Because these shipping conspiracy theories tend to follow such similar patterns, the ways in which fans who subscribe to them respond to real-life events also wind up being very similar. If one or more members of a gay pairing has a girlfriend, fans will insist she's a beard — usually one who's been hired by the pairing's managers.
This belief is usually accompanied by the assumption that as soon as a major significant milestone like a movie release or a successful world tour has passed, the pairing will be free to come forth and declare their love — like an end-of-days prediction, but usually gayer. Fandom has dubbed the practice of forming elaborate theories and then fitting news events and occurrences into them "tinhatting," a name meant to evoke tinfoil conspiracist hats.
Like every other conspiracy group, fans who tinhat read and decode secret messages from the members of their ships to both each other and the public. Said fans are convinced that the couple is sending the messages as a way of affirming the love they can't express publicly.
Usually tinhatters comprise just a small portion of an otherwise diverse fandom. But the belief that Larry Stylinson is real has become such a popular and dominating theory among One Direction fans that it often dwarfs other branches of the One Direction community. For more than four years — that's at least as long as people have been quantifying Tumblr's tag usage and noting Twitter's frequently Larry-centric worldwide hashtag trends — the ship has been one of the largest elements of the One Direction fandom, which itself is one of the largest fandoms on the internet.
The result is that Larry fans have constructed an enormous echo chamber of belief around the Larry Stylinson "conspiracy. The scope of the Larry conspiracy theory is immense and features a number of regularly espoused beliefs, including the idea that One Direction's management company, Modest which Larries usually refer to insidiously as just "Management" , is heavily controlling Styles and Tomlinson's social media images and public appearances at all times.
Management's alleged perniciousness extends to securing beards for both Styles and Tomlinson, contractually forbidding the two to be gay, and regularly distributing fake pictures of their involvement in straight, heteronormative relationships. In addition to all of these "typical" conspiracy tropes, Larry boasts its own set of uniquely weird particulars — starting with two rainbow-colored stuffed teddy bears that accompany the band on tours.
The bears, dubbed Rainbow Bondage Bear and Sugar Baby Bear by the fandom, evidently belong to either a band member or a crew member. Until recently the bears had their own now-deleted official Twitter accounts, which often featured humorous updates posted from the stage and on tour.
Because rainbows are associated with gay pride, many Larries see the bears as yet another code for the progression of Styles and Tomlinson's relationship. Indeed, after news broke in that Tomlinson's friend Briana Jungwirth was pregnant with his child, nine months of intense speculation followed that the pregnancy was fake.
When the birth of Tomlinson and Jungwirth's baby was announced in January, fans switched to arguing that the baby itself was a surrogate, a doll, or a complete fabrication, going to staggeringly elaborate lengths to uphold the conspiracy. They would have you believe all those things than just be like, "Look, that guy loves that guy. Sorry for the confusion. For her part, SAO describes falling so deeply into the Larry ship that she created a BuzzFeed Community account and posted an infamous ship manifesto for the pairing, which BuzzFeed eventually took down, along with all of her previous contributions, after she wrote separate posts insinuating that Tomlinson's baby isn't real.
SAO told Vox that the evidence of Styles and Tomlinson's relationship is so compelling that she's never seriously considered any other possibility:. I have never thought "Okay, well maybe this is all fake.
The stark contrast in public narrative vs actions is too disparaging to ignore. I'm a very literal and logical person and I have looked at this situation every which way and each time I do I come to the same conclusion, which is that Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson are in love with each other. Any Larry shipper will tell you that homophobia is the main reason Styles and Tomlinson are still in the closet.
And one of the main reasons Larry shippers are so vocal is that they hate the idea that these two men can't openly express their love. SAO told Vox she stays invested because "I feel it's a harsh injustice not only to them, but to their young followers, to make it seem like being gay is wrong or somehow makes you lesser.
SOA added that the One Direction fandom is full of younger queer and questioning individuals who have been alternately helped and hurt by the Larry phenomenon. But these good intentions have led to some unfortunate complications.
Most of the support for Larry being real is rooted in the way fans interpret the physical intimacy between Styles and Tomlinson. But those who keep the closest eye on such things also note that there's been a sharp drop in their level of physical intimacy. Since , Styles and Tomlinson have gone from joking about posing for photos "with our arms around each other" to rarely standing next to each other in public.
In a interview with Tumblr's now-defunct Storyboard, Tomlinson was blunt about blaming the Larry Stylinson phenomenon for changing his public behavior:. People look into our every move — it is actually affecting the way me and Harry are in public. In other words, fandom's insistence that Styles and Tomlinson's ability to comfortably share physical intimacy with each other means they must be gay resulted in the sad but predictable drop-off of said physical intimacy between them.
Ironically, the movement attempting to liberate them from the closet has essentially forced them to behave unnaturally — to conform to rigid standards of masculinity in order to quash the rumors. The Larry ship also trades in perpetual misogyny: While Louis was dating longtime former girlfriend Eleanor Calder, she and her family were subject to constant backlash and harassment from fans convinced she was serving as a beard.
Some Directioners were so committed to the Larry cause that they even began harassing a record producer and his son who happened to share Calder's last name. The reason? They believed he was the key to unlocking proof that Eleanor had a secret identical twin that Management was using to help fake photos of her relationship with Tomlinson.
In the waning years of the One Direction fandom — Malik left the band last March; the remaining members kicked off a long hiatus last fall; Styles is starring in an upcoming Christopher Nolan World War II epic with more rumored movie roles on the way; Tomlinson is, however unwittingly, starting a family; and the idea of the other band members moving on has begun to seem inevitable — the misogyny accompanying Larry Stylinson has faded, though belief in Larry is still weirdly as strong as ever.
Neither Styles's many girlfriends nor Tomlinson's new girlfriend, Danielle Campbell, has suffered from the deep level of harassment that Calder and her family withstood for many years. But the belief in the conspiracy still overrides everything else.
Courtney and Jorie told Vox unequivocally that the Larry ship had brought them closer together and given them a community of friends. Type keyword s to search. Today's Top Stories. How to Watch 'After We Fell'. Getty Images. This content is imported from Giphy. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.
This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. This one quotes a video of Tomlinson, where he supposedly says, "I'm gay.
It's pretty unfortunate. Soon enough, people were requesting my friendship, and I was chatting in the chat room and I was becoming a true member of the Larry community. I changed my avatar to a picture of Harry screaming. I thought it would be appropriate because he's screaming for freedom. You can post personal status updates, like Rodrigo did above. You can also write blog posts, like the one below, titled "Too Far?
0コメント