An email that was in my masqthephlsphr inbox this morning. It’s bad enough this person seems to believe buffy and angel are real people. But why would s/he think they’d hang out at my website?
“heyy!!
buffy u are a role model to me.
i look up tou in many different ways.
by the way i hopeur not going out with angel because hes cute!! if u no what i mean.
if u could tell him that and heres my email [removed]
will u and angel email , i would appreciate if u and angel could email , so please try to and i have to go so get back to ya
ur friend,
Jessica”
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Published by Nancy E. Shaffer
NANCY E. SHAFFER has been an experimental psychologist (M.A., Cognitive Psychology, Rice University), a philosopher (Ph.D., History and Philosophy of Science, University of California, Davis), and software developer. She taught history and philosophy of science at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec and the University of Nebraska Omaha.
Her philosophical work has appeared in the journal Philosophy of Science and her pop-culture philosophy website, All Things Philosophical on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel: the Series.
Dis/inhbition is her first novel.
She currently resides in Tempe, Arizona.
View all posts by Nancy E. Shaffer
Author Nancy E. Shaffer 
Oh my…
I thought Connor lived at your site, but I had no idea that Buffy and Angel did. It’s not like they can read two-syllable words or…oh, wait, you’re an Angel fan too. Oops. I take this back then. Sorry.
Hmmm. Well, you have a few ways of looking at this:
1) Jessica is 8. Old enough to be kinda interested in cute guys (or is this still too young? I can’t remember!), but young enough that she might still think Angel is a real guy she can date. Though what this says about her parents, I don’t know!
2) Jessica is 35. And pulling your leg. Troll?
3) Jessica is 35. And is confused. Which is possible, considering that one poster we had whose name I won’t give here just for privacy’s sake.
I’m leaning towards #2 myself. Though there’s always:
4) Jessica is 14. And really, really dense.
Here’s my reasoning
Given the deliberate misspellings, I’m leaning towards early teen years. Younger kids don’t shorten words like “U” for “you”, etc. Believe it or not, it requires a certain level of linquistic sophistication.
This person is a bit out of touch with reality, like your aforementioned ATPo poster. Possibly for emotional reasons, rather than cognitive.
That is icky-making
Did you block the email address? I would have. Or written back a really snarky reply about fictional characters — but I have painkillers now.
Re: That is icky-making
I assume this is a harmless kid. And it’s certainly not the first e-mail of this type I’ve gotten since I started my website. If they keep writing, I may take some sort of action (likely, blocking their address), but I just erased the email this time.
some people get hostile towards any expression of fandom
I’m thinking “Jessica” writes emails like that to every website she comes to that’s devoted to discussing a t.v. show or fictional character. ie “Only geeks out of touch with reality would spend all day talking about t.v. characters.” Some people just don’t get the existential (thanks to Sol for posting that little lesson, cause I was pretty clueless on the meaning before that), so they either react with a “you discuss a t.v. show??? but it’s not real!” or with a “I bet they discuss it because they think it’s real! What dorks! I think I’ll do an impression of them and their dorkiness in this horridly misspelled email. Oh, I am so witty!”
Re: some people get hostile towards any expression of fandom
That makes more sense than our theories. And is actually kind of reassuring. I’d rather be made fun of by a close-minded sane person than think there are folks out there who DO think it’s real.
Oh, my!
The closest I’ve gotten to a letter like that was when someone wrote my Six Feet Under site, about a year ago, addressing me as “David” and asking why I having so many problems with Keith. And oh, yeah my “sister” Claire is really hot!
Perhaps even more disturbing is that that letter was written with correct grammar and punctuation…so from surface alone, the person should have known better unless he or she (a) really can’t tell the difference between fiction and non-fiction or (b) was messing with me. But from the earnestness of the letter, I kind of lean towards the former.
Re: Oh, my!
Or they simply could have been trying to get their frustrations out.
Folks who don’t hang out with other fans but feel a desire to talk about the show might just send you an email addressed to a character. So it could be somewhere between (a) and (b) where they know the character is fictional, but they just have something to say.
That’s my fan-fanwank