Arianators assemble: Ariana Grande’s fans weave a web of support

As anyone who has met Ariana Grande will confirm, before you get to Ariana, you meet the Arianators. They are the mainly teenage, mainly female fan base, who have followed Grande since she was an elfin starlet on the Nickelodeon series Victorious. The Arianators are legion, bumping up her Twitter and Instagram followings to 46m and 106m respectively, while her Snapchat posts also get millions of views. Grande was prolific on social media and responsive to fans from the start, managing her own “socials” and maintaining a flow of warm, chatty posts. Thanks to occasional “follow sprees”, during which she befriends anyone who asks on Twitter, 66,000 especially lucky Arianators can boast the ultimate badge of fanship: Grande’s name in their list of followers.

Interviewing her in 2013 when she was in London to promote the release of her first album, Yours Truly, I discovered the strength of Arianator loyalty. There were at least 100 fans outside her hotel, all of them school age and prepared to wait it out for as long as it took to get a glimpse of her. At that stage, she was a 20-year-old actor who had released a couple of singles and was following the Miley Cyrus crossover path to a pop career. But the Arianators are made of different stuff to Cyrus’s “Smilers”. Unlike most fandoms – the collective noun used by fans themselves – the Arianators were reticent and unwilling to talk to the press. If they hadn’t filled the whole pavement in groups of four or five, scribbling affirmations of Ari-love in black pen, they could have been described as keeping themselves to themselves. They were a cross-section of teenage London: black, white, Muslim; even the odd boy, including one who carefully studied his feet when I spoke to him.

This week, the Arianators have risen and circled their wagons around their hero. An Instagram comment from selenaxvoice – “WE ARE WITH YOU” – is the gist of it, but social media is boiling. There are messages to Grande (“We love you ari, we are a family and we stay together until the end” ), and fan-to-fan reassurances (“Everything will be fine again”); a good deal of energy is also being expended on dealing with the inevitable trolls. Unaccustomed to having to defend her, supporters are slightly diffident with them; a character who waspishly tweeted: “Pray for this, pray for that. You don’t get shit doing that” received the response: “You’re not a very nice person.” An Instagrammer who criticised the fact that the bunny ears Grande wears on stage have been used as a “pray4Manchester” symbol was politely shushed.

They are sharing selfies from the Manchester concert, and videos of Grande on stage that night Some have been uploaded to YouTube, which has been rapidly losing ground to Snapchat and Instagram where most Arianators congregate. Perhaps they want to recalibrate the way the evening ended; the way it should have ended, with 18,000 happily exhausted Arianators pouring out of the arena and safely home. For a fandom who don’t go out of their way to grandstand, Arianators are offering an impressive web of mutual support.

The cold shoulder they showed me in 2013, I later realised, wasn’t so much unfriendliness as protectiveness. Whereas, for instance, One Direction’s fandom could be extravagantly aggressive toward outsiders, and each other, Grande’s have always closed ranks. Their devotion is no less fierce, but there is an almost maternal quality to it, engendered by Grande’s apparent delicacy. Physically, she is even smaller than the average celebrity, and when her emotional openness is added, she seems vulnerable. That, perhaps, is what is sustaining the Arianators now: the thought that she relies on her fans more than most pop stars do.