In my restless dreams, I am haunted by visions of Pedro Pascal. I have seen his lop-sided grin, menacingly permanent, mocking me as he stabs me in my stomach while I sleep; I see him in apparitions through every waking moment, waiting to jump me around every dark corner. Last night, as I lay on top of my covers in the pitch-black, I could still see him standing outside of my window. I could not make out his mumbling, but I could tell from his cadence and the shadow of his stupid shrug that it was some corny, self-effacing joke, followed by some variation of ‘gay rights.’ I am terrified for my life.
 I do not know who Pedro Pascal is. As with most things, he seems to have been conjured into existence by the manifestations of strange online people — I believe he was in something called The Last of Us, but I have been exceptionally busy partying and brushing my beautiful hair, so I cannot confirm what the hell that is. (Further research has informed me that he was also in Game of Thrones. I don’t really give a fuck about that either.) I do know that, since whatever Satanic sacrifice called him to this dimension, his presence has been inescapable. He is ubiquitous, a force through all of time and space, and we are all unwitting participants in his monopolisation of the zeitgeist. I have absorbed enough information about him through osmosis to construct a character profile for the spectre in my head. Pedro Pascal is kind; Pedro Pascal is a competent actor; Pedro Pascal is a quirked-up shawty; Pedro Pascal is babygirl; Pedro Pascal is daddy; Pedro Pascal is a gay icon; Pedro Pascal has a sort of gay vibe probably; and most importantly, Pedro Pascal is hot. He is the Helen of Hollywood, the face that launched a thousand twitter threads, and everybody is now obsessed with posturing themselves as Somebody Who Would Fuck Pedro Pascal.Â
When I was 14, I was ousted from my niche Tumblr community in the Glee fandom because I dared to say something deeply controversial; I did not get the Benedict Cumberbatch hype. The girl who took personal issue with this statement saw him as something of a ‘comfort character’, but she was also obsessed with bloodplay and paleness, so I guess his whole thing makes sense contextually. The British had a strange hold over the maladaptive teenager during this era. I was unnerved; I am not looks-ist, by any means, and it would be hypocritical of me to even try — but I could not fathom why there seemed to be this widespread cultural machine hellbent on proving his attractiveness. There was an entire SNL skit dedicated to the premise of women being turned-on by just the sound of his voice. I felt like I was in 1984.Â
What I hypothesise now is that this phenomenon occurs as a strange form of community-building: this type of quirky male hotness seems to foster a solidarity between Individuals Who Want to Fuck Benedict Cumberbatch. The identity alone seems to symbolise a set of truths about one’s character. It indicates the type of media you like to consume, your lack of superficiality when determining male attractiveness and the corresponding virtue that comes with being into The Quirky Guy, and your tendency towards championing the unproblematic ‘good men’. Both Cumberbatch and Pascal feel to me like incarnations of this same virtuous babygirl/fuckable Daddy cycle, where a man’s moral virtue and unassuming likeability are placed on a pedestal, and his raw sexual appeal is therefore okay to publicly lust after. We have also seen countless instances in which this archetype has been disproven — I would say Steven Yeun occupied a similar place in the culture, and the recent controversies surrounding Beef have led countless fans to throw their hands to God and cry ‘are there no good men left?’Â
In the age of online parasociality and ‘men bad’ liberal feminism, we have formed a curious byproduct in this need to attach ourselves to famous men who have not transgressed or failed us in the way so many others have. We have no intimate knowledge of their private lives or beliefs, and this makes it all the easier to idealise them. The babygirlification of the Male Celebrity is possible because we can imagine narratives to fill in the distance between us. When we talk about decentring men from our lives to vanquish the patriarchy within us, the conversation is often perverted into this sentiment of ‘all men are bad, except for the few I have determined are unequivocally good.’ I wonder if it would be more conducive to accept that all men are just some guy: capable of kindness, talent, even attractiveness, while also having the capacity to err and harm. Perhaps the Pedro Pascal battalion and its contemporaries would do well to see their distance from celebrity as a necessary boundary, as opposed to a nullity they can replace by dreaming up fantasies to project onto him.Â
There is a deep-state cabal at work here, attempting to convert me to the groupthink of People Who Need To Fuck Pedro Pascal. They recently released a still from that gay cowboy drama he’s doing with Ethan Hawke. Everything about it feels like a marketing strategist went through the most popular Letterboxd commenters and designed a psychic weapon to disarm and satiate the masses. We are in a moment of peak cultural saturation, with its inescapable cliff just within eyeshot. But I survived the great Benedict Cumerbatch War of the early 2010s, and my antibodies have made me impervious to the witchcraft of the Random Guy Generator. Some could make the argument that it is not that serious and maybe I would get it if I just watched something he was in, but I cannot agree with that in good conscience, because I like everything good before you guys even hear about it. There is no way he could have avoided my discerning gaze for so long, unless there was something wicked in his ways. Others could even argue that I have engaged in my own sort of babygirlification through the Motherification of random female celebrities, but my version of Mother-brain accepts the cruelties and failings that come with motherhood, and I seek only to acknowledge her power and cuntiness — I make no judgments or preconceptions of one’s character. Babygirlification is distinct in its requirement of virtue from a perfect stranger, and its inevitable collapse when this goes unsatisfied. What follows is that, really, the problem lies not within Pascal himself. I am sure that he’s perfectly lovely and talented, and probably attractive to many, and really just some guy—but rather, it is this infantilised and objectified beast that has taken his likeness and disseminated itself into the fabric of our culture. This is the animal that seeks to hunt me down, and the same one that I will vanquish with my own hands.