It’s been months, but there’s still something about Chappell Roan’s rise that feels shocking. One day, she’s playing to loyal crowds in medium-sized venues. After that comes Coachella. Next was Lollapalooza. Then, around 110,000 people packed into a field in Chicago scream her lyrics back at her. When things are going that fast, there isn’t much room to breathe or build walls.
In spite of this, Roan has been trying to build walls in real time, in public, and with a lot of opposition.
She put up two TikTok videos in August 2024 that got over 30 million views between them. She wasn’t announcing a tour or a new song. Fans were being told to stop following her family around. Don’t grab her for hugs when she didn’t ask for them. Stop thinking that they knew her just because they knew every word on her album. The videos were blunt, a little angry, and completely predictable for anyone who has been paying attention to how the relationship between celebrities and fans has changed quietly over the last ten years.
The person who said it changed how it hit home. Chappell Roan isn’t a faraway megastar who only talks to people through publicists. Part of what makes her so appealing is that she’s completely open and honest; she’s messy, opinionated, and in the present. Sally Theran, a psychology professor at Wellesley College who studies parasocial relationships, has said that fans are so drawn to how real the characters are. When someone seems real, it’s harder to resist the urge to be friends with them.
Parasocial relationships aren’t new, and they’re not always bad. Researchers have been studying how people connect emotionally with people they’ve never met since the 1950s. At first, it was TV personalities, then musicians, and now the endless stream of faces on everyone’s phone. A parasocial psychologist named Gayle Stever says that the brain doesn’t really tell the difference between connecting with someone you know and connecting with someone you’ve seen a hundred times. It always acts the same. It makes a connection.
The way that attachment feels has changed because of social media. Fans no longer just stand back and watch. They post, tag, and direct message. They see artists share things that feel personal, like tour bus videos, sleepy voice memos, and uncensored rants, and they think that intimacy goes both ways, which is a reasonable but wrong assumption. It seems like the feed has shortened the mental gap between the performer and the audience in ways that no one saw coming.
Roan has been figuring out how to deal with that collapse in real life. In a bar, a fan grabbed her and kissed her. Police turned away someone who was trying to get an autograph because they wouldn’t leave. People have been after her family. These aren’t general complaints about how hard fame is; they’re specific physical violations that most people would know right away were wrong if they happened to someone they knew.
It’s interesting, and maybe a little hard to deal with, that the backlash she faced when she spoke out was real. Some people found her to be boring. Some people said she was trying to get attention while she was complaining about it. At least some of that criticism is partly true—fame is a deal, and Roan is aware of the benefits it brings. That version, on the other hand, doesn’t really say what she wants, which isn’t privacy. It’s the right thing to do in public places.
She might have changed something, even if only a little. Now, more artists are talking about this openly, and more fans seem to be figuring out, at least in some parts of the internet, the line between appreciation and entitlement. It’s really not clear if that shift will hold. There is a lot of parasocial attachment, and the things that make it possible aren’t going away.
Roan has almost done something against her will: she has brought up the question. Not in a think tank or on a panel of experts in the field, but by standing in the mess of her sudden fame and making it clear that something is wrong.
