A girl you run into screaming at a concert may go home afterward and cut up the footage she recorded to make GIFs and memes that will pass through many other hands, becoming something entirely different and totally bizarre. Unsatisfied by One Direction’s constriction in time and place and situation, screaming girls who are also fanfiction writers will cast them as employees of suburban coffee shops, or plop them into the 1960s to operate alongside that other famous British band, or go behind the scenes with totally imagined detail, drawing out what they imagine to be the emotional consequences of fame or the more universal pangs of secret love. The writer Zan Romanoff has interviewed women who dress themselves up in the spirit of Harry Styles—indulging in elaborate cosplay—as an expression of devotion that is also a prolonged creative exercise.1
The image of the screaming fangirl is so familiar and dramatic, it precludes curiosity. But for decades, fans have not just passively enjoyed or loudly desired the objects of their fandom. They’ve also edited them and recirculated them and used them as the inspiration for a range of creative works so enormous—and largely uncatalogued—that it can’t even be grasped. The art, the stories, and the in-jokes are as much a part of what it means to be a fan as staking out an airport or memorizing dozens of songs. I would never, ever, ever want to meet a member of One Direction, and I actively evaded the opportunity one afternoon when a coworker messaged me on Slack to announce that Harry Styles was just sitting around in the coffee shop on the ground floor of our office building. But I would like to spend every day online talking about them, and I’ve spent years now tinkering with my ideas about what they might signify.
The term “transformational fandom” comes from Dreamwidth—an iteration of LiveJournal, built using the same code in 2008, after LiveJournal’s new ownership implemented draconian content guidelines. It was coined by a pseudonymous fanfiction writer who was trying to explain the origin of an ongoing conflict between copyright holders and the amateurs who were appropriating from their work to make new stories. It’s “all about laying hands upon the source and twisting it to the fans’ own purposes,” they wrote in 2009. “It tends to spin outward into nutty chaos at the least provocation, and while there are majority opinions [and] minority opinions, it’s largely a democracy of taste; everyone has their own shot at declaring what the source material means, and at radically re-interpreting it.”2
Transformational fandom separates itself from “affirmational” or “mimetic” fandom that celebrates the “canon” exactly as it is, copying it with exact replicas or precise cosplaying. It sometimes takes the form of playful disrespect, and you can’t always understand it by taking it at face value. Its practice takes many forms, some of which could reasonably be described as mutilation, and from the outside, it might not even look like love at all. The One Direction fandom, as I experienced it on Tumblr in the early 2010s, was playfully vicious and much grosser than you might expect. The images I remember best were surrealist—sometimes creepy or disgusting. There’s Niall Horan, somehow flying through the air in maroon skinny jeans, doing a split, upper body completely rigid, face frozen with eyes dead ahead, a blurry still from a long-lost video. There he is hovering in the dark corner of a concrete structure, foregrounded by twin bundles of sticks, never explained. Or there are his teeth in close-up before he had braces, or the weird toe on his left foot that’s shaped like a lima bean. Girls on Tumblr made use of these images as naturally as if they were words.
To take things to another level: one method for making a meme totally indecipherable to the uninitiated is “deep-frying” it. Though “deep-fried memes” originated on Tumblr and were popularized by Black Twitter, they’re most often associated now with the boys of Reddit. The subreddit r/DeepFriedMemes had 1 million members and self-described as a living archive for “memes that imitate and exaggerate the degradation of an image,” before the moderators made the forum private in 2020. (In a farewell letter published via a public Google Doc, one mod wrote that the popularity of the subreddit had doomed it; “people began frying more lazily.”)3 It’s a category of form, not content, and the original meme can be almost anything, but in practice the jokes skew toward the “bruh” and “too lit,” sex and weed and guns and Yoda. These images, crackling with yellow-white noise and blurred like the edges of a CGI ghost, evoke the distance between writer and reader on social platforms. Posts are refracted through filter after filter and pixels lost through screenshot after screenshot, singeing off the fingerprints. If a human face goes through this process, it never fails to come out the other side demonic. If this startles you, it seems to say, you haven’t spent enough time online. The deep-fried One Direction memes on Tumblr are “deep-fried” not just because of the way they look—like magazine pages forgotten in the pocket of a pair of jeans that have then gone through a washing machine—but because they announce the absurdity of knowing enough about One Direction to appreciate them.
While many of the biggest subreddits for niche interests in gaming and internet culture explicitly prohibit “normies,” to my knowledge no one on Tumblr has ever bothered to do anything like that. You simply wouldn’t wind your way to the center of a Tumblr subcommunity without effort—drive-by spectatorship is unlikely, and when it happens, it’s immediately checked by the indecipherability of the conversations and images it witnesses. One of my favorite deep-fried One Direction memes—which looks as though it might have been, at one point, several lives ago, a screenshot of a tweet—was posted to Tumblr with a fuzzy background, the color of an eyeball in close-up, and bold Times New Roman text that is chopped off on one side and decapitated all along the top. “Friend: i don’t like 1D Because there not bad boy” is wedged into the upper left corner. “Me: oh really!” is squished up against the edge of a photo of a boy who is barely recognizable as Niall Horan in a cardigan—he has holes for eyes—sitting with his legs stretched out across a staircase, which has a red-and-white sticker on it reading “Do not sit on stairs.”4
Whoever made this image may or may not have had any fidelity to the stereotype of a screaming fangirl. All I know about them is that they were infatuated with or intrigued by One Direction enough to make something funny and weird using an image that most people would have considered pretty uninspiring. The resulting meme makes fun of One Direction and it makes fun of the people who love them—it may read in other ways to other fans, but to me it looks like a sardonic wink or a playful jab at fans’ ridiculous fervor for defending something that doesn’t really need defending. (Nobody was going to change their minds about One Direction just because we insisted they were “bad boys” worth loving; One Direction was not at risk of being viewed as unpopular even if various people in each of our lives were unimpressed.) Though the criticism of fangirls is that they become tragically selfless and one-track-minded, the evidence available everywhere I look is that they become self-aware and creatively free.
Theodor Adorno, the most famous cultural theorist associated with the mid-century Marxists of the Frankfurt School, did not find “music for entertainment” very entertaining. This is probably the opinion he’s cited on most often, and it’s become a useful straw man (he’s dead!) in contemporary essays in defense of popular things. Pop music “seems to complement the reduction of people to silence, the dying out of speech as expression, the inability to communicate at all,” he wrote in his 1938 essay “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening.”5
Though critics often deride him as a snob, this isn’t exactly true. He was disdainful of high art as well, which could be created only through patronage made possible by wealth accumulation. His issue was not exactly the quality of the music, though he sometimes undermined himself with blanket statements about that too, but the cold, systematized manner in which it was produced and sold. To him, the culture industry— a term he coined so that he would not have to use the term “mass culture,” which implied too much agency on the part of said masses—was the exact opposite of possibility. It secured the status quo. It offered only a brief respite from work, providing the worker with energy to work more. It offered the “pretense” of individual identity and choice, but was really a force for making everyone agree that they thought and felt the same. He found this devastating and predicted a dark future in which love would be imagined only as it is described in the pop songs, happiness would be the car that the pop song advertised, and songs would eventually serve only as billboards for themselves and their industry. (The lyrics of the One Direction song “Better Than Words” are almost entirely made up of the titles of eighteen famous love songs…) Of the fans he saw losing their cool at live music performances, he wrote, “Their ecstasy is without content.” And of the type of person who could fall for all of this, he wrote with a tinge of sympathy that they must have “free time and little freedom.”
Adorno’s work has been the starting point for the last seventy years of pop culture analysis. When I read it now, I obviously see things I didn’t see as a college freshman, flipping through it to pull essentially random quotations for an English paper, before One Direction came so forcefully into my life. I feel an embarrassing knee-jerk defensiveness, and I also feel resistant to the central claim that culture is something that happens to almost everyone the same way, or that it is strictly possible for “ecstasy” to be “without content.” I can’t skim over what I recognize: One Direction fans, or Beatles fans, the screaming girls who went home and holed up in their bedrooms to make whatever they were going to make in response to their outsized emotions, did have plenty of free time and “little freedom.” That’s the default condition of a teenager, and it’s also the way I felt about my life when I was a friendless undergrad on a two-thousand-acre campus, confined to a narrow range of activities that didn’t make me happy. (This is obviously not exactly what he meant.) But the world opened up for me online in unexpected form; wanting to understand what I loved so much about One Direction, I started asking rhetorical questions and observing my own reactions. At eighteen, I was ashamed to be exactly what everyone imagines when they think of a boy band fan, and I didn’t think I was dreaming of making out with any pop stars, but what if I did? I didn’t feel trapped or manipulated. I felt like I’d been given a jigsaw puzzle, and if I could put it together, I would understand something about myself, maybe even see the whole picture.
When I read fanfiction, I see others taking on this same task. This is a tradition of fandom that precedes the internet, and some of the earliest fanfiction involving real people—rather than fictional TV, film, or literary characters—was about the Beatles. It was circulated only in small batches, through letters, likely because of a powerful taboo applied to real person fiction (RPF) that lasted until the social media age. (“I’ve talked to one or two old fans who used to do that, and who would still hang out on fandom websites when I found the fandom back in 2010,” a popular Beatles fic writer who goes by ChutJeDors told me, but that was as close I got to any of them.)6 Basically none of that writing has survived, and the Fanlore wiki notes that “not much is known about the players, fanworks, or fan activities of the community,” particularly in contrast to the well-documented Star Trek fanfiction community that emerged around the same time, largely among men.7 Whatever might have been saved and posted to FanFiction.net at the dawn of online fandom would have been lost in 2001, when the website banned fiction featuring “non-historical and non-fictional characters.”
But decades later, the most popular category of Beatles fanfiction being disseminated through the proto–social network Yahoo Groups was slashfic—stories that focus on same-sex romantic pairings—that imagined a relationship between Paul McCartney and John Lennon. This kind of hypothetical romance is called a “ship,” a noun that doubles as a verb, as in “I ship Paul and John.” Today, the Groups service is impossible to access—the service was shut down by the parent company Verizon in 2020—and even the most famous fics are difficult to find. Some smaller fic sites are partially archived via the Wayback Machine, but stories are often viewable only as snippets, and collections that were hosted on the fannish platforms Dreamwidth and LiveJournal are largely inactive now. Most new “McLennon” stories are posted on Archive of Our Own or Tumblr.
I am not a Beatles fan, but I enjoy clicking through the tags that bring me to stories as long as books, following the unlikely adventures of McLennon. Many of them are written based off of prompts, or requests, as is a common practice in fic-writing communities. A fan who enjoys the ship will ask a talented writer to craft them a story with a premise they have in mind, like “What about a fanfiction where Paul starts feeling ill but doesn’t tell anybody until he gets really sick and then John … has to take care [of] him? That would be so cute!”8 Or “Can you do a fic where paul is pregnant and going into labor?”9 There are alternative universe—“AU”—stories in which the members of the Beatles are a bunch of college students or young wizards at Hogwarts, or in which Paul McCartney is a woman named Mary and the Beatles are a co-ed band. I found and could only skim a forty-nine-thousand-word story about Paul McCartney coming out in 1966—the same for a forty-three-thousand-word story about McCartney and Lennon living together in New York City from the mid-1970s to the present. There are Tumblr pages dedicated to curating and aggregating the best McLennon fiction from Archive of Our Own, LiveJournal, and Wattpad, and that specialize in finding “lost fics”—stories you have a vague memory of reading once and loving. The fic writer ChutJeDors describes her blog, called Your Quality John/Paul-Library, as a lost and found, as well as a place for recommendations and for fic-writing resources.10 (She plans to add research materials about Liverpool and a dictionary of Scouse, its local dialect, to help writers who are interested in using authentic details.) Your Quality John/Paul-Library recommends a super-short story about John touching Paul’s butt, as well as a thirty-thousand-word story about John agreeing to serve as a fake boyfriend at Paul’s family Christmas party. The light is mixed in with the dark, and there are also stories about death and illness. There are even stories about nothing, as is the case with one Chut published in January 2021: “No plot—just boring, perfect everyday life on Thomas Lane, Liverpool,” the description of an eighty-six-thousand-word story about Lennon and McCartney as “an old married couple” reads.11
There are thousands of pieces of long-form slashfic about each possible pairing of One Direction members as well, but there are also novel forms of transformation enabled by newer internet platforms. On Tumblr, which is primarily an image-based platform, micro fanfics called “imagines” overlay tiny point-of-view scenarios on top of photos of the boys, inviting the reader to “imagine” themselves in some specific situation or another. They can be boring, asking the viewer to imagine such obvious things as kissing Harry Styles or marrying Zayn Malik. They can be fun, as when they goofily sketch out a situation the viewer might really be curious about experiencing. They can also be horrifying and surprising, for any number of reasons—the most surrealist of them seem to be written by people who are reaching to find something that has not already been proposed, or people who just have uncontrollable imaginations, or people who are making fun of the form. One that I think about often goes like this: “Imagine: You and Harry are on a date and you’re playing chubby bunny.” This text is positioned at the top of a photo of Harry Styles eating a bunch of large marshmallows. “On your first try you accidentally swallow the whole marshmallow and run to the bathroom and poop it out. You and Harry look at it in the toilet and laught [sic] and he hugs you.”12 You and Harry look into the toilet and laugh and he hugs you!
The most inexplicable entries are archived on a Tumblr called “bad1dimagines.” It can be difficult to tell which scenarios were dreamed up sincerely, which were jokes about the practice of fandom in general, and which were concocted as imitations of a person’s own morbid longings—satire that would be ineffective were it not for the commentary of the account’s anonymous twentysomething curator. She has been providing this service for years now, after starting it on a whim in 2015, and her captions often receive tens of thousands of likes and reblogs, indicating that a sizable chunk of the fandom is in on the joke. A probably sincere post asks the reader to imagine: “Zayn just moved to your neighborhood and one day when you’re walking to school he tells you to come and get on his scooter so you agree and when you two get to the school everyone’s staring at you and the strange, exotic boy besides you and eventually rumors go around that you two are dating and then you two fall in love.” Underneath, the bad1dimagines curator added, “I wonder if they’re staring at you bc you’re with zayn or if, and just hear me out here, if it’s because you’re two people riding one scooter.”13 Though the captions can sometimes be a little mean, their author accepts every premise as it’s presented to her. Never does she suggest that it’s unrealistic to dream of personal interactions with the extremely famous members of a boy band.
Bad1dimagines is structured around a much more coherent tagging system than your average Tumblr, which makes it easy to find the scary stuff. There’s a whole section of the blog dedicated to “Dark Harry” imagines—stories about Harry Styles being violent or controlling or murderous.14 These strike some of the same notes as the wealth of fanfiction about Justin Bieber dying in hideous ways, seeming to reach for the only higher-pitched and more confusing emotional reaction imaginable for someone who already feels as strongly as they think is possible.15 Liam stabs you in the abdomen. Niall pushes you off a bridge. Harry runs you over with his car, laughing, or cuts your collarbones out of your chest “because he loved them so much.”16 These violent images are culled from other forms of popular culture, remixed to star a group of boys whose commercial proposition is that they would never hurt you. How scary—and why do it? If there’s a joke, what is it? (One post, seared into my brain, is a collection of images plotting “the outfit you wear to jump in front of niall’s car.” It includes a blue gown covered in Swarovski crystals and a microwavable Kid Cuisine meal with Shrek-branded packaging.)17 I didn’t think I knew, until I’d scrolled through so many “bad” imagines that I no longer understood what any common nouns directly signified and could not remember how to put together a sentence. That’s when I really started laughing.
The joke is that we have talked so much about these people that we no longer have anything left to say that isn’t totally absurd. “Imagine: niall horan crawling inside your ear” goes one of my favorite Tumblr posts. “you tell him to stop, but he is in there.”18 I don’t have any idea who made this, or why, or how it became so well known among girls who were on the internet in 2013 that references to it persist to this day. What I like about it is its senselessness and the creator’s evident delight in her own unusual mind; it invokes the nightmarish nonsense of love for a stranger and the hilarity of losing control, and when I see it, I remember what I wanted more than anything when I was nineteen years old. I wanted something to happen to me that couldn’t be described.