This week, one of the year’s biggest breakout music acts, Chappell Roan, said she was stepping back from the spotlight after fans tracked down her family.

Appearing on the podcast The Comment Section with Drew Afualo the singer said she once promised she would step back if “stalker vibes” started to feel threatening. “People have started to be freaks,” she began. “Like, they follow me or they know where my parents live, where my sister works. All this weird shit.”

“A few years ago I said if [there were] stalker vibes, like if my family was in danger, [this] is when I would quit. And we’re there.”

The 26-year-old singer said she’s “pumped the brakes on anything to make me more known.”

“It’s kind of a forest fire right now,” she added.

Roan, whose 2023 album The Rise And Fall Of A Midwest Princess propelled her to international fame, has been touring the US and will head to Europe and the UK later this year. Despite Australian fans hanging on for Chappell’s return Down Under, there’s a chance “pumping the brakes” may include an Australian tour.

In short, this is why we can’t have nice things.

What has gone wrong with fan culture? Is it social media blurring boundaries between public and personal? Is it the treatment of celebrities as commodities, with fans failing to humanise their idols? Is it a growing epidemic of loneliness seeing people reach out to celebrities in increasingly maniacal ways?

This kind of one-sided obsession with celebrities has a name: parasocial relationships.

According to Psychology Today, parasocial relationships are “one-sided relationships in which a person develops a strong sense of connection, intimacy, or familiarity with someone they don’t know, most often celebrities or media personalities.”

While, when no one is harmed, parasocial relationships can be viewed as healthy. They create connection and community, and can boost your mental health. However, they can be skewed into personal attacks.

For example, in 2022, when a reviewer gave Taylor Swift’s Folklore album an 8/10, some of her fans were so irate by it not getting full marks, so to speak, that they published the reviewer’s home address online, encouraging other Swifties to harass her.

“I think when people become a part of [a fandom], to an extent they start to feel quite connected to Taylor Swift and it’s becomes such a strong part of their identity that when they feel like Taylro Swift is being insulted, they feel like they’re being insulted themselves, and so they can have this strong emotional response,” a psychologist known only as Melissa detailed on the ABC’s All In The Mind podcast.

Other researchers have studied the more threatening concept of ‘celebrity worship’, which they’ve found to be associated with problematic Internet use, maladaptive daydreaming, and desire for fame.

Is it our own pursuit of being noticed that pushes fans to do, in the words of Chappell Roan, “all this weird shit”.

Of course, one of the more common instances of fans crossing boundaries—even when they’re defined pretty clearly as ‘performer’ and ‘audience’—is the spate of musicians being thrown various objects on stage during their concerts.

In 2023, Harry Styles was hurt when he was struck in the eye by an unknown object thrown at him in Vienna. This isn’t the only time this has happened to Harry, after he was also hit in the eye by flying skittles. He previously dodged chicken nuggets and a used tampon.

Last year, Bebe Rexha was hospitalised after she was hit near the eye by an iPhone thrown by an audience member. A few months earlier, someone gave their mum’s ashes to P!nk. “I don’t know how to feel about this,” said a clearly—and rightfully—disturbed P!nk.

 

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Meanwhile, Billie Eilish has a restraining order against a 53-year-old man who came to her house and sent hundreds of messages to her family, even threatening to kill her brother, Finneas O’Connell. In 2021, she told The Irish Times that she has a lot of stalkers, “people that want to do bad things to me”.

“I really don’t like to be alone,” she says. “I do like having anonymity, or autonomy, but I really am flipped out when I’m alone. I hate it. I have a lot of stalkers,” she says, matter of factly, “and I have people that want to do bad things to me, and I also am freaked out by the dark and, like, what’s under beds and couches. I have a lot of weird, irrational fears. So I’m still at my parents’ house a lot. I just love my parents and really like it here. It’s very comforting.”

Eilish is 22 years old.

While the majority of any fandom will throw their hands in the air and beg ‘why?!’ at these niche fans who don’t understand personal boundaries, it bears repeating that your idols don’t owe you anything.

You may love your favourite musician, but when does that expression of love become toxic, problematic and abusive? Demonstrations of adoration, however well intended, need to be kept in check, lest we all lose out in the long run.

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