Having devoted fans can be a terrifying and fulfilling thing for a public figure to experience — and increasingly, celebrities are telling us about it. The latest round of toxic fandom rhetoric arguably started with Chappelle Roane, who headlined in August to talk against his own devotees, details A Pair of TikToks About fan harassment, backstabbing, inappropriate behavior and bullying.
“I don’t care that abuse and harassment, stalking, whatever, is a normal thing to do to famous or slightly famous people,” the “Good Luck Babe” singer said. “I don’t care that it’s normal; I don’t care that this crazy behavior comes with the job, this career field that I’ve chosen. That doesn’t make it okay. That doesn’t make it normal. It doesn’t mean I want it. ; that doesn’t mean I like it.” She’s clearly not alone: The sheer number of celebrities who have either publicly spoken out or reached out in private to support Rowan over her TikTok rant is huge, A range of high-profile stars From Katy Perry to Lady Gaga, to Jewel To Elton John.
What Rowan is describing here is a growing trend around the world. Fandom has changed into a discourse over the past decade, but with celebrities listening more and more to what fans have to say, fans are now getting a peek at what their actions mean for their favorite stars — and a lot of it isn’t so flattering. It’s unclear whether celebrity pushback is making things better, or whether their protests will ever reach the most entitled fans and paparazzi—for whom celebrities are less like people and more like collectable Pokémon.
All of which suggests that Chappelle’s fans, or even her paparazzi, aren’t the problem: it’s the increasingly toxic nature of celebrity fandom.
Unfortunately, fans stalking and harassing celebrities is nothing new, and thanks to the rise of anti-fandom, it’s possible to make hating a creator your full-time fannish hobby with legions of other haters, all without regard for how the person behind the persona may suffer as a result. can What seems to be new, however, is that celebrities are often defending themselves — publicly calling out bad fan and paparazzi behavior in real time, and even more publicly calling out the toxicity that led to that behavior.
The onus is usually on celebrities to keep their cool 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 berated a group of teenagers who were harassing him at a hotel, asking them, “Is this funny to you?” TMZ The scene is framed Like “Bieber goes crazy over a bunch of young kids.” tabloid diagonal That Bieber was temperamental, though a group of teenagers He was seen swarmingPhone out, and Bieber raised his voice though. the singer in the past A group of fans had to very calmly tell him again, don’t beat him up in his house — after that year A series of horrific incidents, including fans breaking into his hotel room and arrests outside his home.
Sometimes a celebrity’s reaction to fan harassment seems like a victim’s. Queer Eyeof Jonathan Van Ness BuzzFeed said When a fan literally ran up behind him to hug him in 2022, his response was an apology. to him: “I’m sorry I tried to attack you. We are friends, right? Do you want to take a selfie?” To overcome that level of implicit passive conditioning, it’s no wonder so many celebrities applauded Rowan for speaking up.
You might think that some extreme fans are causing most of the problems. The real problem, though, is messier. Modern fan culture has moved away from worshiping distant, unattainable Hollywood divas and toward a complex entanglement between fans and those they position.
This shift arguably began late in K-pop fandom, with its own complex auroras of pop stardom and stand-up, and the grassroots fandom of YouTube and later Twitch. In these 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 fans that came with it. They usually interacted with their fans as if they were their friends – sometimes with Very complex and even deeply sad result
Then came social media, which made celebrities more accessible and gave fans more ways to connect and rally together with extreme trends. These days, it’s no longer just about the mythical stalker fan, lurking in the dark, clearly, if poorly understood, intent on harm. Fans stalk celebrities openly, actively, and proudly, often completely rejecting the idea that what they’re doing is wrong or causing their loved ones serious discomfort. In recent years, including celebrities John Cena And mythical Asking fans to stop filming them, Mitsky claimed the experience of performing for a sea of phones made them feel like they were being “consumed as material”. The devotees May or may not comply.
In many cases, even the idea that an actor can be someone other than their professional persona A cause of excitement among fans, celebrities have to fight and learn how to reconcile. It is by no means only “extreme” fans who fall victim to this level of entitled thinking. Think how many ordinary people on the Internet were emotionally invested in John Mulaney’s divorce or the Try Guys scandal or Benniffer’s roller coaster. These media narratives play out the way they do because many ordinary people feel an intense amount of ownership over the lives of these people we’ve never seen, and a deep resistance Anything that contradicts the narrative or personality we’ve bought into. (Gailors, none of us are free from sin!)
To be fair to fans, they don’t always reach this point; They often experience naive, perhaps unintentional, encouragement from celebrities or at least from their PR teams. Sometimes celebrities subtly toe the ever-blurring lines of their parasocial relationship with their fanbase, usually for marketing and promotion. Sakshi Jin, the oldest member of the Korean mega-band BTS, oddly has to give 1,000 hugs to 1,000 fans After leaving his mandatory military service earlier this year. Or look, for example, at the entire Swifty ecosystem, which arguably depends on Taylor Swift being as obsessed with her fans, or at least with their opinions, as they are with her.
Yet this lean-in brings blowback for celebrities as well as fans for not only dealing with the socially constructed persona they helped create, but with the attitudes of fans who have decided they worship that persona. Once that genie is out, there’s no getting it back in the bottle. An email from Mitsky to Rowan, “I wanted to humbly welcome you to the world’s worst exclusive club.” alleged reading“The club where strangers think you belong.”
What Mitsky is describing here is essentially an academic concept of celebrity.star text” — when a celebrity figure occupies a socially constructed role that develops independently of them, based on how they behave, how the public interprets that behavior, and the cultural narratives that may be attached to that behavior. As I have previously argued, each celebrity exists both as themselves and as symbols, or “star texts” that they represent, and rarely is that text within any celebrity’s power to control or curtail.
The result of this sticky interdependence is that fans feel entitled to shred their celebrities’ lives and sometimes physically possess the celebrities themselves, whether it’s through stalking, harassment, refusing to stop filming them, or being handsy and wildly inappropriate. It’s no secret, and certainly nothing new, that in many intense celebrity fandoms, Fans want to control and manage The private lives of their favorite stars, even to the extent of shaming them and reacting against them when they try to live their own lives outside of their public personas.
To some extent, we all form opinions and even judgments about high-profile people, and those people – at least those who have been properly media trained – know we do and are prepared for it. The evolving dynamics of fandom are steadily eroding current fandom etiquette and normative behavior, arguably faster than the ability of celebrities to adapt and adjust. What to do, for example, when fans Change your flight information Or trying to book a seat next to you on a plane? What do fans do when they create increasingly outlandish conspiracy theories that distort their sense of reality, so they can maintain their collective narrative in the face of conflicting information?
These mindsets are not created in a vacuum, but rather in an environment where fans stop seeing idols as real people and start seeing them as products or as narratives in which they’ve invested — that must be maintained at all costs. The economics of celebrity-stalking are rewarding for fans and paparazzi Being as aggressive as possible. They might as well be Terribly organized In their approach, they rely on each other for resources, intel, and access. For celebrities, such constant fan scrutiny and entitlement can prove too much to handle — at least not without one. Occasional explosions or show resistance.
It’s tempting to wonder if anything can be done to curb such intense and pervasive levels of fandom—especially when it seems to permeate all aspects of society, from politics to personal aesthetics. For now, Rowan may have found the answer, and it seems very similar to a recent tactic used by the left to emphasize how out-of-the-ordinary the extreme political views of their opponents are: call them really weird.
Rowan said In his first TikTok post. “It’s not normal. It’s weird. It’s weird how people think you know a person just because you see them online and you hear the art they make. It’s weird! I’m allowed to say no to horrible behavior, okay?”
If the public and celebrity support for Roan is any indication, there may be more to come from where that came from, and celebrities finally saying “no” to their fans could arguably be a net gain for everyone.
