I love Louis and I’ve been following his videos for a long time. What he does is supremely important to our messed up society.
But here’s the thing: for the past few months, I’ve had the distinct feeling than each of Louis’ videos is slightly more unhinged than the previous one.
I mean I’m fully aware Louis’ videos are not mainstream, and until recently, I’ve always felt there was a clear method to the randomness. But lately, it¨s been more randomness than method for me, and it’s reached a point where I feel it’s doing a disservice to the causes of right to repair and sovereign ownership.
Am I the only one who feels this way?
I really hate to come out saying this, but I really think there’s something going on with Louis, and beyond the causes he fights for on our behalf - and goodness knows I’m eternally grateful for what he’s achieved - I’m honestly a bit worried for him.
I’m not a Youtuber’s fan and I have no relationship with Louis. What I see is another human being who seems to have begun a slow slide into incoherence. Being concerned for another human being is called empathy.
This is textbook parasocial relationship stuff. You know absolutely nothing about his personal life or circumstances. He doesn’t even know you exist. Implying he is mentally unwell based on the 10 minute videos he chooses to upload and then spreading this unfounded rumour across social media is really disrespectful and dangerous behaviour.
Kind of like, oh, I don’t know… implying a Lemmy user you know nothing about has a unhealthy “parasocial” relationship going on with a random Youtuber based on a single post 🙂
Don’t reverse the roles: he’s the one who puts himself in the limelight. If he didn’t want people to make public coments on his very public videos, then he shouldn’t make his videos public.
You’re not commenting on his public videos though, you’re commenting on his private life. He doesn’t make videos about his mental health.
You might want to look up a definition of “parasocial.” It sounds like you’re taking that term to mean something other than the common usage of the term. It’s not any kind of insult or accusation or anything. (“Unhealthy parasocial relationship” might be, though Ilandar didn’t use that phrase specifically. Ilandar is accusing you of making some logical leaps without any real knowledge of what might be going on with Rossmann. I’m not saying you are or aren’t making logical leaps, but just the word “parasocial” doesn’t mean anything like that.)
“Parasocial relationship” is just the term used to describe the relationship between a fairly well-known public-ish figure and their audience. (Though I think it usually tends to be used more when a “social-network-ish” platform like YouTube is involved than with, say, Hollywood actors.) If you’ve watched some of Rossman’s videos, at least enough to know a little bit about his public persona and if he also doesn’t really even know in specific that you exist (or if you’re no more than a username he’s seen on a bunch of YouTube comments or something), the proper term for that is “parasocial relationship” whether you’re making logical leaps or not. If you’ve watched any significant number of Mr. Beast videos but don’t know him beyond that, you have a parasocial relationship with him. I follow the Google software engineer Rob Pike on Mastodon and read all his toots. So I by definition have a parasocial relationship with Rob Pike and he with me. That’s not to say Rob Pike knows I exist, nor that I have any special knowledge about him, nor that he owes me anything. (And in fact by calling my relationship with him “parasocial”, I’m basically explicitly saying I don’t have any relationship with him beyond consuming some content he publishes publicly.)
Again, I’m not taking any position on whether there’s any thing “unhealthy” going on with you. (I haven’t watched enough of Rossmann’s recent content to know whether any of your statements about him are justified or not.) But if he’s a “random Youtuber” and you don’t have any other relationship with him than having watched and maybe commented on a good handful or more of his videos, then I can think of no more perfect example of a “parasocial relationship.”