Why are fan constructions of Richard Armitage so vulnerable?

Continued from here.

The fragility of a fandom-based tulpa

I can be whoever you need me to be: Richard Armitage from photoshoot video made for Esquire UK. Screencap.

One aspect of fandom that makes it particularly friendly or perhaps even prone to tulpa construction, I would argue, is similar to the reason that series tv and movies are friendly to fanfic — it’s because the building blocks are there and ready, created by an industry that itself manipulates them for our delectation. In fanfic, the would-be author can practice what it would be like to write a story from beginning to end, using characters and themes already in place; in fandom, the fan can use the pieces of an admired personality as put together in the media and other sources to build a helpful projection of the crush based on her needs. One doesn’t need to expend the effort to create this projection from the ground up — one can find a plausible projection that is already half built in that it has been constituted by a real person and an industry that also both engages in constructing him and encourages us to do so — to apply our own fantasies to the crush. In that sense, someone like Armitage, about whom many questions remain unanswered, can be an ideal tulpa simply because a lot of things can be projected onto the screen that he provides. A problem then arises when the person who gave rise to the tulpa for the fan does something that draws into question the accuracy of the fan’s tulpa. Thus the very attractiveness and approachability of the celebrity (or we can even extend this to the characters he plays) as tulpa is the same thing that makes a celebrity-based tulpa vulnerable. When I’m writing a character in a book (thought by some to be another parallel to the tulpa), I can always assert inviolably that I know that character better than anyone else; the character is not typically vulnerable to explosion from within, or at least not to anything that would surprise me. In contrast, the celebrity tulpa is always vulnerable and constantly in need of defense precisely because my tulpa can be decisively overridden and made null and void with a single remark in an interview.

Or I can be this person: Richard Armitage, from Hobbit DVD extras. Screencap.

When such conflicting data arises, fans often start to squabble (or worse), and I’ve long wondered why I or anyone cares enough to argue as opposed to discussing calmly any of the issues that arise: for example, about whether or how much native chest hair Richard Armitage has (a common point of controversy among legacy fans before about 2012), whether he still smokes (an unbelievably explosive topic), who he’s sleeping with, whether he’s had a nose job, if his latest suit was a good fit, or for that matter, anything else about him at all that is either unanswered or open to interpretation. I’m not excluding myself from this phenomenon, because I am not only constantly tempted to argue on the basis of certain kinds of evidence that someone else is constructing Armitage incorrectly — I give in to the temptation much more often than I would like. APM is also but one kind of manifestation of this tendency. I’ve termed this sort of squabble an identity battle, because the centrality of identity was the only thing that explained to me the energy and occasionally the rage with which these battles were conducted, but it still puzzled me. Why is Richard Armitage’s identity, or even my understanding of it, or any detail about him — or, something else I’ve occasionally been involved in, a pitched battle over the interpretation of something one of his characters does — the occasion for such furious disagreement?

My conclusion is that thinking about Armitage as tulpa explains some of this. After thinking about the Richard Armitage tulpa and the roles the version of it that I have play in my own life, I hypothesize that the problem goes back to the structural features of the tulpa. It is a figure that motivates me to do or feel something (in my case, write) that I really want badly, but which I haven’t been able (for whatever reason) to provide for myself. It doesn’t really matter what that motivation is, or why I haven’t been able to put my own purchase on it — fans build all kinds of tulpas for different reasons. Thus, it is central to my identity because it allows me to live out or work in useful ways to a central desire, often, if fan reports are accurate, something that I’d forgotten about or needed to be reawakened and thus I cannot give up easily. So when conflicting information arises and I feel that someone’s saying something wrong, it’s not the real Richard Armitage who’s been challenged or harmed or is in need of protection, although I think I could self-justify it in those terms. But Armitage’s needs in a situation like this, were they even known, would be more or less irrelevant. In these struggles, it’s my tulpa Armitage that’s under siege.

My tulpa Armitage is centrally important to my identity, and must be protected at all costs, because he’s providing me with this thing that I need that I didn’t know how to get before, whatever that thing is. At the same time, he’s doubly vulnerable, both because my own capacity to provide what I desire for myself is somehow damaged, and because he’s vulnerable to implosion from other sources, particularly the real Richard Armitage. The tulpa is vital to my life, but he can be destroyed either by my inability to maintain him, or by the statements of the person or the industry who gives me the very building blocks I need to understand him.

Each of us builds the Richard Armitage tulpas we need

What if you’re not engaged in Armitage-inspired weight loss? I think to some extent, for a lot of superfans, it doesn’t matter, and I think many of us build multiple tulpas at the same time, or build tulpas that meet multiple needs. Those who need fitness inspiration build that version of Armitage. Some of us need a distraction (“fandom as escapism”) so we give our imagined Richard Armitage, or his characters, the power to provide us with that, I hope, as much as possible, without guilt. Some of us need a pretend lover. Some of us need a shoulder to cry on. Some of us — me — need a muse and the re-exposure to a legitimation of the senses. Each of us builds a tulpa around that need.

Next time: my Richard Armitage tulpa.

~ by Servetus on June 3, 2015.