Maybe the lack of HL interaction is /the/ fan service. It's akin to watching a movie where you're sure the two lead actors love each other but they just wouldn't touch, or kiss, or admit their feelings, and you're hooked watching the movie until they do so. That may be how some fans interpret the whole "H & L hate each other" drama. And management must have somehow figured out they can convert the fans' clamor into profit or attention at least, because as your anon pointed out, Larries abound.
In spring 2012 I watched an interview in which the boys were asked who was single, and Harry didn’t raise his hand—at which point the other boys freaked (look at Zayn in particular), and then after answering a couple of questions Louis ended the interview by moving people along. This was also the start of Harry desexualizing questions about girls, surprising the interviewer by answering the question ‘how are the American women' with 'they are very polite'. At the same time Harry and Louis were acting very sexual on stage, but for the most part subtle, in the back, hard to notice if you don’t have a camera to produce footage for you to analyze. It was showing up all over youtube in fan-shot videos, but was always censored out of official dvds, and absolute, thunderous silence from the press. With the exception of this, leading to this public statement by Harry.
But what fans were seeing on stage was enough to get them worked up to a screaming fit that they were about to come out—and that was the week we entered our current world of closeting. Suddenly, the boys went on Much Music and did a non-denial denial of their relationship, Eleanor was brought out and fans saw them peck in public, to Harry’s visible discomfort, the boys did interviews in all possible combinations except H&L—and there was a sudden change in stage behavior. Suddenly Louis was stationed away from Harry, with a couch or other boys in between—although Harry and Louis generally interacted anyway—and the other boys suddenly started acting intimate together, and acting incredibly stiff and awkward about it. When Zayn or Niall tried to act that way with Louis, he glared at them or pushed them away. But everybody remembered the H&L interactions on stage and were very much looking forward to seeing them again when they went on tour a second time for TMH. What actually happened was that there were a few small interactions, especially Louis giving Harry loving looks from afar, but these eventually went away. And the interactions became less and less until we got to the point of zero. I could tell ahead of time that the motivation was to give fans no ‘larry moments’ at all, because that entire fall we witnessed them trying to shut it down, and that’s exactly what did happen. The strategies they used in the last month of UAN—separation of Harry and Louis, gay baiting from the other boys—was now instigated from the very beginning of the TMH tour, and more effectively.
The effect of all this on the fans was to frighten them into passivity, self-censorship, and great aggression against other fans to force censorship on them too. Fans became frightened to say what they really thought, for fear that the boys would hate them—print quotes from Louis said that he found larry fans ’fucking annoyance’ and they were ruining his life and relationships—other fans would hate them and they would become the target of a mass bullying campaign, and they would be personally responsible for 1D breaking up as a band. Fans were afraid that if they acknowledged what they were seeing, or if they acted happy about what they were seeing, then they would be responsible for the boys being punished and for the fans being punished. I had a very odd moment last year when an anon told me that they had grown up under a dictatorship in South America and the atmosphere of fear and passivity in the 1D fandom reminded them of that. And another person started screaming at that person that they were being disrespectful to those who grew up under a dictatorship. There was a major disconnection there. It was very odd.
This year I’m grateful that we are getting closet-weakening stuff through official channels that had to have institutional blessing—I most certainly would not want to go back to 2013 conditions just to prove to you a point.
Is it really, really that hard to believe that the band’s management wanted them to be closeted but the boys themselves did not want to be closeted? That different people can have different interests and agendas?
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