>>1180062>>1180510A variety of social media figures, such as Markiplier, appear to have both a personal character and a specific type of voice plus appearance that conveys a general sense of warmth. And this portrays something comfortable psychologically in a way that feels sincere.
I suppose this means that we can think of their career popularity as highly similar to TV and film personalities of the pre-internet-age.
You can call these relationships "parasocial", in a way, but I think there's a distinction in that somebody like Markiplier is an actually intelligent and reflective person to where there isn't any made-up persona anywhere. Not really. So, if you met him in person, and he (or you) wanted to talk about the history of Pokemon or something random... why not? A psychologist would call this "agreeableness" and "openness" in terms of the "big five personality traits".
This interview is interesting in that I think you probably could line both Letterman and Rogers alongside Markiplier up as all being basically "sheep in sheep's clothing" and having close relationships with fans/supporters/whatever based on that.
A tl ; dr of what I just said would be that like you could probably cut social media figures in two, from those with a parasocial kind of thing going on (like the OP character who's literally meant to be this fox hybrid type creature that's goofy yet sexual) where what's seen online is a "front" versus those with "no front" / "what you see is what you get": a great test being the question "Would you still like them if they were on normie TV shows doing normie things?"
