PARASOCIALIZE

2 stories

CONTEST

The one you are fighting about. Fandom wars, backlash, being publicly wrong. The argument is about a stranger. It is never really about the stranger.

A climate protest in Washington DC, 2015. Re-fetched: the previous one was a pilgrimage site in the Philippines captioned as a public argument, which is the same class of error in the other direction.
A climate protest in Washington DC, 2015. Re-fetched: the previous one was a pilgrimage site in the Philippines captioned as a public argument, which is the same class of error in the other direction. · Johnny Silvercloud · CC BY-SA 2.0

House of the Dragon ended and the fans are furious at the show, not the characters

NME on the backlash to season three. This is a fight about storytelling and everyone is using the wrong words.

This is a fight about a story and it is being fought with the vocabulary of a parasocial grievance, which is why it is so ugly. When a character does something you hate, a well-adjusted viewer says the writing was bad. A parasocial viewer says you did this to me. Both are in that thread and the gap between them is the whole argument.

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CONTESTLAW 2

A glimpse is not a full picture and the comments decided otherwise

Love Island and the World Cup produced millions of viewers who went on to investigate strangers.

Here is the whole mechanism in one summer: visibility got mistaken for access, and access got mistaken for entitlement. You watched a person for eight weeks. You know their tone. You do not know one thing about their life, only a version of it that producers cut down to a confessional and got paid for. If that sounds familiar to anyone who ever bought a tape because the cover looked like their week, you already know the trick.

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