Inspired by this article.
It’s been over a decade since The Office ended. Cast member John Krasinski has been married to Emily Blunt for thirteen years. The relationship between John’s character Jim and Pam, the character played by Jenna Fischer, was entirely fictional.
Yet both Fischer and Blunt report fan interactions, continuing to the present day, in which people complain that Blunt is not “Pam” and yell at them that he’s with the wrong woman. Fischer says people “don’t know how” she and John aren’t a real-life couple: “They don’t understand it.”
How is it that anyone can still be this dumb?
I get that some nonzero proportion of this is tongue-in-cheek, the same kind of impulse behind the dumb joke when you see a co-worker temporarily sitting at someone else’s desk and say “you don’t look like X, har har.” I also get that old-fashioned studio marketing from a few decades ago would manufacture stories about romance between co-stars for purposes of movie and talent promotion (and also to distract from and conceal rumors of closeted actors, among other potential scandals), so there’s an appetite for these relationships when they actually happen.
But when it’s not real? When there is ample and long-standing publicity about the two actors being nothing more than friends, that they’ve never been anything but friends, and not only that but the male actor’s wife is also friends with the female actor, and there’s nothing more going on? How willfully ignorant do you have to be to insist that the fictional relationship in the story you watched has any kind of real-world meaning, in the face of concrete evidence to the contrary?
I legitimately don’t understand this mindset. Can anyone explain it?
