Did Troye Sivan and Connor Franta date? A Chappell Roan pic gave a big clue

Before Troye Sivan was going on world tours and selling out arenas with Charli XCX for their joint tour, he was a young kid with a video camera and a dream. He found himself enmeshed in the YouTube community, collaborating with the biggest content creators at the time: Tyler Oakley, Zoella, Hannah and Mamrie Hart. At the time, he was also starting to spend more time with fellow YouTuber Connor Franta, shortly after Franta abruptly left the YouTube group Our2ndLife (O2L).

The two appeared in videos together and hung out often, but it was unclear if they were just friends or more. The internet did as the internet does, and shipped them together. (Note: shipping refers to the internet term where people fantasize that two people are in a relationship.) However, recently, more clues have emerged that there may have been a romance between the two — and surprisingly enough, Chappell Roan had something to do with it.

Last August, Franta appeared on a podcast called Obsessed with Brooke Averick and talked about his connection to Roan, saying back in 2014, he found her first-ever YouTube video with his "boyfriend at the time" and said, "We found the song, it had like no plays, but her voice was unbelievable, so we started tweeting about it, like: ‘This girl is incredible.' We were like 'She's the next Adele.'"

Not too soon after the interview, fans dug up an old post from Sivan that he posted in 2014, where he shared a photo of himself with Franta and Roan, with the caption, "I’ve had a 16-year-old girl on repeat for two months." Social media users took that as confirmation enough, but the two never addressed the unearthed tweet after fans dug it up. That is until, last week, when Sivan uploaded a photo carousel to Instagram and included a cropped version of the photo of him and Roan, with Franta cropped out.

He shared the series of images and added in a comment, "FYI I found that pic online doing my weekly Google of 'Troye Sivan and Chappell Roan', not my crop!!!!!"

That then led Franta to post the same photo the next day with Sivan cropped out (along with a different set of photos) and a caption that read, "My good side."

The caption hinted at a song that was featured on Sivan's second album, Bloom, called "The Good Side," which is about a breakup that many believed was about his relationship with Franta.

In a 2018 interview on the Zane Lowe Show about the song, Sivan explained: "I was going through a breakup. Just the nature of breakups, one person is always going to get the shorter end of the stick," he wrote. "I got lucky, and I think I do have guilt about that. I feel bad about it; if I could’ve changed it, I would’ve. But it just happened like that. I left, went on tour, got to see the world, and met someone new really soon afterwards."

"It’s sort of a letter to that person to express apologies and sympathy and if I could change this at all, I would’ve," he added. "So I’m hoping that this song, a couple years down the line, is going to serve as a cathartic experience for the both of us to be like, ‘look, this is the way that things happened and whenever we’re ready to move on, let’s do that.’”