Comfort Creators: Gender, Parasocial Relationships, and Emotional Labor

Jessica Maddox, "Comfort Creators: Gender, Parasocial Relationships, and Emotional Labor." Paper accepted to the Popular Culture Association annual conference, Atlanta, Georgia, April 2026. Abstract: Comfort media has emerged as a way for individuals to navigate an oversaturated and often negative media environment. From comfort shows to books, these are media people return to for normalcy, calmness, and no surprises because they know how the media will in. But online, a subset of content creators has emerged – comfort creators – for people to consume. Comfort creators are people who provide relief amid an online environment full of AI slop, mis/disinformation, the overconsumption of influencer culture, and more. However, the difference between comfort creators and comfort television shows (or books, or movies) is an important one. What does it mean to consume a person for comfort over a fictional piece of media? Through an analysis of popular “comfort creator” accounts, as well as interviews with comfort creators, I explore how comfort creators are a modern iteration of emotional labor, expending their own feelings and labor to calm others. Through instilling this comfort in their audiences, comfort creators cultivate parasocial relationships with their followers, which means their fans feel closer to them than they actually are. By becoming comfort people over comfort fictional media, relying on strangers for joy, relief, and calmness becomes muddled with blurred boundaries on social media. This leads to increased emotional labor and burnout for content creators, who become unable to meet their audiences’ constant demands for comfort.