by right of the alcynes

He did a wonderful job, but as he was returning my plant to my custody, he explained "I watered her every other day, I gave her new dirt, moved her into the sunshine, prayed the rosary-"

"What?"

He looked at me, confused. "Isn't she a plant you pray with?"

"No," I said slowly. "She's a prayer plant. That's the... colloquial name of the plant."

Upon seeing his stricken face, I realized something went wrong. Turns out, this entire time, he's been including my plant in on his prayers and leaving her near icons.

It started out (at least on a large, mainstream scale, it actually predates this) because people started sending death threats to the wives of actors from shows like Supernatural and Sherlock because said wives were "in the way of the actors true love" and/or "were beards preventing their husbands from being together" and shit like that. People even threatened their kids.

Martin Freeman also received death threats when he said that the pressure coming from Johnlock fans to make the relationship canon was making the show less fun to work on because it was impacting the narrative so significantly.

Also for a while there people kept bringing erotica to cons and giving it to the actors featured. This is still a thing but you hear about it less. And there was the Sherlock Fan Fic Incident where a reporter moderating an early screening of an episode made the actors read out loud from someone's erotic fanfic. It wasn't rpf, but it triggered a lot of conversations about the line between character and real person and how fanfic should be used in general.

And TBC, it wasn't just Sherlock and Supernatural. They were just two of the biggest. And part of the problem, too, is that some celebrities have asked fans to stop writing rpf about them and the fans still do. So there was already this idea that rpf writers don't care about boundaries and every writer who continues to write about people who have asked them to stop reinforces that.

So people started being like "hey write what you want but stop giving it to them/sending it to them/expecting them to comment/expecting it to be real/threatening their families." Which was always the social expectation of rpf: you don't give it to the people it's about.

That was the part that made it a "parasocial" issue. It was the writers and readers who thought their fictional stories were more true and more accurately reflected the true desires of the actor than reality did. And calling it out for what it was was primarily people trying to discourage toxic parasocial relationships and a possible outcome (believing the fic was true) of those relationships. Most people still didn't give a fuck about writing rpf if you were normal about it.

But this was at the height of Tumblr's "everything is either pure and good or else Problematic™" phase, so you couldn't have a nuanced stance like "rpf is okay but doing X with it is not" so over time the term got applied to all rpf, even tho the stance "don't write rpf because it's disrespectful/the celebrities didn't consent" doesn't actually inherently have anything to do with parasocial relationships.