There's a reason I keep my opinions to only about fictional characters

It has to do with the fact that what one sees in the media about a fictional character is what there is to a character and what one sees in the media about an actor or artist is what the media wants us to believe about that particular person.
I’m putting in a page-break because I doubt anyone wants to see me up on my soap box. I’m hoping that at least a few people will take a moment to at least skim through a paragraph or two.
A lot of people like to pretend or are possibly ignorant to the fact that “celebrities” (for lack of a better word) are defenseless to the slander painted against them no matter what Congress has to say to that. Just because these people’s professions put them in the lime light does not mean they asked to be called a slut or anorexic or an addict. It seems to me as if people forget that Lohan, Winehouse, Bush, Parker, even Stewart are people. They have (or had in the recently deceased Winehouse’s case) feelings and lives, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers and other people they care for. All of these stories about slutting around town, shooting up, raging incompetence, and lack of a soul are hurtful.
I honestly can’t believe in an age where we en mass cry out against cyber bullying and rage against terrorists that we can support or condone what the current day media do. I just wished that once people would really, really put themselves in those “infamous” celebrities positions and actually think about how it would feel to be nominated for “Villain of the Year” and win “Worst Dressed Performer” or third worst dressed British Woman. I want people to take a moment and think of how they would feel, honestly feel to be ranked number two on Richard Blackwell’s 48th annual “Ten Worst Dressed Women” list.
Take a moment and think about how your parents, siblings, grandparents, or whomever you call your loved ones would feel about hearing stories of you doing smack from People Magazine or having an affair from the evening news. Imagine everyone who you care what they think of you finding out about a completely fictitious evil that you purportedly did and never looking at you the same way. Imagine the stress and shame at not being able to defend yourself, lest you turn into another “Charlie Sheen” or “Bill Clinton”.
Take a moment to think about people using your name as a slang way to refer to the most horrifically embarrassing and stressful moment in your life so far.
How fun does that sound?
Do you think you asked for it?
Do you think you deserve it for being a smacked out anorexic whore?
How much do you think these perfectly normal and privacy wanting people deserve it?
And on to a lower level of this gigantic one woman soap box comes something else I wonder rather a lot. I always sort of feel hot under my cheeks and embarrassed when I look up in the grocery store and am greeted with somebody else’s private life that it makes me wonder how people can enjoy prying into someone else’s life like that. It makes me wonder how someone can read about Pitt and Jolie and not feel ashamed at being entertained by someone else’s traumatic love life. I’m wondering how many people would truly revel in knowing that out there are people snickering and pointing at their picture and talking about how their relationships are falling apart.
Maybe this stems from my utter lack of curiosity about a celebrity’s private life. To me all that matters is their professional front. I want to know what movies they’ve been in, where they studied their art, what awards they’ve won… Things pertaining to their career. I don’t care who they marry or how much they weigh or what they do at clubs because that’s their business and not mine, thanks.
Which brings me back to my original point. I’ll talk all day and night long about fictional characters. I’ll holler about Sherlock’s asexuality or Blake’s whorishness because they’re not real. At the end of it I can point to passages or scripts and point and define and explicate from there because that material has been put down so that I could. I can point out out-of-characterness if someone says Sherlock would tip tap in pink dance shoes and lay a smooch on Moriarty’s naughty bits because I have diction and history and that entire character laid out before me. Fictional characters are there to be dissected and fought over. They are there so that I can. I can’t hurt their feelings or make their mama’s cry because their mamas are made of paper and ink and a suspension in disbelief.
Actors are mediums to a fictional character; they give shape and sound to a nebulous idea and create a solid organ that we can conceive but they are not ours to dissect or deconstruct. Actors are people who are generous enough to lend us their bodies and skill so that we can distill our imaginations. Yes, some are better than others at it and some of them don’t have their life all that well together but that doesn’t give us the right to turn our noses up at our fellow humans and ignore the fact that they feel and that they can see our disgust.
That’s the difference between a character and an actor, really, right there. Characters don’t know we exist. They can’t. They’re not real. Some creative man or woman or many men and women sat down and dreamt them up. They are fake; make-believe. But actors aren’t. They are flesh and heart and dreams and hopes and families and histories and laughs and hands that reach out into the night to hold our empty palms because they are human also and because they know; they understand and want to give us a brief reprieve from the isolation that is so intrinsic to the human condition. And to touch us and give us this break from reality they put on ways and means and wigs and make up and stand under lights and call out words that aren’t theirs and pretend with all their might to be this make-believe person so that we can pretend to know this make-believe person and find company in their stories.
So how can we hate them for lies and gossip when they do so much for us? How can we not thank them (of course, from a healthy distance) for all that they do for us? How can we not respect their humanity and give them the respect and privacy that we find such a self-evident right?