I’ve been thinking about how to verbalize this for two days, but here it finally is: I was appalled by some of the crowd interactions at my show (Toronto n1).
For one, people were being incredibly demanding of JB’s time and attention, even after she flat-out told us that she was on a time crunch because of the technical difficulties. She tried to shut it down and literally went silent at one point, but people were still trying to make conversation. It felt like a lot of people were there with the goal of getting noticed by her, which is just parasocial and disrespectful, and it obviously stressed her out a lot. Being at a concert is a privilege, not a right, and fans shouldn’t feel entitled to social interaction with the artist.
Also, I was disgusted by the people who were wooing and applauding her tics (mostly during song in E after she couldn’t figure out the keyboard thing and had to start over - she was ticcing a lot more after that). People also laughed when she did them, which is just so rude. Some people were telling her to stop or ‘aww’ing, which doesn’t help either; even positive acknowledgment stresses her out because it means we’ve noticed, and stress makes her tics worse. I’m not trying to say it’s not okay to feel things about her tics - it breaks my heart to see her do them because its visual confirmation that she’s anxious - but she clearly doesn’t want our pity. (There’s a difference between pity and empathy, y’all. Fucking learn it, please).