[1/25] When people talk about bad parasocial relationships, it's usually about fans who think a show &or its creators should cater to their emotional needs. It's overly intimate messages from strangers, violent threats when a fan takes a character death as a personal betrayal.

But there's another toxic aspect I don't see talked about near often enough, and it actually stems from a theoretically good thing: parasocial relationships are a one-sided friendship, and just like two-sided friendships they're about GIVING as well as taking.

Fans have a lot of pent-up positive emotions. They want to give them back, and do, as philanthropy and community. It's part of what makes shows that are good at parasocial so successful and beloved. So how could it be bad to want someone to have nice things?

It's bad when want-friend-to-have-nice-things comes out quietly as "I have qualms about what my friends are doing, but I don't have a good way to talk to them privately, and if I called them out in public that would hurt them & they don't deserve that"

And when want-friend-to-have-nice-things comes out loudly as "Someone on the internet is saying a bad thing about my friends, and they're being so MEAN about people I KNOW have good intentions, I need to fucking SHUT THEM UP before my friends see this and get hurt!!"

"Oh NO my friends have seen it, I need to make sure they know I love and support them just the way they are, please ignore that dumbass jerkface over there!!"

All of which is well and good (...well. is survivable) at typical friendship scale, where if a meanie says bad things about me then my five friends come tell them off — especially since, at least in my case, the five friends are likely to /ask/ me first if I'm okay with that.

But parasociality is a one-to-many relation full of people acting like a one-to-one relation. My five friends is now my five hundred friends, all of whom act like the others don't exist, none of whom think to check in with me first, and five hundred friends becomes a dogpile.

#CriticalRole, for instance, is as notorious for this kind of toxic parasociality among some of its fans as it is loved for the genuinely positive & fulfilling relationships it's fostered among others.

(yes it is real ironic to me that this parasocial protectiveness manifested as, last I heard, leaping on a critical fan with accusations that he was The /Real/ Parasocial One, Not Like All Of Us Reasonable People; anyway)

Here is, as far as I can tell, the CR experience of having a parasocial fandom:

• you now have hundreds (or thousands, or hundreds of thousands) of friends out there
• anytime you publicly face even a small adversity, your hundred+ friends will want to leap in to support you

• you can't go to each of your hundred+ friends like "please don't"
• if you make a vague "please don't" announcement, many of your hundred+ friends will react with:
• aw see this is why they're so good and deserve my protection
• anyway this doesn't apply to ME

The other fandom I hang around is Rusty Quill. As far as I'm aware, parasocial loyalty there doesn't manifest as dogpiles (yet). But the ways the fandom and creators talk about each other are so eerily similar, I wouldn't be super surprised if CR turned out to be RQ's future.

#RQGaming has a tabletop etiquette episode (Metacast 8: Sensitivity in Gaming: https://play.acast.com/s/rustyquillgaming/rqgmetacast8-sensitivityingaming / fanscripts: http://bit.ly/rqgscript ) that I quite like. It ends on a sidebar about sensitivity & gaming in a podcast context that brings up two points:

[1] The RQ crew really truly wants to know if you have a criticism, and this is why they're so present and available

[2] The RQ crew (or at least @benrlmeredith) tries to be very thoughtful about not abusing the parasocial relationship between creator and audience

Here's the thing about creator responsibility in a parasocial relationship, though: saying "please tell us criticisms" is not enough, & parasocial feels are why.

Creator responsibility therefore requires clear, consistent, PROACTIVE work to make space & time for that criticism.

#MagnusPod fandom is large and growing fast, and the biggest fandom space for talking about it is run by @TheRustyQuill. They are very /available/, but I don't think that automatically translates to available for criticism, and in some ways actually makes it worse:

If you want to talk through something that's bothering you about them, so you can decide if it's worth bringing up officially, where do you do that? They might read this channel later. They might be reading this channel /right now/. https://twitter.com/teawoodleaf/status/1290037448567734273

If someone brings up a thing that's bothering you, and they see it and take it seriously, saying anything else about it would be /mean/. Give them a fair chance to address it first! Do you not know they care and they're doing their absolute best?

Anyway we've been negative here for long enough, time to get back to saying lovely things like this channel is for, otherwise they might think we're actually mad at them and be hurt. https://twitter.com/teawoodleaf/status/1290037452954984449

So there is an inevitable chilling effect on criticism, with fans reining in themselves and each other, produced precisely BECAUSE the RQ bunch are all so lovely and earnest and available and inspire such loyalty.

(Maybe I'm reading too much into things and everyone really doesn't have any problems! Maybe they work it all out invisibly in DMs! Maybe I'm projecting about why /I/ don't feel comfortable doing criticism!

But I do keep tabs on outstanding issues I'm aware of, and it's striking to me how rarely and tentatively they're brought up as a Criticism rather than just, like, a tragic fact of life we all have to work around.)

I don't have any solid suggestions on how to counterbalance this; that would require having examples of creators who've actually succeeded at doing so.

I just hope that creators who are concerned about not abusing the power dynamics they've created — so, y'know, hopefully all of them — are really paying attention to whether they might be "benefiting" (it's not a benefit) from parasocial protectiveness.

[END]