Chappell Roan and the problem with fandom

Having devoted fans can be a terrifying and fraught thing for a public figure to experience — and increasingly, the celebs are telling us about it. The latest round of toxic fandom discourse arguably started with Chappell Roan, who made headlines in August for speaking out against her own fans, elaborating in a pair of TikToks about fan harassment, stalking, inappropriate behavior, and bullying.

“I don’t care that abuse and harassment, stalking, whatever, is a normal thing to do to people who are famous or a little famous,” the “Good Luck Babe” singer said. “I don’t care that it’s normal; I don’t care that this crazy type of behavior comes along with the job, this career field that I’ve chosen. That does not make it okay. That does not make it normal. It doesn’t mean that I want it; it doesn’t mean that I like it.” She’s clearly not alone: The sheer number of celebrities who’ve either spoken out publicly or reached out privately in support of Roan after her TikTok rant is huge, a range of high-profile stars from Katy Perry to Lady Gaga, from Jewel to Elton John.

What Roan is describing here is an increasing trend around the globe. Fandom has changed over the last decade to become more of a discourse, but while celebs have had to hear more and more of what fans have to say, now fans are getting a peek at what their actions mean to their favorite stars — and a lot of it is not so flattering. It’s unclear whether the celebrities’ pushback is making the situation better or if their protests will ever reach the most entitled fans and paparazzi — those for whom celebrities are less like people and more like collectible Pokémon.

All of this suggests that Chappell Roan’s fans, and even her paparazzi, aren’t the problem: It’s the increasingly toxic nature of celebrity fandom itself.

Unfortunately, fans stalking and harassing celebrities is nothing new, and thanks to the rise of anti-fandoms, it’s possible to make hating a creator your full-time fannish hobby alongside legions of other haters, all without regard for how the person behind the persona might suffer as a result. What seems to be new, however, is that more and more frequently, the celebrities are defending themselves — openly calling out bad fan and paparazzi behavior in real time, and more publicly calling out the toxicity that leads to that behavior.

The onus is typically on celebrities to maintain their calm in the face of outlandish behavior from fans and paparazzi, no matter how out of hand things get. In August, when Justin Bieber lost his cool and rebuked a group of teens who’d been harassing him at a hotel, asking them, “Is this funny to you guys?” TMZ framed the scene as “Bieber freaks out on a bunch of young kids.” The tabloid slant was that Bieber was temperamental, even though the group of teens appeared to swarm him, phones out, and even though Bieber never raised his voice. The singer previously had to tell a group of fans, again very calmly, not to stalk him at his home — this after years of scary stalking incidents, including fans breaking into his hotel rooms and getting arrested outside of his house.

Sometimes the celebrity’s reaction in the face of fan harassment seems to be similar to that of an abuse victim. Queer Eye’s Jonathan Van Ness told BuzzFeed in 2022 that when a fan literally ran up behind him in order to tackle-hug him, his response was to apologize to her: “I’m sorry I tried to attack you. We’re friends, right? Do you wanna take a selfie?” With that level of ingrained passive conditioning to overcome, it’s no wonder many celebrities applauded Roan for speaking out.

You might think a few extreme fans are causing most of the issues. The real problem, though, is messier. Modern fan culture has shifted away from worshiping aloof, unavailable Hollywood divas from afar and toward complex entanglements between fans and the people they stan.

This shift arguably began in the late aughts within K-pop fandom, which is its own complicated ouroboros of pop stardom and standom, and within grassroots fandoms on YouTube and later Twitch. In those online spaces, amateur gamers and streamers who hit it big often had zero media training and zero preparation for how to deal with their new fame and the devotees that came with it. They typically interacted with their fans as though they were their friends — sometimes with extremely complicated and even deeply tragic results.

Then came the advent of social media, which made celebrities even more accessible and gave fans with extreme tendencies even more ways to connect and mobilize en masse. These days, it’s no longer just about the mythical stalker fan, lurking in the dark, with clear, if poorly understood, intentions to do harm. Fans stalk celebrities openly, proactively, and proudly, often fully rejecting the idea that what they’re doing is wrong or causing their fave serious discomfort. In recent years, celebrities including John Cena and Mitski have asked fans to stop filming them, with Mitski claiming the experience of having to perform for a sea of phones makes them feel as though they’re being “consumed as content.” The fans may or may not comply.

In many cases, even the idea that an actor could be someone else outside of their professional persona is a cause of tension among fans, one that celebrities have to grapple with and learn how to reconcile. It’s by no means only “extreme” fans who fall prey to this level of entitled thinking. Think how many normal people on the internet were emotionally invested in John Mulaney’s divorce or the Try Guys scandal, or the roller coaster that was (is? was?) Bennifer. These media narratives play out the way they do precisely because so many normal people feel an intense amount of ownership over the lives of these people we’ve never met,and a deep resistance to anything that contradicts the narrative or the persona we’ve bought into. (Gaylors, none of us are free from sin!)

To be fair to the fans, they don’t always reach this stage on their own; they often experience tacit, perhaps unwitting, encouragement from the celebrities, or at least their PR teams. Sometimes celebrities will subtly lean into the ever-blurring lines of their parasocial relationships with their fanbases, usually in furtherance of marketing and promotion. Witness Jin, the oldest member of Korean mega-band BTS, bizarrely having to give 1,000 hugs to 1,000 fans upon his exit from his mandatory military service earlier this year. Or see, for instance, the entire Swiftie ecosystem, which arguably depends upon Taylor Swift being as obsessed with her fans, or at least with their opinions, as they are with her.

Yet this lean-in comes with blowback for the celebrity as well as the fan because they have to live not only with the socially constructed persona they helped create, but with the attitudes of the fans who’ve decided they adore that persona. Once that genie is out, there’s no putting it back in the bottle. “I just wanted to humbly welcome you to the shittiest exclusive club in the world,” an email from Mitski to Roan reportedly read, “the club where strangers think you belong to them.”

What Mitski is describing here is essentially the academic concept of the celebrity as a “star text” — when a celebrity persona occupies a socially constructed role that evolves independently from them, based on how they behave, how the public interprets that behavior, and the cultural narrative that might attach to that behavior. As I’ve previously argued, every celebrity exists both as themselves and as the symbol, or the “star text,” that they represent, and very rarely is that text within any celebrity’s ability to control or corral.

The result of this sticky interdependence is an increase in fans feeling entitled to pieces of their celebrities’ lives, and sometimes physically entitled to the celebrities themselves, whether it be through stalking, harassment, refusal to stop filming them, or getting handsy and wildly inappropriate. It’s no secret, and certainly nothing new, that in many intense celebrity fandoms, fans seek to control and direct their favorite stars’ private lives, even to the extent of shaming them and performing backlash against them when they try to have lives of their own outside of their public personas.

To some extent, we all form opinions and even judgments about high-profile people, and those people — at least the ones who’ve been properly media trained — know we do this and prepare for it. The evolving dynamics of fandom are constantly eroding current fandom etiquette and normative behavior, arguably faster than the celebs’ ability to adapt and adjust. What to do, for example, when fans change your flight information or attempt to book a seat next to you on a plane? What to do when fans form increasingly bizarre conspiracy theories that distort their sense of what’s real, all so they can maintain their collective narratives in the face of opposing information?

These mentalities don’t form in a vacuum, but rather within environments where fans cease to see idols as real people and begin to see them as commodities or as narratives in which they have invested — narratives that must be maintained at all cost. The economy of celebrity-stalking rewards fans and paparazzi for being as invasive as possible. They can also be terrifyingly organized in their methods, relying on one another for resources, intel, and access. For the celebrity, this kind of constant fan scrutiny and entitlement can prove too much to handle — at least not without an occasional outburst or show of resistance.

It’s tempting to wonder what, if anything, can be done to curb this kind of intense and pervasive level of fandom — especially when it seems to be creeping into all aspects of society, from politics to personal aesthetics. For now, Roan may have found the answer, and it seems to be very similar to the recent tactics used by the left to emphasize how far outside the norm are the extreme political views of their opponents: Call them really weird.

“I don’t give a fuck if you think it’s selfish of me to say no for a photo or for your time or for a hug,” Roan said in her first TikTok post. “That’s not normal. That’s weird. It’s weird how people think that you know a person just because you see them online and you listen to the art they make. That’s fucking weird! I’m allowed to say no to creepy behavior, okay?”

If the public and celebrity support for Roan is any indication, there may be more to come where that came from, and celebrities finally saying “no” to their fans can arguably only be a net gain for everyone.