On confidently confused social-media fanfiction and the communal invention of public lives
By: Kelsey Maurine Brickl
Celebrity fan culture has developed a habit of redistributing consent through language that sounds affectionate enough to escape serious scrutiny.
A Taylor Swift fan in New York City excitedly calls the singer’s Madison Square Garden nuptials “our royal wedding.” Another describes Swift, a famous stranger, as “like an older sibling.” Elsewhere online, people discuss an actor repeatedly confirmed to have no public social-media presence as though the actor quietly reads their fixated posts, follows their memes, watches their accounts, and occasionally places private photographs into circulation for them to discover. The conspiratorial speculation is offered playfully, reinforced in openly advertised group chats, and repeated until the absence of evidence barely registers, protected by the collective plausible deniability of “just joking.”
These exchanges are easy to dismiss because they do not resemble the conduct most people associate with dangerous fixation. No one is issuing a threat or claiming a secret marriage. The language appears comic, communal, even self-mocking. Yet the humor depends upon a serious presumption: strangers have appointed themselves interpreters of another person’s private attention, romance, finances, preferences, amusement, and consent.
My previous essays on parasociality examined the social machinery surrounding proximity. Fleeting stage-door encounters and expensive merchandise purchases become fandom credentials. Repeat attendance at concerts, theatrical productions, games, and matches, along with completionist consumption of an artist’s discography or filmography, becomes accumulated fan standing. A smile, a brief conversation, a hat or bracelet handed over, a caught baseball, or a signed programme survives online as proof that the fan was seen and known to have existed.
Other fans reward the encounter, archive it, compare it, envy it, and attach relational significance to conduct that may have lasted less than a minute. The current form goes further because the imagined relationship no longer depends on an encounter at all. The celebrity’s unobserved thoughts become available for communal authorship — social media circular fanfiction.
A photograph appears, and participants decide that it may have come from the actor’s own phone. Someone excitedly suggests that the actor secretly follows fan accounts despite long-standing confirmation that the actor maintains no visible account. Another extends the conspiratorial fantasy by imagining the actor “watching” the fans and reading their conversations. Sexual jokes about the actor’s body follow, accompanied by assurances that the actor would probably find them funny, perhaps even arousing. Each dehumanizing claim places the fans inside the actor’s field of attention. The actor is repeatedly imagined looking toward them, understanding them, and privately enjoying the attention they provide.
No one in the group needs to claim privileged knowledge or physical access because the fantasy is assembled through small contributions. One person proposes a shard of possibility. Another adds an AI-generated screenshot. Someone recalls a long-past interview and treats a passing remark as corroboration. Someone else introduces a meme that makes the claim feel less disturbing and less accountable because everyone present is laughing. The group gradually objectifies the actor and constructs an interior life for a person none of them can observe and none of them know. No one is embarrassed.
This construction work flatters its mostly anonymous authors because it allows them to imagine that they matter to someone influential, that their posts about their idols are noticed by someone beyond their fan chats, that their jokes are understood, that their sexual commentary is welcomed rather than found disturbing or repulsive, and that their continued attention has acquired private significance rather than being seen as alarming.
The asymmetry of time, access, and power remains intact, but the community supplies a version of events in which attention travels both ways. This is a massive disconnect from reality. Even if the grandiose fantasy is not actually believed, its repetition should set off alarm bells about the state of modern online parasociality.
The overconfidence required for this particular form of online parasociality arises through repetition and social reward. The same idea voiced by several people begins to feel less presumptuous, arrogant, and overfamiliar because responsibility has been distributed across the group. Each participant can retreat into irony while retaining the pleasure of imagined reciprocity. “We’re being delusional on purpose! Hahaha! We’re just silly fans joking about doing crazy sexual and social things to and with our favorite pop star, athlete, politician, or actor! Hehehe!” becomes a license to rehearse claims that would sound absurdly, even frighteningly, invasive if spoken aloud, in person, without the protective shield of a screen and the socially permissive vocabulary of fandom.
That protection should therefore not survive close and serious examination. A joke about what a stranger secretly reads still assigns that stranger a private habit. A joke about what a stranger privately thinks still assigns an interior life unavailable to the speaker. A joke about what a stranger would enjoy still invents consent. A joke about hidden online attention still places the speaker at the center of another person’s unseen world. The speaker may remain uncertain, playful, or self-aware, but the imagined public figure is afforded no comparable uncertainty. By the end of the exchange, the stranger has already been written into the story as reader, confidant, approving audience, or silent participant.
To be very clear, I do not know what the public figures being speculated about explicitly online think about any of this. The people making these claims do not know, either. That shared lack of knowledge should end the inquiry. Instead, it supplies the empty space in which the fantasy expands.
Celebrity weddings make the same presumption easier to see because a wedding already has a formal grammar of belonging. There are invited guests, relatives, attendants, witnesses, workers, neighbors, photographers, passersby, and people who learn about the event afterward. Those distinctions are ordinary and intelligible. They begin to collapse when fandom assigns ceremonial standing to people whom the couple has never met.
When Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce announced their engagement, some fans described the future wedding as “our royal wedding.” Others wrote about Swift as though an older sister had become engaged. The language did more than express pleasure. It installed the speaker inside the event.
The first-person plural carries a claim and nearly becomes a Royal We when wielded by certain social media accounts. “Our” gives the public a share in the marriage before any invitation exists. The older-sister comparison gives emotional intimacy the appearance of kinship. The fan’s long familiarity with songs, interviews, photographs, performances, and public narratives is converted into a position within the celebrity’s private life.
That conversion depends on self-importance. The fan has watched for years, so the watching must have accumulated relational meaning. The fan remembers breakups, albums, tours, interviews, clothing, gestures, jokes, and public disappointments, then begins to feel present within the history being observed. Intense knowledge of the public record is mistaken for a place in the private one.
A meaningful sibling relationship contains reciprocal memory, obligation, conflict, embarrassment, repair, and knowledge acquired through life together. Following a career creates none of that. The metaphor feels natural only because the fan has built a continuous internal relationship that the public figure does not share.
Dua Lipa’s recent wedding in Palermo, Sicily to Callum Turner carried the same presumption into physical space and attached a commercial apparatus to it. Residents did not need to care about Dua Lipa’s marriage, guest list, fashion, celebrity arrivals, or the photographs that would circulate afterward. They had homes, businesses, routines, streets, and ordinary expectations about moving through their own neighborhood. Those ordinary claims became obstacles once Palermo was repurposed as the visual setting for an internationally marketable celebrity event.
The main square was valuable because it could be photographed. The streets because they supplied atmosphere. The residents’ buildings, balconies, doorways, and daily surroundings became scenic property in images produced for newspapers, entertainment sites, paparazzi agencies, social platforms, fashion accounts, and fan pages. Private security and event planning controlled access on the ground while photographers converted the resulting exclusivity into saleable pictures. The wedding generated content because the city around it could be made to look romantic, secretive, glamorous, and difficult to reach.
“Our square is not your living room” rejected more than just logistical inconvenience or overtourism frustration among Palermo residents; it rejected the transformation of civic space into a privately controlled set whose images would feed a commercial parasocial fan economy that extracted financial value from a real place with year-round lived comparative socio-economic hardship while capitalizing on its visuals.
Paparazzi photographs and candid snaps taken on cell phones and sold to outlets like TMZ occupy a revealing position within parasocial culture. They are sold as access to an otherwise inaccessible life. A distant glimpse of a guest, dress, car, hotel entrance, or guarded doorway can be reproduced across hundreds of outlets because fans have been trained to experience fragments as intimacy. The scarcity created by privacy and security increases the price of the image, while the existence of the image invites viewers to believe they have entered the event in some minor emotional sense.
The fan may never visit Palermo, know the couple, or understand the local disruption. The image still arrives as a personal offering: a secret angle, a stolen moment, a closer look. Celebrity media sells this sensation repeatedly. The photograph has commercial value because the audience has been encouraged to confuse visual access with relational access.
Residents of Palermo were expected to absorb the physical cost of an economy from which they received no meaningful benefit. Streets could be constrained, movement interrupted, businesses affected, and ordinary access subordinated because the spectacle would be profitable elsewhere. The same logic already shadows fantasies of a Taylor Swift wedding in New York, where street closures, barricades, police deployment, paparazzi access, and neighborhood disruption are treated as natural extensions of “our royal wedding.”
One enterprising New Yorker, knowing how irrationally devoted some Swifties would be, sold bags of trash discarded from Swift’s wedding to Kelce. Every bag sold within twenty-four hours. In both cities, ordinary public life became the background against which strangers purchased and performed emotional proximity to people they did not know.
That parasocial economy depends on the same self-importance visible in fan group chats and social-media posts. The fan assumes that sustained attention creates standing in the celebrity’s private life. The entertainment apparatus assumes that the event carries enough universal significance to justify annexing streets, businesses, homes, and routines belonging to people who may feel no attachment at all. Personal or commercial value is treated as evidence of public consent.
Palermo residents interrupted that process by refusing the role assigned to them. New Yorkers surrounding any heavily secured celebrity wedding would be entitled to do the same. They are not grateful scenery for a spectacle designed to generate photographs, coverage, clicks, speculation, and fan identification. The parasocial fantasy reaches the audience as romance. On the ground, it requires barriers, surveillance, controlled movement, appropriated space, and a city temporarily reorganized for the profitable manufacture of intimacy.
The same manufacture occurs online when fans invent a public figure’s private amusement, awareness, gratitude, or approval. The fantasy is emotionally profitable even when no money changes hands. Around a celebrity wedding, emotional investment and financial extraction become visibly joined. Paparazzi, publishers, platforms, advertisers, fashion brands, hospitality businesses, and fan accounts all benefit from the demand to see more, know more, and feel closer.
I do not know what any unnamed public figure thinks, wants, reads, notices, enjoys, or dislikes. Neither do the people who have built social and commercial systems around supplying answers to those questions. X, Instagram, and TikTok show how communal repetition can smooth words, suggestions, comforting grandiose conspiracies, and other behavior that would trigger severe alarm in person. Palermo and New York City this summer show what happens when invented intimacy requires a physical setting. Someone else’s street becomes the set, someone else’s disruption becomes the atmosphere, and someone else’s ordinary life becomes content for sale.
Selected Readings
Allard, Laurence. 2005. “Expressive Expressivism: Contemporary Fan Cultures and Digital Spaces.” Réseaux 132 (4): 81–104.
Associated Press / PBS NewsHour. 2026. “Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce Marry in Front of Famous Friends at Madison Square Garden.” July 4, 2026.
CBS News. 2026. “Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce Married in Ceremony Officiated by Adam Sandler.” July 4, 2026.
Click, Melissa A., Hyunji Lee, and Holly Willson Holladay. 2013. “Making Monsters: Lady Gaga, Fan Identification, and Social Media.” Popular Communication 11 (4): 360–379.
Dibble, Jayson L., Tilo Hartmann, and Sarah F. Rosaen. 2016. “Preserving Accuracy in Concept and Measurement: Clarifying Parasocial Interaction, Parasocial Relationship, and Parasocial Engagement.” Communication Theory 26 (1): 21–44.
Ferris, Kerry O. 2001. “See and Be Seen: The Psychology of Celebrity.” Human Relations 54 (3): 315–332.
The Guardian. 2026. “Dua Lipa and Callum Turner Wedding Divides Palermo: ‘I Could Understand If It Was for the Pope’.” June 5, 2026.
Ghost Light Access. 2026. “Do Parasocial Fans Dream of Electric Sheep? Field Notes from Researching Modern Fandom.” Ghost Light Access Research & Essays. https://ghostlightaccess.org/do-parasocial-fans-dream-of-electric-sheep-field-notes-from-researching-modern-fandom/.
Giles, David C. 2002. “Parasocial Interaction: A Review of the Literature and a Model for Future Research.” Media Psychology 4 (3): 279–305.
Horton, Donald, and R. Richard Wohl. 1956. “Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction: Observations on Intimacy at a Distance.” Psychiatry 19 (3): 215–229.
The Irish Times. 2026. “Dua Lipa and Callum Turner Wedding Divides Palermo: Mood on the Ground in Palermo is Somewhat Ambivalent.” June 6, 2026.
Jenson, Joli. 1992. “Fandom as Pathology: The Consequences of Celebrity Worship.” In The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, edited by Lisa A. Lewis, 9–29. London: Routledge.
Maltby, John, James Houran, and Lynn E. McCutcheon. 2003. “A Clinical Interpretation of Attitude and Behaviors Associated with Celebrity Worship.” The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 191 (1): 25–29.
Marwick, Alice E., and danah boyd. 2011. “To See and Be Seen: Celebrity Practice on Twitter.” Convergence 17 (2): 139–158.
The New York Times. 2026. “Swift Rents Madison Square Garden for Upcoming July Nuptials.” June 24, 2026.
Stever, Gayle S. 2011. “Celebrity Worship: Deconstructing a Concept.” Journal of Media Psychology 14 (1): 56–73.
Time for Sicily. 2026. “Dua Lipa Wedding in Palermo: Why Sicily is the Perfect Choice.” June 2026.
TMZ / Media Impact Reports. 2026. “NYC Artist Justin Gignac Sells Out ‘NYC Pocket Garbage: Not Invited Edition’ Cubes from Swift-Kelce Wedding Perimeter.” July 2026.
Tukachinsky, Riva, and Gayle S. Stever. 2019. “Parasocial Relationships with Celebrities.” In The Oxford Handbook of Entertainment Theory, edited by Peter Vorderer and Christoph Klimmt. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Vogue / Business of Fashion. 2026. “How Celebrity Weddings Took Over the Global Trend Machine.” July 2026.