Popstar Ariana Grande has been on a roll lately. Her 2020 release Positions quickly became the superstar's fifth number-one album in the US.
Grande started 2021 by marrying her real estate agent beau Dalton Gomez in a low-key, elegant ceremony, and most recently, she's been preparing for the role of a judge on the hit NBC talent show The Voice.
But no one can have it all, and Grande's most recent brush with the uglier side of fame has consisted of a flooding of negative comments in response to photographs uploaded to the Grammy winner's social media accounts.
The star's slim, petite build has meant that she has constantly been subject to body-shaming. Grande has even tried the tactic of embracing the trolling and made fun of it in a picture uploaded to her Instagram account in 2015 in which she wears a sweater emblazoned with the slogan, "I have no t*ts!"
But the comments under Grande's latest post, including "built like a 12 year old," "damn she got no cake," and "flat," have been called out by the singer's fans for taking it too far.
One Twitter user wrote, "Ariana has never been so confident in her body as she is now. It's so sad to see that a lot of people are still body shaming her just because she has a natural petite body".
Meanwhile, another fan commented on the original Instagram post, saying, "you are gorgeous love, don't listen to all these stuck up teenage boys thinking you expect their validation."
Some users were worried that Grande had seen the negative comments when she appeared to limit the responses on her most recent posts. A fan wrote, "ariana limited her Instagram comments because a lot of people were body shaming... i h4te you all so much".
However, there was also a suggestion that while criticism of Grande's body type may not affect her, it might affect others who share a similar build. A Twitter user wrote, "at the end of the day, ariana probably isn't paying much attention to the body shaming she's been getting, a lot of the ppl paying attention are ppl that already suffer with their body image".
While another fan speculated that the negative remarks might hit especially hard for the "7 Rings" hitmaker because they clash with the 3-year anniversary of the rapper Mac Miller's death. Miller and Grande were romantically linked between 2015 and 2017, and the star appeared to take the death of her former boyfriend very hard.