Parasocial Behavior - Tumblr Posts
This is apparently why, and like yeah sure it's easy to poke fun at the artifice of their whole 'sona and how they like to play the academic queen bee, or chairman of the board, it's an obvious dynamic. They're everyone's friend so just go ahead and speak to them lol.
I swear to god, getting cryptothiesm to block me must be some hidden achievement I have to keep speed running. Official weirdposter lol, they're just a kid.
Most well-adjusted John Mulaney fan. I'm sure your parasocial relationship with a rich white middle aged abusive drug addict feels awesome.
Actually, it is incredibly weird to just directly copy celebrities' tattoos. Like, imagine if you had a tattoo in memory of your dead parent and someone you've literally never met comes up to you on the street, shows you the exact same tattoo and tells you that they love you so much they got this and they want you to like. Be happy about that? Think that's a good thing?
"They've never said they don't like it!"
They shouldn't have to.
"They've never said it has a specific meaning!"
They shouldn't have to.
Its creepy. Its invasive. Its weird. Period.
Tattoos inspired by a celebrity's or incorporating aspects of a celebrity's is one thing, but this trend where its acceptable and even encouraged to just up and directly take a piece of someone's personal art and put it on your body is insane.
Replicating a celebrity's tattoos and personal, custom jewellery is incredibly weird, invasive, parasocial and disrespectful.
People should not have to beg you not to copy tattoos they got to honor their dead parents or copyright jewellery they made for their significant others. People should not have to constantly cover and hide their bodies to prevent people from copying their personal body art.
Its not cute. Its not harmless. Its not sweet, or a way to connect to them, or be close to them. Its not 'whatever.'
Its creepy. Invasive. Disrespectful.
Imagine you go through the process of losing a loved one and designing a piece of art meant to represent them and mourn them and continue their life on your body and one day some random stranger comes up to you and shoved that same tattoo on their body in your face and brags about how they got it done because they just love you so much and thought it was so cool.
If you still think its just a harmless little way of showing love or something, I really don't know what else to say to you. Its fucked up. Its gross.
When you’re just trying to enjoy a show and you get hit with some buzz words that you google and immediately regret . Loneliness is a bitch
I think that parasocial relationships are okay to an extent...hear me out.
Firstly, what is a parasocial relationship? Defined by https://www.findapsychologist.org, parasocial relationships are "one-sided relationships, where one person extends emotional energy, interest and time, and the other party, the persona, is completely unaware of the other's existence." With this in mind, aren't parasocial relationships...inevitable? I mean, simply developing a positive outlook on an actor's performance, or a musician's discography would be considered a parasocially-influenced experience, right?
I think that commonly when we delve into discussion of parasocial interactions these days, we tend to prioritize the topic of more severe instances where a delusional individual believes that their favorite celebrity knows them personally & desires their company, when the both of them have possibly never even interacted on a face-to-face basis or communicated virtually at all. But much milder incidents of parasocial behavior are committed all of the time among us "regular people" far more than we are comfortable heeding to.
It's important to note that parasocial relationships aren't always inherently brought about with malicious intent or heinous levels of derealization (which is ACTUALLY classified as a mental disorder & it'd be ableist to fault someone for battling with a condition beyond their own control), & are instead fundamentalised by an overly-exploited craving for human connection. More people are excruciatingly isolated & lonely than we'd like to think & their way of coping with their unfortunate circumstances is through subconsciously developing parasocial relationships with people & characters that they take a profound OR subtle liking to. Who can consciously degrade a person who's finally found their only grasp of enjoyment in life? Who has the right to judge them or try to tear the fixation away from that individual?
Clearly, harassment & stalking is bad. This post is in no way a defence of said behavior. Rather, see it as a justification of a universal experience that has been too often put to shame. We ALL are in parasocial relationships. If you've ever had the nerve to engage with a content creator, a celebrity, a politician, a stranger's platform &/or develop ANY kind of opinion on their character without there first being a reciprocal acknowledgement taken place - Congrats. You have also participated in a parasocial relationship.
TLDR!!
In conclusion, we ought to be more gracious with each other when it comes to this delicate topic. Parasocial relationships are merely inescapable and practically necessary (I'd argue) in a society that relies so heavily on the presence of digitalization & constant media-intake. People need people. That's just intrinsically human. And being parasocial is never "bad", concerning, or worthy of shame/scrutiny unless a subject of interest is being made to feel unsafe, uncomfortable, or the outputting person's mental stability is reliant upon the external party to whom they share no direct relation to.
Thanks for reading if you managed to make it this far. Smooches.
Reference source:
Quite frankly some of y’all are getting too parasocial again, especially with the ‘LGBTQSMP’ stuff. By y’all, I mean the fandom at large, but don’t think I haven’t seen some weird stuff on here too.
Last night on Quackity’s stream, one of the first donos called him a “fruit loop”. And like okay, whatever, that’s bad, but then I managed to find the dono’s twitter literally by accident going through my twitter feed and here’s their reason why they did it:
And that’s really fucking weird! You all see why this is weird, right? And all of the replies to the clip of the dono I found (where I found this person) were all in agreement that this was a funny and totally normal thing to do. But, as I’m sure everyone is aware, this is not, in fact, normal. It’s parasocial as fuck, and it’s weird at best and harassment at worst.
Donation etiquette posts are something that go around the fandom every couple of days, and for good reason. Some people are too goddamn parasocial. You don’t know these people, and they don’t know you. It’s like if you walk up to the cashier at McDonalds and call them a “fruit loop” because you saw her talking to another girl earlier. That’s fucked up. At best, it’s fucking weird to do. At worst, it’s outing/harassment. (Not that I think Quackity is queer or anything, that’s none of my business, and it’s not anyone else’s.)
I’ve seen some weird stuff on Twitter recently. Truthing, really, and that’s something parts of this fandom have struggled with for a really long time. But take this tweet by the same person as above as an example:
There’s a difference between jokes about “haha the qsmp is just a gay dating show and jaiden”, but some people are taking that way too literally. I’ve seen truthing on both the English side and Spanish side of the community recently, and you know that I’m not searching it out for the sake of drama because I don’t speak Spanish. I’ve seen multiple Spanish accounts on Twitter telling people to stop being weird in chat because it’s gotten to the point there that the mods are getting involved (I was watching Roier’s stream last night, and I’m pretty sure I saw this myself in chat.)
Jokes are fine. Fandom jokes are fine. But that’s where the jokes should stay- in the fandom. Yes, Quackity made a joke on day one stumbling over his words and “accidentally” calling everyone his boyfriends. Yes, the Spanish creators are a lot more chill with shipping content than the English ones. That doesn’t mean anything irl. Calling it the first bisexual smp is fine as a fandom joke, but people seem to be considering it truth when, as far as I’m aware, there’s only one actual bisexual on the server, and there’s, I believe, only two LGBTQ+ members. While the default shouldn’t be straight, it isn’t cool to just assume people’s identities, and especially not from what they do in minecraft roleplay. That’s called acting, not real life.
Truthing is dangerous. Anyone older than 16 probably remembers the way Markiplier and Jacksepticeye stopped interacting online entirely, and it’s because truthing and shipping actively damaged their friendship. Dan and Phil struggled with this, too, with them actually being gay but being unable to come out until years after they were popular because of all the truthing going on with them.
It’s dangerous! It’s weird as hell! Not everyone is dnf. Even if their boundaries don’t mention it specifically, it should be common sense not to openly speculate on a cc’s sexuality. It should be even more common sense not to call them a literal slur in their text-to-speech donos because you think it’s “telling the truth”. For a straight person, it’s just uncomfortable. For a queer person not out, it could be dangerous.
As a whole, the fandom has been behaving. We’re just under a week in as of today when I’m writing this, so I guess we’ll have to see what happens next. But please remember to be normal. These people aren’t your friends. You don’t know them. You barely even know their characters right now. So calm down and touch some grass before someone actually gets hurt.
call me parasocial delusional or like cringe but i actually get sad thinking about the fact i’ll probably never meet hayden christensen. when i tell you i’d do anything for a hug from him </3