I am not going to lie: I’ve been upset about it for three days now, swinging back and forth between being super angry and trying to be okay with it. I thought about not answering this, because I don’t want to open this Pandora’s box, but I decided to in the hopes that I can help someone else. I won’t be answering follow up questions/reactions, though. That’s my boundary.
Now, I think the important thing is to call this out for what it is and stop making excuses: it’s an Olivia tattoo, and whether it’s for a stunt, a cat, a house, the One Direction song, an unknown godchild, it doesn’t matter. He has it, he showed it off (rather purposefully), he knew what we would think and the kind of debate/restlessness it would spark.
Can I forgive him for that, point blank, without further reasoning or rationalizing? I’ve decided I can.
Why? Because I don’t think it negates all he’s given me these past thirteen years and especially this last leg of tour, and because I don’t think what he does for PR and/or to protect his closet is a statement about who he is as a human being. No one has to agree with me. It’s a decision I’ve made for myself and I’m happy with it. If this is your red line (and I fully encourage you to ask yourself this regularly) then that’s fine. Grieve the person you thought he was and take steps to distance yourself from what hurts you. I don’t mean to minimize this: walking away is hard as shit. But he will be okay, I promise. The person who needs to be okay the most is you.
Do I think they really dated/that he was in love with her? No.
Why? Because he looked miserable every time he was around her, because he took very clear steps to ensure she wasn’t tied to his music (which I’ve noticed he holds pretty sacred above all), and because at the end of the day he still broke up with her two days after his very public last contractual obligation was filled and kissed her friend extremely publicly.
Can you find ways to argue around that? Of course you can. You can find ways to argue around anything. But for me, that’s not how you treat someone you’re in love with even if they’ve pissed you off beyond belief and messed with your career. Nothing Harry has done outside of this stunt shows me he would treat people he cares about that way, even in his worst moments. It’s incongruous to everything I’ve seen and known of him and his character in the last thirteen years. I may not know him personally, and I may be wrong about him, but again, that’s my conclusion and I’m happy with it.
Do I think the tattoo means something’s in the works to rekindle the stunt? I truly don’t know.
But if it is, then it’s been planned for a long, long, long time (he had the tattoo during Daylight filming, which is May 2022; the BUA was Nov 2022), and there’s nothing I can do about it. It is what it is.
I’ve always preached being okay with not knowing, being okay with being uncomfortable, and this is certainly making me walk the talk.
The bottom line is: Am I okay with the things I have answers to? Yes.
Am I okay with the thing I don’t have answers to? I am working on it.
But that’s my responsibility, not Harry’s.
— FIN —
*thank you, Gina, for your contributions to clearing my head and for many of the phrases I used here to express myself.
to help with the salad memes the daily mail published an article a couple days ago w a story saying olivia made special dressing and salad for harry and jason threw himself under her car because he was so upset… there’s more in the article but that’s the most important/funniest part if you don’t want to have to subject yourself to reading it :)
i really didn't actually it sounds insane enough from the little info you've given me thank you so much you're an angel <3
I cropped out the rest of your ask because I didn’t know if it was okay to post the entire thing, I hope you don’t mind.
I also know I said I wouldn’t respond to anything more regarding this, but I really appreciated the tone you came with and the respect for my boundaries, and I also had some thoughts that were belated so I’m taking this opportunity to add them.
I, unfortunately, don't have any answers for you, except to say that the hurt you feel is valid, as are the questions you're asking yourself.
But, the simplest way I can put things, without going too much further into the discussion, is that there are:
- things that are objectively wrong,
- things we think are right because of the information we have, and
- things Harry thinks are right because of the information he has.
There's a very huge - possibility infinite - gap in the complexity and nuance between those last two things, and it's a gap that can only really be filled by two things: faith and trust.
And in times like these, we have to ask ourselves: is who he's shown himself to be over the course of his career worth our faith and trust?
Again, I don't have an answer for you, because that's something everyone has to decide for themselves. It's also something which is fluid and can change. But so far, it's been the best way for me to approach situations where I feel he's disappointed me — to ask myself, do I actually know, truthfully and holistically, what's best for him better than he does?
I was hoping to get your opinion on this entire holivia situation. You seem very open and patient to anons and I enjoy reading your responses. Why do you think it is that Harry and his team seem to have less of a say or control when it comes to this particular stunt? I understand there is a hollywood movie involved but it still seems oddly excessive to me. In the past Harry has been able to put his foot down and even cut beards off when they've behaved a little OTT but not with this one. tbc.
Hi there!
Sorry this took a while, you guys always hit me with the interesting stuff when I have other things I really ought to be doing. Oops. 😅
So, I know that I maybe sound like a broken record with my disclaimers, but when we talk about topics like this, I think it’s really important to remind ourselves that all we’re capable of doing is inferring. We don’t actually have any concrete knowledge about what Harry and Olivia’s stunt contract stipulates, what the overarching goals of the stunt are, what their red lines are, how they negotiated things, how things have evolved and whether the contract is flexible, etc. and we’re not ever going to have access to that info. I say this because I think we as a fandom sometimes have the habit of talking about situations like we know things for certain, because we’re often looking to each other for guidance and to make sense of very complex professional and personal situations that, unfortunately, tend to weigh very heavily on us emotionally, and part of fandom “health” (at least for me) is getting comfortable with not knowing and never getting a definitive answer.
Another really important thing to note (that someone very smart pointed out in a tag on one of my posts, I wish I could tag you) is that personal and professional goals are very different. What someone wants to achieve professionally can be (and very often is) contradictory to what they may want for their personal life. Part of living in the real world is understanding that that tension and complexity is always going to exist, and it’s actually extremely rare for those two things to align, especially in a career where success is almost entirely dependent on public love and support. I don’t think that’s said often enough when we discuss closeting and Harry and Louis’ situations.
All that said, let’s get into your question. (This is going to get long, so I apologize.)
Firstly, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a situation where Harry/his team have ever “put their foot down” when it comes to a stunt, but more importantly, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a stunt be “over the top” like this. So, when you say Olivia’s team says “jump” and Harry’s team says “how high?” I think that’s a bit of a misreading of the situation.
My guess is what you’re actually seeing is Olivia using the loopholes in their contract to her utmost advantage, which no other stunt has either thought to do, or had enough leverage to do in the past. We have to remember that these negotiations likely happened at the beginning of DWD, and at that time, Olivia was in a different professional situation than she is in now. She was his director, she was casting him, she was his professional superior, and negotiating something like a PR stunt with your professional superior is a delicate thing because, no matter how popular or accomplished Harry is or how much Olivia may have wanted his fan base for the movie, the power dynamics are still very much present. Compounded with the fact that Olivia herself was who they were pitching as his stunt partner, it would have been very easy to write something in the contract that she could take as a personal insult and that could’ve very easily jeopardized his role in the movie, their working relationship, his reputation as an up and coming actor… the list goes on.
That particular complexity has never existed with any of Harry’s other stunts (even the more high profile ones like Taylor and Kendall) because he’s never been directly beholden to them in a professional capacity. The worst thing that could’ve happened to him if he’d insulted those stunt partners somehow is calling the deal off and a few scathing rumors and songs here or there. With Taylor and Kendall, Harry was always an equal, not a subordinate. With the others, they had a vested interest in staying in Harry’s good graces by not pushing the boundaries, because he was a lot more famous than most of them. Olivia, however, seems not to care about pushing that boundary, mostly, I think, due to her personality, her “alpha-female” approach to her career goals, and the fact that Harry is likely to continue to conduct himself as professionally as he can even in a trying situation, so the backlash she gets from him, personally, is probably not enough to dissuade her.
Secondly, an important part of workplace politics is maintaining amicable business relationships. That means knowing how to choose your battles and always having professional reasoning (as opposed to personal) behind the battles you do choose to fight. So, I don’t actually think Harry’s more “on board than ever” but rather that he’s choosing his battles. And, if we’re honest, there’s no professional reasoning behind Olivia not being at multiple shows, or being papped in his merch, or them being papped together. “You’re annoying,” and “you annoy me,” and “my die hard fans can’t stand the sight of you” (and, also apparently for Olivia, “you’re having family issues that you need to deal with”) can’t really compete with consistent engagement with tabloids, Twitter trends, conversion rates (of GP to casual listeners to stans), Harry being placed on Hollywood’s radar, etc. However, it seems like when there is solid professional reasoning behind shutting down a decision, Harry and his team do take it. We’ve seen that in the social media and print media gag order (Olivia wasn’t allowed to mention him in her Vogue interview though she tried very hard to insinuate a confirmation) and the pivot in terms of the Harry’s House narrative (that I suspect largely had to do with how they plan to navigate My Policeman promo). I think our frustration as a fandom lies in that it’s not easy for us not to equate things that are annoying with things that are damaging to our relationship with Harry because when you’re as emotionally involved as we are, it all feels the same.
Lastly, I think we have to remember that the music industry and Hollywood are entirely different beasts, and I bring that up for two reasons:
1) Stunts serve different purposes, depending on the situation. For Harry Styles, singer-songwriter, it was meant to closet him, give an intriguing background to his love songs, make people interested in him, maybe even be used as a cover for why sex-symbol-rockstar-modern-day-Rolling Stone doesn’t ever take anyone back to his hotel room.
For Harry Styles, up and coming actor, it’s both to closet him and to keep people interested in him and his projects when he technically still has nothing to show for it. You can’t be interested in an actor from that one ensemble cast three years ago, even if it was a Nolan film. There needs to be a reason for him to be top of mind, especially when he technically has no body of work to give him credibility. Like it or not, a fauxmance is the way to do that, and at the end of the day, we have to remember that Harry does want to break into Hollywood. So, he has to play the game.
2) While we often joke about Larry being the music industry’s worst kept secret, it doesn’t necessarily follow that that would be the case in Hollywood. When Harry and Louis first got together, they were incredibly young (and not very good at hiding their feelings), and the people around them held relatively close ranks. They had the same bodyguards, their band was close, they worked with the same producers and song writers, they were in the same meetings, they used the same people as the crew over and over, and that level of environmental control made it much easier to mitigate the risk of them being outed while still allowing them to be “out” in their immediate environment (whether literally or through song writing). That seemed to carry over to their solo careers, where they seem to stay within the same professional circles of people as much as possible for, I suppose, many reasons, but also because I think they’ve built the kind of trust with these people that’s really hard to come by when you’re famous and closeted.
But, Harry doesn’t have that environmental control in Hollywood. He can’t call the shots on a movie set, or handpick the crew, or have time to develop that trust with all the people around him. And so, the answer to that is, if he can’t be fully out, he has to keep up some semblance of the closet by stunting, and that means, if Olivia wants to push the boundaries of their contract by being around all the damn time, then her inescapable presence, however annoying, at least serves to keep the narrative as consistent as possible with the least amount of Harry’s effort required.
TL;DR - It’s likely that Olivia is taking advantage of loopholes in a contract that was negotiated when she had professional leverage over Harry and his team, Harry and team need to choose their battles (and, I believe, have) with regards to the stunt and technically, however frustrating Olivia’s constant presence is, it’s not professionally damaging to Harry (so far) which makes it hard to draw lines for “smaller” nuisances, stunts in the music industry vs Hollywood have different goals, and unlike in the controlled circle of his professional environment in the music industry, in Hollywood, Harry likely still needs to keep up appearances because he doesn’t have the capacity to mitigate the risk of being officially outed in such a wide group of people.
Hope that was interesting to read and was at least halfway coherent!
So, first disclaimer is this is a personal theory that I have no evidence to back up. It is a hypothesis. Second disclaimer is that I’m not a lawyer and have no legal background whatsoever.
But, from general knowledge (I’ve worked for brands and marketing in my previous life), when any two parties go into a collaboration (brand + celebrity, brand + brand, or, in the case of a stunt, celebrity + celebrity), there will be a section in the contract that focuses on image, cleanliness, and morality clauses. (Harry has alluded to similar cleanliness clauses between 1D and Sony and Syco in his recent BH&G interview.)
These clauses are there to protect celebrities and brands from damages to their brand image and reputation, and can range anywhere from vague stipulations to super hard cut limitations, but will essentially say something along the lines of “if either party is in breach of this clause or is forseen to be a risk to the collaborators’ image and branding, the collaborator reserves the right to terminate the partnership, etc etc etc.” (For example, this is very likely the legal grounds brands used to dissolve their partnerships with Kanye.)
Now, when things went belly up with DWD, the first question on everyone’s mind was why these morality clauses weren’t triggered and used to get Harry out of the stunt immediately because Olivia was clearly in breach of multiple things, considering how much of her image was taking a nosedive and how much it was affecting Harry’s very pristine and protected professional reputation.
But, in hindsight and reflecting on the timing of the BUA, my theory is that these morality clauses were breached, but instead of dissolving their collaboration immediately (like they honestly should have), Harry’s team used the breach to renegotiate their stunt contract by shortening the length of the stunt in exchange for continuing to participate in it while things were still happening for DWD and MP. And, knowing Olivia wouldn’t go down without a fight, shortening the length of the stunt likely came with other advantages on her end, like softer communications narratives (“taking a break” vs. “breaking up”, amicable split), continued access to his concerts while they’re taking place in North America, continued linkages through Pleasing merch and parallel pap walks, etc.
More importantly though, regardless of however way their communications teams phrase it, there is a clear effort to split them (and, in turn, their images and brands). It’s very clear that Harry wanted to confirm to the public that they’re officially no longer linked and (likely to protect himself from Olivia doing interviews after the fact or whatever) put a hard boundary on what she can/can’t say about them publicly.
It seems very clear that the marketing strategy theyre currently going for is “this movie & relationship are getting negative attention bc harry styles fans are crazy” it’s how they twisted florence’s critique of Olivia’s constant sexualization of the film & it was a big push in this article. Seems that Florence will continue to do the bare minimum for promo due to her and olivias strained relationship and they can’t explain that away so they need some group to blame it on
Oh, for sure. “Fan girl hysteria” is the ace in their hole to explain away any negative public reaction she’s getting. It’s why they made sure to mention that fans were “appalled at their age difference”, that they “made fun of her dancing” and wanted to cancel her for “bad or insensitive jokes made over a decade ago” (like we don’t all have a screencap of her reposting that @/clit.test thing not two weeks ago.)
Bonus points for using phrasing like “intense and jarring”, and honorable mention for her sudden benevolence towards fandom because apparently they (Holivia) are now a collective; “deeply loving people who have fostered an accepting community”. (I’m pretty sure it’s Harry’s community, that he just completely shit on in its entirety in print, but okay.)
There is, of course, no mention of the fact that her own cast has completely shut her out of any social media interaction, except for the person she’s contracted to be around her all the time. I guess fan girl hysteria is also to blame for Gemma Chan and Florence keeping such close ranks and making sure to overtly ignore any comments, posts, or tags she makes of them.
