This summer, Courtney and Jorie are planning to get matching tattoos. A pair of year-olds from Texas, the two met a few years ago at a concert, bonded over their love of the same bands, and have been best friends ever since. These days they go to shows together about three times a week. The tattoos will commemorate their friendship — but they also carry a much deeper meaning, even though at first glance they're just a pair of cute little birds.
In fact, here they are as seen on one incredibly famous chest: that of One Direction band member Harry Styles. Sometimes called Haz, Styles is the perpetually tousled hunky one, often inaccurately portrayed as the band's lead singer mainly by virtue of being deemed the hottest. One Direction's other contender for "hottest," Zayn Malik, famously left the band in and recently released a record-breaking solo album.
Styles has covered his body with tattoos, but this one — at least to a large subsection of One Direction fans — has special significance. Courtney is referring to the slight differences in the two birds as they appear below Styles's collarbone.
Look closely at the photo above: The bird on the right is slightly larger than the bird on the left, and if you squint, you'll notice it also has a straighter, slantier hood marking where its eyebrow might be. For millions of Directioners, these two little birds are deeply symbolic. According to their theory, the bird on the right, the larger one, represents Styles. The smaller bird on the left represents his fellow band member Louis Tomlinson sometimes called Tommo.
The birds' size difference is said to represent the size difference between Styles and Tomlinson — and also, doesn't the bird on the right clearly have Styles's slanted eyebrows? To fans like Courtney and Jorie, Styles's bird tattoo is crucial evidence in favor of one of the internet's most fascinating and convoluted conspiracy theories: the widespread belief among One Direction fans that Styles and Tomlinson are in love with each other.
To understand what's happening in the One Direction fandom, you have to understand what shipping is. In fandom terms, shipping generally means rooting for two fictional characters, or in some cases real people, to get together.
In the post-'90s world of fandom, shippers usually label their favorite hypothetical relationships with a unique name, usually a portmanteau of some sort. The ship name is a huge part of how people self-identify in fandom. These days, you can be part of a fandom for a TV show, film, franchise, book, or band and never interact with people outside your ship.
Which brings us to One Direction and Styles and Tomlinson. If you combine the names "Harry" and "Louis," you get "Larry. Styles and Tomlinson have, or at the least used to have, a very obvious friendship. One Direction's members have always enjoyed an easy physical intimacy, but fans decided soon after the band hit it big in that these two were special.
Indeed, the internet is teeming with Larries — as Directioners who ship Larry often refer to themselves — who've spent years chronicling every microgesture and millisecond of the way Styles and Tomlinson interact with each other:.
In the band's early years, Styles spoke openly about the "Larry Stylinson" label and said that he and Tomlinson had talked about moving in together later in life due to their friendship. This tweet of endearment from Tomlinson to Styles is the second most retweeted post in Twitter history:.
Yours sincerely, Louis. Some One Direction fans view this affection as an obvious sign of more than friendship. The anonymous blogger behind Sex at Oxbridge , a well-known tell-all blog run by a something student in London, found herself drawn to the Larry ship in , totally by chance and purely on the strength of Styles and Tomlinson's interactions with one another.
Speaking to Vox via email, the blog's author — known on the web only as SAO — said she was shocked when she realized they weren't actually a couple:. I saw their video for "Best Song Ever" and really liked the song, so it was only by chance that after the video ended on YouTube one of the suggested videos was about Larry Stylinson and when I watched it I was like, "Oh, cute - two of them are together. I didn't know that! Louis Tomlinson stepped out in the London streets, donning a shirt with a rainbow Apple logo a few days after Apple CEO Tim Cook came out as a gay man in front of an international audience.
Fans have found fandoms a safe place to express their sexuality without being open or publically shamed for it. When both partners are the same gender, both partners have equal power. What must be the black-market value of that thing? Styles, who writes in collaboration with Hull and producer Tyler Johnson, sounds as if he took the advice. A golden-haired lover recurs. There are up tracks, down tracks, some with the trippy delirium of harpsichord-era Stones, others with the angsty Britpop swell of strings.
The only time he worries about an individual lyric is if it risks putting an ex in a difficult position. Or is that gonna get annoying for them, if people try to decipher it? Styles raises an eyebrow. Why are the very famous so inclined to hook up with the very famous?
From the outside it looks twice the hassle, with twice the odds of ending badly. I mean, I do. I have a private life. But I try to let it come up when it comes up. It would be fucking weird. A quick aside about his accent, which is hard to capture in print. He was appalled.
Once Styles begins to get comfortable in the pub, the flatter, no-nonsense sounds of his youth return. Nowpe he says, for nope. Fook , for fuck. His mother, Anne, would praise his singing voice in the car, and when Styles was 16 it was agreed he could audition for a singing contest on TV.
Can you imagine? By the winter of , Styles was a fan favourite, a key member of One Direction , a five-piece that enjoyed enormous national exposure and gathered millions of fans before any music had been released.
Cameras filmed every part of their rise. Our tragedies connoted gravitas. I kind of liked these bands, but they were indie bands, cool-kid bands, and cool kids had so often struck me as cruel kids. Skid Row. Damn Yankees. I spent the night measuring the similarities between One Direction and the Who. I know all Who fans, old and male, will shudder at my exercise. Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend, the last two remaining Who members, performed surrounded by ghosts and I felt this haunting deeply, even imagining 45 years hence, 1D taking the stage in their 70s.
The accounting on my end is a bit brutal. This drop of new information is a gallon of gasoline on my fear fire. I picture something like the creature from the Black Lagoon eating my ovary.
I make things up for a living. With my family asleep, the loneliness of death is real. I pass my laptop on my way to the bathroom and think, I should delete my new novel , a recently completed book that took me five years to write.
The only thing that matters to me in that moment is staying alive, and deleting the book would be the clearest example of what words mean against death. My husband rocks me in his lap when my mind gets stuck on repeat. Let me stay. Nothing I mutter makes the night easier. The day they remove my right ovary, Zayn fails to show up at the world premiere of the new 1D record. It seems right in terms of my reproductive health. Some of their moms are younger than I am. One of them also has twins.
Zayn bought his mom a house, her first house ever. The mass is benign. This is good news, great news, the best possible news I could ever receive, though a small part of me is furious at how my imagination makes fake things real.
After my surgery, early menopause sets in. Hot flashes, night sweats. But after a few weeks, these flashes make me sad. I wonder where my ovary is. Then, four months after the surgery, menopause also departs. My period returns replete with a crazy surge of hormones and pimples. I enter puberty again in my 40s. This seems like a great sign, a definite step away from the end. Maybe I even put on some 1D.
You are not a teenager, it says. And that afternoon, Zayn, mid-tour, quits the band, quits One Direction. One of the most entrenched and elaborate fantasies among 1D fans is that Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson are lovers. There are diatribes against Modest! There are reams of Larry Stylinson fanfiction. Other pieces are more traditionally debauched. The truth of these fantasies is that every girl makes her own One Direction. This capaciousness is clear when 1D is juxtaposed against a more narrowly defined singularity, say Justin Bieber or Ed Sheeran.
He metastasized Liams for everyone, Nialls enough to go around. The fantasies these girls create are so elaborate, it can be a betrayal when the boys are revealed to be five mortal men who like to sing, who might even already be engaged to marry someone else besides you.
Just ask Taylor Swift about the death threats she received while dating Harry. Just ask Zayn. She scowled, tough and bitten. She smiled like a beautiful girl who knows love. She spit onstage, a solid body dispersing itself over the audience. As I said, I had three children under age 3. At night, I had a mantra. Patti Smith is a mom. What is it Sante means to leave unsaid? The shift from a public artist to a private parent?
Or is it something more sinister? I already know what people think about moms: cookie recipes, Halloween costumes, hysterical uteruses, laundry, organic yogurt, kitschy comforts of home, chicken breasts, regular old breasts, frivolousness, pop music, vanilla flavoring, minivans.
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