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#im actually just ranting here bc it feels more private than twt
gnflorida · 3 years
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im kinda curious about how benji making an account resulted in him manipulating fans if you'd like to explain a little more :)
cause i get how that would be bad for both sides. i've seen so many people just using that accs dms as therapy session which is,,,not good imo. so yeah thoughts?
sure anon! i’m gonna put this under a cut bc it ended up being pretty long. but here’s my ramble on that little case study, and the danger of parasocial relationships in general:
tw // mention of grooming and sexual harassment (not with a fan but just as a point of discussion)
so we have benji krol and jorge garay. maybe you know them from being kinda relevant on tiktok like a year and a half ago, maybe you remember the accusations that practically ended both of their careers. i’m exposing myself heavy here, but i used to run a stan acct on twitter for them. i know it’s embarassing! i regret it too! typing their names still kinda makes me sick tbh! but i used to see a lot of myself in them, and the community was fun, and it was nice to see what i thought was a healthy queer relationship. we move on.
benji had a very close relationship with his stans, especially after quarantine started. he had multiple private/secret twitter accounts where he would take a very active role in the fandom. he’d spend so long on those accounts, to the point where there were times where we would tell him not to use them (and that in and of itself is very showing of what our dynamic with him was like). he would reply and talk to a lot of ppl on stan twt, myself included, but there was a small groupchat of about a dozen people that he talked to very regularly. he would tell them things that were meant to be kept secret even from other stans, and in some cases things that we know for certain he didn’t even tell some of his closest friends.
because they were so close with benji, these stans obviously got a lot of clout within the fandom (as they should have too! they were mostly all rly nice, i’m still moots w a few). but what was going essentially unnoticed there was just how much manipulation was occurring. i honestly don’t believe it was even fully intentional on benji’s part. but over the course of more than a year he manipulated them into defending him against almost every negative accusation he faced. these people would have screenshots and receipts from him personally, ready to pull him out of all potential drama or criticism. and he did this by presenting their relationship as a mutual friendship, as if there wasn’t a blatant and vast imbalance of power.
and then one day last august, the allegations came out. jorge, who was 18, was accused of grooming another influencer who was 15 at the time, and benji was accused of enabling and even contributing to the grooming. over the course of the following days and weeks, as it became apparent that these alleged events did actually happen, the fandom was forced to collectively reevaluate the things that had been going on for over a year, and how we had all ended up in a situation where we unknowingly supported those people. since then, various other information has surfaced that implies that benji himself was somewhat unaware of what was happening. you can watch his yt vdeo if you’re interested in hearing his defense, and the reason he’s not canceled off the face of the earth like jorge is. but the degree to which he may or may not be innocent is not really my focus here.
i cannot begin to express the shock of spending so long idolizing someone, genuinely learning a lot about who they are, only to have something so significant and disgusting revealed about them like that. everyone in the fandom kind of compared receipts and took an outside look at what had been happening and realized just how harmful the close relationship with benji had been. to quote one of my rant tweets from august 22nd: “i just feel so stupid because i would always say ‘we shouldn’t act like we really know them’ and. here i am sobbing anyways bc i still put too much trust in these people who are rly just fucking strangers”. and there were several dozens of people that were much closer to him and much more personally affected than me. plus hundreds of others that were involved in the fandom.
and that brings me into my main point here. this is a firsthand account of a very extreme example of manipulation within a parasocial relationship. i think benji did genuinely care about his fans, even if it was in a very self-indulgent and egotistical manner. but caring about your fans does not do anything to negate the harm that is done by manipulating your relationship with them.
it’s not that a fan doesn’t know what a given content creator is really like, because a lot of them do present their honestly selves to a considerable degree. it’s that there is no way to know what things you don’t know about a CC. no way to tell what will surface tomorrow and completely change your entire perception of them. and no way to interact with them on equal grounds. and because of this, i am extremely wary of any CC who presents their relationship with their fans as one of friendship, especially when a large amount of those fans are minors. it’s not inherently wrong persay, but it’s more dangerous than i think a lot of fans or CCs realize.
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