t uploaded it means that somehow some of the shots from this shoot seem like they have been taken with a potato.

But in addition to the questionable moral of the shoot and variable potato quality, this shoot makes absolutely no sense.

They were painted to look like they were a different race, they had to hold a glass of milk, had to hold a live child (well Michelle had to hold a doll because she had scabies, but that is beside the point), and they had a milk mustache.

These are some of the other ‘race swap’ pictures. This is Keenyah’s:

And Christina’s:

But then Tyra ran out of races, so she just started making up races. Here I’ll show you, this is Lluvy’s new race:

And my favourite one, Michelle’s:

Funnily enough this did not cause the biggest racia(ish) conflict of the season. Because this was when good friends Keenyah and Brittany clashed. Here they are seem frolicking about on the beach before they got into the argument:

The girls came from very different places, and once they went to Africa (when Tyra still took them somewhere that wasn’t in the US), they got into a fight about Nelson Mandela’s prison cell. It was very tone deaf, but it did lead to this precious and subtle TV moment:

Good thing they still ended up friends in the end. And I love when the show is responsible for creating unlikely friendships. Notable example:

I don’t care much for the modern seasons of Top Model but it is a little big exciting that Tyra and her weird (and racially insensitive) bullshit will return for another season, after Rita Ora was the host for some reason.

I mean she made someone pose in a Native American headdress recently, so there is hope!

I really do hope that the next season they’ll travel to “international” location of Cleveland, Ohio. Once there Tyra makes them portray Arab women in hijab just before blowing themselves up with a goat on their head (but totally not in a racist way, you’re just too dumb to understand).

Who knows what she has in store for us? And that about sums it up this entry. I really made no point or argument here.

See you next week!