'The Paradox of Parasocial Relationships and Content for Attention'

I found a very good read on reddit today: ‘The Paradox of Parasocial Relationships and Content for Attention’

I didn’t randomly walk into this one, I was initially thinking about a situation I have just experienced.

I know the existence of a VTuber since they talk in one of the discord servers, but I never made a conversation with them because they are not even living around here. I basically know that they do VTuber things given their profile, as well as my friends reposting their posts since it’s easily identifiable online.

It seems that they were fine with posting irl photos with friends in the server, and I happened to scroll through while catching up the chat log. Then I was having trouble while associating their irl identity with their VTuber identity.

LLM tells me this is a “parasocial expectation mismatch”.

Basically, their VTuber-side character design and personality was already baked into my mind; but the real person behind that character is different from that idealized image. So my “mental continuity” breaks when I see their real appearance.

So I did a quick search on “parasocial expectation mismatch” and encountered that good post.

Maybe this is the reason why I still want to hit the arcades every day despite me owning a controller for the same game - more real, reciprocal, inconvenient connections. In the arcade, I can be known back. The connection is reciprocal - nods and GGs instantly creates the connections. I can watch a complete stranger playing pinballs and get introduced to a pinball museum and I don’t have to plan anything - the story just unfolds in real time.

Speaking of which, does anyone want some “round1 exclusive” rilakkuma cups that I got from buying too many credits?