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parasocial relationships: a (hopefully) useful thread that i think is relevant to the brendon urie situation
my lasts thread was sort of scatterbrained and i think i used the wrong words in places, hopefully this thread will get my point across like i intended to. so i'm gonna talk about parasocial interaction and why i think it plays into the brendon urie situation
http://findapsychologist.org defines parasocial relationships as "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.
Parasocial relationships are most common with celebrities, organizations (such as sports teams) or television stars. Parasocial relationships expand the social network in a way that negates the chance of rejection and empowers individuals to model and identify with individuals of
their choosing who naturally elicit an empathic response." i think this is especially true for certain brendon stans because they feel an intimacy or a connection to brendon through his twitch streams etc. it seems like a lot of his fans feel as if they know and understand
brendon on a personal level. people who experience intense parasocial relationships often tend do go out of their way to do things they think will get their fav's attention, and so i believe kids who are defending brendon so relentlessly (cough cough nicolexrow cough) are
convinced that panic will notice them and... reward them i guess?? or maybe it's just emotional attachment that they're finding really hard to let go of. i would say to these people: you do not know brendon urie personally, what you have with him is a parasocial relationship
and theres no way you can know his true intentions. also, kind of unrelated but when i reported my SA case, i couldn't remember a lot of the details of what happened to me and i wasn't able to provide evidence that it happened, which is pretty common for victims i think -
- so using these two things as 'proof' of brendons innocence is not all that helpful. i mention this because it links back to parasocial relationships - these people think they know brendon but they don't. they know his stage / twitch / whatever persona but they don't know him
on a personal level. meeting brendon and having a positive experience with him doesn't mean he's a good person overall. to conclude: not all parasocial relationships are bad! i feel like i have ones with patrick stump and rina sawayama especially but i can at least recognise that
it starts to get unhealthy when they speak on something as serious as sexual harassment claims with the mindset of 'i know brendon, he would never do this!' some people are really going hate me saying this but the only person who knows the full truth about the
accusations is brendon himself. your 'proof' that he's innocent is a result of your parasocial relationship with him and i think it's really dangerous that this entire mentality of watching his twitch streams and deciding you know everything about him is being somewhat normalised
