Chappell Roan and Her Fans Might Change Celebrity, Toxic Fan Culture Forever

Marissa Alper

Pink cowgirl hats with shimmering rhinestone accoutrements, camouflage baseball caps printed with “Midwest Princess” or “All Things Go” or even “Harris Walz,” colorful sequined bodysuits, red hair and wild curls and drag-inspired makeup. Chappell Roan herself wasn’t inside Forest Hills Stadium on Saturday, Sept. 28, for the All Things Go music festival in New York City, but her spirit was in the air, her voice over the speakers, her likeness on the dancefloor. Her name was on the lips of attendees and performers as they discussed Roan’s comments on fame, handling the conversation with much more thought and nuance than the current web of internet discourse might suggest.

On Sept. 27, Roan announced she was “unable to perform” her previously scheduled sets at All Things Go in New York and Washington, D.C. in order to prioritize her health. This came after weeks of debate over her refusal to endorse a presidential candidate in the upcoming U.S. election — Roan later clarified, “No, I’m not voting for Trump, and yes I will always question those in power and those making decisions over other people” — and months of her setting boundaries with fans and openly discussing her struggles with fame and mental health.

“We just wanna say we love Chappell so much,” MUNA’s Katie Gavin said on stage to roaring cheers during the band’s evening set, addressing Roan’s absence. “We started as a queer band in 2014 and we’ve really been given the time and the grace to be nourished as artists, and we wish nothing but that times a million for her.” Later, the band would play a cover of “Good Luck, Babe” and allude to Roan’s political comments with strong statements of their own in support of abolition and a free Palestine. It felt like another example of the thoughtful discussion happening in real life, versus the outrage and misinterpretation online.

Chappell Roan has been an inescapable force in pop music this past year, as she’s quickly ascended into near-household name status after years of singles and club shows; as Yahoo noted, her rise “came slowly and then all at once” — and she’s documented much of her experience in real time, gravitating toward TikTok, the platform where she once enraptured viewers with a story about spraining her neck, and where she now asks fans to respect her boundaries, unpacks her experiences with stalking, and explains herself in follow-ups to discourse-stirring interview quotes.

In the past year, celebrities have increasingly talked about fans and their relationship to fame. Taylor Swift released a whole album about it. In a recent Vanity Fair video, Ariana Grande said of her fans, “I love them always, but I think sometimes they can hurt my feelings … It’s a hard relationship I think, that’s sort of weirdly parasocial but it feels very real to me.”

Roan is now becoming representative of a multitude of problems around celebrity boundaries and expectations; the pop landscape, as of the past 7-10 years or so, has prioritized authenticity and relatableness, values that Swift, for example, has built her whole career upon. Roan has always emphasized that the character of Chappell Roan is “a project” and asks fans not to use her given name when meeting her, in a seeming effort to create some separation between who she actually is with friends and family and who she performs as to the world.

“I think the Swiftie-ism of it all has bled into how people interact with every celebrity even when they haven’t necessarily opened up those boundaries,” says Kara, a 24-year-old festival attendee in Manhattan. “One of Taylor Swift’s whole things is, ‘We’re friends, you’re my friend, I’m your friend. Chappell’s whole thing is completely opposite of that.”

Regardless of how a given pop star approaches their relationship to fans and to fame, it’s clear that people are thinking about their relationship to the celebrities they love — in conversations you might miss if you’re only looking on Twitter or TikTok. Whether about the election and the political responsibility famous people hold or do not hold, or about the actions of fans online and offline, there is a feeling that things aren’t quite right in the celebrity ecosystem.

To really get at that feeling, I talked to two dozen fans at All Things Go in New York, who ranged in age from 15 to 55, and who all expressed a similar sentiment when asked about her dropping out of the festival: disappointment and sadness, but overwhelmingly, concern for her health and respect for her doing what she needs to do to take care of herself.

“Her wellbeing is definitely top priority,” Kara says. “I think it’s also a great thing that we’re in a stage, especially for a lesbian performer who is already breaking [boundaries], to be able to take the time for herself and respect herself and what she needs.”

The people I spoke to had varying degrees of participation in online fandoms — from “chronically online” to no social media accounts at all — but all knew what Roan had said in interviews and on TikTok this summer. Nearly all expressed some level of discomfort with the ways fan behavior, including their own, can manifest on the internet. All seemed to have pondered the question, what do celebrities owe us?

“People are getting upset with her because she wouldn’t endorse a candidate, and I’m like, six months ago you didn’t even know who she was,” says Laura, 31, who lives in Philadelphia. “Why are you looking to her to tell you what to do? Make your own choices.” As for Roan’s requests to fans not to approach her when she’s not working, Laura adds, “I would love if she reinvents the way we look at celebrities and the way we interact with them. She’s really bringing attention to the fact that how we’ve been behaving around famous people is not normal.”

The fans — and, sometimes to her detriment, hordes of attention-seeking social media commenters — are experiencing Roan’s pop trajectory right alongside her, after all. It’s a kind of access that can feel unnerving as much as endearing. As Roan deals with heightened exposure, amid her candidness about struggling with mental health and living with Bipolar II, fans find themselves reckoning with their love for her music and for what she represents, and their expectations of her that arise out of that love.

“I think this is a big wake-up call for people, I hope, to think about, what are we contributing to this issue?” says Sam, 23, who lives in Manhattan. “People need to really reflect. They’re not respecting the artist that they love so much.”

Sam, for example, remembers running a fan account for a band in middle school and being, she says, “f*cking … obsessive,” with the way she was posting. “I look back on it now and I’m like, woah, get a grip,” she says. She attended the festival with Dorothy, 20, from Queens, who has been a Lady Gaga fan since she was a kid and gets notifications whenever Gaga tweets. “I know she’s in London today,” Dorothy says. “It’s definitely [weird] that I know every day where Lady Gaga is, but it’s stuff like that where we grew up in a culture that’s obsessed with female pop stars.”

That culture, of course, isn’t new. Countless women musicians, actors, and public figures throughout the 20th century faced the pressures of public fame amid a rise in technology and increased access to celebrities’ personal lives. “If it was like 1990, they would have shoved [Roan] on stage anyways in a sparkly skirt,” adds Kara, who, like Roan, also has bipolar II disorder. “I don’t think we need another Britney Spears — not well but forced to perform like a little marionette.”

Mother and daughter Sarra, 23, and Farhana, 55, traveled to ATG from Toronto; Sarra has seen Roan three times in concert, the first time in a room of around 30 people, and notes the speed at which everything changed for the artist. Sarra doesn’t have a social media presence, which Farhana is thankful for as a parent. But both are excited at the ways Roan is standing up for herself.

“I'm gonna speak as, like, an older woman in that, you know, women in the past, we would never establish these boundaries for ourselves,” Farhana says. “We would put ourselves through whatever was needed.” Still, she notes that things are scarier now, too, for celebrities. “There are a lot more vehicles to either address, touch, or be aware of that celebrity. They know your hotel, they know your phone, they know everything.”

The toxicity is both on and offline.

“I have seen people be total creeps because they want that access to the artist,” a music industry professional who asked not to be named tells me on the grounds at All Things Go. “You love something so much you feel maybe a certain bit of, not entitlement, but something like that. I've definitely seen some people be a bit too touchy or want to follow you to the next event, to the next after party.” It’s a phenomenon that they say is compounded by how much we want to know about our favorite artists’ political beliefs, relationships, and everyday experiences. “We're [now] talking about every aspect of these artist's lives. That's intense.”

Holly Humberstone, a 24-year-old English singer-songwriter who has mid-billing on the All Things Go lineup, says she hasn’t experienced that side of fandom just yet. Humberstone has 270,000 followers on Instagram and 190,000 on TikTok, which grants her a certain level of privacy even though she has 1.4 million monthly listeners — who love her because of her confessional songwriting — on Spotify as of September 2024.

“[Roan] is doing a great job and setting boundaries is really important, and I don't think anyone can really comment on how, how, each person wants to do things, you know? I think it's completely like a personal choice,” Humberstone tells Teen Vogue. “For me it's really important to feel like I have a personal relationship with my fans, because I'm sharing so much of myself and my thoughts … but I guess there is a line.” She’s not totally sure where that line is; she’s still able to live a normal life alongside her music career.

“If it does escalate and if things get bigger, then I guess I just will be looking after my mental health,” she says. “You just kind of have to take things as they happen. Complete respect for Chappell. I think it must be really confusing and really, really exciting, and a lot of pressure and really strange, so many people knowing who you are.”

TikTok, Instagram comment sections, and Twitter threads create a world of vitriol and backlash, where even well-meaning or well-constructed criticism can lead to harassment, and where pretty much everyone’s decisions are given the most bad-faith interpretation possible. This tends to go a hundredfold for fandom communities, where in-fighting is magnified by “anti-fans” — fans of other celebrities, or just haters of a specific artist, who spread criticism, abuse, and misinformation, often in supposed defense of a different artist they love.

“The past day or two, like, my feed has been all just terrible things saying about her,” says 16-year-old Emilia from Teaneck, New Jersey. “Like making fun of her and her political views, and just like her dropping out and saying all these things, when they've never experienced that themselves.

The internet vitriol also goes for an artist’s fans, who can find themselves fighting for their internet lives after a tweet goes awry. One person’s opinion — for example, something like, “I’m devastated Chappell Roan isn’t playing ATG” — can get blown out into an overgeneralized, “All the Chappell Roan fans at ATG don’t even like other queer artists” or “These people don’t deserve their tickets.” In reality, every single person I spoke to mentioned other artists they were excited to see and explore.

That doesn’t mean Chappell Roan fans are perfect angels online. Also on Sept. 28, Saturday Night Live aired a sketch starring Bowen Yang that called attention to how we treat Chappell Roan (and other celebrities) like we treat viral hippo Moo Deng — an animal in a cage, purely at our mercy, existing only for our enjoyment. Despite Yang’s recent interview with Roan and his longstanding support of her on his podcast with Matt Rogers, fans read it as mockery of Roan’s boundaries and began piling on Yang in quote tweets.

Because of the magnitude of the backlash, Bowen clarified his intention on Instagram. “Oh geez. Mocks???” Yang wrote. “If my personal stance and this piece aren’t absolutely clear in terms of supporting her then there it is I guess. Everything she has ever asked for has been reasonable and even then we can connect it to another story about boundaries or whatever.”

A certain sensitivity around Roan is understandable, given the onslaught she’s been facing; it’s also where the parasocial relationship kicks in. The desire to defend a celebrity — and in essence, to defend ourselves — can feel irresistible.

As Emilia sums up the internet: “It's so toxic versus, like, here.”

The vibes at All Things Go are good. Despite the on-and-off rain and Roan’s departure, people are enjoying what MUNA called “Lesbapalooza.” The crowds seem to consist largely of LGBTQ+ people and women, and several fans point out that the respect level just feels different than other shows they’ve attended.

Elle from Richmond, Virginia, and Sarah, from Philadelphia, both 26, dance on the wet tennis courts in Chappell Roan cosplay, unafraid of the rain. “This is probably, like, the first concert in a few years that I've felt the most comfortable,” Sarah says. “Everyone's okay with everyone here and we're all just trying to have a good time. Other concerts it's, like, ‘Get out of my way, I need to be the front person with my phone up.’”

Ironically, Sam and Dorothy say that might not have been the case had Roan actually performed. “We probably would have shown up an hour and a half earlier. We know it would have been even more chaotic if she was here,” Dorothy says. Sam adds, “We talked about this on the way here, we both felt like there was a little pressure and stress relieved because of that.”

The issue of concert etiquette continues to come up in media and in fandom spaces, especially after concerts resumed following the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. It felt to some like a new generation of concert-goers had been tossed out into the wild in 2022, and they brought with them a perceived heightened level of certain behaviors: incessant recording of both the artist and themselves, scream-singing to an unholy degree (“Where is the self-awareness, where’s the decorum?” Sam asks), body-checking their way to a barricade, and what Madison, 22, of Westbury, NY, calls “acting very uncouth.”

Sam and Dorothy think that behavior comes out of a desire for a “perfect” experience — tickets are scarce and expensive, so you have to make every second count. “You get one chance and you wanna enjoy it the most you can,” Sam says. Dorothy notes, “I’ll admit it, I wanted to dance to ‘Hot to Go’ and have this video of me dancing to Hot to Go.”

There are levels to etiquette, however — wanting a video of yourself dancing seems fairly innocuous compared to rushing a barricade, or shoving people out of the way so you can get closer to a performer.

“Being aware of how you're treating other people is all that really matters,” Madison says. “Because if you want to be feral in the corner, like, do it, do your thing, because you're 15 and you have hormones or whatever. It just becomes an issue when it bleeds into how you're treating other people.”

Several 20-somethings I spoke to talked about growing out of obsessive online behavior, some mentioning “15-year-olds” who spread toxicity online and have bad concert etiquette in person, implying that the worst fan-related behavior is coming from teenagers. This is a common refrain in internet spaces, and it’s not totally unfounded — it makes sense that the youngest among us might be particularly vulnerable to joining fan communities that encourage (overtly or covertly) toxic behavior. The internet is a vessel for exploration and expression, now as tied to coming-of-age as offline behavior, and children have wildly varying degrees of community support and parental oversight.

21-year-old Bella, also of Manhattan, was a One Direction fan when she was younger. “I still know [their] blood types,” she says. “But as I’ve gotten older and I’ve been able to touch grass and see the real world, I’ve been able to fangirl but at a moderated level. I know what’s happening, but [it’s] whatever the artist is giving to us. I try to respect that boundary as much as social media will let me do that.”

Still, teens are aware of this discourse, taking it in as they navigate their fandom journeys. They, perhaps expectedly, take some issue with the idea that teenagers are the problem when it comes to internet pile-ons.

“I honestly don't feel like it's teenagers. We agree with what she's doing, and if she needs to do it for herself, then she can do it for herself. I feel like it's all the adults who, like, didn't like her in the first place and then are just kind of hopping on the bandwagon [to put their two cents in],” says Emilia. Her friend Olivia, also 16 from New Jersey, adds, “They're coming from a different point of view from their generation of just like, ‘this is a job, you need to keep going with it. Mental health isn't as important.’” Both say they’ve grown up with mental health taught as a priority at school and at home.

Lyliannah, 15, from Long Island, isn’t sold on the idea that it’s just teenagers either. Some of it is misinterpretation, she says, though “a lot of people are very toxic.” She also argues that teens aren’t glued to their phones. “If anything, it's actually, like, adults that are glued to their phones. Like my dad, if he's not on his phone I'd be kind of concerned.” For Lyliannah, the money invested in seeing your favorite artist means she needs to live in the moment: “If you're going to spend all that money to go to a concert, just like, don't go on your phone the entire time.”

Despite all of this discourse, the internet drama, the ticket prices and Ticketmaster frustration, and all of the ways people can be annoying and harmful in person and online, there’s still a pure kind of joy in the concert experience. The feeling of being outside, out in the world, surrounded by thousands of people singing along to the songs you love most in the world.

In place of Roan, All Things Go organized a drag queen-led dance party, with queens Hanukah Lewinsky, Mo'Riah, Reese Havoc, Beaujangless, Aquaria, and Kevin Aviance taking the stage in homage to the artist who has paid so much homage to drag culture. Some fans expressed a bit of skepticism before the party — and many did on the internet — saying they might have just preferred another musician take her place. But DJ B-Roc pressed play on “Femininomenon” and the vibe in Forest Hills shifted.

The music and the drag performers' energy brought everyone back into the fun and passion and queer community that forms the basis of the Chappell Roan project. The parasocial relationship, which on some level will always be in place and isn’t wholly negative, happens for a reason — it arises from this connection we have to the people who make the art that shapes our lives. “Hot to Go” hit and thousands of fans did the choreo for Roan and for themselves, for the love and silliness of it, for the delight of singing one of the most euphoric pop songs of the year. Our voices rose on the bridge of “Good Luck, Babe,” and something feral and beautiful emerged, vast and intimate and close to the heart of it all. You’d have to stop the world just to stop the feeling.

Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue

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