It is past 1 a.m. in Southern California and 22-year-old Corrina is on the hunt. A blurry paparazzi photo of Olivia Rodrigo hit the internet hours ago—Olivia out somewhere wearing something—and sleep is suddenly secondary to the STEM grad. Corrina runs an Instagram account (@oliviarodrigoclothing) with 25,300 followers devoted to identifying every piece of clothing Olivia wears in public, and she has been called to action.

“It seemed like I was going through the dark web at this point,” she’ll tell me later. “Like, really in the depths of it.” She scrolls through TikToks with two Likes. Pinterest gets a turn next, until her feed blurs. Olivia’s stylists Chloe and Chenelle Delgadillo have warmly confirmed designer labels with her in the past (a small thrill she’s still not over), but given the hour, that’s not really on the table. Finally, after much searching, she finds Olivia’s outfit and posts the fashion credit to Instagram. “It’s like finding the last piece in a 1,000-piece puzzle set,” she says. “It’s just so fun!”

This is what it looks like to love Olivia Rodrigo. When the Cosmo cover star so much as steps out in a babydoll dress, the moment waterfalls into hundreds of thousands of fans answering the call online, posting together in tandem. “Livies” are mostly young women who found a language in Olivia’s music for things they hadn’t been able to say and a community where they can finally say them.

“Being a Livie really makes me feel like I belong in something,” says 19-year-old Claire, who runs an Olivia update account from the Philippines with 11,200 followers (@Olivia.UpdatesRodrigo). “Whenever we interact with our favorite artist or band, we feel a sense of community. They make us feel like a family.”

The Livie fandom runs on a sense of mutual recognition: Fans believe Olivia sees them, and she keeps proving them right. In the lead-up to her new album, you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love (out June 12), her team has brought doughnuts and merch to fans gathered at the pink art mural wall in Los Angeles, and Olivia herself even dropped into an open mic at Pete’s Candy Store in Brooklyn this week to perform “drop dead” unannounced.

For Livies who can’t just show up at a mural wall or stumble into a Brooklyn bar at the right moment, the lyrics do the same work. Olivia writes like an analog artist in an internet age (old-school in a way her predecessors have noticed and appreciated), and the emotions she pens are specific enough to feel private and universal enough to travel. “Part of early adulthood is realizing you have more questions than answers, that everything you thought you’d have figured out by now remains a mystery,” Olivia’s best friend Madison Hu writes in Olivia’s Cosmo cover story. “It’s an intimidating revelation but one Olivia leans into.” That quality—the willingness to not know and stay mid-feeling rather than post-feeling—is precisely what Livies light up about. “They all say that it gets better, it gets better the more you grow” goes the bridge of “Teenage Dream.” “But what if I don’t?”

That lyric floors Claire every time. “Growing up, you think, Oh, I want to get older because all my problems will go away,” she says. “But in your 20s, you know now it doesn’t really work that way.”

Claire has been following Olivia since 2015, when she saw her in an American Girl movie. She started up an Olivia account in 2020 in the middle of pandemic quarantine and now spends 10 to 12 hours a day on it during big moments, posting updates between information technology classes. She is unabashedly a fangirl, everywhere, on every platform. “I’m not afraid to share it with the world,” she says. “You may not get it, but that’s me. That’s my passion, and that’s what I love.”

What people tend to misunderstand about this level of fandom, says Lori Morimoto, an assistant professor of Asian studies at Temple University Japan who researches transcontinental fan communities, is that its value isn’t always legible by conventional metrics. “Especially in the United States, we are so committed to this idea of not wasting time,” she says. “If your time is not productive in a sort of economic sense, then what are you even doing with your life? And this is one of those things that steps outside of that.”

What it offers instead, she argues, is connection, meaning, and the pleasure of mattering to a community that is hungry for what you bring into it. “Knowledge is a form of closeness,” she says. “It gives you something back.”

Corrina knows the feeling. She came to Olivia’s world from a health care and STEM background, drawn in by the way Olivia makes music, fashion, and branding marry together. “I just wanted to exercise the hemisphere of my brain that loves creativity and the arts,” she says. “I get to balance the science-y side of my life but also the pop culture fangirl in me.” She is, she’ll tell you with a wink, a casualty of the Gen Z job crisis, and the account has given her something to be devoted to.

And devotion, in this fandom, has a way of turning outward. Claire has witnessed fans finance GoFundMes for each other’s medical debts. It’s touched her personally, too. When Olivia came to Manila for a performance and Claire didn’t have the money to go, a fellow fan reached out and offered to cover the expense. “They asked if I had a bank account, because they were going to sponsor me,” she says. “I had to say, ‘I’m so sorry, but I don’t, because the Philippines doesn’t support this particular app.’” The concert didn’t happen for Claire, but the gesture stayed with her. “They really do help,” she says. “When one person is in need of something, there are people willing to help in any way possible.”

Amélie, 19, who runs one of the largest Olivia fan Instagrams with 115,000 followers (@liv.source), has seen this as well. When Olivia turned 23 this year, Amélie and a group of friends launched “Livies 4 Good,” directing fans toward the Women’s Refugee Commission. Together, they raised $1,600 in a week. “I think it’s so beautiful how Olivia’s advocacy inspires her fans to want to make an impact on the world just like she has,” Amélie says.

Amélie found Olivia at 13 and recognized something she hadn’t seen before: a girl only a few years older, half-Filipina like herself, blazing a path forward in the spotlight. Hearing Olivia name her feelings explicitly in her music brought Amélie something close to relief. “It’s hard growing up as a woman of color and feeling like no matter what you do to try and chase the ‘ideal’ and try to fit in, there’s always something missing,” Amélie says. “I swear it felt like she was reading my diary.” She’s now studying music business in college, a direction she credits entirely to Olivia. “I never imagined the community would grow so big,” she says.

Olivia, for her part, is thoughtful about what she’s built and the specific weight it carries, even in places her tour bus doesn’t reach. “I had never been to the Philippines in my life,” she told Cosmopolitan in her cover interview, “and being able to go there and play in an arena of 55,000 people is so crazy. I loved watching the young girls in the crowd sing songs like ‘traitor.’” On set for her Cosmo shoot, she also went out of her way to speak directly to her Filipino fans, sharing her favorite karaoke song and saying, “Whenever I do karaoke, I think, hell yeah, I’m Filipino!”

In Claire’s province of the Philippines, the billboards are hundreds of miles away. Fan events are experienced through screens, and being a fangirl is not, as she puts it, something people around her really adapt to. But when that karaoke version of “drop dead” hit iTunes, her group chat lit up. “She did this for us,” she says. “She’s thinking about us.”

It’s a small moment. It’s also the point. Olivia could have released any version on iTunes for any market in a decision that may seem, on paper, like a marketing footnote. But to this group chat thousands of miles from any arena she’s played, it was a love letter and a signal that someone in the center of pop culture was thinking about the people on its edges.

What Olivia models (a willingness to be honest about feelings, to speak up on issues when it would be easier not to, to pull people in who may be geographically far away) is what her fans have built for each other. Corrina feels it at 1 a.m. with a sartorial puzzle piece finally in hand, Amélie feels it at 6 a.m. on a release day, and Claire feels it every time the group chat pops off.

“Olivia is standing her ground, speaking out about what’s happening in the world in her music,” Claire says. “She is open, and I’m grateful. Because we shouldn’t be left in the dark.”