I watched an interview with a screen actor once, talking about playing a stage villain and the vibe of negativity that can be felt coming from an audience. they related a story of another actor playing Iago in Othello in a production in Texas, when this guy stood up in the audience, pulled out a gun, and shot them.

the wound was not life threatening and the shooter was clearly disturbed, but the actor who was shot admitted later that it was the most flattering personal review of his talent that he ever received.

There are many, many videos of people trying out VR for the first time and having very visceral reactions to scary scenarios like zombies or walking on a plank 30 stories up in the air. They know it's not real when they put on the headset, but there is a technical threshold upon which the brain unconsciously registers incoming visual information as "real". This is called Presence and it's what makes VR so interesting, and potentially powerful. Over time, other areas of your brain override the physical behavior one might exhibit reflexively in those scenarios, but your heart rate, pupil dilation, and galvanic skin response will still betray the fact that your body is unconsciously responding to a scenario you consciously know is not real.

When you watch a movie/show and are having emotional responses to images on a screen, your unconscious is still doing the same thing. Despite television not reaching the threshold necessary for Presence that VR accomplishes, in many ways it still is working on your unconscious mind as if you're looking through a window. The temperance you exhibit in controlling these behavior is not an automatic indicator of "Free Will", but years of learned behavior internally competing with your reflexive behaviors.

We can keep working this concept backwards from video, to audio, to books, to still images, and statues. The entire concept of fandom, cosplay, etc, is merely a socially accepted compromise for people working through their internalization of art that has had an involuntary emotional impact on them.

As we become encouraged more and more by society to be more selfish, more reactive is it any wonder then that there are people in this world who lose that battle of temperance and attack the focus of their emotional responses?

Thank you for coming to my Ted talk.

The Skyler White thing is just completely based on misogyny, the whole time Skyler was trying to save her husband from being an absolute piece of shit and killing himself and possibly even his whole family in the process. Men see past all that and go "aaah woman annoying, probably on her period the whole time "

People (often bourgeois people in this case) want an escape from the troubles of the real world, so they lose themselves in art. When that art reminds them of the real world, they get pissed off.

It happened to me at the beginning of covid. I got really into Babylon Berlin. Then, spoiler, one of the main characters died. I had developed a parasocial relationship with this character, so I was shocked and devastated. I didn’t realize how attached I was until it happened. Then, one or two episodes later, they managed to bring the character back to life.

This might explain why blatantly communist art isn’t that popular and why g*mers have meltdowns over pronouns, women, and the existence of Black people. Bourgeois people want an escape from the teeming masses who are defeating them everywhere. So they lose themselves in art (and are often the only ones with the time and money to enjoy it). They don’t want a reminder in that art of how their time is running out.

I remember the director's commentary on The Wire mentioning that some of the local actors they'd hired got shit in the local scene for things their characters did, so that's another example of it.

People watch House of the Dragon?

Nah, this is absolutely not anything new at all. I've heard of this phenomenon happening to every actor who has ever played a cartoonishly evil antagonist in Brazilian novelas for as long as I've been alive. A lot of people simply don't have much media literacy and cannot establish this layer of separation between actor and character. I suppose what's different today is that people feel more comfortably being vocal about their shitty opinions and harassing innocent people online.

If you've ever played D&D you know that being unable to separate the actions of a character from the person portraying that character is a disease afflicting the brains of, like, most Americans at least

the kid who played young Anakin being harassed by Star Wars fans

Jake Lloyd. Yeah, his story is fucked up. He was harassed but his mother says he was largely protected from that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jake_Lloyd#Personal_life

https://archive.today/20240313020501/https://scrippsnews.com/stories/the-real-life-saga-of-star-wars-child-actor-jake-lloyd/

I think they also harassed Steve Blum for some of his performances. Lena Heady too for her portrayal of Cersei, and Jack Gleeson for his portrayal of Joffrey.

I think it's two things:

1. Most people feel some degree of emotion when consuming fiction. I'm weird in that I feel mostly nothing when consuming fiction. For me anyways, it really just boils down to "this is all make believe lmao." I know people who are in the opposite spectrum, people who start crying when their favorite character dies.

2. People in the US at least have been groomed to approach fiction through literalism. By this, I mean how many times have you hear about wanting to create an immersive^TM experience, especially when it comes to movies or videogames? By crafting an immersive^TM experience, you're basically trying to blur the line between reality and fiction, and since the real world is a material world that we understand with our five senses, the fictional world is also a material world that we understand with our five senses. You're no longer sitting on your ass watching a medieval battle take place within a computer monitor but instead are inside that medieval world. When the cunning regent defeats the failson heir apparent in battle, it's just some older dude owning a younger dude and not the director and writers trying to express a broader thematic point. The regent doesn't represent ambition and vision, and the heir apparent doesn't represent the ancien regime that had outstayed its welcome. The regent doesn't represent the parts of medieval society that are unsatisfied with the status quo, and the heir apparent doesn't represent the conservative parts of medieval society that want to uphold the status quo. No, it's just an older dude randomly owning a younger dude in combat because that's how your five senses understand what's going on. But this is not the only way to approach fiction. You could approach fiction through a craftmanship lens, and appreciate fiction based on how well-crafted it is. You could approach fiction through an allegorical lens and see characters as avatars of more general concepts. You could approach fiction through a biographical lens in the sense that fiction is a means for the artist to communicate about themselves to the world (this unfortunately has led to parasocial obsession and stan behavior, so I guess not the best example). You could approach fiction through a political lens and judge fiction based on how well it serves a particular political goal.

With 1 and 2, if some actor plays an asshole character, it's harder for someone to emotionally check themselves and say, "This is make-believe. Why am I getting mad at some stranger pretending to be a fictional character who doesn't exist in real life? The character is an asshole because the director wanted the asshole character to be a stand-in for every single unhinged techbro who owns a Cybertruck, and the director doesn't like techbros because they are a socialist who thinks techbros need to be send down the countryside and contribute to society for once in their worthless lives."

Billy D Williams had to justify Lando's actions to fans for the longest time

Stalin sent trotsky hatemail written on an nkvd icepick when he took the villain thing a little too far

🥶

"My best guess is that people with very little emotional intelligence have emotions over the media they consume and need to let it out on someone as an outlet? Combined with just, poor education leading to poor media literacy?"

This and a literal million other things. These shows are seen by millions of people. It would be interesting to do a study (google prolly knows) on the reason people felt compelled to engage in that behavior.

I think it depends. In the case of this Game of Thrones example - those people commenting strike me as having an awareness that it's a character. One person even addresses his character rather than him. Though he might be taking it to be harassing, I think it's an expression of what you'd call 'heat' in pro-wrestling. It's good for business. They're recognising his character work (and the writing of the show). I don't think any of those people mean what they say harmfully. I think it's all quite tongue in cheek.

I think your other examples are just willful ignorance in the pursuit of personal catharsis. G*mers are savvy enough to know that Rose is acting for Rian Johnson, who is directing for Kathleen Kennedy, who is owned by Disney. They just want a place to displace their anger (and like you say feel powerful in relative anonymity behind a screen). They're weird nerds looking to vent misogyny in defense of their obsession with either star wars or the culture wars in general. It's pure anger and hatred. It's especially prevalent in a world where the peoples power has been reduced, and where most interactions for a lot of people happen online.