Parasocial Relationships - Tumblr Posts
I know having a Parasocial Relationship with a celebrity is wrongTM but like I can’t be the only one who (healthily) feels motivated to achieve my dreams by listening to Taylor’s songs and her speeches and studying her career… like I didn’t grow up in high income home like she did and my parents in no way are investing any money for my own career but that doesn’t mean I can’t feel inspired by how Taylor didn’t actually have ties to the industry growing up and managed to break through it. In some way I too will break into the academic field I’m aiming for while having no tied to it now. I’ve been living through this woman since I was like 13 and now I’m 23 and after many years of low mental health and depression and feeling lonely I’m at a place in my life where I CAN start chasing my dreams and I actually believe in myself and when I listen to You’re on your own kid or read the lover diary entries I get reminded that I CAN I CAN I CAN I CAN do it. So basically my point is that sometimes living vicariously through celebrities isn’t that bad and actually can benefit your mental health.
blessed to have your love from a distance but cursed to fall apart the closer you get to me
hereby ending all parasocial relationships EXCEPT with the starting forward on my college basketball team who i saw at a diner one day junior year and have never spoken to. he’s never heard of tumblr and he’s my best friend.
I just sat my ass down in bed ready to sleep but then got stuck staring intensely at chris cornell shirtless pics
this entire video is a masterpiece but the linked passage at 31.02 is another level.
excerpt from 34.02
“audiences gained the vocabulary to understand this dynamic and began somewhat self-policing in regards to parasociality. some creators still actively cultivate parasocial bonds for money but the awareness is out there that parasociality exists and is bad.
which brings us to the present moment. a parasocial relationship is a fucking meme. people freely interact with the concept, ironically admitting that they experience it while simultaneously demonstrating awareness as to its problematic aspects when the balanced informed take becomes the meme.
[at this part of the video, the screen shows screenshotted memes of people mocking their own feelings towards a parasocial relationship they are in, including the edited ludwig thumbnail meme.
image id: a sad face is drawn next to the ludwig thumbnail of ludwig in a christmas jumper with the title “I Am Not Your Friend”. below it, a happy face is drawn next to the edited ludwig thumbnail with the “Not” in the titles erased and another smiley face, this time with hair, pasted over the person’s face.]
Seems like they were operating in a mode of speaking to someone they sort of know who they know is deep into a piece of media, when in fact they were offering themselves up in front of thousands to be appraised as a worthwhile human being.
idk, keep it parasocial I guess.
I'm trying to read blood meridian since you recommended it and it's highly regarded, but damn, it's hard to stomach all the racism in this thing
It is a book about why the colonization of the Americas was indefensibly evil. Some of the characters are gonna be racist.
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.
You'll never convince me that it isn't weird and obsessive how the moment a celebrity gets a partner their fans immediately begin to do FBI-level digging into them and every single social media post, family photo or school project they've ever done in the hopes of finding something bad.
Obsessive, jealous excavating of the entire history of their new partners is just a ridiculous example of a harmful parasocial relationship. You're not 'looking out for them' or 'just looking.' Its always painfully obvious when someone's gone digging to try and pull out a 'gotcha' card so they can keep fantasising.
Not to mention that anything that is found is usually years old and is clearly an isolated incident the person has grown from. Someone making a crass or inappropriate joke a decade ago they haven't repeated since doesn't make them a monster undeserving of your fantasy man.
Don't think I've forgotten the way you all tried to call Henry Cavill's girlfriend a rampant racist for taking a traditional mudbath on a tropical holiday as if you don't all have a clay facemask in your bathroom cubbies or like none of you ever tried the charcoal peel masks.
Hello you! Don't know you but I just wanted to thank you for what you said about the behaviour of fans about male celebritries' gf, you totally said what I also think with the appropriate words. Thank you for that, I really enjoyed reading this ♥
You're welcome, and its something I've held a viewpoint on for a long time now. Any time an attractive Hollywood man gets a partner there's this ridiculous witch hunt against them and this obnoxious trend of 'I'll prove they're unworthy.' Its honestly painful to see sometimes, and its frankly just embarrassing after a while.
If you're truly a fan of someone and if you truly want to see them happy and enjoying their own lives you wouldn't be trying to destroy their relationships because it interrupts your ability to fantasize about them.
An actor who is openly okay with their character being shipped with other characters or who is openly okay with being shipped with their costars/friends is not automatically giving you permission to engage them in it or push it on them.
It is not an open invitation to send them explicit ship art or tag them in ship posts or ask them inappropriate questions at Cons. It is not an open invitation to try to dig out their sexuality or use their stance on shipping as "evidence" that they're X or not X.
"I am okay with people having creative perspectives on my relationships." =/= "I am okay with being forced to constantly see it, be asked about it or have it impact my life."
I've seen people bringing explicit art to conventions for the actors to sign and for some of them it has very clearly made them uncomfortable. Even if its not intended to be RPF you are still using their exact likeness in pornography.
Unless you know with 100% certainly that someone is okay with being actively engaged in something, don't try to push their involvement. Stop asking them invasive questions at panels. Stop bringing explicit art or fanfiction to meets.
In real terms, its like when your parents or friends insist you have a crush on someone or you must be secretly dating. It makes things uncomfortable, awkward, and after a point it gets frustrating and upsetting. There are countless examples of famous people who've had their lives impacted by people trying to force ship content on them, be it by destroying their real-life relationships or just by making them actively resent the characters, fans and/or ships.
Septiplier (Youtubers Mark Fischbach/Markiplier and Seán McLoughlin/Jacksepticeye) is a prime example of this, where fans were so determined to actively force them to engage with shipping that it began to negatively impact their friendship and real-life relationships to the extent that for a while they took a break on being publicly seen as interacting.
To summarize; Creating ship content and shipping characters or RPF is fine and valid, but unless an actor has explicitly said they are happy to be engaged in it or presented with it, you should do your due diligence to make sure you're not exposing them to content or trying to force that content to sway/impact/represent reality. (E.g; many straight actors are perfectly fine with their fans creating queer RPF, and it does not "provide proof" that they're actually not straight.)
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.
Okay because I keep seeing these posts, I am just gonna cartwheel in here and say something.
It is not inappropriate to be attracted to real people.
Like, entirely setting aside the question of if you think a fantasy character block men is hot, if you are looking at the photos of a real streamer and you've got hearts in your eyes, I can't overemphasize how normal that is. You're good. Don't worry about it.
These people are funny, and they have good voices, and we watch them be entertaining for hours at a time. This is prime real estate for a little crush. And having a crush is fine, the question is about your behaviour once you have a crush.
I am seeing people thinking that having a crush on a streamer means they're dangerously parasocial, or somehow predatory, or abusive, and that ever breathing a word of it is basically sexual harassment. And like, no. Being attracted to real people is not weird. That's arguably less weird than being attracted to fictional characters. The only question is like, once you know that you want to smooch the real person, how do you then treat that person and the people around you?
Seeing a photo of a famous person and thinking "oh hell yeah I want to hold their hand": this is a celebrity crush. I am aroace and I've spent enough time in some people's streams that I start to go "oh man I wonder if they'd like if if we played D&D together" (medusa-flirting). This has happened to regular people looking at attractive famous people probably since someone in the cave man clan was a particularly good hunter and got praise for it. Thoughts in your head don't hurt people. This is fine.
Seeing clips of a famous person and having sexual thoughts about them: this is still a celebrity crush. Your average boring office worker does this with movie stars. Half the people on the bus are doing this with instagram influencers. Runnning a nice r-rated movie in your head is fine, and doesn't hurt anyone. Thoughts in your head still dont' hurt people. This is still fine.
Collecting photos of a famous person and going GOD they're hot to your friends where the famous person won't see it: still a celebrity crush. There is a standing joke in I don't know how many healthy relationships that your partner gets a certain amount of freebies where you could totally cheat if it's Idris Elba, because it's IDRIS ELBA, that's not cheating that's just sense. You can aknowlege someone's sexiness to your friends, and even joke about it, and you're not being predatory, and you're not being inappropriate. Desire is not a crime. People can publically talk about being attracted to a person, and as long as they're not making it that person's problem, they're fine. Having a "hot people" tag on your blog with careful photos gathered from someone's public instagram where they deliberately posted photos of themselves looking hot? I can't over emphasize how fine this is. If people don't want to see hot people on their dash I guess they can unfollow? But you're literally being totally appropriate still.
Getting a nice private group chat with friends who like to talk abouta famous person and talking about how you'd like to knock him up: Look, what else are group chats as adults for? Are you seeing a trend here? As long as you are keeping your attraction to yourself and not making it other people's problem, as long as you're not bothering the real person with it, as long as you aknowledge to yourself that this is never going to happen and this is just a fun fantasy, this is just like, how attraction works. See pretty person, talk about pretty person, have fun with the fictional imaginings you're having— as long as you're not forcing this imagining on someone else, making it their problem, trying to make it real, as long as you know the difference between fiction and real life, you're fine.
Going up to someone's chat and talking about their dick: This is where you cross the line.
Putting NSFW work in someone's fan art tag. Wearing a shirt with porn on it to a meet and greet. Untagging your fanfic so that people who want to read g-rated works about someone are confronted with e-rated works. Asking one of their friends about their relationship status and if they smell good. This is the bad stuff. Don't do THAT. Keep it away from the real person.
The problem is not the attraction, the problem is forcing the attraction on other people. Like, use your brain. There's a segment of attraction that you can put on main, and then there's a segment that you can put on main but you'd better be sure that the person you're talking about is not going to see it, and then there's a segment you should keep for the group chat, but that's just a very basic sliding scale of "how sexual am I being" correlated with "how private am I being about this". If you want to run a full on porn video in your head starring Wilbur Soot, you're not bothering other people with that, you're not being inappropriate. That becomes inappropriate if you are a) putting that in tags where people who don't want to see the porn video would see it b) talking to Wilbur Soot about it. Those are the boundaries. Wait also c) talking to Wilbur Soot's friends about it, don't do that either.
If the person you're attracted to is an adult famous person, like, people being attracted to them is just part of the landscape. I promise an adult celebrity is not sitting in their room being traumatized because people might be thinking about them romantically or sexually. Putting it up in their faces? Bad. Very bad. I hate it. Don't do it. But I see people freaking out about thoughts. Thoughts aren't real. They do not exist in the real world. You can do what you fuckin' want in your thoughts and you are not hurting people.
Like I know we don't want to be inappropriate with streamers, but that doesn't mean that any sexual or romantic thoughts about them are forbidden, or that mild "GOD he's cute" or picspams on main are hurting people, or that off in a closed group of fellow adult enthusiasts you can't be like "so I think streamer would be submissive if I was domming him" and everyone can be like "oh you'd dom him so well". As long as you're keeping it away from people who are bothered by it, you're fine.
Attraction to real people is normal and how attraction works. You're not hurting people if you think they're cute. You're not hurting people if you want to fuck them, either, as long as you're not making them interact with that desire. This is just a simple matter of keeping the higher-rated material away from the people involved.
Attraction to real people isn't inappropriate. You're fine.
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.
Preach
With truly all the love and empathy in my heart: crying daily over the sexual assault allegations again at Gaiman isn’t healthy. I’ve seen multiple people –especially fans of GO – saying this since they came out, and it’s really fucking concerning me.
I wonder if it has to do with the insidious ideas that 1) people are either Bad or Good, 2) Bad people can only do Bad things, and 3) liking Bad things or Bad people makes you Bad.
None of these things are true.
People are mixed up and incredibly complicated. Someone can be an incredible artist/chef/ally against racism/drag queen and still be predatory/homophobic/antisemitic/never tips their wait staff. People do things that harm others in big and small ways all the time. You do too. I promise.
(Also the idea of dehumanizing anyone, even people who do genuinely insurmountable harm, as somehow less than human is an inherently fascist ideology)
The fact that you (yes, you!!) do harmful things doesn’t immediately make you Bad. There are certainly things that someone might do that causes more harm (say, assault) versus less, but, perhaps unfortunately, that doesn’t somehow infect all the things they’ve done in the past with their Badness. Gaiman helped write Good Omens. There’s no way now to say “I was wrong and this book was Bad all along” or even “oh, all the parts I like were written by Pratchett, the Bad parts must have been Gaiman.” You didn’t miss an inherent evil by liking the book in the past. It doesn’t make you Bad for liking it now.
(It also doesn’t mean that people associated with Gaiman, like David Tennant, are also Tainted by Badness. This is also a slippery slope argument into dehumanization and fascist ideas)
By all means: stop giving Gaiman your money. Stop tagging him in your Azi/Crowley fanart. But do this as a way to disentangle yourself from parasocial relationships that are actively causing you grief and to vote with your wallet, not because unlinking yourself from Bad Art and Bad People will somehow absolve you and make you Good again. If you already have a copy of Good Omens or Sandman, whether you reread it is between you and your gods. Interacting with a text you find important doesn’t make you Bad or Good. It’s just reading. What you do with the stories is what matters (ironically, that’s the message of a lot of both Gaiman and Pratchett’s work).
Maybe take a peek at Good Omens and re familiarize yourself with its other core message: People are not Bad or Good. People do bad and good things.
Then maybe drink a cup of tea. You need to rehydrate.
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:
The ✨neurodivergent urge✨ to further parse the evolutionary origins of crushes, and of the complicated, technologically-driven rise of parasocial relationships; as a way to help dismantle their sometimes distressing and distracting overwhelming effects on my psyche
Plus
The ✨anarchist urge✨ to continually challenge stories grounded in monarchial and gentry-centered settings and denounce them as classist, as very cruelly disingenuous, and as terribly problematic: given that such stories ultimately romanticize and make propaganda of characters who are of the exploitative and colonizing 1% -- ffs, none of us "commoners" would be invited to such parties! We'd be dressed in rags, frantically working ourselves to exhaustion and death in a horrifically dangerous factory, or dying of treatable illnesses in a filthy, freezing hovel, or --
Vs
The ✨mentally-exhausted abuse survivor and giddy-schoolgirl-ish urge✨ to pen a fun, heady, regency-era, bridgerton-esque romp of a romance where my suspiciously youthful and non-disabled self-insert builds a heartwarming friendship with (and subsequently falls in love with) my parasocial crush
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.
god, I love the parasocial relationships I've got with the fake people in my phone <3