A FEW YEARS ago, a conspiracy theory was formed, suggesting that Avril Lavigne died in the early 2000′s and was replaced with a lookalike whose real name is Melissa Vandella.
This weekend, the conspiracy theory resurfaced on Twitter when user @givenchyass started a thread reviving it.
Here’s how it starts:
First, a comparison is drawn between Avril’s early work and the music that she is currently making.
There’s no denying there’s a huge difference between the young woman that Avril was in the era of her hit song ‘Complicated’ and who she is in the video for her 2014 song ‘Hello Kitty’:
Could this have anything to do with the fact she’s making what seems like a vaguely racist attempt to cater to her Japanese audience because her Japanese record sales have surpassed UK sales since 2004? Or could it be because she’s dead? Who’s to say?
I’ll let givenchyass take over for a minute:
So we’ve got Avril on the left and Melissa on the right. Avril hired Melissa to deal with the paparazzi and press in an attempt to keep things low key for herself.
They became best friends and soon after Melissa was taught how to sing like Avril “for a joke”, according to an unknown source.
In 2003, Avril’s grandfather passed away which led to a downward spiral in Avril’s life where she cried on stage and in interviews, locking herself away to write for weeks at a time. You may remember that hermusic became increasingly more depressing on her 2004 album ‘Under My Skin‘.
Without her grandfather, Avril Lavigne then supposedly took her own life. Instead of releasing this news to the world, her record label covered up her entire death and Melissa Vandella took on Avril’s work full-time.
Again, Avril/Melissa’s new look may have had something to do with the fashion trends of 2007 and the increasing popularity of ‘scene kids’, a subculture much like emos, that were obsessed with bright colours and dying their hair in more daring ways than the rebellious commercialized punk girls of the early 00′s.
But maybe it didn’t. Maybe it was an easy way to cover up that this was no longer the flat-haired Avril Lavigne that we all knew and loved from 2002.
The Twitter user breaking this down then goes on to look at some of the hard evidence:
“I’m not saying Avril is dead but… Avril is dead.”
Other users have contributed evidence to this theory. For instance, a side by side comparison of Avril’s handwriting from years ago vs. her handwriting today:
the sweetest heart / Twitter
the sweetest heart / Twitter / Twitter
There have been a lot of funny tweets about this situation:
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"alex" 😒 / Twitter
"alex" 😒 / Twitter / Twitter
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But mostly, Twitter users have responded by replying to everything Avril has posted this weekend by saying “sounds like something Melissa would say.”
There’s only one solution to this:
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