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By TeeJay Small
| Published
If you grew up during the 2000s and 2010s, there’s a good chance you modeled part of your personality on your favorite sitcom characters. Whether you intended to or not, you likely picked up a few phrases and mannerisms from the likes of Michael Scott or Dennis Reynolds, and maybe even internalized some of their silly sitcom logic in your daily decision making. In most cases, this is a perfectly normal psychological phenomenon. Still, media literacy seems to be at an all time low, so there can be strange consequences when the ideals and actions of these fictional characters are applied to real life.
Take Nick Offerman, for example. Offerman famously portrayed the grouchy libertarian Ron Swanson on Parks and Recreation for seven seasons. Over the course of the show, Ron experiences growth and change, and undergoes a transformation from a gruff, government-hating divorcee to a loving husband and father who, well, still hates the government, but enjoys the company of many people elected to public office. For years now, Nick Offerman has been forced to deal with fans who use his likeness as some kind of paragon of hard-right conservatism, even though that has never been what the man or the character stands for.
Offerman outlined his frustration during a recent profile in Variety. While discussing the bizarre discourse surrounding toxic masculinity in recent months, he explained “My masculinity, such as it is, began to get a lot of attention along with everything else about Ron Swanson and Parks and Recreation. It took me by surprise to be part of the conversation, but because a lot of wrongheaded viewers identified incorrectly with Ron.”
One-Dimensional Fans Vs. Three-Dimensional Characters
The Death By Lightning actor went on to articulate “Ron is a smart and avid hunter, so [some viewers] assumed he must be a misogynist. They made a lot of incorrect assumptions, hoping to find an avatar for their ideologies. So that drew me in; I thought, ‘Well, no, if you pay attention, you’ll see that Ron is a feminist … He’s the best man at a gay wedding.’ But it dovetailed with this weird new obsession with masculinity.”
This phenomenon is obviously not exclusive to Nick Offerman. Many actors have had difficulty distinguishing themselves from their characters over the years, at least in the eyes of their most ravenous fans. Still, Offerman had such a hand in shaping Ron Swanson over the years that many of the character’s core traits, beliefs, and hobbies are borne from real life. As a result, Offerman often takes to social media to stand up for marginalized communities, especially when bullies use GIFs or video edits of Ron Swanson to attack them.
As he explains elsewhere in the interview, some of these social media back-and-forths have resulted in him being called slurs, or being accused of “eating children.” To that end, Offerman concludes “You can’t navigate life steering by Twitter trolls, the sadness of Elon Musk and his minions … I willfully ignore the overall public zeitgeist.” Despite his ability to reconcile the frustrations of fame, it seems clear that Offerman is perturbed by the lack of media literacy in certain fans of Parks & Rec.
I suppose it’s your prerogative to be a toxic misogynist if that’s what you’re into, but using Ron Swanson as an avatar for bullying isn’t going to work. The read on the character is dead wrong. In fact, you’d have more luck identifying with the Parks & Rec character Jeremy Jamm, whom Ron punches squarely in the face at one point in the show. One thing’s for certain: don’t expect Nick Offerman the actor to extend an olive branch if your aim is to emulate Ron by engaging in regressive, backwards politics that hurt women and minorities. You’ll walk away with little more than some tepid Twitter beef and an unmistakable Swanson frown.
