On the second season finale of The Pitt, Dr. Robby (Noah Wyle) painfully articulates the darkness that has been weighing on him for 15 episodes—driving him, at points, to suicidal ideation. “The most important things I’ve ever done in my life have been in this hospital. Nothing will ever matter more than what I’ve done in this hospital. But it is killing me,” he says in confidence to Dr. Abbot (Shawn Hatosy). “You know how they say a part of you dies when you lose someone you love? I’m not convinced that a part of you doesn’t die every time you see a fellow human pass, and I’ve seen so many people die that I feel like it’s leeching something from my soul.”

The speech—a mix of raw emotion and restraint superbly delivered by Wyle—effectively explains why Dr. Robby has been a bit off his game the whole season. But there’s a good chance his explanation will fall on deaf ears. A surprising number of people who used to love HBO Max’s Emmy-winning series now swear it’s “awful”—and, what’s more, that Wyle, its creator and star, is the one to blame.

In isolation, a fanbase turning on something they once loved wouldn’t be particularly notable; ultimately, that’s their prerogative. But The Pitt’s woes are part of a larger wave sweeping fandoms across many mediums and genres, in which relationships that used to be pleasantly parasocial have become borderline disturbing. This is a problem that music fans are well acquainted with; there’s a specific term for diehard fans, ”Stans,” that comes from an Eminem hit about a guy whose obsessive love for Slim Shady drives him to a murder-suicide. Certain stans have earned a reputation for cyber aggression—see: the Swifties and the Barbz.

But now this unbridled intensity is bleeding into other areas of culture, with alarming results. What’s more, the proliferation of gossip handles like Deux Moi and fan accounts like ClubChalamet mean that doubling down on a parasocial fixation can be a legitimate career path, and a profitable one at that. It doesn’t help that the line between reality and fiction on the internet is becoming increasingly blurred: Is this video I’m watching real or AI? Is ChatGPT my friend? It’s easy to feel like nothing online is real—or, conversely, that it’s all too real.

In the recent past, the teams behind television shows across genres—from the reality competition show The Traitors to the YA romcom The Summer I Turned Pretty—have had to issue statements pleading with fans to stop cyberbullying and harassing contestants and actors. “The show isn’t real but the people playing the characters are,” posted the official The Summer I Turned Pretty TikTok account in a caption accompanying a video graphic that read: “The Summer We Started Acting Normal Online.” Yes, it’s fun to choose sides in a fictional romantic triangle—I’m still #TeamJacob, by the way. But when the real actors involved start to feel uncomfortable, or worse, unsafe, it’s time, respectfully, to take a chill pill.

Then there’s the boy who can’t go to prom. Last week, 17-year-old Percy Jackson star Walker Scobell said on his Instagram story that he has to sit out this rite of passage because his fans have threatened to kill every girl he might want to bring as a date. “Please stop sending death threats to EVERY teenage girl who could remotely be associated with me based on their proximity to where I live,” he wrote in a now expired Instagram Story. “It’s not fair to them or to their families. Maybe also just stop sending death threats in general. That’s just not cool. Kinda weird I have to say this.”