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Every few months the internet seems to decide it needs a new main character.
Sometimes it’s a politician. Sometimes it’s a random person who said something strange in a TikTok comment section. Increasingly, though, it’s actors who have done the terrible crime of… taking a job.
Right now the internet has decided that several people connected to the upcoming adaptation of Heated Rivalry are that main character. Actors Hudson Williams, Connor Storrie, and François Arnaud have all found themselves pulled into a storm of speculation, analysis, and increasingly uncomfortable commentary about their personal lives.
And to be completely honest, I would not blame any of them for eventually turning around and telling fans to fuck off. The way they have been treated over the past few weeks, in particular, has been genuinely grotesque.
Very little of the conversation has anything to do with the work itself.
Instead, it has become another example of a pattern that has been quietly growing online for years: the point where fandom stops being enthusiasm and starts looking a lot like surveillance.
The Illusion of Intimacy
Parasocial relationships are not new. The term was first used by media scholars in the 1950s to describe the strange sense of intimacy audiences can develop with people they only encounter through media.
Watch someone long enough and they begin to feel familiar. Familiarity starts to resemble closeness.
Social media has intensified this dynamic dramatically. Actors now exist within the same digital spaces as their audiences. They post casually, share glimpses of their lives, interact with fans.
The distance between performer and viewer appears to collapse.
But the relationship is still fundamentally one-sided.
Audiences may feel as though they know the people they follow. Those people do not know them in return. When that imbalance gets forgotten, the tone of engagement can change quickly. Interest becomes expectation. Curiosity becomes interrogation.
And at that point, some fans begin to behave as though access to a stranger’s life is something they deserve.
When the Actor Becomes the Character
Actors who take on beloved queer roles often find themselves navigating an especially complicated space. Audiences want authenticity. Studios want visibility. Social media rewards constant interaction. But the performers themselves remain separate from the characters they portray.
Hudson Williams is not Shane Hollander.
Connie Storrie is not Ilya Rozanov.
François Arnaud is not Scott Hunter.
They are actors stepping into fictional lives for a story. Once filming ends, those characters stay on the page or the screen. The actors return to their own lives, with identities, relationships and experiences that exist entirely outside the narrative.
Parasocial fandom often struggles with this boundary. When audiences become deeply invested in a fictional relationship, the emotional intensity of that story can create the expectation that the performers themselves should somehow reflect it.
When that expectation collides with reality, speculation rushes in to fill the gap.
The Demand for Disclosure
One of the more troubling strands in the current conversation is the pressure placed on actors to disclose their sexuality.
The argument often appears framed in the language of authenticity. If someone is playing a queer character, some fans ask, shouldn’t the actor also be queer?
But this logic quietly transforms representation into identity verification.
Acting is the profession of inhabiting lives that are not your own. While conversations about representation in casting are important, the private identities of performers cannot reasonably become matters for public examination.
And yet online discourse repeatedly drifts in that direction. Fans search for interviews, analyse social media activity, and attempt to determine whether an actor has publicly identified as queer. Silence is interpreted as evasion. Privacy becomes suspicious.
At that point the boundary between storytelling and personal identity begins to collapse.
The Lesson We Should Have Learned
The consequences of this dynamic have already been visible.
During the rise of Heartstopper, one of the show’s young stars, Kit Connor, became the subject of relentless speculation about his sexuality. Connor was only eighteen at the time. Parts of the fandom accused him of “queerbaiting” simply for portraying a bisexual character while not publicly identifying as queer himself.
After months of pressure, Connor eventually addressed the situation directly.
In doing so, he confirmed that he was bisexual and added a line that quickly circulated online: “Congrats for forcing an 18 year old to out himself.”
It was a stark reminder of how easily fandom entitlement can cross a line.
Coming out, when it happens, should be a personal decision. When it happens because thousands of strangers have decided they deserve an answer, something has gone badly wrong.
Representation Does Not Require Confession
The desire for meaningful queer representation is understandable. For decades queer characters were marginalised, erased, or forced into narrow stereotypes. Many actors felt pressure to hide parts of their identities in order to sustain a career.
That history still shapes how audiences respond to queer storytelling today. But replacing one form of pressure with another does not solve the problem. Public disclosure cannot become a condition for participating in a role.
No actor owes the internet a statement about their sexuality.
No performer is required to narrate their private life to validate a character.
No individual should feel compelled to define themselves because strangers online have decided they deserve clarity.
Sexuality is personal. For many people it is fluid, evolving, or simply something they prefer not to discuss publicly. Turning that process into fandom discourse is invasive at best.
The Social Media Amplifier
The structure of social media makes all of this worse.
Online platforms reward speculation, speed, and reaction. A single ambiguous interaction can be dissected across hundreds of posts within hours. Screenshots circulate. Theories multiply.
Actors can quickly find themselves at the centre of conversations they never intended to join. Their likes, follows, and comments are treated like clues in an ongoing investigation.
In reality, they are simply professionals doing their jobs within an industry that now expects public visibility as part of promotion.
They are not characters in an unfolding fan narrative.
A Boundary That Should Not Be Difficult
The situation surrounding Heated Rivalry highlights a principle that should not be difficult to maintain.
It is entirely possible to care deeply about a story without feeling entitled to the lives of the people involved in telling it.
Readers can become emotionally attached to characters. Viewers can celebrate the relationships portrayed on screen. That connection is part of what makes storytelling powerful.
But the actors involved remain separate from the narrative.
They are professionals, not extensions of the characters they play.
At Some Point It Needs to Be Said Plainly
At the risk of sounding blunt, a lot of this behaviour is simply strange.
Demanding that actors disclose their sexuality because they are playing queer characters is invasive. Analysing their social media activity like a group investigation is invasive. Treating their private lives as fandom discourse is invasive.
This behaviour is often framed as advocacy. In practice it tends to look much more like parasocial entitlement dressed up in progressive language.
The people involved in these productions are workers in an industry. They are not participants in a public referendum about their identities.
And if someone finds themselves demanding that a stranger prove their sexuality because of a fictional romance they enjoy, it may genuinely be time to close the app and step outside and touch grass.
The internet will survive the break.
The actors would probably appreciate it too.
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