"Victory's your only payment"

/50

The Leigh art I promised @drippyeagerr take ur mans

TW: CROW

As someone who has experienced both being a mega fanboy listener, and being a fairly popular creator in the medium, this belief in super parasocial mind control confuses and irritates me. It's not even close to true. In reality I can't even get them to buy a T-shirt off of my merch store. The gap between the perceived level of authority and social power that VAs have over their audience and their ACTUAL social power is so massive that it's farcical.

I'm going to go ahead and address some common myths and misconceptions about Roleplay VAs, their audiences, and the relationship between them.

Myth: Boyfriend ASMR and Audios Roleplay VAs are rich and raking in easy money. Fact: Very few of us even make enough money to earn a living off of it. The majority of Roleplay VAs combined cashflow from monetized YouTube channels and Patreons are earning them less than a minimum wage job would. People who make even middle-class income off of audios are extremely uncommon and people who are legitimately rich off of roleplay audios are vanishingly rare. Like single-digit rare.

Myth: Audio roleplays featuring Listener/Speaker romance detract from people's ability to form real-life relationships. Fact: Audio roleplays don't fucking do that and this is completely made up by people who want to stigmatize the medium. For some it's even helpful, with people who are relatively inexperienced with romantic relationships being able to explore relationship dynamics in the stress-free, judgement-free. Audio roleplays are a form of character-rich storytelling, and are valued by their audience for that. They aren't crutches that hold people back from learning to form and strengthen real-life relationships.

Myth: Popular VAs are comparable to celebrities, major online influencers, or other public figures. Fact: Roleplay audios are an independent, niche, amateur driven art form. We don't have PR teams, we don't get press releases, we don't have advertising campaigns backing us, and we don't have contractual protections guaranteeing future opportunities or success the way celebrities of legacy media do. We are, at most, popular within the boundaries of an extremely niche medium that is poorly understood (and even stigmatized) by most of the public.

Myth: Audio Roleplay and Boyfriend/Girlfriend ASMR listeners are emotionally dependent, pitiable, pathologically parasocial, and desperately lonely people who's loneliness is being cynically exploited by the roleplay voice actors whose content they consume and support. Fact: Audio Roleplay listeners are actual complete people with actual lives outside of listening to audios. They have friendships, hobbies, and often times real-life romantic relationships. Moral panic over roleplay VAs often paints the audience as pathetic, delusional people in order to attack the VAs as exploiters of a vulnerable and emotionally dependent populace. They're also often misrepresented as an audience of naive teens. Both of these depictions are untrue and honestly insulting to the community. Based on my own YouTube analytics data*, 88-92% of the Audio Roleplay audience is composed of adults, with the two biggest age groups being the age 18-24 cohort and 25-34 cohort. Most of these people are either in relationships or have experience with relationships, and aren't dependent on audios as their sole form of emotional comfort.

Myth: If you meet someone through their audios, you can never develop a true friendship. You will always be a parasocial fan who is beneath them and under their command. Fact: Roleplay VAs cultivate their own communities and have to be highly interactive to grow. Sometimes they get to know people who first discovered them through their work, and develop friendships with them. You definitionally cannot have a parasocial relationship with someone who actually knows you. Also, you have free will and enjoying someone's content does not erase your free will, despite all the claims suggesting the contrary.

Myth: Depictions of toxic, unrealistic, frightening, distressful, or otherwise flawed relationship dynamics normalizes and romanticizes bad relationship dynamics, leading listeners into harmful relationships. Fact: It's fiction and the audience can tell the difference. Roleplaying a romance with a "yandere" type character might be scary and self-destructive in real life, but it can be exciting within the safety of fiction, where the scenario is consequence-free and the audience has the freedom to back out at any point at will. Furthermore, roleplaying distressful scenarios like arguments (or in some cases even abuse) can be cathartic, and a way to alleviate anxieties over the possibility of being in those situations. By experiencing those scenarios within the safety of point-of-view fiction, the audience feels like they could face them head-on and survive them, rather than simply stewing in vague, shapeless anxiety over potentially finding oneself in that situation.

Myth: Parasocial relationships are inherently pathological and delusional, and roleplay audios create especially parasocial and uniquely destructive parasocial bonds. Fact: Parasocial relationships are normal, typically harmless, and even comforting. They are simply your brain sensing familiarity with someone you aren't actually familiar with. Almost everyone can rationally understand that they aren't really friends with someone who doesn't know them and aren't negatively affected by that subconscious sense of familiarity. The word "parasocial" is not included in the name of any mental diagnosis in both the DSM-5 and ICD-11, though people act like it is. Parasocial feelings can be unhealthy if they present as obsession, delusions of emotional reciprocation, and other destructive and self-destructive behavior. There actually has been some research done on this, and unhealthy parasocial relationships almost always present alongside a pre-existing diagnosable (and treatable) disorder**. In these (rare) scenarios the person who is the subject of the parasocial bond is most at risk, not the person feeling it. Furthermore, most incidences of unhealthy parasocial behavior are directed at larger-than-life celebrities in the realm of legacy media (movie stars, famous musicians, etc). There is no evidence that roleplay VAs especially cultivate those unhealthy behaviors other than pure speculation that assumes audiences can't distinguish between a fictional performance and real-life romance.

Myth: Audios are inherently plotless, low-brow, disposable wish-fulfillment entertainment for self-indulgent audiences with no artistic value. Fact: Audios are a unique storytelling artform that engages the imagination in a unique way that other forms of storytelling do not. They can and do have complex stories and character arcs, and continue to become more ambitious and complex as the medium grows and evolves. Both the audiences and creators are aware of its artistic potential and value it for that.

*I make highly plot-driven audio roleplays, with a primarily female audience. My audience analytic data may not be representative of audios in the style of boyfriend roleplays with lighter plots and more emphasis on roleplaying comfort, intimacy, etc. There may also be different age demographic data for VAs with a primarily male audience.

Anyway, hi, if you're scrolling through the reblogs and reading this I am Escaped Audios. I make Cinematic Audio Roleplays. If you don't know what that is, imagine Boyfriend ASMR but instead of ASMR there's a more complex plot and a big collaborative cast and immersive sound design.

Give audio roleplays a try! I promise you there's more to them than you probably think! Listen to my audios! Here's my completed series playlist, pick anyone that fits your vibe!

I can do worse.

Like Darlin' singlehandedly took on not one but two vamps and came out with their life in tact. They survived Quinn for fucks sake. Lovely stunned Adam with newly awakened magic enough to alert their location to Vincent.

Those two, even though they're not technically associated with the house anymore, know how to take Vamps down. They know what it's like to be associated with vamps and risk themselves because of it.