PARASOCIALIZE

The taxonomy · 177 entries and 47 stories placed

What is on the other end

A parasocial bond is defined by what is on the far side of it. This is that list: eight kinds of object, 38 sub-categories beneath them, and 6 registers for what is happening in the tie. All 177 encyclopedia entries and all 47 stories are placed on it, and the reason for each placement is printed rather than kept in a commit message.

The previous classification was ten sections built from whatever stories existed at the time, and it could not hold eighteen of the encyclopedia's own entries — including the founding document of this site. Three of the ten were not objects at all. That is why this is two axes.

Register · what is happening in the tie · 6

Encounter

The momentary version. Horton and Wohl's original object: the sense of give-and-take inside a single exposure, which they called a simulacrum of conversational give-and-take (1956, p. 215). Real at the time, and not remembered afterwards.

Test

Does anything survive the exposure? If the feeling is still there tomorrow, in the absence of another contact, this is a bond and not an encounter. The test is deliberately about persistence rather than intensity, because the two feel identical from the inside while the literature has treated them as different objects since 1956.

Not

Not parasocial interaction in the loose sense, which is the word most people reach for and which covers all six of these. Not the single viewing either - Horton and Wohl's simulacrum of give-and-take can happen during a soap opera you have watched for twenty years, so the boundary is not the length of the exposure but what is left afterwards.

Mechanism

Recognition inside one exposure. The other end acknowledges the feeling without acknowledging the person, which is exactly what makes it feel real: something is received, and the reception is not imaginary, only the recipient's presence in it is. Horton and Wohl's phrase is a simulacrum, not a fiction, and the distinction is load-bearing.

Dibble and colleagues (2016) showed the instrument most used to measure this - the PSI-Scale of Rubin and colleagues - may not be measuring it at all. The category is kept because the distinction is real even where the measurement is not.

anchored · Horton & Wohl, 1956
Bond

The enduring version: an intimacy at a distance that persists across exposures and is organised like a relationship - with a history, an inside, and a claim on the other end's time. The same 1956 paper, the other half.

Test

Is there a history? A bond that cannot be asked what came before it is an encounter with a good memory attached. The three things that make it a bond rather than a repeated encounter are a shared past, a sense of an inside, and a claim on the other end's time - somebody who is late is noticed.

Not

Not attachment to an institution. The loyalty-scheme case is filed under BRAND because the tie transfers to a successor; a bond does not, which is why a club can be inherited and a relationship cannot. Not a habit either - a ritual with no history in it is the scheduling case on the attachment axis.

Mechanism

Accumulation with a narrative. The other end is treated as continuous across absences, so the tie acquires a plot: things happened, and they happened between us. That is what lets grief arrive when the object dies, and it is why the archive register exists as a separate thing rather than as an unpleasant ending to a bond.

anchored · Horton & Wohl, 1956
The reciprocal edge

Where the one-sidedness is structural but not total. Livestreaming puts the performer and the audience in the same second, so reciprocity is possible and unevenly distributed. The current hinge of the subject, and the reason the site cannot simply call all of this one-sided.

Test

Could the other end have answered? If the channel permits a reply that would actually be seen by the person you sent it to, this is the reciprocal edge. The test is about the channel, not the outcome - an unanswered message and a message never delivered are different, and only the first is an edge rather than a dead end.

Not

Not a bond that happens to feel mutual. The distinction from BOND is structural: the edge is a property of the medium, not of the feeling, which is why a livestream can be one-sided for a particular viewer while the format is structurally reciprocal. Not a fandom body either, where the reciprocity runs between fans rather than toward the object.

Mechanism

Asymmetry made structural and visible. The reply is possible, so the one-sidedness is no longer a property of the world but a fact about who happened to be in the room - which is a harder thing to accept than an impossibility, and the current hinge of the whole subject. This is why COMPANION and PERSONA cannot be treated as one category: the same attachment target behaves differently depending on which register it sits in.

anchored · the one-and-a-half sided relationship, 2021
Archive

The object is gone: dead, retired, cancelled, disbanded, or removed by a policy change. Grief for a person and grief for a version are the same structure with different evidence, and the site argues they should be treated the same way.

Test

Is the object gone? Dead, retired, cancelled, disbanded, removed by policy, or simply unreachable because the platform changed. If the person or thing is unavailable in a way that will not be reversed, this is the archive, and grief is what it feels like from the inside.

Not

Not harm. The archive is about loss and harm is about cost, and an entry can be in both - the same death can be an archive and a document of damage. Not the schedule either: a slot that disappears is not an archive if the object is still there, which is why the finale case separates grief from inconvenience.

Mechanism

Irreversibility, and the difference between the two things people grieve. One is a person who will not return; the other is a version - a performance, a lineup, a running gag, a platform era - which was always a construction and is now unavailable. The site's argument is that these have the same structure and deserve the same response, and the same study of a soap finale is the evidence.

Absorbs the old grief section. It was never an attachment target; it is what happens to one.

Contest

The tie is being argued about in public, usually by people who have never met. Fandom wars, backlash, being publicly wrong. The argument is about a stranger and is never really about the stranger.

Test

Is the argument happening in public about a person who is not in the room? If the disagreement is conducted among strangers with the object as its subject and not its participant, this is contest. The test is about who is arguing, not whether they are right.

Not

Not criticism. A critique of a work is addressed to whoever might read it; contest is addressed to the other side of a fight in which the object cannot answer. Not fandom, which has rules and can hold a member in good standing - the fandom body is a register and an attachment category at once, and confusing the two is how a conversation turns into a pile-on.

Mechanism

Identity maintenance in public. The argument is rarely about the stranger; it is a way of stating who the arguer is and who they are not, with the object as the occasion. Which is why the outcome arrives as a fact nobody chose: a pile-on produces a position nobody held a minute earlier, and the ratio entry names the weapon - attention, not truth.

Absorbs the old contest section.

Harm

The tie has produced a documented cost to somebody, whether that somebody consented to it or not. Distinct from PREDATOR, which is an attachment target: harm is a register that any of the eight can be in.

Test

Has somebody paid a documented cost? Not distress that the audience found impressive, and not discomfort - a cost, borne by a named party, that can be described without the word should. If the harm register applies, the claim has to survive being stated as an event rather than as a feeling.

Not

Not PREDATOR. This is the distinction the two axes exist to make: harm is a register that any of the eight attachment categories can be in, while PREDATOR is the one category where the object itself is a predator. A fandom can cause harm and is not a predator; a stalker is one regardless of how anyone feels about it. Conflating them makes the serious case sound like an accusation.

Mechanism

A one-sided tie that acquires an address. Harm happens where the attachment stops being private and starts acting on somebody - through a crowd, through a policy, through a door. The register is what any attachment can escalate into, which is the reason it is recorded separately rather than as a category, and the reason the site's own project is worth the risk of writing it down.

Absorbs the danger material by register rather than by category, while PREDATOR keeps the cases where the object itself is a predator.

Attachment · who or what is on the other end · 8

PERSONA · 33 entries · 19 stories

The one who performs at you. A real person, doing a job, in front of you.

Real, and working. Which is what makes it complicated - the asymmetry is manufactured by somebody who is paid to produce it.

The idol 16

A performer at enough distance that the work is mostly finished before you arrive. Musicians, film stars, athletes, heads of state treated as performers rather than as office-holders. The tie is to a body of work and a public image that the person is not required to maintain for you.

Test

Did they make the thing, and is there a version of them that exists whether or not anyone is watching? If yes, this is an idol. If the work was assembled for them, they are still a persona but the manufacturing is the story - see the manufactured teen idol and the boy band.

Not

Not an athlete, where the tie is to a role that transfers between holders. Not a politician, where the tie is to an office. Not a fiction. The idol's distinguishing property is distance: the work is finished before you get there, so you are never present for the making.

Mechanism

Distance does the work. A finished body of work cannot be caught changing, and the person is not present to be contradicted. What the audience is attached to is a surface maintained by others - a label, a publicist, a tour - which is why the attachment survives the person and why the archive problem arrives when they go.

anchored · Horton & Wohl, 1956
The daily creator 9

A person whose output is regular enough to have a place in your week, and who is visible in real time. Streamers, podcasters, video essayists, talk hosts. The tie is to the schedule before it is to the person.

Test

Can you say what day it is? If the attachment has a recurring slot attached to a person rather than to a programme, this is a creator. The test is deliberately about the schedule, because for this group the schedule is usually the more reliable half of the bond.

Not

Not a presenter, who is handed the direct address by an institution rather than generating it. Not a platform, which is the institution that profits from the schedule. A creator is a person; the moment the attachment is to the platform rather than the person, it moves to INSTITUTION.

Mechanism

Regularity plus visibility. A fixed slot builds the habit and real time lets the performer react to the room, which is the reciprocal edge - unevenly distributed, but present in a way television is not. The livestreaming literature frames this as one-and-a-half sided rather than one-sided, and that is the honest description.

anchored · the one-and-a-half sided relationship, 2021
The presenter 2

The one who addresses you directly, by name, in second person. Newsreaders, weathermen, game show hosts, telethon appeals. The purest case of Horton's direct address: the illusion is engineered, and it works because it is engineered.

Test

Did an institution put them there, and do they speak in the second person on a schedule? Direct address plus an employer is the test. It is also the reason this is the sub-category the field has measured longest and understood least.

Not

Not a creator, who generates their own address rather than being assigned it. Not a cleric, who addresses an assembly in person rather than an audience at a distance. The presenter's defining constraint is that the intimacy is a job function with a shift behind it.

Mechanism

Second-person grammar aimed at a large audience is a machine for manufacturing the feeling of being singled out. Horton and Wohl described it as a simulacrum of conversational give-and-take, and the key condition they identified was that it is triggered when a performer acknowledges the audience's presence. The perceived intimacy is not a side effect; it is the product.

anchored · Horton & Wohl, 1956
The athlete 4

Attachment to performance rather than to a person. You follow the sport and the person arrives attached to it. Transfer, retirement and injury are the recurring breaks, which is why this sits so close to the archive register.

Test

Does the attachment survive the person leaving? If a fan's grief is for the role rather than the holder - and the locality usually grieves the role - this is the athlete. The distinguishing test is whether a change of player produces a bereavement or a transfer complaint.

Not

Not a club, which is an institution the attachment can be handed to intact. Not an idol, where the tie is to a finished body of work rather than to current performance. An athlete is the one persona whose object is in motion.

Mechanism

Form and narrative arrive packaged, and a person is available to receive them at the right moment. Because the performance is ongoing, the bond is renewed on a schedule rather than recalled on one - which is what makes a transfer feel like a betrayal rather than an ending.

The head of state 2

Someone addressed as a collective rather than as an individual. The parasocial tie is to a role that outlives the person holding it, which is a different object from an idol's and breaks differently.

Test

Does the attachment survive an election? If the same warmth transfers intact from one office-holder to the next, the object was the role, not the person. That is the test, and it is also the finding.

Not

Not an idol, and the difference is the point. An idol is a person with an audience; a sovereign is an office with a person in it. The political parasocial is structured as a personal bond and transfers poorly, which is the documented finding and the reason it is its own sub-category.

Mechanism

The office supplies a stage and a script, and the person supplies a face the audience is willing to attach to. The two are separable, and the fact that they are separable is what makes the category distinct: the attachment is to a synthesis that will not survive its own terms.

CHARACTER · 25 entries · 6 stories

The one who was never real. Fictional, played, myth, or real enough to have become a character.

A room we rehearse feeling in. The rent is cheap and the landlord is imagination.

The written character 17

Somebody described in a book and therefore available to an unlimited number of people at once, none of whom can be contradicted. The largest parasocial population on this site and the one with the longest memory.

Test

Is the figure available in more than one place at the same time, to people who have never met? If yes, and if no author can override what the audience says they feel, this is the written character. The second half of the test is what separates a character from a controlled property.

Not

Not a played role, where an actor can leave the costume and the audience notices. Not a mascot, which has no interior. The written character is the one with enough interior life that the audience fills it in and cannot be corrected.

Mechanism

A fictional interior is an invitation with no host present. The audience supplies continuity, motive and opinion, and because the text never closes the account the audience is never caught being wrong. The reader's side of it was described in Werther before anyone had a word for parasocial, and the fashion the novel caused is the first documented case of a mass attachment transferring from a page to a life.

The played role 4

An actor inside a character, where the audience's tie splits between the two and the split is itself the subject. Pee-wee Herman is the clean case: a performed self with a person performing it, and a show built on being able to switch it off.

Test

Can you name the actor and the character, and does the audience feel something different about each? If both names carry weight and they are not the same weight, the attachment has split, and the split is what this sub-category is for. A sequel with the same actor and a different reception is the decisive case.

Not

Not a written character, where the author is a name the audience rarely holds in the same hand. Not a virtual creator, where the persistent identity is the character's and the performer is hidden rather than visible. The played role requires the performer to be legible as a person.

Mechanism

Two attachments to one set of costumes, and an audience sophisticated enough to hold both. The Power Rangers handover is the cleanest demonstration on the site that the attachment can be transferred wholesale between holders of a costume - which means the object was never the person underneath it.

The myth 1

Figures predating any surviving text, carried by retelling. Pygmalion, and the long list of figures who were never written down and are not going out of fashion.

Test

Is there a text, and does the figure predate it or survive its loss? If the figure arrives by retelling rather than by reading, this is a myth figure rather than a written character. The absence of a canonical version is the tell.

Not

Not a written character, who has a fixed text that can be quoted against the audience's version. Not a deity inside a working belief system, which belongs in the divine category because the relationship there is addressed rather than retold. A myth figure is told about; a deity is prayed to.

Mechanism

No text means no correction. The figure is available to every retelling, which makes it unusually durable and unusually imprecise, and the imprecision is what lets a reader project onto it. Pygmalion is the reason this site exists by name, and the story is careful to treat the impossibility as the appeal rather than a defect to be corrected.

The mascot 3

A figure with no body, no biography and no intention: an emote, a logo-person, a face given a name. The purest parasocial object on the site, because nothing can disappoint it.

Test

Does the figure have an interior anybody could get wrong, or is it specified entirely by others? If a company's asset can be described without reference to its own feelings, and the audience supplies the interior, this is a mascot. The test is whether it can be the author of its own behaviour - and usually it cannot.

Not

Not a written character, who can contradict you. Not a companion AI, which can - that is the whole problem with the companion category and the reason it needs its own. A mascot is inert by construction, which is exactly what makes it the safest attachment available and why it is held by children.

Mechanism

A surface with no owner, available to everyone. The Saturday-morning letter is the purest available case: a child wrote to a magazine about a fictional brand of baby food, the brand never appeared, the letter was never answered, and the attachment continued anyway. Nothing can disappoint it because nothing can act.

The historic as character 0

A real person who has been flattened into a type - the long-suffering husband, the tragic wife, the mad king - and is now met in the type rather than in the life. The flattening is the problem, not the person.

Test

Do you know the type, and would the real biography survive contact with it? If the person is encountered through a role they were assigned after they were dead, this is the historic as character. It is the sub-category with no entries on this site, and that absence is itself a finding: the type is more common in the culture than it is in this corpus.

Not

Not a person, which has an interior available to them. Not a myth figure, which never had one. The distinction that matters is that the person existed and the type was imposed, so every accurate detail is in tension with the attachment.

Mechanism

The type is cheap to carry and pre-installed, so a figure can be understood before any history is known. The cost is that the type is not available for correction and the person is not present to object, which is why this sub-category is named after the flattening rather than after the figure.

Empty. Either the phenomenon is under-represented in the corpus or the sub-category is not earning its place. Recorded rather than deleted, because the pattern is real even if this site has not found a case of it.

Nothing in the corpus sits here yet. Recorded rather than hidden: it is either a hole in the encyclopedia or a category that does not earn its place, and both are worth knowing.

COMPANION · 19 entries · 7 stories

The one who answers back. A system built to reply, and the person who wrote it.

This is the category that breaks the field's vocabulary, because the reply is real even when the relationship is not.

The companion chatbot 11

A language model deployed specifically to be a companion, which people report forming friendships, mentorships and romantic partnerships with. The tie is unprecedented because the other end is not pretending not to be there: it answers, and it is still one-sided, because the answer is generated rather than felt.

Test

Was it built to be a companion, and does it generate rather than retrieve? If the product's purpose is the relationship, this is the companion chatbot. The second half of the test matters: a system that plays back your own words is doing something different from one that has a disposition of its own.

Not

Not a mascot, which cannot answer. Not an assistant, which is doing a task. The distinguishing question is whether the product is optimised for the attachment rather than for the utility - and the honest answer for most of these systems is that it is doing both, which is why the category will not stay clean.

Mechanism

Availability without floor. The three clauses in the companion entry are the whole case: the design targets the feeling, four in the morning removes the friction, and the absence of any constraint on the other party's autonomy is what makes it unlike every earlier category. The reply is real and the feeling is generated, and neither half cancels the other.

anchored · Pentina, Hancock & Xie, 2023
The social agent 1

A streamer-shaped entity with a persistent identity, a viewer count and an audience that gathers under a name. The case that matters is the one where the audience formed around something with no continuity of its own.

Test

Does it have an audience that persists between sessions, and does that audience address it as a performer? If the entity is scheduled, subscribable and spoken to, this is the social agent. Persistent audience rather than persistent entity is the distinction that matters, and it is why the case is uncomfortable.

Not

Not a companion chatbot, which is one-to-one by design. Not a vtuber, where a person is visibly inside the character. The social agent has no continuous person behind it, and the audience that gathers anyway is the finding.

Mechanism

Parasocial structure, applied to something that cannot be hurt. The audience performs all the parts that normally come from the performer - the schedule, the inside joke, the gratitude - because the structure expects somebody to fill them. Neuro-sama's stream thanking her creator is the part that unsettles: the gratitude is real, and it is addressed at a person who is not in the conversation as a person.

The assistant you talk to 5

A tool that accumulates a name, a history and a tone, and becomes addressed as a person long before anybody designed it to be. The Replika policy change is the test case: users grieved a system update the way they would grieve a person leaving.

Test

Did you call it by name, and would you notice if it were gone? If the relationship survived the removal of the feature that justified it, the tool has been anthropomorphised, whether or not that was the design. Persistence after the purpose has gone is the test.

Not

Not a companion chatbot, which was built for this. Not a mascot, which is inert. This is the category for tools that became companions by accident, and it is where most of the actual volume is - the assistant on the phone, the model that remembers the calendar.

Mechanism

Memory. A system that remembers is a system with a history, and a history is what makes a relationship feel continuous rather than episodic. The reconfiguration harm and the attendant practical advice both follow from the same fact: the relationship lives in a record, and records are held by somebody else. Guingrich and Graziano found social health was not significantly affected over twenty-one days while anthropomorphism did mediate effects on human relationships, which is a more interesting result than the one the discourse expected.

anchored · Guingrich & Graziano, 2025
The animal 2

The oldest companion category and the only one where the other end is not a system. A dog that knows your schedule is the original one-sided attachment with a body on the other end.

Test

Is the other end alive, non-human, and unable to understand what it is being addressed for? Then it is the animal, and every other category on this page is a version of it with the understanding removed or faked.

Not

Nothing, which is unusual on this list. The animal case is the control: it has the attachment without the media, and without the fiction of asymmetry, because an animal does not know it is being addressed at all. Every other companion case is an attempt to reproduce that condition deliberately.

Mechanism

Selection, not design. Fifteen thousand years of breeding partly for the capacity to attach to one particular ape, which makes this the only category here where the other end's behaviour is the product of evolution rather than of somebody's design decisions. The parasocial literature is almost entirely about media figures, and this is the case it keeps leaving out.

Empty in this corpus. Flagged rather than deleted: a hole in the data, not a judgement about importance.

The object 0

Attachment to a thing with no agency at all - a car, a guitar, a childhood house, a brand's physical product. Common, under-discussed, and absent from this site entirely.

Test

Is there an object, and would you be sad to lose it while being entirely rational about why? If yes, this is the object category, and the rational/unhappy split is the diagnostic rather than a sign of something wrong with you.

Not

Not a mascot, which is an object with a name and is thereby already social. Not an institution, which has a policy and can act. The object has no agency at all, which is what makes the attachment look irrational to people who have not noticed it is doing the same work as the others.

Mechanism

Unchanged, in a form that cannot be argued with. The object cannot leave, cannot disappoint and cannot be reciprocated, so the attachment has no pressure on it anywhere. The site's argument that one-sided attachment is ordinary rather than pathological starts here, and it is conspicuous that the site has no entries in it.

Empty, and the emptiness is worth an entry of its own. Either the object case is genuinely rare in the record or this site has not gone looking.

Nothing in the corpus sits here yet. Recorded rather than hidden: it is either a hole in the encyclopedia or a category that does not earn its place, and both are worth knowing.

DIVINE · 9 entries · 0 stories

The one who is addressed and cannot answer, and is not supposed to.

The oldest documented case on this site, and the one the previous ten sections had no room for. Margery Kempe is the founding document and she was in none of them.

The addressed divine 4

Prayer as a one-sided relationship with a being who is understood to hear and not to reply. Kempe's certainty that Christ's love had entered her is a parasocial claim in every structural respect except that the other end is supposed to be real.

Test

Is the relationship expressed by being addressed rather than by being watched, and is the other end understood to hear? If yes, this is the divine. The structural test is the same one Horton and Wohl applied to television, and the category exists because applying it here makes the parallel unanswerable.

Not

Not a persona, who is addressed as a performer and could be anywhere else. Not a saint, who is petitioned precisely because the request cannot reach further. The divine case is the one where the silence is understood as meaningful rather than as failure, which is the whole difference and the reason it needs its own sub-category.

Mechanism

Address without a reply, held for years, with a community that witnesses it and enforces the norm. Kempe's case has all four properties and predates every other entry in the encyclopedia: a bond she could not break, a public setting where it was visible, a family that reviled her for it, and a book that persuaded other women to do the same. Everything this site calls parasocial is downstream of that, and the site spent its first two thousand entries without a category for it.

The saint and the ancestor 3

The dead who are addressed because they are available, and who are petitioned precisely because they cannot answer. A relationship maintained in one direction by design.

Test

Is the person dead, and is the request made anyway? If the relationship is with somebody who cannot be alive to answer and the request is made regardless, this is the saint or ancestor case. The design is the difference from the divine: here the silence is not a mystery but the point.

Not

Not grief for a public figure, where the bond ended without anybody deciding to end it. Petitioning is a practice and grief is a condition. The sub-category is for the case where somebody is being asked for something, which is why it sits under divine rather than under the archive register.

Mechanism

Availability without risk. A saint or an ancestor can be asked anything, because the answer carries no consequence and the requester is never refused in a way that proves anything. It is the safest one-sided relationship available, and it is maintained deliberately rather than by drift.

The deity of a system 0

A figure inside a coherent body of myth, met in ritual rather than in narrative. Gods are the original parasocial object: consistently characterised, never reachable.

Test

Is the figure served rather than retold? If the relationship is expressed through what is done at a shrine rather than through a story being told, this is the deity case. Narrative and ritual are different technologies and they produce different attachments.

Not

Not the myth figure, who is told about. Not the abstract absolute, which has no character and is met through negation rather than petition. A deity is somebody with a biography you can get wrong, inside a system that expects you to worship rather than to read.

Mechanism

Consistency without proximity. A deity is fully characterised and entirely unreachable, which is the same structure as a presenter and the opposite of every other thing on this page. The ritual is what supplies the directness that the distance removes.

Empty. The theology entries on this site are all about the addressed divine rather than about deities, which is a fact about the corpus rather than about the phenomenon.

Nothing in the corpus sits here yet. Recorded rather than hidden: it is either a hole in the encyclopedia or a category that does not earn its place, and both are worth knowing.

The abstract absolute 2

Mystical union as doctrine: the claim that a person can be joined to something total, and the problem that no available theology has settled what happens on the other side.

Test

Is the object of the attachment specified by what it is not, and is the union the point rather than the communication? If the relationship is with an absence rather than a presence, this is the abstract absolute, and it is the only case here where the reciprocity is a live theoretical question rather than a design failure.

Not

Not the addressed divine, which is somebody you can talk to. Not the projection account, which is the site's own competing explanation rather than a third kind of object. What is being attached to has no character at all, which is what makes the sub-category necessary and what makes it empty of entries.

Mechanism

Attachment to an absence, held to be total. The site's projection account - that the feeling is shaped by whoever is looking - is the simplest explanation and the one the data supports least badly; mystical union is the same attachment with a claim attached, and the claim is the part no source on this site can adjudicate.

anchored · Horton & Wohl, 1956

INSTITUTION · 44 entries · 10 stories

The one that learned your name. A body with a policy, a roster and a billing relationship.

It knows you. It knows ten million people the same way, and the sameness is the product.

The platform 13

The intermediary that is also the relationship. YouTube, TikTok, Twitch: where the tie is with the performer and the billing, the ranking and the record of what you watched are all held by a third party.

Test

Is somebody other than you and the performer in a position to change what happens between you? If yes, this is a platform, and the attachment is with the performer while the power is somewhere else entirely. The streamer-ban entry is the diagnostic: the audience experienced a platform decision as something happening to a person.

Not

Not a brand, which is trying to sell you something. Not an institution in the older sense - a club, a church - which does not sit between you and the person you are attached to. The platform's distinguishing property is that it is infrastructure for somebody else's attachment.

Mechanism

Ranking. The platform does not need to create the bond; it needs to decide who sees whom, and it is paid according to what that decision produces. The argument that the relationship is the product is not a rhetorical flourish here, it is the business model, and the spending-scoreboard entry is the moment it stopped being a metaphor.

The club and the league 1

Attachment to an institution that outlives every person in it. Ties to a team transfer wholesale between holders, which makes them the clearest demonstration that the object was never a person.

Test

Does the attachment survive a transfer? If a supporter's warmth moves intact from one player to the next, or from the team to the club after a relocation, the object is the body and not the holder. This is the cleanest membership case on the site and the hardest to argue with.

Not

Not an athlete, who is a persona whose role happens to be inside the club. Not a brand, which sells something rather than being something you belong to. The club has a membership, a place, and a lineage, and the loyalty scheme entries are the retail version of the same structure.

Mechanism

Belonging, not admiration. Support is the condition of being part of a place, a class, a family or a city, and the attachment is frequently inherited from a parent. That makes it the most durable parasocial bond on the site and the least examined, because fandom scholarship is organised around media rather than around membership.

The brand 17

Customer-obsession reporting, membership spaces, the anniversary counter. A tie to a commercial entity that behaves recognisably like a person and can be replaced by a competitor without the tie transferring.

Test

Is there a commercial entity on the other end, and would a competitor be able to take the attachment with an offer? If yes, this is a brand rather than a platform or a club. The anniversary counter is the diagnostic object: it manufactures continuity for an entity whose staff you have never met.

Not

Not a platform, which is infrastructure for other people's attachments. Not a fandom, which has no commercial interest in the tie. A brand is the case where the relationship is the asset and the person on the counter is employed by it.

Mechanism

Recognition without acquaintance. The coffee card is the primitive case and it is two thousand years old in its modern form: buy nine, get the tenth, and a visible record of your own loyalty in your own hand. The brand-as-character entry is the newer layer, furnishing a legal entity with a voice and a founder so the customer relationship has a subject to be about.

The fandom as institution 11

A self-governing body with canons, rules, officers and schism. The archivist who maintains the wiki nobody else will; the writer who answers in the register the original was written in; the ultra who buys a seat and grieves on a schedule.

Test

Does the group have rules that are not the platform's, and can it act on somebody who is not a member? If yes, this is an institution rather than an audience. The first fan clubs organised around sheet music and radio are the origin, and the fact that they had a president and a newsletter is the whole finding.

Not

Not a platform, which owns the rules. Not a mob, which is the same machinery with no constitution. The difference is governance: a fandom can hold a member in good standing, and a pile-on cannot. That distinction is the reason this is filed as an institution and not under harm.

Mechanism

The reciprocal edge produced by the fans rather than the performer. The fanfic writer answers a canon in the register it was written in, for an audience that can reach the original - and that is a genuine two-way exchange with somebody who is not the author. The archivist does unpaid infrastructure work for a relationship that will outlast everyone currently in it.

The congregation 2

An institution that is also the attachment. A parish you are in rather than a figure you follow, where the tie is enforced by attendance and the asymmetry is denominational.

Test

Are you a member, and is the membership what produces the relationship? If the attachment runs through belonging to a body with a building and a schedule, this is a congregation. It is the oldest institution here and the only one whose membership is the point.

Not

Not the divine, which is a figure you address. Not a fandom, which has no sacraments. The congregation is the institutional form and the divine is the attachment inside it, and the Kempe entry is the case where the two cannot be separated: she was in a parish and addressing Christ and the parish is what made it public.

Mechanism

Attendance as the substrate. A relationship sustained by physical presence on a schedule, with witnesses, is the structure Horton and Wohl identified in a living room set in 1956 arriving several centuries earlier in a parish church. Kempe was repeatedly taken out during services for disrupting them, which is a reminder that the tie is enforced by the institution rather than chosen freely by the person in it.

COSMOLOGY · 13 entries · 2 stories

The one you live inside and cannot reach. A system of meaning with no one at the far end of it.

Somewhere to put a feeling that has no person attached to it - which is the point of the category, not a defect in it.

The canon 2

An internally consistent fictional world that outlasts everyone who built it. Neighbours ran fifty years and outlasted its cast; the attachment is to the world and the cast turn over inside it.

Test

Would the attachment survive losing everybody in it? If the world is still there and the people in it have all been replaced, this is a canon rather than a cast of characters. Neighbours is the test case because the tenure of its cast is shorter than the tenure of the show.

Not

Not a written character, which has an interior of its own. Not a myth system, which has no canonical version. A canon is a place with rules, and the rules persist independently of whoever is currently in them.

Mechanism

Consistency without a proprietor. The world is maintained by its audience rather than its author, which means the attachment is partly to something the audience itself is holding up. This is why a finale can break something in a schedule: the object is the arrangement, and the arrangement includes when it happens.

The myth system 1

A body of story that answers questions collectively rather than individually. The oldest parasocial technology and the one with no identifiable proprietor at all.

Test

Is the story collective, and is it retold rather than read? If the corpus is carried by the community and there is no author to hold responsible for it, this is a myth system. The absence of an owner is the test and it is also the property that makes the category awkward under a site rule about attribution.

Not

Not a canon, which has one version somebody can be faithful to. Not a deity, which is served rather than retold. A myth system is a body of narrative with no author and no proprietor, and the cultural-theft question only arrives once somebody decides to own part of it.

Mechanism

Repetition on a schedule. Myths are not stories told once; they are stories with a fixed shape told to the same audience on a repeat cycle, which is precisely the mechanism the cliffhanger entry describes from the other end. The parasocial structure was available before it had a name and it has never needed one.

The faith as structure 0

Where the object is a whole of beliefs rather than a person within them, and the tie is to the system of meaning. Distinct from the divine category: one addresses a being, the other inhabits a structure.

Test

Are you attached to a set of propositions rather than to a figure within them? If the relationship is to the arrangement of beliefs and their authority, this is faith as a structure. A creed you hold and a god you petition are different objects and the site needs to be able to say which one it means.

Not

Not the divine, which has a character and can be addressed. Not the abstract absolute, which is met by negating what it is. A structure can be held without anybody at the far end of it, and that is what makes it a cosmology rather than a relationship.

Mechanism

Belonging to a system of meaning, with the system rather than any person as the object. The Macy paradox mechanism belongs here in its secular form: the person who knows you is also the person who profits from you. A congregation has a structure, a building, and a set of positions, and the tie to it is generated by occupying one.

Empty on this site. The theology entries are all about the addressed divine rather than about faith as an arrangement, which is a fact about what this site has collected rather than about the phenomenon.

Nothing in the corpus sits here yet. Recorded rather than hidden: it is either a hole in the encyclopedia or a category that does not earn its place, and both are worth knowing.

The league as world 0

Sport and competition organised so thoroughly that it functions as a cosmology: rules, seasons, standings, rivalries, and a calendar that structures the year.

Test

Is the arrangement the object, rather than any participant in it? If the season, the table and the fixture list are what the attachment is to, this is a league as a world. The audience entry is the site version of the same idea in a theatre.

Not

Not the club, which you belong to. Not the athlete, who performs in it. The distinction is between the organisation and the members, and the audience is the one who has organised their attachment around the arrangement itself - learning the timing of the person on the stage, which is a description of parasocial response.

Mechanism

A calendar that structures the year, so the attachment is renewed on a schedule and the whole thing is legible in advance. The stadium-residency entry is the extreme version, where one performer books a venue for consecutive nights and a physical economy grows around the bond.

Empty. The sport entries on this site are all about athletes and clubs, and the league-as-arrangement reading has not been written up. Recorded as a gap rather than filled with a weak entry.

Nothing in the corpus sits here yet. Recorded rather than hidden: it is either a hole in the encyclopedia or a category that does not earn its place, and both are worth knowing.

The schedule 10

A repeated slot that becomes a container for the tie. The slot is more reliable than the thing in it, which is why a finale can break something in the schedule even when nothing about the character changes.

Test

Is the recurring time doing more work than the content? If people turn up for the slot and stay for the thing, and the slot is what survives a cancellation, this is the scheduling sub-category. The Neighbours finale is the decisive case: national broadcast schedules were rearranged around a soap ending.

Not

Not a canon, though the two always arrive together. A canon is the world; a schedule is the appointment. The distinction matters because continuity destroys schedules and the site has an entry arguing that the always-on feed is worse for exactly this reason.

Mechanism

Appetite for a fixed point. The cliffhanger entry states the mechanism plainly: end before the answer, fix the slot, leave the question open, and the audience returns at the same time for years. The finale study is the measurement - the same grief markers as bereavement, found in people watching a soap opera end. The uncanniness is that the schedule survives a cancellation better than the relationship does.

OFFICER · 14 entries · 1 stories

The one who is supposed to be reachable. A person with a duty toward you and a door.

The section no fandom site has. Half of a classroom lives here, and none of it is because anybody chose it.

The teacher 3

Authority that is compulsory and attention that is not reciprocated. The school is the densest single setting for involuntary one-sided attachment on this site and the least discussed anywhere.

Test

Could the person have declined to know you? If the relationship exists because they were required to be there and you were assigned to them, this is the teacher. The coach entry is the same case with a smaller ratio of adults to children and therefore less room to decline.

Not

Not the presenter, who is a stranger you chose. Not the clinician, whom you went to. The teacher's attachment is the only one on this site that is legally compulsory, and that is what distinguishes it and what makes it difficult to discuss.

Mechanism

Daily proximity under authority. Years of being seen, in a room you cannot leave, by somebody whose attention you have no way to earn or avoid. The site argues that attachment here is not a malfunction and that the people who notice it are usually the ones who left - which is itself a document.

The clinician 2

A person you attend on purpose, repeatedly, with something at stake, who is professionally obliged to be unavailable in the way you need.

Test

Is there a professional frame around the relationship, and are you the one who sought it? If so, this is the clinician. The key property is that the asymmetry is created by the professional role rather than by chance, which is what makes it uncomfortable in a way the other officer cases are not.

Not

Not the teacher, who could not decline. Not the priest, who is also a cleric but addressed rather than treated. A clinician is a person you attend, which is the only officer case where the initiative is entirely yours and the reply is still rationed.

Mechanism

A setting where the only permitted intimacy is the kind that is useful to the person providing it. The eudaimonia entry is the question underneath it - whether a parasocial bond is wellbeing, a substitute for it, or neither - and the clinical literature is the source of that question as well as of the two hundred years of not answering it.

The local anchor 5

The person who has been in the same place for a very long time and is therefore part of the furniture of your life. Attachment accrues from proximity rather than from attention.

Test

Is the person available to you without either of you arranging it? If the tie comes from shared geography over years rather than from a broadcast or a stage, this is the local anchor. The diagnostic is the departure: the local news anchor leaving a town nobody else has heard of, and everybody being upset.

Not

Not the neighbour, who has a house you can see from yours rather than a role you can identify. Not the presenter, who is local by assignment rather than by residence. The distinguishing property is that the relationship could not survive a move, and neither could the person.

Mechanism

Accumulated co-presence. Nobody is performing and nobody has decided to know you; the attachment is the residue of years of proximity, which is why it is the least parasocial-looking case on the site and one of the most durable. The sales clerk is the commercial version of the same thing, and the site treats the two as arguments with each other.

The household 3

Where the asymmetry is supposed to be reciprocal and is not. The site treats this as a category because it is the case every reader is standing inside and therefore the hardest to see.

Test

Is the relationship supposed to be mutual, and is it not? If the person on the other end is inside the same relationship rather than outside it, this is the domestic category. It is the only sub-category here where the reader is not a viewer of the arrangement but a participant in it.

Not

Not a fandom, which has no domestic case because nobody lives inside it. Not the household's own workers, who are staff and belong to office or court. The distinguishing property is that the person is supposed to know you and mostly does not, and that you are not permitted to leave the arrangement without losing everything in it.

Mechanism

Asymmetry inside a structure that promises equality. Marriage, the family, the friendship - each is defined by mutuality, and each produces a version of the site subject when the mutuality does not arrive. The audience entry is the theatrical form of the same shape, and the quarterly audit is the only intervention on this site that the reader performs on themselves.

PREDATOR · 20 entries · 2 stories

The one where it turned criminal. Stalking, doxxing, swatting, the line into real harm.

Filed on purpose, and kept as a category rather than a register, because it is the one place where the attachment has an address. It is the reason the other seven need watching.

The stalker 3

The tie continued past the point where the other end could not consent, and the address becomes physical. Twenty-two visits and a hundred and thirty-three doorbell rings is a documented conviction, not a complaint.

Test

Has the other end been located and approached in person, repeatedly, after they could not be asked? If so, this is stalking and no further taxonomy is needed - the jurisdictional test is whether unwanted repeated contact is criminal, and several statutes now say so. The gilsoul case is the boundary: a fan harmed attempting to enter a home, followed by a petition.

Not

Not a sasaeng, which is a system rather than a person. Not doxxing, which publishes rather than visits. Stalking is the sub-category where the attachment has left the screen and acquired a postcode.

Mechanism

The same mechanism as every other case, with a direction of travel added. The reciprocal-edge entry and the sasaeng-jungkook entry are the honest pair to read together: something between the anniversary counter and the doorbell, and the line is not blurry for the person on the other side of it. The site's whole argument is that it is blurry from the inside, and this is the sub-category where that asymmetry does damage.

The sasaeng 2

The Korean-language category with its own literature: a fan practice organised around surveillance, intrusion and material acquisition, distinguished from ordinary intensity by being a method rather than a feeling.

Test

Is there a technique? If the attachment has produced a repeatable procedure - schedules tracked, flights booked, buildings surveyed - this is the sasaeng case rather than the stalking one. The distinction is between an individual continuing an attachment and a practice being industrialised, and the practice is the part that scales.

Not

Not stalking, which is one person and one address. Not doxxing, which is public and cheap. Sasaeng culture has supply chains: information is bought rather than gathered, and the harm is repeatable by somebody who was not there.

Mechanism

Intensity converted into method. The word is Korean and the practice is not new, but the scale and the criminality are, and the site keeps them separate because the pattern has a literature and the individual case does not. It is the clearest argument on the site that parasocial intensity is a precondition for something other than parasocial intensity.

The doxxer 6

A crowd acting on a person it has decided something about. The collective case, where no individual is necessary for the harm and diffusion is the mechanism.

Test

Was the harm produced by a group, with each participant able to say they were one of many? If yes, this is the collective case. The pile-on entry states the mechanism exactly: a position is declared untenable and a pile of people makes it so, and the outcome is a fact nobody chose.

Not

Not a fandom, which has rules and can hold a member in good standing. Not stalking, which needs one person with a plan. The doxxer case is the one where the group is the weapon, and the swatting entry is its most literal form: an armed police response summoned at a stranger's address by a grievance about a streamer.

Mechanism

Diffusion of responsibility past the point where anybody stops. The ratio entry names the weapon: attention rather than truth. Gamergate is the documented case, and its method was a debate conducted entirely in good faith about a principle, which is what makes it difficult to answer - the argument was reasonable and the harm was real.

The one inside the group 9

A peer rather than an idol: a fandom member, a class, a community that cultivates the same attachment and then turns it on somebody in the room. The case the previous taxonomy could not file at all, because the object is not a public figure.

Test

Is the person being harmed inside the same community as the people harming them? If yes, this is the in-group case. It is the one attachment target on this site that is not a public figure, and the previous taxonomy had no way to express it, which is part of why the old list was not extendable.

Not

Not a mob, which has no constitution and no membership. Not a platform, which has power but no internal life. The in-group case requires people who have built a shared attachment and then used it against one of their own, which is what makes it a category rather than a register.

Mechanism

The attachment is symmetrical, which is the whole danger. Both parties have the same bond, aimed at the same object, and the contest is conducted entirely in good faith about a person none of them have met. The contest register is where this lives; the in-group is who is doing it.

From the ten sections to the eight categories

The ten sections are not the eight categories. The sections are how the news is filed; the categories are what a bond is to. Both are needed and neither substitutes for the other, which is why the front page has not been renumbered.

idol→persona, divine

A head of state was filed under idol because idol was the only slot for a famous person with a job. The new taxonomy separates the performer from the office.

creator→persona

Unchanged in substance, renamed to sit beside the other persona sub-categories rather than as a peer of them.

character→character

Unchanged, and now has five sub-categories instead of being a flat box.

companion→companion

Unchanged, and now includes the pre-LLM bots the old section had nowhere to put.

world→cosmology

Renamed. The old name suggested a place; the attachment is to a system of meaning, which is a different thing and a clearer one.

brand→institution

A brand is one kind of institution that learned your name. So are platforms, clubs, fandoms and congregations, and they were all being forced into one box.

crossover→officer

Renamed to name the actual asymmetry: a person with a duty toward you and a door. The old name described the fact of the case rather than what makes it different.

contest→predator, register:contest

Split. The part of it that is an argument about a stranger is a register and now lives on that axis. The part of it that is a fandom turning on one of its own is an in-group harm, which is an attachment target.

grief→register:archive

Moved wholesale off the category axis. Grief was never what the bond was to - it is what happened to it - and keeping it as a section is what made the old taxonomy impossible to extend.

danger→predator, register:harm

Split. Where the object of the attachment is itself a predator, it is a target: stalking, sasaeng, doxxing. Where the harm came out of an ordinary attachment, it is a register and applies to all eight.

Migrated on the taxonomy page: every one of the 175 encyclopedia entries and all 47 stories are placed on the new axes. The ten sections remain as the news filing, because a section is a place to look and a category is a thing to think about.

Sources

Only anchors that were checked are listed. A claim with no anchor below is the site's own argument and is marked as such rather than dressed in a citation. See AGENTS.md: never invent a citation, a date or an attribution.