“People who don’t know fandom, don’t know One Direction, what they do know is Larry Stylinson,” says Ashley Hull, a fan from Brooklyn who’s in her early thirties.1 When she became a One Direction fan in her twenties, her friends didn’t have any real interest in what she was doing. But they would ask: Have you heard about this? Do you think they’re sleeping together? That they’re married? “I stay perfectly on the margins of the conflict,” she said. “Maybe in 2013, 2014, it would have seemed worth it to argue with them online but at this point they believe what they believe, and nothing anyone says is going to convince them otherwise.”
“Larry Stylinson” is the name given to the imagined and hoped-for romantic relationship between Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson, as well as the name of a conspiracy theory. If Styles and Tomlinson are secretly married, and have been for years, it stands to reason that powerful forces are preventing them from being publicly in love—the media is certainly implicated, as is anyone who has worked closely with One Direction, particularly in the early years of their career. On Tumblr, image collages have “proved” that Tomlinson’s longtime girlfriend Eleanor Calder was actually three different people—triplets named Eleanor, Tina, and Gretchen—all cast in the role of fake girlfriend by the band’s label. When Harry Styles dated Taylor Swift for a few months at the end of 2012, “Haylor” became a flash point pitting those who considered themselves fans of both artists and enjoyed the relationship against those who believed Styles was delivering coded messages promising that Swift was nothing more than a tabloid diversion tactic. (A particularly well-known GIF, which shows a slowed-down second of concert footage, purports to show Styles looking at a picture of Swift held up by someone in the crowd, then miming a slow and deliberate pinch of his chin—beard.)
Larry Stylinson is also the subject of thousands of pieces of fanfiction, but there’s a difference between imaginative stories and a literal-minded conspiracy theory. Larry truthers, who call themselves “Larries,” believe that Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson fell in love when they met on The X Factor and that various powerful figures within the entertainment industry have been forcing them to conceal that love for the last ten years of their lives. This theory became popular enough to reach the ears of its stars, which is when it started to drive a wedge between fans who believed and fans who didn’t. Before we spoke, Hull sent me photos of half a dozen portraits she’d painted of Styles and Tomlinson individually. Back in 2012, she’d blogged about One Direction on LiveJournal and read fanfiction about them to kill the time during her first postgrad summer. But the evolution to serious speculation about real-world events was disturbing to her. “I find it really toxic,” she said. “Fanfic is always part of fandom. I’m fine with people reading about the five of them or different variations, but Oh, we need to tweet at them, they need to see this … No, they don’t.”
Though fandom shaped Tumblr, the affordances of Tumblr shaped fandom in return. The medium caused something big to happen: the blossoming of a conspiracy theory that might otherwise have stayed the private secret of a small group of fans. It was allowed to grow in a semi-controlled environment that gave it just the right amount of oxygen. Tumblr was accustomed to academic and theoretical discussions of media, and was ready to play with the premise that famous people might also be read as texts. It was a place for piling up images until they revealed some kind of significance, and it distinguished itself from both the fully mainstream Facebook (which required that users present their full legal names) and the fully chaotic 4chan (which allows users to generate a new anonymous ID with every post) by encouraging users to build up followings under pseudonyms that could eventually become something like personal brands without the consequences. It had a culture of submitting and responding to anonymous questions, which allowed the curious to experiment with the theory before they were ready to announce their interest to the rest of their online circle. It had a spirit of debate and a tolerance for disagreement, but it was also cliquey and it had a norm of wielding shame as a weapon; in retrospect it’s obvious how it could split a once somewhat cohesive group cleanly in two. When I spoke to Hull two years after our first conversation, during the coronavirus pandemic, she wondered if I’d noticed that Larry Stylinson was trending again. “The conspiracy theory will continue to prosper no matter the evidence that is given,” she said. “It’s a line of thinking I compare to QAnon believers. They see what they want to see.”2
The Larry Stylinson theory has mutated many times—bit players come and go, media attention waxes and wanes—but at its center is a simple love story. Two boys from regular upbringings were thrust into the public spotlight together, and fell for each other as they came of age, happy at times, trapped at others. (“I’d marry you, Harry,” Louis Tomlinson jokes in an X Factor behind-the-scenes video diary filmed in the fall of 2010.) Every flirty joke and gesture of intimacy between the two has been collected and collated into hundreds of YouTube compilation videos and Tumblr master posts. After The X Factor, Styles and Tomlinson lived together briefly in an apartment in London. That was the closest they ever were in public, but the many meticulous timelines of their relationship published to Tumblr by amateur researchers have several other major events in common. There was the “White Paint” weekend, the name given to the frenzied conversation that took place on Tumblr in the fall of 2012 after Louis Tomlinson wore white face paint for Halloween and Harry Styles was photographed with what appeared to be white paint in his hair the following day. Then there was an incredibly grainy video of two people who appear to be Tomlinson and Styles, swaying toward each other, possibly kissing, filmed in a bar in New Zealand in April 2012, which is still cited as the ultimate “proof,” even as believers admit that it looks as though it was filmed on “a graphing calculator,” “a first-generation Nokia phone,” “a potato,” or “a sock.” There’s the “Blue Bandana Incident,” a reference to a Twitter project in 2014 that asked fans to wear a bandana corresponding in color to their favorite member of the band. When Harry was photographed wearing a blue one—Louis’s designated color—at least ten times in the following year, it was widely interpreted as a wink to the fans: you’re onto us.
During the biggest years of Larry, following a bunch of One Direction–related blogs on Tumblr and then scrolling down the dashboard was like watching an information war play out in real time. There were GIFs of Harry Styles falling over onstage next to GIFs of Harry Styles supposedly staring longingly into Louis Tomlinson’s eyes before falling over onstage. Then there were paparazzi photos of One Direction doing whatever, right next to paparazzi photos of One Direction in which any dark-haired woman with glasses standing a moderate distance away from them was deemed a member of their “management,” tasked with stalking them. At the time, the heteronormativity of mainstream media was a major topic of discussion on Tumblr across most fandoms. This complicated conversations about Larry Stylinson because it could be used as a cudgel, and Larries often ended disputes by asking pointed questions about why nonbelievers felt the need to “protect” the boys from gay rumors. The mysterious author of a monumental Tumblr text titled “The Harry+Louis Treatise”—which has been deleted but is well known enough to be archived piecemeal across the site in reblogs and on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine—collates all of this alongside dozens of other pieces of evidence. In a disclaimer, it also states: “I do not think it is inherently homophobic not to [believe] in Larry. If you don’t see it, you don’t see it. But I would honestly question how hard you are looking.” Refusing to look hard enough was “at best, aggressively heteronormative.”3
The progressive politics that were popular on the platform at the time were appropriated as weapons by both sides. Those who disputed the Larry narrative would often spit back that Larries were misogynists who methodically tore down Styles’s and Tomlinson’s public love interests as frauds and fame-chasers, revealing an anti-woman bent. This was fair, but the Larries’ advantage was the work they were willing to put in. The Harry+Louis Treatise contains literally hundreds of links to GIFs. The sentence “There is an outrageous amount of evidence of their jealousy; here is a bit of it,” as it originally appeared, had a hyperlink to one super-slowed-down GIF or video on every word. “This moment of Louis smacking Zayn’s hand away from Harry and this one of Harry reacting to Zayn feeding Louis are particularly hilarious,” it continued, linking twice more.4 Master posts include photos of Harry with what seemed to be the letter L written on his hands and arms in pen in the early years of the band. The sheer amount of stuff could be overwhelming. On one Larrie Tumblr, a timeline of “Larry” events from only the month of February 2012 has 207 items. “The way they look at each other, man,” the treatise reads, again putting a hyperlink on every word, each to a different looping image of the two making eye contact. Some GIFs are so important, they receive their own write-ups: one of the most famous Larry GIFs shows Styles seated behind Tomlinson during an interview, reaching over the back of a couch his arm rests on to graze Tomlinson’s upper arm with two knuckles. “This is small. This is subtle. This is not for the camera or the fans. This is for them.”
Two sides of an unresolvable dispute took shape through endless sniping in anonymous “Ask” boxes, accusations of bad behavior that would circulate with screenshots of proof piled up in the replies, and a new custom of putting “DNI”—or “do not interact”—requests in one’s Tumblr bio, specifying which group a person wouldn’t even be able to stand seeing in the likes on her posts. There was endless debate, often unfurling in academic language, over what did or did not constitute internalized misogyny and what could or could not be considered homophobic. Larries referred to Calder as “Elebeard” or “Elewhore,” or at their most polite, a “glorified dog sitter.”5 They tweeted at members of Tomlinson’s family and covered his sisters’ Instagram pages with questions about when he was going to come out, when he was going to be “free.” Non-Larries had solid arguments against these kinds of behaviors but would often also pathologize the believers as “disgusting” or “mentally ill.” The non- Larries came to be labeled as “Antis” and some of them grew into that label, defining their fandom disproportionately as a counterpoint to someone else’s, which they had deemed inappropriate.
The fandom splintered into named and easily recognizable camps, and a standard set of terminology was solidified around the second half of 2014. The Larries were the truthers; a “dark Larrie” was a secret Larrie.6 (Antis would often accuse Larries of deliberately blurring the line between themselves and regular Larry shippers, who were interested only in fiction. They would sometimes even comb Archive of Our Own for Larry Stylinson stories that were written by Larries and then publish lists in case their followers wanted to avoid them.) Antis, the stans who openly disapproved of Larries, were the primary opposing force. (Today, there is a small but noticeable number of publicly contrite ex-Larries, who sometimes express lingering affection for the “idea” of Larry, but more often become full-fledged Antis, writing long “leaving a cult”–style posts about how they extricated themselves.) There were a few subgroups: Larries believed that Styles and Tomlinson were officially together and always had been, while “Houies” thought they had been together at some point and had broken up; some Larries also used the term “Weak Larrie,” for wishy-washy believers, sometimes as a joke. Today, on the outskirts of the feud there are “Harries,” who are fans only of Harry Styles (not of Louis Tomlinson) and do not believe in Larry, but are often referred to as “Het Harries” by those who do. (This title is crueler than it immediately appears, because it’s meant as a crude suggestion that anybody who doubts Larry is just obsessed with the idea of having sex with one of the men themselves.) An even smaller faction is known as “Rads”—fans of Louis who are now convinced that Harry and his team are out to ruin Louis’s career.
There is some room, mostly in offline conversations, to equivocate about Larry. Mina Hughes, a student from Texas, told me she didn’t identify as a Larrie, but she was invested in the story. “I am a grown-up, and I am self-aware enough to know that it’s really childish to want total strangers to be dating,” she told me. “I don’t care if it’s true or not.” But she has fond memories of the love story because she first came across it when she was seventeen, right after she’d moved to Oregon by herself—Larry was a comfort then. “Now it just calms me down to think about them, because I’m so used to doing that.”7 Abby Armada considers herself an Anti, but still has a soft spot for Larry fiction, which she has written plenty of herself—her most popular story is about Harry and Louis falling in love while working at a restaurant, where Harry is a baker. “I think when you go down that rabbit hole, there’s five minutes of your life where you’re like, This could be true. I was never one of those people who took those five minutes and made it my whole life,” she told me. The point where it becomes ridiculous, to her, is when Larries start talking about the clues hidden in Styles’s and Tomlinson’s outfits. “Not everything is a secret code,” she said. “They are giving these two really famous idiot boys too much credit.”8
For the power players on both sides of the dispute, however, there is little room for uncertainty. The most well-known—you could say infamous—Anti goes by Skye.9 She’s a One Direction fan in her midthirties who lives in Houston and runs a small network of media properties called Shit Larries Say—a Tumblr, a YouTube channel with about eighty videos, and a podcast, which started in 2020 and set out to pick apart a new master post by a well-known Big Larrie. (“Big Larrie” is an iteration of BNF, or “Big Name Fan,” a term as old as organized fandom. It’s used to identify fans who are famous within fan spaces and have some level of authority and influence.) She often singles out individual posts from Big Larries and dissects them line by line, which is why they talk about how she’s pedantic and pretentious and “obsessed” with them. (To be fair, she does spend an awful lot of time correcting their grammar.) When I suggested to her that she might be fixating on the Larries, she said she was fine with that characterization, but clarified that she has higher aspirations.10 She told me that she’s been interested in misinformation and conspiratorial thinking since the beginning of the 2016 election cycle, and that she considers Larries a valuable case study.
Years ago, Skye identified Larries as an existential threat to online fandom in general, and her opinion of them is that they’re even more malicious than most have previously imagined. They confuse people, she argues. A new fan can go on Archive of Our Own to read shipping fic about Larry and have no idea that she’s reading a story by someone who also spends serious time blogging on Tumblr about “stunt” girlfriends and secret contracts. Skye spent years participating in various media fandoms on LiveJournal before she became a One Direction fan, and she sometimes speaks like a traditionalist. “The fandom with One Direction, they don’t know what’s acceptable, what’s not, what lines should exist,” she told me. “That’s not shipping, what they’re doing.” Em, another well-known Anti and One Direction fan in her forties, cohosts the Shit Larries Say podcast and has a similarly lengthy background in fandom. “Fans just have no boundaries now,” she told me. Confronting the subjects of fic was not something that happened in fandoms she participated in before the age of social media. “That would be the equivalent of going to a fan convention and sticking porn in someone’s face. But it happened day in, day out on Twitter.”11
Meanwhile, the Big Larries hold court—dismissing hypotheses they don’t like, elevating the ideas they do, condescending to anyone who misses a piece of information, making the decisions when it’s clear that the grand theory has to make a major pivot. The undisputed Larry expert is a One Direction fan in her late forties who has gone by several Tumblr usernames and is also in charge of a charitable organization that raises and donates money to various progressive causes on behalf of the fandom. (When I asked her to speak with me for this book, she declined to be interviewed and said, “Everyone hates us until they need us for something.”12 Because she expressed concern about being doxed or harassed, I am referring to her as Lisa, a pseudonym.)13 She fields questions nearly every day from new Larries who don’t have the same knowledge of a decade’s worth of lore—if she’s in the mood, that is. Otherwise she might simply command them to “scroll down.” Her bio explains that she has been part of the fandom since 2012 and a Larrie “since day 1.”14 She offers commentary on every event in the wide world of Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson—noting the movements of their friends, acquaintances, romantic partners (“stunts,” as in PR stunts), and anyone else who could be believed to know anything about them. She does not engage with people like Skye. “We don’t talk to them. For ANY reason,” she wrote in an exasperated response to a question about the Anti crowd, and Skye specifically. “I’ve been here a billion years … anything they want to ‘learn’ about is probably within the bowels of my blog, which they are on 24/7 anyway LOL.”15
Before there were Larries, there were “tinhats.” Since the beginning of online fandom, there have been people who are alienated from their communities because of their insistence that two celebrities are in love, without proof and sometimes despite public denials. Tin-hatting is not the same as real-person fanfiction, but that’s part of the reason there’s a stigma against it—it undercuts the typical defenses of real person fiction, which is a sensitive topic and usually requires writers to point out that they would never show their work to the stars involved, that they know what they’re creating is just imaginary, and that it’s meant solely for fun and as a creative enterprise.
There was a strong taboo against using real people as characters for fan stories until the internet loosened the rules. (The fan studies scholar Henry Jenkins learned about RPF while researching his 1992 book Textual Poachers but didn’t include it for this reason; fans specifically asked him not to blow their cover.)16 By the time of email listservs, things had started to open up a bit. Real person fiction about The X-Files actors Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny was particularly well documented in the 1990s, and its popularity surged alongside that of slashfics about ’90s boy bands and the classic ’90s duo Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. But even then, most fans agreed that real person fiction was acceptable only if writers never “broke the fourth wall” by alerting the subjects of the stories to their existence. And of course, it was all supposed to be fiction.
Partly, this was because fans had to be careful: the ability to disseminate these stories widely, for free, carried with it the risk of backlash. In the early aughts, fandom’s reliance on a small number of for-profit platforms also made hosting and sharing real person fiction much harder than it is now. In 2002, the popular site FanFiction.net banned adult content and real person fic, and the founder, Xing Li, gave hardly any explanation for the decision, offering only a perfunctory apology.17 In 2007, LiveJournal’s purge of various types of explicit content—an event known colloquially as “Strikethrough”—while not specific to RPF stories, eliminated another popular choice of platform for what fic writers lovingly refer to as “smut.”18 The subsequent exodus of fans from LiveJournal is often cited as a primary driver of Tumblr’s growth—there were no rules about content there. Around the same time, the nonprofit Organization for Transformative Works built and launched the fanfiction repository Archive of Our Own, which was similarly welcoming. With more places for RPF to thrive, the taboo started to erode.
The change was also sped along by the rise of the Lord of the Rings film fandom in the early aughts. Many of those fans were interested not in Tolkien characters but in the actors who played them, and they wrote book-length stories on the internet about the love between Orlando Bloom and Viggo Mortensen, or Dominic Monaghan and Elijah Wood. “It was Lord of the Rings RPF that brought RPF to mainstream fandom recognition,” the researcher Anna Martin wrote in a 2014 thesis paper on real person fiction.19 In 2002, when a fan asked the series’ star Ian McKellen if he found fanfiction “slanderous,” he replied that he found “nothing harmful in sharing fantasies about favorite characters or their interpreters,” and that “even real person stories seem unobjectionable as they are clearly fictional.”20 This was a huge moment for RPF writers, representing hard-won acceptance and a validation of their art, but the peace didn’t last long. A year later, some “Domlijah” shippers became convinced that the dream relationship between Dominic Monaghan and Elijah Wood wasn’t fiction after all, but an elaborately covered-up tragedy. They became the very first “tinhats.”
Domlijah truthers would make photo essays called “picspams”—someone with an artful eye could easily arrange photos to evoke a certain emotion, perhaps thrill, at witnessing an affection that was being hidden, but not well. They’d create litanies of images of the actors jumping into each other’s arms, kissing each other’s cheeks, looking at each other from any distance. This practice became a precedent. After The Lord of the Rings came Supernatural, an unexpected hit about two brothers who hunt monsters—the brothers, Sam and Dean Winchester, became a popular subject of slash fiction. (There are hundreds of thousands of stories on Archive of Our Own tagged #Wincest.) Nearly simultaneously, a real person shipping community paired the starring actors, Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles. Then, truthers started talking about the very “real” relationship on the “spn_gossip” board on LiveJournal. By then, the word “tinhat” was in wide use, as was the word “het,” as slang for a nonbeliever.
There are people in the One Direction fandom who were old enough to remember that all of this had happened before. Em told me she started writing fanfiction and making GeoCities fan sites in the late 1990s, back when she loved NSYNC. Much of that band’s fan activity took place in mailing lists run through Yahoo Groups, where fans often discussed which members they would like to see together and exchanged real person slash fiction. The fiction didn’t bother her at all. What did was the moment when people first started saying, Wait, actually this is real. “It split the community,” she said. “There would be people who would read your fanfiction and be like, This is great and really describes who they are, and people would feel uncomfortable, like, I’m just writing fanfiction, what are you talking about?”21
To Em, speculation about a person’s sexuality was a corruption of fandom’s purpose. In the late 1990s, conjecture about the sexuality of celebrities was a preoccupation of gossip bloggers and conservative commentators, and it was a sordid fascination—a public piling-on of pressure and judgment, an unfeeling attempt to force reluctant people to come out. In the mailing lists, there were a lot of people who claimed to be insiders “saying, No, no, no, he’s out to the band, everyone knows about it,” implying that it was a condition of Lance Bass’s recording contract that he stay closeted to the outside world, she remembered. “After the band broke up, he basically confirmed that he hadn’t been out [before] and that all of the speculation made him really uncomfortable,” she said. “And I felt like nobody learned from that.” Her interest in Larry Stylinson came from a concern that history was repeating itself. To her, it was a stretch to say that Larry truthers were “fans” at all—they were selfish, single-minded, and dangerous.
“Always in my heart @Harry_Styles,” Louis Tomlinson wrote on October 2, 2011. “Yours sincerely, Louis.”22
A decade later, this tweet and historical moment are referred to as simply “AIMH.” October 2 is celebrated as #AIMH day every year. The hashtag has been used an unknowable number of times, but hardly a day passes without it, and as I write this, I can flip to Twitter and see its latest use—eight hours ago. The tweet is a miracle and a mystery. Year after year, Tomlinson elects not to delete it, which—if his public denials of Larry Stylinson are to be believed—has brought him nothing but grief. Why does he keep it? It stays up, it stays iconic, and it stays proof. This is the appeal of Larry: it’s all right there. It’s a love story you can click through over and over.
Larry is a conspiracy theory about forces as well known as the U.S. government or the scientific community: the entertainment industry and “the media.” But more than that, it is a conspiracy theory about grown-ups—adults with money, adults with power, adults who could convince two teenagers that they could never be publicly in love, but who could never quite dissuade them to stop signaling to the thousands of quiet, diligent spectators spending their days online, swapping evidence, listening closely. (“Look, they’re paying attention,” the Harry+Louis Treatise promised in 2014, referring to the couple that its author was fighting to save. “They know what we’re talking about.”)23 If they were proved right, nothing would change except two lives. Two people that no one in the fandom personally knew would finally get to be happy. (“Larries reveal complex forms of desire that appear to belong more to the collective—the desiring community—than to the individual,” the cultural studies scholars Hannah McCann and Clare Southerton observed in 2019. “Far from lusting after their boyband idols, Larries desire desire itself.”)24
Angela Gibbs—the mother I spoke to who bonded with her daughter over One Direction—had a different kind of investment in Larry than the Larries who ruled Tumblr. Going back to the moment she became a fan of the band, watching TV in the middle of the night, she told me she was struck by the intimacy between two of the boys—one with curly hair, one wearing suspenders. She didn’t know their names yet, but they were the reason she wanted to go out and buy a One Direction CD the very next day. There was something about them. “Louis and Harry have a special place in my heart for sure just because I was like who are these boys? I wanted to find out more because of those two,” she explained. But when I asked if she thought they were in love, she equivocated. “It felt like there was something more between them, more than a friendship, but not necessarily a romantic love, just affection for each other,” she said first. Then, “I don’t know. I think maybe yes. But it’d be okay if it wasn’t true, you know what I mean? As long as they’re happy—if they’re together, if they were or aren’t, or whatever.”25
This was a common feeling among One Direction fans early in the band’s existence, and one they were largely robbed of once the conspiracy theory was codified as serious business. The problems started when “Larry Stylinson” made its way to Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson directly, in questions from curious journalists, and in tweets from Larries who wanted to let them know they were standing by. They laughed it off for some time, but eventually stopped appearing alone together on camera or in the corner of a stage. (“There’s no secret relationships going on with any of the band members,” Zayn Malik said in a 2015 interview. “It’s not funny, and it still continues to be quite hard for them. They won’t naturally go put their arm around each other because they’re conscious of this thing that’s going on.”)26 After the band went on “hiatus,” they were seen in the same place in public only once, shortly after Tomlinson’s mother died.
As the two became more guarded about their interactions, the fandom’s divisions became more bitter, and Larry Stylinson took on another common element of internet conspiracy theories: symbolism became key, and any direct, contradictory evidence could be subordinated to it. The denials were not denials, but messages to watchful fans that they should start paying closer attention to the things that could not be read by anyone other than them—most notably a series of apparently matching tattoos. The Harry+Louis Treatise section on tattoos begins: “I’ve found that the tattoos are often enough for people to believe in Harry+ Louis.”27 Styles got a tattoo of a ship shortly before Tomlinson got a tattoo of a compass. Tomlinson got one of a piece of rope; Styles got one of an anchor. When Harry got a tattoo of a rose, the fandom speculated as to whether Louis would get one of a dagger to complete a common tattoo design with supposed connotations of tragic love. When he did get a dagger tattoo, in November 2014, it proved them right. It got easier to see why it might be better to ignore Tomlinson’s public denials—which were so flat and boring and crude—in favor of a subtext that was rich and interesting and romantic.
In September 2012, Tomlinson’s frustration with the harassment of his then girlfriend Eleanor Calder culminated in an event referred to as “the Bullshit Tweet.” The full tweet, posted by Tomlinson, reads: “Hows this, Larry is the biggest load of bullshit I’ve ever heard. I’m happy why can’t you accept that.”28 To Antis, it was enraging—proof of what they’d feared, that the shippers had gone far too far. To Larries, it meant that the real Louis Tomlinson was not in charge of his Twitter account, and that someone else was tweeting for him. They started referring to Tomlinson by different names depending on which medium he was—or wasn’t, really—speaking in. Tweets that denied Larry were sent by @Louis_Tomlinson. Words in magazines were spoken by Print!Louis. Neither of these people were Louis Tomlinson himself. (Although they could be if that happened to be reassuring—as when Tomlinson followed a Larry shipper on Twitter, supposedly to reassure the entire community.)
Written two years after the tweet, the Harry+ Louis Treatise contains a long parenthetical explaining the Bullshit Tweet away yet again:
For what it’s worth, on the second anniversary of Bullshit Day, as it were, Harry posted a photo of two guys—one in blue, one in green, which are the colors associated with Louis and Harry—and captioned it “Strong.” Which happens to be the title of a song everyone knows the Larries think Louis co-wrote for Harry. So was it Harry’s own little commemoration of Bullshit Day? Maybe. Either way, would he absolutely know that the Larries would read any use of “strong” like that as a reference to the song, and thus to Louis? Yes.29
The division between Antis and Larries was aggravated by this kind of reasoning, but outside scrutiny was arguably even more destructive. In August 2013, Larries were embroiled in an internet-age disaster. One night, Twitter lit up with the hashtag #RIPLarryShippers—seemingly out of nowhere, One Direction fans had somehow become convinced that Larries were committing suicide. But there was an explanation: the hashtag trended for two days following the debut of a documentary called Crazy About One Direction, on British public television Channel 4.30 The documentary had featured several interviews with Larries and prompted more than three hundred thousand tweets within the hour of its first airing. The Larry community was furious that their “private” world had been made public; the rest of the fandom was furious that it was associated with Larries. Amid the chaos, a rumor emerged that Larries were committing suicide in response—with the number of such deaths starting at fourteen, then rising to twenty-eight, and then to forty-two. Hardly any of the tweets contained any information about where the rumor had come from, but it was so widely circulated that even Liam Payne addressed it, writing, “Not really sure what’s going on right now I just hope everyone’s ok xxx.”31
The event was covered by publications as mainstream as The Atlantic. “The Internet is mourning,” the reporter Alexander Abad-Santos wrote. “No, not because of the horrific situation in Egypt, but rather because One Direction fans believe 42 fans killed themselves in response to a British documentary.”32 The internet culture site The Daily Dot debunked the rumor and traced it to a nonsensical tweet from a week before the documentary aired.33 Still, this was before widespread literacy about viral misinformation. (A year after #RIPLarryShippers, some fans still used the hashtag #ProjectNeverForget to commemorate the fictional deaths.) Daisy Asquith, the film’s director, watched #RIPLarryShippers trend for two days and panicked over the possibility that some fans might really have harmed themselves. She was relieved when the claim turned out to be baseless, but she was still shocked by all that had happened. Unrelated to the #RIPLarryShippers drama, fans also uploaded reaction videos to YouTube with the tag #ThisIsNotUS—more than half of the videos were in protest of the fans chosen to be featured in the documentary. The girls in these videos were not Larries and argued that the film should have focused on “normal fans who have never met the boys and have boring lives,” Asquith summarized in an essay published in 2016; more than a quarter of them talked about how Larry Stylinson is a topic that does not belong on television.
Larries apparently hadn’t understood how all this attention from the outside world would feel until they felt it. People were making fun of them, and the rest of the fandom was furious because they felt Larries gave them a bad image—being a fangirl was a bad enough image already. “The hierarchies, taste policing, and internalized shame within the fandom collide awkwardly with the projected shame and derision that is applied from the outside,” Asquith wrote. She had “outed” the Larry ship, she realized. “Moving Larry from Tumblr to television decontextualized it and had a destabilizing effect on the fandom, who were already arguing about its significance.” Even though Larry shipping happens on public Tumblr accounts, and many of them are indexed by Google Search, fans were shocked to see that anybody was looking. All of the fan art that Asquith used in the documentary went through the proper clearance process with individual artists, but fans who watched it assumed that she must have stolen it. Their criticisms were often about “trespassing,” and taking something out of an insulated context to turn it into a spectacle for outsiders. “Larry in private fan spaces is fun, clever, and naughty, but seen through the public eye it suddenly feels embarrassing and stupid to fans,” she concluded.34
#RIPLarryShippers was a brief panic but it was also, in hindsight, a point of no return. Larries were dragged into the spotlight on television, a medium that was all wrong for them. A conversation that was native to the internet and seemed to have some kind of internal logic when discussed on Tumblr was then presented in a format in which it made no sense. It was obviously something that a general viewing audience was going to reject, and that rejection was going to have to inform this group’s self-image. So, shaken up by the events surrounding the documentary and the public’s new awareness of them, Larries were forced to choose: shame or doubling down.
They chose the latter and cobbled together evidence that September 28, 2013, was Harry and Louis’s wedding day. This was confirmed to them when Styles tweeted a lyric from a Joni Mitchell song: “We don’t need no piece of paper from the city hall.”35 To ritualize reminders of this wedding, the number twenty-eight became yet another symbol for Larries. It was already the number on Tomlinson’s soccer jersey, which explains why he had a two and an eight tattooed on a pair of his fingers, but now it was also the date that bound Larry together for life. They looked for the number everywhere. Years later, Styles posted a photo on his Instagram of a billboard with the LA zip code 90028. That was a reference to his wedding anniversary, they claimed. Years after that, Tomlinson tweeted the word “Always” and captioned a selfie “You”—February is the second month, and these posts were on the twenty-sixth day of the month, which adds up to twenty-eight. In 2017, Tomlinson released his debut solo single on the same day that Styles’s film Dunkirk premiered in the United States—July 21. July is the seventh month, etc. These were meager things, but these clues were all that was left after One Direction announced an indefinite hiatus and Tomlinson and Styles stopped appearing together or speaking to each other in public, and after the whole world turned against Larries, who were only telling a love story.
Long before the news media became seriously concerned about deceit and manipulation on YouTube or the algorithmic wormholes on the platform that lead people to take up strange beliefs, Larries were circulating as fact doctored videos that “proved” Larry Stylinson was real. Even those that were presented as unedited raw footage, like the notorious video of Styles and Tomlinson sharing a drunken kiss in a New Zealand bar, were carefully and misleadingly framed.
The audio in the New Zealand video is essentially unintelligible, the only clear phrases coming from the woman holding whatever recording device took it. The captions were added by someone listening to what they wanted to hear—you can’t actually hear Tomlinson yell the word “Boyfriend!” Yet it appears on the screen as an uncontested caption. You can’t hear a “Woman #4” saying, “Oh my gosh, they’re kissing,” either, but that appears on the screen, too. To watch the video and read it the way Larry shippers would like it to be read, you have only to approach it the way you would any chaotic clip from reality television, with captions provided by off-screen producers. If you trust the person who’s presenting it, you would have no reason to question it.
Em, the cohost of the Shit Larries Say podcast, noticed early how Larries worked to create a completely original reality through the media that they put on their timelines. After Tomlinson called bullshit on Larry—literally—she was shocked and disturbed that nothing changed in the Larry world. “Instead of diminishing, they became more defiant,” she said. “That was a thing I had never seen happen before.”36 From that point on, she was uneasy about participating in the fandom on Tumblr at all, having noticed that Larries were behind many of the biggest blogs and the most popular fandom projects (including, to some extent, Project No Control). “I didn’t want to interact with those people, but they were overwhelmingly the creators of content,” Em told me. “At that point, they were propagandists. You almost couldn’t get media, or fanfiction, or the GIFs, or the captioned work, or the paparazzi photos or things like that unless it was filtered through those eyes. I just felt like, Am I crazy? Am I the only person seeing this?”
To her, it was obvious the Larries’ constant close-reading and refusal to accept anything at face value had curdled into obsessive self-interest and a hard lack of empathy. She remembers the spring of 2014, when a clip called “the weed video” was leaked. Blown up by the tabloid media, the video shows Louis Tomlinson and Zayn Malik in an SUV in Peru smoking what appears to be a joint—in it, a voice that seems to be Tomlinson’s also says a common British abbreviation of the n-word. The use of the slur dominated conversation among the fandom on Twitter and Tumblr for days. “I’m a Black woman and the slur in the weed video hurt me profoundly,” Em said. But for some Larries this was not a betrayal of One Direction’s Black fan base— it was simply another chess move on the part of “management.” They were forcing him to do things that would make him look bad, and he was probably tortured by what they were having him do. Because of their worldview, it was impossible for Larries to even engage with the possibility that Black fans were pained by the revelation, having conditioned themselves for years to think only about one perspective.
“I felt like it was a culmination of this kind of mindset of not being able to engage with reality,” Em said. “I felt like the fandom didn’t have my back.” So she took a year off, and when she came back, things were even worse. In the summer of 2015, she watched the One Direction fandom destroy itself forever over a new theory, called Babygate.