Today, I watched a great video by Shar, on YouTube.
I definitely recommend you check it out!
Shar's channel is really awesome. I love the mix of silly, short videos, and longer videos that delve a bit deeper into the topic at hand. Also, she's really talented! Her art is great, she's a developer, her editing is really cute and bubbly; watching her videos feels like eating cotton candy. Rather, it feels like what I envision eating cotton candy to be like. In truth, I never have a good time eating cotton candy. It's too messy.
I digress. Great videos!!
Oftentimes (glorious word, by the way, "oftentimes"), I find myself strongly enamoured
read, falling deeply and madly in love
with random people online. I've come to realize that this is a pretty common phenomenon. I really like Shar's videos, so I can't help but imagine that I'd really like Shar herself. Is this a so-called parasocial relationship?
Perchance; Mayhaps.
This has reminded me of a TikToker I used to follow. I still follow her actually, technically, I just uninstalled TikTok. I forget her @, but everyone called her "unc," which was funny in itself, but her videos were all about gambling with gas station scratch-offs. I can feel violent laughter bubbling up within me just from typing that out. What a concept. She's a marketing genius.
Continuing. She got tons of comments saying stuff like "fly me out unc" or "pay for my lodging at a place close to your location, unc," and other similarly parasocial requests related to a commenter's desire to meet the creator in the flesh. Pardon the run-on sentence, there. I don't want to meet my favourite creators at all!
I follow lots of people; I watch lots of people's stuff on the regular; I enjoy and laugh at their uploads, and I imagine that they are fun and pleasant to be around. However, I don't want to meet them!
I very much enjoy watching their silly videos and reading their cool posts, but I enjoy doing that from the comfort of my home; safely, through a screen. Not that I think Shar (or anyone else whose content I consume) would be particularly dangerous to be in the vicinity of, mind you. It's moreso a matter of practicality, in the sense that meeting new people is inherently dangerous, regardless of the people in question.
An aside: it seems "moreso" is, at best, a dubious spelling of the word-phrase "more so." I find this incredibly disparaging. Moreso looks very cool. I will continue to use it.
Anyway. I really love finding these nuggets of lovely on the internet. I love finding things to love.