Note: By the time this piece eventually came back to me as a thing to publish, Yuzuru Hanyu and his wife had divorced because of harassment from his fans, Taylor Swift had moved on from Healy to a football player with a mid digital footprint, and… I have no idea what Doja is doing with her love life. Normally, I’d fully scrap the piece but… it’s too good to jettison despite being Old News at points.

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“Kick out Chen and Chanyeol who are hurting the group, Stop deceiving the fans, EXO doesn’t need vicious members, Chen and Chanyeol OUT”

This is a message plastered across a mobile billboard that was apparently stationed outside of SM Entertainment in summer 2023, calling for the removal of two of the group’s members. While fans’ ire towards Chanyeol stem from rumors that he’s a serial cheater who causes damage to his group’s reputation, the reason why the fans want Chen gone? He got his fiancée pregnant before marriage and before enlistment a few years back. From the second that his relationship – with a non-famous woman – was revealed, several EXO-Ls, the group’s very vocal fanbase, and unaffiliated Korean internet users (of course) took to the internet and made it known that they weren’t pleased and that they thought his relationship ruined EXO’s reputation in the public eye.

When it comes to the love lives of idols, Korean fans have been associated with being extra possessive of their fandom objects: the idols and actors that they adore.

Because of the nature of the idol-fan relationship – one where idols actively participate in the parasocial relationship as a form of marketing and fans can win opportunities to interact with their idols one on one in the form of in-person and virtual events – the deep relationship that develops is intense and can become negative on the part of the fans who believe the idol-fan parasocial relationship is a) mutually intense and b) something that gives them the right to dictate their idol’s behavior and comment on it as well.

However, that’s not to say that Korean fans have cornered the market when it comes to raging or weeping when their fandom object gets in a relationship or has children out of wedlock.

They most certainly do not.

Everyone is very weird about their specific celebrity objects.

It’s just that some people are allowed to get away with their behavior. (This is me gesturing broadly at the way we don’t talk about Western male stan behavior on behalf of their idols – here in the colloquial, non-pop sense – like Travis Scott, Tory Lanez, and other terrible men who these jerks feel attached to to the point of doing harm and being little freaks in their name.)

When it comes to Western celebrities getting heat and harassment for being in a relationship, it’s not just the fannish sense of betrayal that shows up. When a woman of color (especially a Black woman) is the romantic option for the celebrity… fans add racism to the misogyny and general parasocial entitlement that they unleash.

Selena Gomez and Hailey Bieber (nee Baldwin) both have been subject to years of harassment from separate portions of Justin Bieber’s fans who feel strongly about the singer’s relationships with them. (And some of what Gomez has faced is obviously racialized.)

Some of Tom Hiddleston’s fans felt so betrayed by his relationship with actress Zawe Ashton, that they’ve spent three years being racist weenies online about her and, recently, their infant child.

When rumors started spreading that 42-year old MCU actor Chris Evans was in a relationship with 26-year old Warrior Monk actress Alba Baptista, they both got heat. He was accused of “robbing the cradle” and disappointing his fans while she had her entire digital footprint dug up in order to find reasons to make the relationship clearly problematic.

Back in the day, pop princess Brandy actually lied about the depth of her relationship with Robert Smith because she didn’t want to jeopardize her public image and let down the people in her life who expected tons from her. Lying about being married didn’t help, however, because she got backlash the second the truth came out.

Fans worldwide and across decades feel a specific entitlement to their fandom object’s attention with fans peeling off the second the fandom object “grows up” and ends up in a public relationship or with a child.

This is not solely the sort of backlash we see with the reaction to Taylor Swift’s relationship with alleged racist Matty Healy (and the rushed “Karma” remix that felt like damage control) or Doja Cat’s relationship with comedian J. Cyrus, who is accused of mistreating and being inappropriate with his moderators and female fans.

While some fans certainly feel entitled to their celebrity object’s relationships and feel as though they get to give the celebrity unasked-for advice, primarily, the way the parasocial relationship devolves is in situations where the response to dating and marriage is… a deep and hard to explain grief.

In response to the announcement that retired figure skating legend Yuzuru Hanyu has gotten married, the blog FANYUFANME authored a passionate piece entitled “Can I Still Love Yuzu?”. In the piece, the author expresses warmth, grief, and confusion, showing stages of a parasocial relationship under pressure as a direct result of the fandom object… growing in a way fans cannot follow. While I strongly suggest that everyone read this piece in full and in good faith, there are some parts that stand out. In one part, the author writes that:

It seems Yuzu’s loneliness is a much more artistically abstract version of loneliness than my own. I imagined he and I were sharing the version of loneliness which is coming home to an empty apartment, watching Yuzu, and then going to bed alone. (Though I never really thought he did the “watching Yuzu” part…ok, maybe I did.) There are so many things we thought we shared with Yuzu (besides his Practice). For many of us, we also thought we were sharing the experience of being single. He seemed truly alone. I saw what I was feeling in his eyes, his actions, his words, his moments of despair. It was never about wanting Yuzu to be suffering alone. But there was an open door between us. A connection we could feel with him. The struggle of being alone in the world. I thought, ‘If Yuzu can be alone, so can I.’ But now that door has been shut, and we are on the other side. Still lonely. And now without Yuzu. Whenever I was alone, I felt like Lonely Yuzu was walking beside me. Sitting beside me. At his laptop beside me. On his non-phone beside me. And that made everything OK です. Now, Yuzu isn’t lonely, but I still am. How can I be alone…alone?

I do and do not understand this specific grief.

In 2009, the rockstar Miyavi announced that he was getting married to the popstar melody… and that she was pregnant. I was… maybe eighteen at the time and, at that point, had been a fan of Miyavi for over five years. I was also, novel to celebrity fandoms, a fan of melody sparked by her appearance with Ryohei in the m-flo loves track “Miss You”.

For me, I wasn’t able to see Miyavi and melody’s marriage – going on fourteen years this year – as a betrayal because it was more like… I was getting two cakes. I was getting my ultimate bias (miyavi) marrying the featured artist on one of my favorite songs (melody)… and they were having children.

But that’s because my relationship with my celebrity objects has almost always been one where I adore them and their partner(s)… to a point. I only ever get angry about celebrity relationships… when I feel like my celebrity object is mistreated in one.

While I was a tiny tadpole when Whitney Houston got married to Bobby Brown… I quietly celebrated when she got divorced from him in 2007. I never felt like that was a healthy relationship even before I knew anything that could be considered “tea”. But I wouldn’t have, at the time, thought of messaging Bobby Brown with half of the things that I thought back then. I wouldn’t have made my personal problem(s) with the relationship public. But that’s because everyone does every single aspect of fandom differently.

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Usually, the most intense fans of celebrities who end up in public relationships… view the relationship as a betrayal of the parasocial contract.

They view it as something that breaks the constructed binding contract between fan and fannish object where we (the fans) are told and even shown that they are the celebrity’s one-and-only (shared with tens of thousands at minimum) in the parasocial relationship. It’s a sort of contract relationship where we (the fans) give the celebrity love and support (and money) and the celebrity responds by giving us the… semi-illusion that they love and care about us.

And while that sounds somewhat mercenary, it’s important to note that the parasocial relationship is mutual to an extent.

These celebrities love us (the fans) in the abstract.

When an idol holds your hand at a hi-touch event or Beyonce jokes about you (fondly) after recognizing you showing up at your third (or thirtieth) concert, that’s sincere emotion. They love their fans as much as they can… because none of us actually know each other and we both (fan and celebrity) love the idea of the object before us, the thing we actually know on a surface level.

The parasocial relationship has limits and celebrity relationships show the borders of those limits quite clearly.

As FANYUFANME winds up pointing out, those relationships form a boundary where your image of the idol/celebrity, one that they put forward as part of their (partially) constructed image, takes a hit when they enter a relationship. Because you can sit in a video live with your fave on Instagram, TikTok, or Weverse and watch them hang out with the fans. You can chat with celebrities on various apps or even get a reply back on social media.

But the second a celebrity you were deeply attached to gets in a long term relationship (or gets married), for many people, it is the reminder that the celebrity – who seemed to be alone in the public eye, like many of their fans – isn’t as alone as we are, that they don’t need us the way we need them.

Something which triggers a sharp reaction of intense hurt.

The disappointment, grief, and (sometimes) anger that some fans feel when faced with the reality of celebrity objects changing in some way is because of how the parasocial relationship works especially after you spend years in it with a celebrity.

It’s not just relationships, that’s just the most common way we know to talk about this, but any sign of “growing up” that threatens to destabilize the parasocial relationship – a relationship that, while passionate, is as unstable as a house built on sand or a cliff. Just about anything can shake it up and shatter it even after years of nourishment.

The problem with some EXO-Ls being angry about Chen’s relationship and children isn’t that they had a reaction to what they saw as a massive betrayal of the (para)social contract. It’s that some of them slandered Chen online, collaborated on the mobile billboard, or are demanding he leave the group.

Being upset with the seemingly sudden news of Yuzuru’s relationship isn’t wrong – especially if you related to his heartfelt confessions on livestreams or as expressed in his performances. It would only become a problem if you’re out there calling him a liar, using ill-gained (stalker or paparazzi) information to debunk the news, or harassing anyone who could be linked with him. (I’m not on figure skating social media, so while I don’t think it’s a widespread problem or that any of what I’m saying is really happening, if you think it is… Well. I’m so sorry your fandom is freaking out and I hope it calms down soon.)

I can’t – and wouldn’t – tell anyone that they needed to feel bad because they reacted poorly to a celebrity object getting in a relationship. Especially if it’s privately held or kept within the fandom space. While it’s not a feeling set I tend to experience, it’s important for me to note that part of having emotions is having them go wild when overwhelmed.

The issue isn’t feeling – because we can’t help what we feel especially when in the grip of the parasocial relationship’s emotional whirlwind – but the doing.