august 26 dot

Yayoi Kusama (August 14) Hayden Panettiere (August 16) Dolly Parton (August 25) Tim Curry (August 25) For the most part, people's public reactions to famous artists dying are not rooted in their actual, literal relationships with the artists —— they're rooted in relationships with the work of those artists. I love this. I love that although this timeline is endlessly stupid and pointlessly cruel, we still have the power (and the agency!) to clock out for a bit and be humans feeling things together. Fandom often gets reduced to parasociality, which is a shame, because while a lot of contemporary fandom is almost necessarily parasocial (cough, cough, social media ruined the world), I've always believed that at its purest and most real, fandom is a public declaration of love. All of this is to say that if someone makes you feel stupid for mourning Dolly Parton (or Tim Curry, or Yayoi Kusama, or Hayden Panettiere, or whoever else, you should resist the urge to say something sharp (or…