a disaster, a knee jerk reaction

i am mostly preaching to the choir here, as i have cultivated my own smaller circle of like-minded people, but assuming i have any reach whatsoever, that whoever might be reading this is new to fandom in general, new to hockey specifically, or maybe this is your first (or just most intense) rpf ship; please, please understand rpf is short for real person fiction. it is SO much fun treating public figures like a text we can analyze, building up characterization notes and headcanons, losing our collective minds at the things they do. and willmack specifically do some crazy shit!

but we can never forget that foundational pillar: our interpretations are fiction. we do not have any personal insight into what they are truly thinking or feeling. when we start to think that we do, that is when things get dangerous. that is when people start to get parasocial to a toxic degree, start to interpret things as "signs" from the objects of rpf, start to create these echo chambers where logic no longer exists. it eventually breeds harassment when one or both ship members stop following the "script," which destroys their private life (or god forbid, the life of their future partner). this happened in 1D fandom (and others too i know; i'm just speaking from my particular experience) and the real life friendship it impacted has never been the same to this day.