The personal life of Ertuğrul stars is too hot to handle for Pakistanis

Actors who play Ertugrul and Halima Sultan were attacked by desi trolls on their Instagram pages

Diriliş: Ertuğrul, a hugely popular Turkish television series, has made its way to Pakistani screens at the behest of Prime Minister Imran Khan.

Aired every night at 9:10 pm on a local television channel, the series seems to have hit a close spot with Pakistanis, and has racked up its own, vast, fan following.

However, the fan obsession with the show's actors/characters seems to have taken a flight for the worse; screenshots from the Instagram profile of the actor who plays Halima Sultan on the show, Esra Bilgiç, revealed the dark, albeit hilarious, side of Pakistani fans as they went on to relentlessly moral police her on her clothing and poses.



The picture elicited comments like 'Why are some Turkish and Pakistani actors following Western culture?' and 'I hate you after seeing this picture Halima Sultan.'

That's not all, many even likened her on-screen persona to something that they expected from her in real life. The 'modest and noble' lady trope was repeated, implying that that's how she should lead her life.





There were also long paragraphs about how she should emulate the character she played on screen and that she looked much better in 12th-century attire than the 'western' clothes she wears in her personal life. The impossibility of which is obviously lost on many of the commentators.



Surprisingly, Esra isn't the only one who got a flurry of such comments. The actor who plays Ertugrul Ghazi, Engin Altan Duzyatan, also got similar comments, though they weren't confined to how he dressed up - they focused on his pet dog, with people telling him how, as a Muslim, he shouldn't have a dog as a pet.



While user 'razy.ahmed' went back on his comment to imply that he was joking, the motive for the backtracking was pointed towards the backlash he received. "

Here's hoping that our people realise that actors are actual people in real life and cannot and don't have to emulate the characters they play on-screen.

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