Parasociety: An Invalidated Intimacy

Illustration by Atharv Salve/The Edict

It is early January 2025. Every second article is buzzing with the news: the world-renowned, well-beloved Neil Gaiman is a predator. The Vulture’s article, There Is No Safe Word was near cataclysmic to Gaiman’s career. Allegations of abuse and their subsequent suppression over the years were all brought to light. Shows like Good Omens and The Sandman, some of his most famous works, removed Gaiman from their production. 

I opened Twitter in search of further updates only to find myself in the midst of a battle of wits, words and profanity. There was, of course, the expected uproar about news like this. But I found grief and mourning, not always for his very real victims, but for the characters he created and the loss of their futures in light of his absence. 

Many said they felt “betrayed” by Gaiman, but to take things further, their concerns were more situated around the characters who would not be developed in the same way again. One fan tweeted that while they knew about what Gaiman had done, “I didn’t realise that it meant the death of Good Omens…definitely wouldn’t have allowed myself to get so emotionally attached to the characters if I knew.” There is something heavily parasocial in these reactions, from their grief to the prioritisation of their personal loss over the trauma of real-world victims.

I was talking to a fellow Ashokan about the Tweets and Gaiman, who said, “With parasocial relationships, it comes down to whether or not you can acknowledge that it's parasocial. If you're feeling this upset, maybe it's time to reconsider and see that you're in a parasocial relationship.” 

While this was a sentiment backed up by others, there were a few who mentioned that being upset at the loss of something you adore cannot entirely be deemed parasocial. It is not the fact that people feel upset or emotional towards a character or a celebrity that is the issue; the problem lies in the disregard of their wrongdoings to protect an idealised version of the perpetrator. 

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On 11th March, 2025 the news broke that popular Korean actor Kim Soo-Hyun, best known for dramas such as ‘Its Okay Not to Be Okay’ and ‘Queen of Tears’, was facing criminal charges for allegedly having a relationship with actress Kim Sae-Ron, who was supposedly only fifteen when the relationship began. Sae-Ron took her own life in February. 

Public opinion, as it does when such a case against a celebrity surfaces, was quick to parrot the commonly known phrase, “You do not really know celebrities.” Celebrities as we view them are simply caricatures. It does not do any good to entitle oneself to the lives of these celebrities and presume a certain intimacy. 

A friend of mine said she could no longer watch one of her favourite shows because every time she saw Kim Soo-Hyun in them, she could not separate his actions from the character she was watching on screen. Along similar lines, another friend said she ceased consuming content of one of her favourite influencers when allegations arose against him. She said, “I disassociated any time and energy I spent...the moral and ethical line (that was crossed) changed things for me.” 

The parasociety, as with any community, is not homogenous. Parasociality contains multitudes, and people engage with it in varying capacities. While some of my peers could not identify parasocial behaviour by its stricter text-book definition, it was clear that at least on an unconscious level there is often some degree of emotional investment. For some people I spoke to for the article, parasocial relationships have helped with their mental health or social lives. They also acknowledged the one-sidedness of the relationship. Because fictional characters exist in a world beyond ours, the acknowledgement of the non-existence of mutuality in the relationship is prevalent from the offset. 

A fellow student also brought up how the way God is perceived and the positive implications of a relationship with God can also be considered parasocial because there is no active reciprocation from the other side. 

In an interview with The Edict, Sramana Majumdar, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Ashoka University, said, “reciprocity is very fundamental…one of the glues that facilitates social interaction…”. She said that parasocial relationships are just like any other relationship, only differing in its realm of engagement. This realm can not only be seen in defining parasociality beyond just being a one-to-one relationship but also in acknowledging the emotional investment that goes into entering a community. Professor Majumdar also said that with Gen Z, an increase in digitisation coupled with a decline in face-to-face social interaction fostered such relationships, however, the investment into a community need not always be negative as large collective action initiatives are sometimes motivated by the same bonds.

In 2020, I was greatly invested in Captain America that I contributed to a multitude of flame wars online and wrote my application essay to Ashoka in defense of his decisions in the long disputed movie, Captain America: Civil War. I spent hours researching the Sokovia Accords and reading essays instead of preparing for my board exams because any slight against Steve Rogers’ character was a slight against me. 

I grant myself an allowance for emotional investment with fictional characters that I never would with celebrities or people in my world. Unlike fictional characters whose dimensions are confined to the page and the screen, as one of my peers put it, “I think twice when I know they're real people. I create a degree of separation when I know that there's something beyond the surface.” 

With an increase in interactive media like video games and even further, AI, there is an increased intimacy being fostered between those who live beyond the screen and within it. When a sensory element is brought in, Professor Sramana says, “The line between what is real and what’s not, what’s public, what’s private, those have been blurred.” 

Professor Sramana highlights that while parasocial relationships can develop due to a dearth in ‘real’ sociability, that need not be the sole factor. In our world of digitisation, losing oneself to the screen is far easier than it ever has been, especially when so much of our communication happens online. The only way to avoid taking these dependencies too far, unfortunately, is through accountability. Holding oneself accountable for the amount of time invested in these relationships and spaces, or having friends and family enforce this accountability, seems to be the only way to maintain a healthy degree of separation.

Parasocial relationships may not be ordinary relationships, and yet, in some way or the other and to varying degrees, most people, and from my interviews I speak here for a sample of college undergrads at Ashoka, engage in some version of parasociality. Be it a hallway crush, a character from Netflix’s latest release, or maybe even the attention and validation of a professor who, as one of my TFs once put it in an address to the class, “will not remember who you are come next Spring,” the conceptions of these are endless. Yet, as with all relationships, one thing remains the same: they can only be healthy when you learn to set boundaries.

(Edited by Giya Sood and Srijana Siri Murthy)