Until last night Ariana Grande’s fans, predominantly tweens and teens, were more preoccupied with the concept of friendship than the ripple effect of international politics. I witnessed this first hand when I was working at MTV and oversaw a Twitter Q&A with Grande, where she spent an hour or so answering questions sent in by fans. As Grande and I scrolled through the 90,000 tweets, I couldn’t help but marvel at how many were on the topic of friendship.
‘What do you look for in a friend?’ they clamoured to know. ‘Who’s your best friend?’ ‘Will you be my friend?’
Today, ‘Arianators’, as her fanbase call themselves, are tragically united in grief and solidarity as well as friendship, collectively lamenting on Twitter the loss of 18-year-old Georgina Callander and eight-year-old Saffie Rose Roussos – the first victims to be named in the attack – whether they knew them personally or not.
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