people being weirded out about the cast interacting with fans on social media have not lived through literally live tweeting appointment tv episodes of your favorite show. the cast of our fav show coming online, spending time with us, talking to us in DMs and having whole ass conversations in the replies, liking and retweeting our fanart, we lived for those times. and some of these actors still know our names today, many years later.
live tweeting with a cast was a whole culture when episodes used to air on a weekly schedule. the actors promised us they would spend time with us. they told us when to be there. they apologized if they couldn't make it. y'all would not have survived it if you get pissy now over some DMs to a fan or an interview with a fan account.
pull that fucking stick out of your ass. actors are people too. they're not your dance monkeys that you get to put on tv for your entertainment and then put them back in a box when you don't need them anymore. these actors are people too. they have every right to be online too. they have every right to interact with fans as long as everything stays appropriate, which it has. they have every right to handle their own accounts as they see fit, that includes blocking people who piss them off, or putting their accounts on private.
you as a fandom collective don't own the internet space. you don't get to decide for everyone who gets to be here or not. and there is nothing you can do about it. I've said it before on a different topic and I'm saying it again: this is one big sandbox and there is room for everyone. if everyone stays civil, that is. if you need to shame people for doing something that makes you uncomfortable, it is your responsibility to remove yourself from the situation and not removing the situation altogether. you don't get to police an entire social media platform. any platform.
also on that note, I've seen thousands of interviews from all different kinds of actors and one thing they usually all have in common is that they say the fun thing about social media is the immediate response. theater actors get instant feedback on their performances, they have the audience's reaction right in front of them. they have the applause and the cheering or the negative reactions. either way, they have immediate feedback. on a tv/movie set that is a very different thing. these people could be putting on the performance of their lives, their magnum opus, and the audience won't see it until months, sometimes years, later. and even then the actors still don't know if and how people liked it. social media gives them that. viewers are communicating how they liked something. actors get their feedback from spaces like this. and none of you gets to decide who gets to be there or not. if you can't handle that, it is time to remove yourself from the situation. because that is your problem. no one else's.
