— Part III: Eroticism, Toxic Intimacy and Post-Sincerity Performance
V. Parasocial Liturgies: When the God Is a Man
What happens when the god is a man?
The answer to this question arrived, rather mundanely, in an unambiguous gesture.
In 2023, when a fan shouted Vessel’s real name from the crowd at a live show, his response was swift and un-Sleep Tokenesque: he spat water at them and flipped them off. The god was still a man, and the man was clearly pissed.
Once the civil names of band members became known, the sanctity of anonymity had been broken. Doxxing and stalking ensued: in January 2024, a supposed fan leaked bassist III’s birth certificate, home address included, and the band responded by wiping their social media and changing their bio to read, simply: “Nothing lasts forever.”¹ The band’s artistic response came later, in their song “Caramel” (2025): “Tell me, did I give you what you came for? / Terrified to answer my own front door.”² The song was unusually clear in its testimony, addressing both the water-spitting incident and the downsides of fame. Revolver later described it as the moment the band reached “forward to show the toxic fringes of their fanbase the real consequences of their parasocial behavior.”³ The anonymity, the ritual distance, the deliberate silence between songs had never been purely aesthetic; they were also protection, and that protection had finally been compromised.
Fan forums took the blow with self-awareness. Reddit threads were filled with guilt and discussed the incidents with a vocabulary borrowed from therapy culture: collective trauma, toxic behaviour, parasocial attachment. The fandom knew precisely what it had done. The structure persisted anyway, because the structure is partially the point.
There is a term for what had been breached, as this breach was only the logical conclusion of how the band’s lore had worked from the start. In 1956, communication researchers Horton and Wohl named parasocial interaction “a seeming face-to-face relationship between spectator and performer”: intimacy that feels reciprocal to the person experiencing it, though the performer does not experience it at all.⁴
This is not new: in the past, millions of unread fan letters were once sent to Elvis Presley and the Backstreet Boys alike. The digital age has since expanded the condition to nearly every medium: Twitch streams, YouTube videos, TikTok reels. Sleep Token built it into their mythology from the ground up, since Vessel’s own relationship to the god Sleep is already parasocial: he worships; Sleep does not worship back. Fans enter a dynamic reproduced exactly, always already shaped like theirs. Devotion in both cases is offered to a silent, withholding deity, the ache in both cases deliberate. The unmasking is a culmination of jouissance: to know the god is to lose him.
The Flesh and the Veil
This can be read as parasociality working as architecture. The eroticism is not laid over that structure but produced by it: Consider the contradiction at the centre of the performance, which is not exactly subtle. The mask conceals the person while simultaneously, the bare chest offers the body. Vessel I is, consistently, shirtless. He is built, he knows it, and convincingly performs the fiction that he is unaware of it. While desire in Sleep Token’s world is filtered through metaphor and devotional language, the body is harder to argue with. A sweaty sixpack glistening in the stage lights belies any claim to restraint, asceticism or sacred distance. What results is eroticism with plausible deniability: the ritual provides the cover where the body evidently doesn’t.
Together, theatrics and body construct a specific archetype. Vessel offers a masculinity that is emotionally expressive, fragile, wounded: aestheticized submission, rare in a genre built on dominance posturing. But the fantasy on offer is covert, and it is addressed, more often than not, to the women in the crowd. They are granted emotional access to he who breaks for them. Hope is kindled: he breaks for Sleep, but he might break for you. He is desirable as wound rather than conqueror, available without being aggressive. The fantasy is not so much you could love me. It is you could worship me, and it would ruin you. The erotics are inseparable from the parasocial structure; the intimacy is real in the way all parasocial intimacy is real, which is to say always one-sided.
However, the mask is the condition of desire; the absence is what makes the wanting possible. The doxxing, however, is desire undone by violation. Circulate the name, the face, the home address, and you destroy the very distance that made the devotion possible. You cannot worship what you have reduced to a Wikipedia entry.
The danger is fully realized when desire collapses into demand and, subsequently, intrusion. “Go ahead and wrap your arms around me” now sounds less like invitation than like a non-consensual embrace the band is too exhausted to fight. Revolver observed that, in some cases, “Vessel was infantilized, sexualized, or both at once.”⁵ The god was, indeed, still a man, and now he was terrified of some of his fans.
VI. From MySpace to the Mask: A Genealogy of Longing
Romanticized suffering, the longing to be undone by love, has been staged many times before, and most of those stagings have not aged kindly. The real question is why Sleep Token’s version, which does almost exactly what an earlier generation did, escapes the verdict its predecessors couldn’t.
In the mid-2000s, aestheticized romantic suffering already took many names and shapes. One of them included a heartagram and a very specific shade of eyeliner. HIM, fronted by Ville Valo with his baritone croon and roses-and-blood visual vocabulary, were one of the era’s designated purveyors of erotic despair. “When angels cry blood / On flowers of evil in bloom”⁶ sounded like Baudelaire-by-way-of-Hot-Topic, but for a generation negotiating the emotional excess of growing up in a post-9/11, internet-awakening world, it struck a very particular chord.
Nowadays, millennials cringe at their old MySpace photos and emo party pictures. But what ages poorly often did so because it was doing something very of its moment, however unrefined the mode. Cringe is historical. HIM was melodrama for the MySpace era in the same way Nirvana was angst for the flannel generation. Pop-cultural cringe is, by and large, sincerity that time has outpaced. HIM tapped into something “real” and spoke in a dialect that has since gone extinct.
Sleep Token is doing almost exactly what HIM did: the same erotic despair, the same romance with the wound. Yet it isn’t read as cringe, and the difference is time and mode. HIM was all visibility — Valo’s face on every wall, emotions spelled out in gothic clichés, the heartagram on every surface. Sleep Token now trades excess for restraint: masks, black robes, geometric staging. HIM’s melodrama is too direct for today’s ironic, hyper-aware digital culture. It risks falling into parody. Add to this the dimension of mystery as parasocial fuel. Where HIM was about Ville Valo as icon, Sleep Token is about Vessel as enigma and site of projection. The fandom actively gets to participate in the myth-making. In the age of TikTok/Discord/Reddit marketing, ambiguity breeds community speculation, which easily leads to a deeper investment in the lore.
But the shift runs deeper than aesthetics, its most telling dimension being their treatment of masculinity.
Valo was the tortured lover, dominant even in his pain: he suffered, he bared his chest, but he swaggered doing it. Vessel inverts this entirely by performing devotion and submission. He kisses his male bandmates onstage, caresses them, collapses at their feet, and the intimacy is absorbed into the performance without apology. Judith Butler famously argued in Gender Trouble (1990) that gender is not something one is but something one performs, a set of repeated actions that produce the appearance of a stable interior self.⁷ Vessel’s performance denaturalizes the codes of masculinity the genre treats as given. Subverted masculinity is not itself new here: glam and goth, Marilyn Manson, HIM and many others before them trafficked in androgyny. What the genre had no category for is the posture of devotion and submission. Not the sensitive indie singer-songwriter dreamily playing Wonderwall, nor the theatrical queen a Prince or Freddie Mercury would offer. Something closer to the posture assigned to the devotee rather than the idol, the one who kneels rather than stands to be knelt to. What in 2025 reads as emotional sophistication, in 2003 would have read as effeminate weakness.
Bands such as Måneskin now occupy similar territory. Audiences attend not despite the singer’s feminized masculinity but partly because of it: a generation raised inside discourse about vulnerability finding, in a metal-adjacent frontman, something the genre had rarely offered. A figure who yields and comes apart and is more compelling, even irresistibly alluring, for it.
What remains constant, across both bands and both eras, is the wound: the longing to feel something real, the desire to be ruined by love. It is an unfulfillable desire, brought about by a Lacanian structural necessity of lack. The fans in the pit would probably just say “it totally hits different.”
Vessel lets the ache hover, unnamed, in the space between the mask and the voice, and offers the eroticized body to go with it. Where HIM was heartbreak you could scream along to, Sleep Token is heartbreak you kneel for.
References
- Emma Wilkes. 2025. “Toxic Fandom, Secret Codes, Flamingos: Inside Sleep Token’s ‘Even in Arcadia.'” Revolver, December 1, 2025, accessed June 17th, 2026. https://www.revolvermag.com/feature/toxic-fandom-secret-codes-sheet-music-inside-sleep-tokens-even-in-arcadia/.
- Sleep Token. 2025. “Caramel.” Lyrics. Genius. https://genius.com/Sleep-token-caramel-lyrics.
- Wilkes, “Toxic Fandom, Secret Codes, Flamingos: Inside Sleep Token’s ‘Even in Arcadia.'” Revolver, accessed June 17th, 2026.
- Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl. 1956. “Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction: Observations on Intimacy at a Distance.” Psychiatry 19 (3): 215-229.
- Wilkes, “Toxic Fandom, Secret Codes, Flamingos: Inside Sleep Token’s ‘Even in Arcadia.'” Revolver, accessed June 17th, 2026.
- HIM. 2003. “The Funeral of Hearts.” Lyrics. Genius. https://genius.com/Him-the-funeral-of-hearts-lyrics.
- Judith Butler. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.