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Contextualizing Harry Styles' "problematic" behavior

Originally, this post was replying to an ask I got making a bunch of accusations. Instead of encouraging that sort of communication and structuring Harry's "defense" around someone else's question, I decided to edit this post and turn it into the definite contextual post about the accusations leveraged at Harry for being "problematic."

I have said this in other posts and questions in this blog, particularly when talking about Louis and Zayn, and I will repeat it when talking about Harry:

EVERYONE is problematic. This notion of cataloguing someone's past misconducts, particularly when that someone has been a public figure since they were a child, is hypocritical and ridiculous. There are certain lines that shouldn't be crossed and repeated offenses should be called out and considered, but generally speaking, life doesn't work on a strike system.

I'm contextualizing the accusations leveraged at Harry also because his successful career has ruffled a lot of feathers, which results in fans of his peers being particularly salty about him and trying to moralize their hatred for him.

ZIONISM

This accusation is the one that's leveraged at him more often, even though there's no actual truth to it.

GUILT BY ASSOCIATION

In late 2012 and until early 2014, Harry lived with a Jewish couple, Ben and Meredith Winston. They had a Kosher home (Harry talked about having to eat a pepperoni pizza in the porch when he first moved there) and would generally follow a bunch of traditionally Jewish practices. Ben's father, Robert Winston, and his mother also took Harry under his wing. They would bring soup to him when he was sick and became like a second family to him.

Harry met Ben when he was 17, and he lived with him from 18 to 20, forming a "home away from home" in some of his most challenging times. Harry also said that living with Ben "saved him." He explained that, because he didn't want to show up high at Ben's house, he was able to stay away from hard drugs in formative years. I go over a little deeper into this whole subject in this post.

For this reason, for a while Harry was very appreciative of Jewish culture. He would post photos wearing a kippah, wear a Star of David pendant alongside his Christian cross on his necklace, tweet about Chanukah, etc. Harry would later become godfather to Ben's daughter Ruby.

Of course, so far, none of this constitutes anything even close to zionism. Please remember that conflating Jewish culture with zionism is anti-semitic. A LOT of Jewish people are against the atrocities Israel has committed. You can read more about it in this column by Ilan Pappe, a pro-Palestinian Israeli historian.

With that said, Ben Winston has shown that he does have zionist views. A lot of people have tried to push both ways when it comes to him, depending on how much they like or dislike Harry, but he's neither a Benjamin Netanyahu's best friend nor a poor little Jewish guy who's being confused for a zionist.

He has talked positively about Israel in the past, and he was also a member of the zionist youth organization Bnei Akiva when he was younger. I have found no indication that he's still an active member of the organization.

Bnei Akiva is a youth group that advocates for the values of Torah (Jewish learning) and Avodah (work). It also greatly encourages aliyah which is the immigration of Jewish people to Israel. This has been misconstrued as actively recruiting members for the IDF. I have even seen accusations that Ben Winston's company, Fulwell 73 has contributed to recruiting for the IDF. As far as I can find with my deep research this is not true. Neither Bnei Akiva nor Fulwell 73 do such a thing.

With that said, aliyah will inevitably result in more people being recruited in the IDF simply because conscription is mandatory in Israel, and I believe that's where the confusion lays. I'm an advocate for the Palestinian plight, so I, of course, deeply disagree with basically all of this.

Ben's views are undoubtedly pro Israel, but he's spoken very very little since October 7. We don't know how staunch his zionism is, probably because he knows that speaking will not be good PR either way. I doubt he's much of a moderate, as the couple of things he said have been very pro Israel, like this statement from his company, which he tweeted in October 2023:

In this statement he defends Israel, puts all the blame for the massacre of Palestinians on Hamas, and says he's worried about the rise of antisemitism in the media—I personally disagree with all of this, but I find the idea that the media was being too hard on Israel particularly ridiculous.

He has not spoken since, at least that I can find. Things have changed drastically since then. While Israel's actions were always atrocious, they have become some of the most evil humanity has ever witnessed. Maybe his stance has softened, or maybe he's ignoring the whole thing as much as possible. I can't really speak to what he believes, but I know it's probably not something I agree with.

Harry is still friends with Ben and will probably always be, but there's no indication that he shares Ben's views. There's actually a lot of evidence that indicates the opposite—which we'll see in a little bit—but first I want to express my views on this whole "guilt by association" thing a lot of people try to push, particularly on celebrities.

If we were to "cross out" people going by guilt by association, we would cross out literally everyone. There are lines in the sand that shouldn't be crossed—such as, for instance, Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher sending letters to the judge advocating for Danny Masterson, or Nicki Minaj marrying a convicted rapist.

However, I rolled my eyes at the "guilt by association" leveraged at, for instance, Taylor Swift for hanging out with Brittany Mahomes. Even at Louis for being friends with Nizam Kabir—a friend of his who has really disgusting views, very Andrew Tate adjacent. This idea that you can't have friends who have wildly different views as you is a very online one. In real life, your family will have views that are opposed to yours. Your oldest friends. Your co-workers. And you won't be able to cut people out based on those views.

Ben's position on Israel is the most popular stance on it, believe it or not. Trump won the popular vote. Men lean more and more conservative each passing day. It's statistically almost impossible to not have someone with those views in your circle. Cutting people out that you've known for a very long time and who supported you in difficult moments (like Nizam or Ben), should not be mandatory to pass an invisible online test of "not problematic." YOU probably have friends with those views, or at least friends who are in Harry or Louis' position themselves.

HIS OWN ACTIONS

There are a few things Harry himself has done that have been used to accuse him of being pro Israel. Most of it is false or out of context, so let's tackle it.

The fist of Israel

First, in 1D's press conference for their This Is Us documentary, when a journalist from Israel introduced herself, Harry raised his fist in acknowledgment. This was misconstrued as support for Israel in particular, because it's common imagery to have a fist with Israel's flag, but that's absolutely not what he's doing. In that same press conference, he did the exact same gesture to a journalist from Sugarscape, a teen mag from the UK. Clearly there was no ulterior intention with the fist and it was just an acknowledgment of the person speaking.

The hammer of Israel

In 2014, Harry grabbed an inflatable hammer with an Israel flag from the audience, danced around with it for a while, then threw it back. That was deemed as a political stance on his part that I find particularly laughable.

Harry grabbing random things from the audience at shows is the most normal occurrence in the world.

Here he is even asking for a fucking sex doll on stage, then dancing with it.

There is zero indication that he was particularly drawn to the hammer because it had an Israel flag on it. Chances are he didn't even see the flag when he asked for it.

And I'll tackle this in a second, but 2014 Harry would definitely not be aware of the political implications of the Israel flag, let alone the hammer. To be fair, most 20-year-olds wouldn't have been either, back then.

[The reason I'm not posting videos of the fist thing or the hammer thing, is that Tumblr only allows one video per post, an I had to use it to post the disproving evidence.]

Direct support

In July 2013 Harry tweeted "You're singing to the choir sister" when Ben Winston suggested he should go to Israel. There are other quotes floating around where Harry supposedly said he wanted to go there in 2014 and 2015, but they were in print media and I can't find them right now to gauge if they were real quotes or not.

If you've been paying attention to Israel's actions in the last almost two years, you've probably noticed that they basically run on propaganda. Their social media is particularly heinous with it. They use any and all association with celebrity to prop themselves up. For instance, they tried to connect themselves to Taylor Swift because one of her bodyguards joined the IDF. Fake quotes by celebs supporting them are not uncommon, so always look for the source of the quote and check that it's not a fabrication.

But, of course, his tweet was real and it's still up. So what of that?

Simple ignorance. Like I just said, your average 19, 20 year old guy in the 2010s, particularly one who didn't even go to university, wouldn't be aware of the situation in Israel. In fact, it didn't become common knowledge until October 7 happened, less than two years ago.

Until then, the media just covered the situation in Israel as a vague "war in the Middle East." The media to this day is extremely pro Israel and reports everything with a very obvious bias, so imagine back then when the situation was not this extreme. You can read more about the media bias here.

Words such as "occupation" (what Israel does in the West Bank) are seen as taboo. Palestinians "die"—they're never "killed". Numbers of Palestinian victims are often questioned. Israel is given credence when they say that Hamas has tunnels under hospitals or that they use civilians as human shields. The media rarely discusses Israel as an Apartheid regime. They avoid at all costs using the term "child" to describe Palestinian victims, but stretch that definition to refer to Israeli ones. The list is very long and could be a post on its own. This is still a problem, but it was a much larger one before October 7. Now there's some level of acknowledgment in the media that Israel's actions are bad. Back then, there was none.

Social media was also a huge void of information. Some people were definitely vocal, but it was a tiny minority. TikTok didn't exist, and Twitter was used very differently back then. It was definitely not the source of news it later became (that Elon is working so hard to suppress).

This is obviously not an excuse to be misinformed. There are tools online to learn about the situation. But you had to deliberately seek out that information. Being ignorant was the norm at the time. Almost every single person in the world who wasn't affected by Israel's actions or wasn't really into international politics would have absolutely no idea of any of the nuances of the situation. Most people would only know vaguely of "conflict" in the Middle East.

Because of his association with Ben Winston, Harry would have seen Israel as "the Jewish country." That is also how most Christians view Israel because of religious connotations stemming from the Bible. Christians are taught that Israel is the promised land for Jewish folk. The idea that he would be informed about Israel's actions and support them back then does not pass any test of logic.

It's almost as stupid as saying that Harry wearing an American flag bandana for most of 2013 was in support of the Irak and Afghanistan wars.

The article

A few days after the whole hammer thing (which was in July 2014), Ben Winston tweeted an article by The Huffington Post. It was written by an Israeli-British journalist called Lliana Bird. Harry then followed the journalist on Twitter.

This article has since been mischaracterized as "pro Israel" and Lliana has been called a zionist, but... that's... just not true.

You can read the whole article here, but here's an excerpt in case you don't want to.

The article is... well, let's say she means well. She wants peace, and she both-sides things. She acts like what Hamas does in Palestine is "just as bad" as what Israel does. This view obviously ignores the power imbalance, first and foremost. And we can continue to discuss how this view is wrong for a very, very long time, but the main takeaway is that... Lliana's article does not hold a zionist point of view. She actively says that Israel is not right to try and dismantle Hamas. And this was in 2014, when Israel was not ACTIVELY flattening Gaza.

This is one of the last paragraphs in Lliana's article:

Israel should instead shower the Palestinian people with love and respect. Fire missiles filled with flowers and notes of Israeli's hopes for peace and love at the Palestinian people. Perhaps, after a few months of this, the Palestinian people might truly believe Israeli's are not monsters out to murder them, that Israelis WANT them to have peace and prosperity, and they will see Hamas for what they are and drive them out themselves.

To frame that as a "pro Israel zionist article" is absolutely fucking ridiculous. She's incredibly naive, but her point is not that misguided. Hamas' actions are extreme because of what they're reacting to. My personal position is that I don't agree with Hamas' actions because no innocent person should be punished for the actions of a state, but that I can understand why kids who grow up being actively bombed, who lose family members or their homes, who see their futures curtailed and live in poverty, would turn to extremism. There aren't really that many other options. You can't abolish an idea. I can't find the actual tweet now, but I remember seeing it a while ago, and it was along the lines of, "If Israel killed my entire family to eradicate Hamas, I would just create Hamas 2.0." Lliana, in her naiveté, was essentially saying the same.

To give this whole thing even more context, Lliana went on to found, alongside Dawn O'Porter (who's a friend of Harry's family) and two other women, the organization formerly called Help Refugees, now called Choose Love.

Choose Love has been actively working to help Palestinian people since its inception. They don't just work with Palestine, but they're one of the organizations that helps Palestine (particularly Gaza) the most. They have raised millions for Palestine.

Harry has donated to Choose Love a lot. This is Choose Love on Instagram in 2023:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Choose Love (@chooselove)

If you go to their account, you'll see how much they advocate for Palestine:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Choose Love (@chooselove)

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Choose Love (@chooselove)

Point blank, one of the founders of this organization is who people use to say that Harry followed "a zionist journalist."

Harry also included Choose Love as a charity partner in his first tour.

He also advocated for fundraising for the charity in late 2020:

And has even privately donated to Choose Love as a Christmas gift for friends:

The Palestinian flag

In 2022 during one of his shows, someone threw him a Palestinian scarf (not a flag). He grabbed it and then dropped it. This has been since seen as some sort of political stance.

I refuse to link to those "cancel celebrities" accounts, and I can't find the video of what happened anywhere else, so I had to create gifs instead.

The scarf doesn't have a Palestinian flag. It has the Palestinian flag's colors. Red, black, white, and green. Chances that in the split second that he grabbed it and looked at it, he put together that it was a Palestinian flag are less than zero. A LOT of other countries have the same colors in their flags too. The flashing lights that you can clearly see in the gif, wouldn't have allowed him to make that type of conclusion that fast even if it was in the shape of a flag, which it wasn't. This attempt is giving him superhuman senses.

Harry grabbing and dropping something is absolutely not uncommon. He gets thrown stuff on stage constantly. There are so many videos of him dodging objects as he moves around and then the sea of random stuff lying on the floor later.

The Israel flag

In 2015, after Zayn left the band, One Direction had a Make A Wish kid who asked them all to sign an Israel flag, so they all did so (including Harry). This has been used as some sort of political stance again. Make A Wish is a charity that gives wishes to sick children. One Direction worked with it a lot and most of their meet & greets were with kids from this charity. The fan had cancer and later passed away. I suppose 1D should've told a cancer-ridden child they wouldn't sign their fucking flag to not seem "problematic," right?

THE LITERAL LIES

Among the sea if stuff that was taken out of context or exaggerated, there are a couple of things that were outright fabricated.

The flag

People claim that there's a picture of Harry holding up an Israeli flag. First of all, it's not even an Israeli flag, because Israel's flag has a darker blue and a white stripe at the top and at the bottom, but second of all, the photo isn't even real. The original picture is him holding the SPANISH flag:

The tweet

There's a single screenshot of a tweet of Harry's that reads, "For all our Israeli fans, stay strong! Hope you will be ok. xx #PrayForIsrael"

That tweet doesn't exist on his account and Harry very rarely deleted tweets (I actually can't think of a single instance, but maybe he deleted a couple that I can't remember). A single screenshot of this tweet exists, even though by the profile picture, this would've had to be tweeted between September and December 2011, and by then, the One Direction fandom was massive and documented everything.

With tweets lost to time related to 1D, you can usually search the wording of them on Twitter and even if the tweet is deleted or the account is gone, you'll find replies from other people to it, or people quoting or talking about it. There isn't a single trace of it when it comes to this tweet. All of that is suspicious enough already.

But then there's also this. This is the first stance of Harry's Israel tweet being brought up (and that is the screenshot that makes the rounds to this day):

That same account on that same day, just 8 minutes later, tweeted this, that's how you used to quote tweets before quoting was a thing. You added RT before the @ of the person and whatever your commentary was before that. Quoting as it works now didn't exist until 2020.

I archived both tweets just in case. Harry's. Niall's.

Whoever this person is, for whatever reason, was trying to frame both Harry and Niall as Israel supporters. It's the same phrasing, on the same day, by the same account. There are no screenshots for Niall's tweet, also no replies or mentions by any fans.

The tweet with Harry's screenshot reads: "TANAK CKP ONE DIRECTION SOKONG ISRAEL PULA?!!" which means "One Direction's children support Israel too?!" in Malay, a language spoken in Brunei, Malaysia, and Singapore.

What the motivation was we don't know. My guess is that he was maybe messing with someone? From his other tweets he seems to be pro Palestine. Maybe he was doing that to mess with a sister or friend who liked the band like, "Your faves are pro Israel." I honestly don't know. The "Fuck" before "Niall's" tweet suggests so as well.

You can check Harry's mentions at the time for Israel (go to Twitter's search and type "Israel to:harry_styles until:2012-12-01" for instance, and it'll give you all the tweets mentioning Harry that contain the word "Israel" prior to December 1st, 2012). You'll see a ton of fans begging him to tweet what this screenshot is claiming he tweeted. Because he didn't tweet it. They were asking him (and all the other 1D members) to support them, because he hadn't. You'll not find a single instance of an Israeli thanking him for supporting them at the time. A tweet like this would have a million different screenshots for that same reason.

Also, Harry didn't delete his, "You're preaching to the choir" tweet to Ben. Why would he delete this one?

The claims

The rest of the accusations are just word of mouth. "He told an Israeli fan that he wanted to go to Israel." Or "he told a comedian that he wanted to go to Israel." Or "he gave a smile to an Israel flag during one of his shows."

There is zero concrete proof of any of this. And we'll go over why it's particularly ridiculous to believe in a second. The smile thing is rather embarrassing, even. The fan that claimed it was incredibly far away in the video that she posted (which wasn't even her own video). The flag is just hanging off a railing in front of her, and Harry seems to be just smiling in the general direction she's in. The idea that he smiled at a concert because he saw an Israel flag specifically is particularly delusional.

REALITY

Harry has been silent on the subject. He has not supported Palestine outwardly in the context of this situation. And I, for one, would like him to show his support, for sure. But the truth of the matter is that 90% of celebrities are silent on this issue because for them it's just a PR nightmare. Nothing they say will give them good publicity, and ultimately, that's what they all care about. Sorry to be blunt, but that is reality for all celebrities. It sucks, but it's true.

Out of the 10% who are vocal, I would say close to 9.99% have been vocally pro Israel. So to single out Harry here is kind of absurd.

With that said, Harry did refuse to perform in Israel. And that's just a fact that we can prove. He refused to perform there before October 7 even happened. Live Nation Israel, and even members of the Israeli government, wanted him to perform there for his Asian leg of Love On Tour.

Idan Roll, who at the time of this post was the Deputy of Foreign Affairs in Israel, posted the following in August 2022. It's still up, and you can find it here.

Look at the emoji, because it might sound stupid, but it says a lot: 🤞🏻

Crossed fingers. "Crossed fingers Harry Styles will perform in Israel." And he didn't.

As It Was and Harry's House were both huge hits in Israel. As It Was was #1 for several weeks. Fans were begging Harry to go. Live Nation Israel was pushing for it A LOT. But he did not.

Israel pays artists just to visit the country, so you can imagine how much money they'd pay for them to perform there.

(The article added a disclaimer saying that they were contacted by private individuals saying they paid for Demi's trip and not the government, which in my opinion, is just them covering their asses, as usual.)

I have been told by people that I trust that Harry privately not just declined the invitation but also said that he would never perform there. Obviously, that's not something we can fact-check, so take it for what it is.

The fact of the matter is, that if Harry had been out there saying he wanted to visit to people, then why wouldn't he just... visit? People can claim that him declining that show is a PR thing, but then they have to dismiss the accusations that he's randomly telling people he wants to go or smiling at flags. If he was doing all that, he would just go to Israel. Like, the cognitive dissonance has to give at some point. You can't have it both ways.

Justin Bieber had a concert planned for October 13th, 2022 in Tel Aviv. Bruno Mars performed in Tel Aviv on October 4th, 2023, and was also supposed to perform there again on October 7... his concert then got canceled for obvious reasons. So Harry's outright and documented refusal is important, particularly in the context of the accusations leveraged at him.

The one thing people can hold against him is that he said in the past (in 2013) that he wanted to go. And in 2023 he refused to do so, declining in the process millions of dollars.

And for those who think that his friendship with Ben is also a factor, his mom, his sister, and a lot of his friends (Molly Hawkins, Sam and Tomo Campbell, for instance) support Palestine outwardly and very loudly. They donate to Palestinian charities and have repeatedly called for a ceasefire. I think putting screenshots of their support here would be a bit hypocritical considering what I said about Ben, like, if one thing isn't proof then neither is the other, but that's what I'm getting at. If one thing isn't proof, neither is the other. You're not responsible for your friend's opinions.

RACISM

DIGITAL BLACKFACE

I'm not going to spend a lot of time with this because it holds even less water than the zionism takes. Harry quoted his friend Pixie Geldof's tweet with "Hahaha" (the quote was how I explained earlier with Niall's tweet). Pixie's tweet said "Hip Hop innit" and had a bunch of photos of a Christmas dinner with her friends, Harry among them. The photos were edited with an app called Snoopify that added stickers of stuff that were related to Snoop Dogg.

Some fans insist that this is "digital blackface" which is ridiculous.

He didn't edit the pic.

He didn't post it.

He just said "hahaha"

It's stickers from a Snoop Dogg app...

His skin wasn't altered for the photo. That's just 2012 iPhone quality.

This is another photo from that same day. The girl with short hair in front of him is Pixie:

This is such a ridiculous thing to have to explain.

BLACK LIVES MATTER

Harry's first solo tour, Harry Styles: Live On Tour, had a first part that was in theaters and a second part that was in arenas.

The first part was shorter too, only spanning a handful of countries. It started September 17th, 2017 in San Francisco and ended December 8th, 2017 in Tokyo.

He only did four shows in the UK, two in London, one in Manchester, and one in Wales. For his London shows, there was a fan project in support of Black Lives Matter. Pamphlets with the words "BLACK LIVES MATTER" were given out to fans and they were supposed to hold them up while Harry performed Sign of the Times. The organizer of the project also took a flag.

Black Lives Matter was created in 2013, and started to become prevalent in 2015, but it wasn't super mainstream yet. Members of the organization started to protest against police brutality with more and more frequency as years went on, and because of it, the movement started to get notoriety, but Black Lives Matter didn't become a massively recognized movement until the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020.

Fans who organized the movement wanted Harry to acknowledge it and support it, which was a very noble cause. And in hindsight, we can realize that... well, he did. At the time, people wanted his immediate reaction to be overt and loud, but that has never been Harry for literally anything.

The first show where fans did the BLM project was London I, October 29th, 2017.

He posted about the signs the day after that, October 30th, you can see them scattered in the audience:

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A post shared by @harrystyles

Supposedly the BLM flag was thrown on stage, but I have found no proof of it. Harry didn't grab the flag, but what he would've seen was a piece of black fabric amidst a sea of all the other stuff he was thrown on stage, so I'm not surprised he didn't grab it.

This post by Harry was not seen as enough at the time, even though back then, Harry had not started his ritual of posting a photo for every show yet. He had posted two photos for that entire tour, one for the first show in America, September 20th, and then one for the Paris show, which was the first one in Europe, on October 26th. Both of those pictures were also posted the day after the show.

The project was done once again for his Manchester show, November 1st, and there was a second project with fans holding the Manchester bees in honor of the terrorist attack in Manchester at the Ariana Grande concert earlier that year. Harry posted both projects back to back. First the bees one. Then the BLM one, front and center:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by @harrystyles

Harry did not post any more pictures off that tour. There were no more BLM projects after this one that year.

He did give a speech during his concert in Stockholm, which you can watch here:

"If you are black, if you are white, if you are gay if you are straight, if you're transgender—whoever you are, whoever you want to be, I support you. I love every single one of you."

This was, somehow, deemed by his detractors into an "all lives matter" speech. Thankfully, his fans and every rational person on the planet know that that is ridiculous, but just in case... all lives matter is a movement that's directly opposite to BLM, where bigoted people reject the fight against police brutality towards black people. Harry is very obviously not doing that—he posted the signs before giving this speech. This speech is also not saying "I love ALL lives" he's simply telling fans that he loves them regardless of their race, sexuality, gender, etc. It's a beautiful, very simple speech.

After this theater part of tour, he started back up in 2018, this time in arenas. First he did Europe, then Australia, then Asia, then South America. There were no BLM projects at any of these shows.

The BLM projects started back up when he started touring America, which was in Dallas, June 5th, 2018. There weren't projects at every show, but six shows in (in Boston, June 18th) he asked the cameraman to show the signs on the screen and then yelled, very passionately, "Yes it does."

He started waving the flag at the shows right after this one (MSG, June 21st/22nd). And has done it pretty much all the time ever since.

Mind you, this was two years before almost every other white celebrity did so. He doesn't deserve praise for being against police brutality—that's just human decency—but this idea that fans had to "beg him" or that he deliberately ignored anything, which those people who like to moralize their hatred for him perpetuate, is ridiculous and doesn't hold water.

A year after this tour, on his Rolling Stone cover for his second album, he said this:

On tour, he had an End Gun Violence sticker on his guitar; he added a Black Lives Matter sticker, as well as the flag. “It’s not about me trying to champion the cause, because I’m not the person to do that,” he says. “It’s just about not ignoring it, I guess. I was a little nervous to do that because the last thing I wanted was for it to feel like I was saying, ‘Look at me! I’m the good guy!’ I didn’t want anyone who was really involved in the movement to think, ‘What the fuck do you know?’ But then when I did it, I realized people got it. Everyone in that room is on the same page and everyone knows what I stand for. I’m not saying I understand how it feels. I’m just trying to say, ‘I see you.’”

Essentially, he wasn't super loud about it at first because he didn't want to be performative, which is a pretty good fucking reason.

After that, in 2020, Harry donated money to bail out BLM protesters. He also went to protests himself. He covered his face and tried to go incognito, but fans spotted him anyway.

Harry also posted about BLM and encouraged people to donate. His tweet about it had a linkfire branded link. It was this:

http://hstyles.lnk.to/JusticeForGeorge

Of course accusations started to flow, that he was somehow doing something wrong by tweeting it that way. They tried to claim that he was getting money from it or that he was collecting info from fans, which is ridiculous.

This type of link does not collect any specific info. Not your IP, your name, your gender, your age, your email, any of your habits. None of that. The information they collect is as follows:

How many people clicked

What country they're from

What device they're on (iPhone, computer, etc)

Where you clicked from

This last one is moot because Harry only posted this link on Twitter. All of this info is useless in this context. It's useful when you're using these links to sell something. Usually you would post the link across multiple sites and then it would track what audience comes from where, so what platform of yours is more lucrative, how much money they spend, etc. Also, since it typically leads to the artist's website, they can then collect personal info. Since here it directed to Change.org, they couldn't collect any personal info.

Harry's reach could be measured by how many people engaged with the tweet. You literally get told how many people clicked on a link you post, so that metric was already obsolete. And what device and country you clicked from is a completely irrelevant piece of information in this context. Harry knows where his audience comes from. He has that info on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music, ticket sales, website visits, etc. So the only metric left is the device... what would he possibly do with that info? The idea that this branded link was nefarious is ridiculous.

Why did they use a branded link? Multiple reasons:

Long links can and do break on Twitter.

When they break, they can become dangerous if a squatter gets them

If the petition changed links or domains, they could just change the destination of the link.

Twitter shortens long links. Because Harry included a photo in his tweet, Twitter didn't show a preview of the page (which they automatically do when you post links). It showed the actual link instead, and it would've looked like this if he hadn't used a branded link: https://change.org/p/mayor-jacob- which doesn't really look super relevant to the conversation and could make people wary of clicking on it. He made sure to put JUSTICE FOR GEORGE in the link.

COLLABORATION WITH BRANDS

This one is only repeated by a handful of people, but I still want to talk about it. Harry was a Gucci ambassador for a while, and Gucci got accusations of having collections that were racially insensitive at points. Harry did not model those collections, nor did he wear any of the items. He also wasn't actively promoting Gucci as these accusations were leveraged. It's just a huge nothingburger.

Then there was his performance in Miami in 2020. Harry was supposed to have a pre-Super-Bowl show in Miami in February 2020. It was right around his birthday. There was a hurricane, so the show was canceled.

Because people are insane, they tried to come for him for performing at a Pre-Super-Bowl show. At the time, the NFL was coming under fire for their treatment of Colin Kaerpernick, a black player who used to kneel during the anthem to protest police brutality. Fans heard Harry and Super Bowl and automatically assumed that Harry would be paid by the NFL. His concert had no connection to the NFL.

But his concert was sponsored by Pepsi, and because fans were angry, instead of lowering their pitchforks, they found something else to be mad about. Some of them (definitely not a majority, once it was revealed that the concert had no connection to the NFL), tried to claim that performing in a Pepsi-sponsored show was just as bad. Which... ???

Pepsi is a sponsor to A TON of things, including multiple of the arenas Harry and almost every single artist performs at. If he had to avoid being sponsored by "problematic" companies, then he couldn't perform at virtually any stadium in the world.

JOKES

This is getting incredibly long and I have to be very mindful of adding images because there's a limit of 30. And I don't want to do this in two parts...

A couple of jokes surrounding Harry at the Late Late Show in 2017 have been used to say that he's "problematic."

This is one of them:

Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Harry were guests at the same time. Aaron tells Harry and James (and the audience) that he has a coop with a bunch of chickens he named after the Kardashians. At the time, Harry had this on-and-off thing with Kendall. They were mostly friends, though. But he knew that when Aaron mentioned Kendall, it would be a thing that he'd be mocked about, and you can see him reacting as soon as her name is mentioned.

Then Aaron says that they lay (as in, they lay eggs) every day. Lay is also slang for having sex. James turns to Harry and asks him if they lay every day. Harry blows a raspberry and takes a sip of water like "Jesus Christ."

Somehow, this joke about HIS OWN SEX LIFE, got turned into, "Harry slut shamed Kendall." The claim is that he grabbed his water in a "sips tea" manner. Um... are you guys blind? Who does the "sips tea" meme while blowing a raspberry and looking flustered?

The joke was that he and Kendall had a lot of sex, which is something that Harry is really not comfortable discussing, as shown countless times. This joke is at his expense as much as Kendall's. And he DIDN'T EVEN MAKE IT.

----

The other jokes were when Harry covered for James when his daughter was born. Harry hosted for James and did all the stuff James usually did, like the monolog.

In that monolog there were two jokes that the moralizers claim were just terrible.

Donald Trump deporting James Corden

Roy Moore was thrown out of Harry's concerts

The first joke is in the actual final video, here.

The naysayers tried to claim that this joke was, "The same week that Donald Trump ended the DACA program" (DACA is an immigration program for minors). That's... just not true? Trump first threatened to repeal DACA in February 2017. Then they made that decision firmer in June 2017. Then they actually tried to end the program in September 2017. The program was not in fact ended then. The whole thing was postponed until March 2018. This joke was not made at any of those points. It was made in December 2017.

The joke was that Trump wanted to deport people who were antagonistic to him, since James is British and he was constantly slagging Trump off... What the hell does this have to do with DACA?? One can't even joke that Trump is an egomaniac who threatens to use his power to control people now because of woke?

The other was that Roy Moore, who was a US senator who was accused of sexual misconduct by a bunch of young women, was trying to get into Harry's shows to prey on his young fans and that Harry kicked him out of them. This joke didn't air (there was another Roy Moore joke instead), and of course the conspiracy talk was that "his team was trying to erase it from the internet." When... that's how talk shows work.

For instance, Harry went to the last Late Late Show in 2023 and he talked about the problem his platform had at the Grammys during his performance. That also didn't air and there's only one very LQ video making the rounds on Twitter and TikTok, but that doesn't mean that "his team is trying to erase it," considering that video paints him in a very positive light. If his team wanted to erase the Roy Moore video off the internet, they could, since they hold the copyright to it. But they haven't, so...

The joke was the same joke all other late night TV people made about Roy Moore. Here's Samantha Bee making a similar joke.

Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers, and Jimmy Kimmel all made similar jokes as well. It's just not that deep. The joke didn't air most likely because they liked the other one better.

It's also funny because Harry obviously didn't write either of these jokes. Right after the Roy Moore joke that did air. He says "I wrote that one out myself... no, I didn't," and then laughs.

This whole thing is so exhausting and stupid. I can't believe I'm writing paragraphs about JOKES from almost a decade ago that Harry didn't even make himself!!

MISOGYNY

I'm not going to make this that long. Harry enjoyed reading Bukowski and Murakami. He used part of Bukowski's biography Barfly for the intro to his song Only Angel, and there's also a bit of a quote to a Bukowski poem in the, "You flower, you feast" lyrics of his song Woman. Liking "problematic" authors doesn't mean you like that their topics are problematic.

You can like their story building, their prose, their language, etc. It's like claiming that liking Roald Dahl makes you racist.

Similarly, Harry liking Elvis' music is used as if Harry supported that man's actions, which is absurd.

OTHER STUFF

COVID shirts

In the context of COVID, Harry sold t-shirts in a partnership with the World's Health Organization. All the proceeds went to them. The t-shirts were also ethically produced following guidelines for workers at the time. Somehow this got twisted into him being bad.

The t-shirts didn't just funnel money for WHO when it was very much needed, but also provided safe and fairly paid employment when it was scarce. What a terrible person!

Lyrics

The moralizers claim that Harry's songs have "problematic topics." One of them is that he named a girl he had a date with without telling her he'd do that.

This is about his song Carolina. We don't know what actually happened there. It's possible she knew but they were trying to act like she didn't because it made the song's arc a bit more interesting (since he says, "Well, I guess she just found out," in the song). Maybe he actually didn't tell her at all and she just found out when the song came out. Either way, she was not bothered, considering this is the reaction by the fucking dad:

Why are we policing other people's relationships? Jesus Christ.

The other one is, "Couldn't take her home to mother in a skirt so short," in Only Angel. The scandal! How dare he say that he can't take a girl back home if her skirt is too short??!

It's funny because I don't think the lyric is offensive as is, considering he right after says, "But I think that's what I like about it." Like, he's very obviously not judging. But then in 2022 the demo version of this song leaked and the original lyrics were:

"Could never take you home because your skirt’s too short And your mother would be mad about it"

Aha! So the problematic person was her mother all along! This is SO ABSURDDDDD.

The last one is, in his song Kiwi, he says, "Hard candy dripping on me till my feet are wet." Hard candy is a drink. And the song is set in a bar. The drink is dripping on him. That's all there is to it. Of course, because hard candy can also be used as slang for pedophilia because of a movie from 2005 (it's a very obscure term that I've never seen used anywhere), then that makes the song problematic. Even though the entire context of the song makes that lyric super clear in context, and it's extremely obvious that the woman in question is a questionable adult who lives alone with her cactus and does a lot of cocaine.

To be clear, maybe three people complain about these songs, but just in case.

Plagiarism

TPWK

The band that sings the chorus in Treat People With Kindness, Lucius, came forward saying they would've liked to have a feature in the song. Harry's team told them that they weren't going to get one. That if they didn't agree they would just not use their vocals. They agreed. They never talked to Harry about it. There's nothing more to the story.

Harry having no features is a whole thing in his discography, particularly because his background was in a band. He probably wants his first feature to be something significant for him. If he didn't want to feature them, then he didn't have to, and that's not problematic at all. Why is he obligated to? He offered to remove their vocals. They didn't want him to do that because they wanted the exposure of performing with him. Harry even invited them to perform the song with him the first time he sang it live...

Why does he have to not only use their vocals, but also do it under their conditions, for his own fucking music? That's such an entitled thing to demand.

ESNY

There's a riff in ESNY that sounds like Badfinger's Baby Blue. This is duly credited in the songwriting. Peter Ham is the songwriter for Baby Blue.

This song sounds familiar!

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Bring a case in court and we'll talk about it.

Tamworth

When Harry was eighteen an interviewer said that American girls were hotter than English girls, to which Harry said that he didn't agree and it was an "even spread." The interviewer kept pushing and Harry said, "Have you ever been to Tamworth?" in a tone that sounded sarcastic.

The moralizers claim that this is Harry being classist and fat-shaming because "Tamworth has the highest obesity rate." That's, well, not true. Someone commented that on the video and the moralizers used it as proof. There's no indication that either of those things were in Harry's mind when he said that, and also I couldn't find a source for the obesity rate thing at all.

Harry does sound sarcastic when he says it, but he's constantly looking at Niall who goes beet red when Harry is talking, so presumably it's just an inside joke. This is the interview. Without knowing what he actually meant, getting bent out of shape over it is ridiculous.

The moralizers also claim that he was "slut shaming them." That one is even more absurd. I think they misunderstand when the interviewer says, "Have you ever been?" and Harry replies, "Many a time," to mean that the girls sleep with a lot of men? Many a time is a way to say "many times," as in, he's been there many times. It's a mostly British expression but it's pretty self-explanatory.

Misgendering

In 2017 a fan took a sign to a concert that had their pronouns as they/them. Harry didn't understand them and used the pronouns she/her. The fan was not upset and said they understood, but to this day this is brought up.

Clearly Harry didn't understand they/them pronouns, considering he had talked about supporting trans people earlier that year.

He, years later, used inclusive language, specifically mentioning non-binary people. Harry currently has a bunch of friends who use they/them pronouns, including his musical director Pauli Lovejoy, so presumably he has educated himself.

Headdress

In 2014 Harry changed his profile picture to one where he was wearing a headdress. Of course, this was insensitive and depicted cultural appropriation. He was called out on it, and he changed it within minutes, but he didn't address it. He hasn't done anything similar to that since.

He was likely very ignorant of what cultural appropriation was, was then educated as he should've been, and corrected his mistake. It would've been great if he had apologized, but that wasn't really the 1D style, so I'm not surprised it got swept under the rug instead.

Thatcher

Margaret Thatcher passed away in 2013. Harry tweeted RIP. To this day that is used to say that he's somehow a Tory, even though Harry literally and openly supports Labour.

Harry slagged off then Tory Prime Minister Boris Johnson during a show with Stormzy:

The Daily Mail even had a headline about him having "a leftie breakdown" because of this.

There's also that time he talked about how happy people were in Belgium because they paid high taxes and "everything was taken care of." This is a basic leftie ideology talking point, and also in direct opposition to one of the biggest things Thatcher advocated for (tax reduction). You can hear it at 5:20 mins.

Harry has talked about being anti Brexit, and even attended a Brexit debate at the House of Lords on Labour's side.

What a deliberately obtuse take, that because he wasn't politically informed at 19, that means he's now, as an adult, a Tory and problematic.

Cheating

There's no indication that Harry has ever cheated on anyone. It's possible he did, but not a single one of his exes has claimed so.

Taylor openly admitted that while he was hooking up with other people so was she, and she repeatedly said that they were friends, even right after they broke up. Going to LENGTHS about it too, btw

The two girlfriends of his that people claim he cheated on are Camille, because of his song Falling....

But Camille has been supportive of him even years after breaking up. Like, this is her interaction on a photo of him performing a song he wrote about her at the Grammys, after he won a fucking Grammy for it. She seems really cut up about it...

Her entire family and friends still support Harry, and Camille agreed to him using her voice in one of his songs about her. Nobody is that chill about a cheating ex. I talked about what I think that line on Falling means in this post.

In terms of Kendall, the claim is that he cheated with an air hostess and a stylist in 2015/2016. There's no indication that Harry was ever with either of those women, just tabloid gossip. The women themselves didn't claim it either. There's just one photo of Harry with the air hostess and he's posing for it like he poses for all fan photos and there are no pictures of him and the stylist.

But even if he had slept with either of them, Harry and Kendall were not formally together at that time. In fact, you can find Ken Baker, the Kardashian's unofficial mouthpiece confirming that they weren't dating, and never had officially dated.

Kendall has detailed who her ex boyfriends were but always insisted that Harry was a friend. They probably never made anything official.

They are friends to this day.

View on Twitter

Homewrecker

This one is about either him sleeping with Lucy Horobin or about Olivia Wilde.

The Lucy Horobin thing I went over in detail in another post, here. Harry was seventeen, Lucy was 32. She was married, but she told him she was separated. She did the same thing with another boybander called Harley from Rizzle Kicks.

In terms of Olivia, she was engaged to Jason Sudeikis, but she claimed that she was separated. Her nanny came out with a tell all about the cheating, with text messages to boot, and she herself said Harry had no idea that Olivia was lying. This is from the "tell all" article:

Considering this was during COVID, it's not strange that Harry believed her.

SUMMARIZING

Is Harry Styles "problematic"... yes? I said so when I opened this post. He's a flawed human being. He's been in the public eye since he was sixteen years old. It would've been impossible for him to never fuck up, never do or say stupid shit, never be ignorant, with a career that spans 15 years, since he was a child.

But the context is meant to show that, as far as we can tell, he's not malicious. He seems to at least try to be a good person. He's not a zionist, or racist, or a misogynist. We have thoroughly proven that.

He's been ignorant in the past, such as when he said he wanted to visit Israel, when he wore a headdress, when he tweeted RIP to Thatcher, or when he misgendered a fan, but he seems to have grown and bettered himself since then. Sometimes he should speak up more or louder, given his platform. He's friends with some questionable people. And he's made a couple of jokes that could've been better.

If that's all there is to his "problematic" persona, after fifteen years in the spotlight, then in my opinion he seems like a pretty sound guy.

[stylesclarified]

Louis+Eleanor+Hannah—The messy timeline

A while ago I got a good-faith ask about Louis potentially cheating on his girlfriend Hannah with a man, and how he could be a victim of internalized homophobia—that it could be the reason he bullied a gay kid. Prompted by that ask, I put together a post proving that Louis had actually cheated on Hannah with who would later be his girlfriend, Eleanor.

Some anons tried to push back against that, so the very concrete proof is spread out in four separate posts, which makes linking back to this quite messy and complicated to read. That is why I decided to just put everything together in one post.

It's the same info I had in all the other posts, just cleaned up for ease of reading.

Ok, so, a Larrie who we'll call Betterstill made a series of posts where she talked about knowing someone who knew Eleanor and how much of a b*tch she was (ok, and?). While making those posts she kind of... gave away something that made how Louis and Eleanor met click.

The first post said that, "Eleanor's best friend from university tells people that she introduced Louis and Eleanor backstage in 2011." In another, Betterstill clarified that the friend was Alana. When an anon pushed back and said that Alana didn't know Harry in 2011, Betterstill replied that, no Alana did work at the same bakery Harry did.

Another anon said that ok, even if Alana worked at the same bakery, she and Harry couldn't have worked there at the same time because she was in university when he worked there, to which Betterstill agreed and said that the story "didn't add up" for that reason.

Alright, now I need to explain all of this, which is very complicated to do in a non-confusing way, so bear with me.

Let's introduce Chloe Burcham. Chloe is one of Gemma's best friends (Harry's sister—idk, just in case):

Chloe's entire family has been friends with Harry's family for decades:

Chloe has also been friends for a very long time with a girl called Alana Burton—or Lani, how people usually called her online. Since neither of them are public figures (though Chloe is sort of an influencer), I don't really want to post old pictures of them together, but you can find them easily enough if you Google. The 1D fandom documents everything.

The kicker here is that Alana was roommates in University with Eleanor, aka Louis' long-time girlfriend. Both she and Eleanor posted endless photos together. Here's a photo Eleanor posted of all her university roommates—Lani is on the far right, while Eleanor is next to the blonde girl with a bob.

For a while, fans of 1D would discuss how trippy it was that Louis' girlfriend (Eleanor) was roommates with someone (Alana) who was childhood friends with one of Harry's childhood friends (Chloe), but there was no indication that Harry and Alana knew each other.

Louis + Eleanor shippers ("Elounor") had their theories about Alana+Chloe being the reason Louis and Eleanor met, but there was nothing concrete to go off of.

Until... kind of out of nowhere Lani tweeted Harry with an inside joke.

And a few weeks later Harry went bowling with Alana, Chloe, Chloe's sister, and some dude.

Then Harry tweeted Lani with a lot of familiarity:

And people were torn. Some believed Chloe had introduced Harry and Alana and that was all there was to it, while others put together the fact that Chloe and Alana had met when they were young because Alana was from a town 5 minutes away from Holmes Chapel (Harry's hometown), and that since Chloe was so close to Harry and Gemma since they were kids, chances were that Harry and Alana had met long before 1D.

Another reason people believed this, was that Louis explained how he and Eleanor met like this:

I don't know if anyone who's this deep into my obscure blog will not know that Harry worked in a bakery prior to being in 1D, but, well, he did. He worked there for two years, from fourteen to sixteen.

Harry (via Liam) also confirmed that he introduced Louis and Eleanor:

So, was Alana the friend of Harry's who worked at the bakery with him? Or was it someone else and Alana was just a coincidence?

Well, Betterstill shared in her "receipt" that Alana indeed worked at the bakery. I don't trust Larries as far as I can throw them, of course, but this one is very reluctantly admitting that Alana worked at the bakery. She's also agreeing with her anons that "the story doesn't add up" because "Alana was in university when Harry worked at the bakery." What I get from this, is that Betterstill actually does know someone somewhat connected to all of this, who confirmed that Alana worked at the bakery with Harry, and is trying to use that knowledge to claim that Eleanor is not a nice person (because Larries all have a vendetta against her), while also trying to somehow cast doubt onto something that she herself is confirming.

Betterstill has dozens of posts talking about being from the same area as Harry and knowing people he knows, so her knowing someone who knows Alana is not far-fetched to me. It seems like her coping mechanism is sort of lying to herself.

But, well, she's wrong. Alana started university the same year that Harry auditioned for The X Factor. As I said, Alana was roommates with Eleanor, meaning, they most likely started university at around the same time. Eleanor started university in 2010 after Harry auditioned for The X Factor. Harry and Alana working together at the bakery makes perfect sense. They could've worked together for the entire two years he worked there.

Fast-forward to January 2018 (a year after Betterstill's "receipt") and we get pictures of Harry hanging out with Alana in Japan:

And then almost two years later, we get content of Alana spending Christmas with the Styles in 2019:

Suffice to say that Harry and Alana are friends, and every part of this story is adding up.

Now, what else was it that Betterstill said? That Alana claims that she introduced Louis and Eleanor backstage at a show in 2011. Okay... interesting. We know for a fact that Louis and Eleanor had met by September 2011 because we have pictures of them together then, so that means they didn't meet backstage at 1D's first tour, since it started in December 2011.

What other shows did 1D have before that? Well, they had a couple of TV show appearances, some on the radio, at malls and stuff. Could it be that Harry invited Alana to one of those? Sure, it could be, but apparently it's not.

You see, Betterstill is/was friends with a bunch of other Larries, such as our good old pal Bulletproof who I talked about in my "living together" posts. Bulletproof gave us a tiny extra detail about this whole thing that's very interesting: that the show they met at was an X Factor one. She later expanded on the show being in the Spring of 2011. Betterstill and Bulletproof's friendship is long documented on both of their blogs, so presumably Betterstill gave Bulletproof details that she didn't make public in her blog.

I had my suspicion that was the case ever since Betterstill mentioned it was backstage at a show in 2011 and while looking for something else on Bulletproof's blog found the confirmation.

I figured that backstage at a show in 2011 had to mean at The X Factor Tour because it was what made the most sense, in terms of being a show where the guys could take friends with them. The families were always talking about getting tickets for those shows on Twitter.

What show? We have no idea, but most likely one in Manchester. The X Factor Tour ran from February 19th till April 9th, 2011.

So, regardless of what the exact show was, that's the range of time we're looking at.

Mmhm, but... at the time Louis was... dating Hannah, his girlfriend who he was with since before One Direction. If all of this is correct (and it adds up perfectly), when Louis and Eleanor met, he was 100% dating Hannah.

Fun fact, if Louis and Eleanor indeed met at a Manchester show, then they met right around the time of his and Hannah's 1-year anniversary:

(archived tweet)

Hannah would tweet about Louis a bunch. Hannah's sister posted this photo of them together on Easter a couple of weeks after The X Factor Tour ended:

Hannah deactivated her account a few years ago, so we can't link to her tweets, but we can see fan reactions to them. On July 17th, she took a Twitter break for a couple of days because of "rumors":

This was right after Louis went back home to Doncaster (where Hannah also lived) for a day, according to what his mom tweeted on July 16th.

A week or so later, Hannah came back from her Twitter break for 1D's anniversary (July 23rd), and right after that, she confirmed she and Louis had broken up but that they remained best friends, to which Louis agreed. We have screenshots of those tweets:

Louis' is still up.

You're gonna have to trust me on this one, because there's no way for me to link the source, but Stan, one of Louis' closest friends, had a period of time in 2013 where his Facebook was public. In fact, through Stan's Facebook we found out that Louis auditioned for The X Factor in 2009 as well:

And through his Facebook we found the date in which he and Eleanor became friends there...

That is four days after the potential date in which Louis broke up with Hannah (July 16th) and four days before Hannah would confirm it on Twitter. That is... quite the fucking timing.

Of course, we don't have 100% confirmation that Louis and Eleanor cheated on Hannah. But come the fuck on... They most likely met in March 2011, then Louis continued to date Hannah, and as soon as Louis and Hannah break up he starts interacting with Eleanor?

Just 10 days after that Eleanor's cousin, Emily Calder who was very young and a huge 1D fan (her @ used to be NomNomNiall), was tweeting about Eleanor knowing Louis. You can check out Emily's Twitter account—Louis still follows her.

(archived tweet)

Louis called her on the phone and followed her that same day.

As far Emily she was aware, at this point, Louis and Eleanor were "just friends." Emily wouldn't find out they were an item until it became public knowledge. Why? Because, well, she was a child, and she was a 1D fan, so she knew perfectly well that Louis had a girlfriend until LITERALLY two weeks prior to following her.

Like...

(archived tweet)

Larries took Emily's lack of knowledge of the situation as "proof" of it being all fake, instead of the fact that she was lied to and told 1% of the information. She was told that Louis and Eleanor had known each other for a while, but she didn't have the full context:

(She had an ask.fm at the time that was linked to her Twitter account, so this is 100% legit, but it's not up anymore for me to link it)

Sugarscape, a popular media outlet at the time that had a lot of interviews with 1D, said that someone spotted Louis with a brunette girl at V Festival (August 20/21 2011). I can't find the original article because Sugarscape has gone offline since then, but I can find an archived version of a second article where they reference it, a year later:

And Eleanor confirmed it was her:

(archived tweet)

Sugarscape wrote this second article because Louis had said in an interview that he and Eleanor didn't know how long they'd been together:

Larries also used this as proof that their relationship was fake. "Louis loves his girlfriend so much but he has no idea when they started dating."

They made whole ass timelines showing the discrepancies in what Louis said in different interviews, and dissected the whole thing in an attempt to "prove" that it was fake.

But... he couldn't say how long they'd been together BECAUSE THEY CHEATED. Not because he "didn't know" or because "he didn't care" or any other Larrie-backward-ass-logic. He did know, but if he admitted it, he was basically spelling out that he had cheated on his ex for months. He always gave different answers because the real one would not paint him in a good light.

Notice how Sugarscape corrects Louis, who said they'd been together for 6-8 months. They're like, "No, actually, it's at least 11." And, no, actually, it's MORE.

At first, Hannah didn't know, but she probably did realize it eventually. A year+ after the breakup, and a month after the Sugarscape article I linked, Hannah's little brother George had a pretty heated exchange with Louis' best friend Stan, in which he used a homophobic slur to describe Louis:

That's why Larries say that George accused Louis of cheating with a man, but that's... not true. You can see from his profile picture that George was a literal child. He most likely just used that slur because it was the worst word he could think of. Louis had been with Eleanor, very openly, for a year. They were first spotted together in September 2011. Eleanor then confirmed that they were together IN AUGUST, a month after he and Hannah broke up.

Even if Louis were gay (which he wasn't) and had a relationship with a man, why would Hannah's 12-year-old brother who he hadn't talked to in a year even know about it?

The "proof" of it is one word that can be very easily explained with logic. Now, here's the thing, a little bit after tweeting all of that, George deleted the tweets, so Larries went out of their way to claim that George had specifically tweeted that Louis had cheated with a man, and that makes the rounds to this day.

George did not tweet that. Here's a post by Larries the day after the tweets, August 17th, 2012, clarifying that it was FAKE. Just in case, I archived the post as well, you can find it here.

There aren't even screenshots of the tweet people use as "proof."

In fact, our friend Bulletproof (who was such a staunch Larrie she believed that Hannah was a friend of Louis' who was doing him a favor by pretending to be his girlfriend), didn't even believe that George was using that slur because he thought Louis was gay. She instead believed that George "wasn't told" what Hannah's "real role" was and that he was upset because of how fast Louis had moved on.

Which he was. That is why George was upset. In fact, so was Hannah!

As I said, her Twitter account is long gone, but she tweeted about unfollowing 1D accounts because she didn't want to see Louis' face on her Timeline in 2012. There's also this...

Hannah posted a video of her and a friend singing with a sore throat, to which a friend of Louis' called Calvin Rodgers (who he was distanced from at the time) commented, "In theory, the singing wasn't AS flat as Louis." A friend of Calvin and Hannah's called Dan replied, "Fair point." To which Calvin replied, "Not only fair, but true." And Hannah replied, "Controversial 🙊"

Anyway, to close this post, let's address two more things.

Larries claimed that Harry "looked uncomfortable" when it was said that he introduced Louis and Eleanor. They attributed this to, well, Harry and Louis being a closeted couple.

In actuality, the problem was probably that Harry was close with Hannah:

And because he was there when Louis met Eleanor, and was the main reason they met, felt uncomfortable about the whole thing.

2. Larries also claim that Harry "never interacted with Eleanor" and had raging jealousy. They project onto him the hatred they have for her.

Harry and Eleanor were probably not friends. Harry and Louis' friendships was already winding down by the time he and Eleanor started dating. But Harry did tweet a picture of Louis and Eleanor together in 2011

Here's Harry photobombing Eleanor and her friend at One Direction's premiere for their documentary This Is Us in 2013.

And here's Harry saying hello to Eleanor and her dad, who were having lunch at the pub close to his house. And yes, that was Eleanor 100%. That's exactly what her father looks like, plus, she's a regular at the pub. There have been a ton of sightings of her there. (Sighting 1, Sighting 2, Sighting 3, Sighting 4, Sighting 5, Sighting 6)

That was August 18th, 2019, btw. Louis and Eleanor had been back together since early 2017. They would break up again in January 2023. So, Eleanor was actively "Louis' beard" in Larries minds.

In order to claim that Harry hated Eleanor or was upset about her and Louis' relationship, Larries will use out of context clips, slowed down gifs, etc. But that's a debunk for a different day.

Anyway, that's all the condensed pretty concrete proof that Louis seemingly cheated on Hannah with Eleanor.

He also seemingly cheated on Eleanor with Briana (and other girls), dated Danielle Campbell very openly while Briana was pregnant with his son, then cheated on Danielle with Eleanor. So, you know, a really nice guy! I can make a post about that at some point if you guys want me to.

[stylesclarified]

Hey, I’m doing some cleanup here. I kind of want this blog to be very easy to navigate, but I also want to be able to answer questions, so I created another blog where you can just ask questions:

@StylesClarifiedAsks

Questions here will be closed from now on, but if you’ve already sent something, I will answer it anyway. I might take a screenshot and answer it directly on the other blog, or just answer here and reblog, then eventually delete it from here.

I’m also going to clean up some old posts to make them easier to read and have all the info contained in one place.

If you have suggestions you can send them in!

For the record, this blog used to be cantcompetewhereudontcompare

[stylesclarified]

Hi. do you think that there have been times when Louis' team have made marketing decisions - heavy emphasis on marketing - to appeal I guess for want of a better word to larries? from the outside there are a couple of things that make me understand why they might be taken a particular way. Things like the similarities between the vids for walls and lights up - walls is built on references, including to lights up. How Louis only repeated one outfit during the US leg of his 2022 tour, a blue+green shirt that he wore in Houston and Seattle, 28 days apart. That last one is batshit to type out but the fact that it involved three things that trigger larries feels deliberate (trolling, to me) or just the most unlucky coincidence. there are other things but I don’t want to natter. I guess I was interested mainly because it seems that most people categorically deny that either Louis or Harry could ever troll/cater to larries, and I get why, above all else given how much and often Louis partic has tried to shut it down. But it does make some sense to me that he might have leant into it for want of retaining an audience. Even though I don’t understand the viability of that business decision in light of his public pushback, but 🤷‍♂️ these are people who don't believe he fathered a child who is his spitting image, nevermind the words that come out of his mouth

Let’s split this into parts:

1. Is it possible that Louis’ team would want to cater to Larries?

YES. Of course it’s possible. Think about it for two seconds… why wouldn’t they? Louis comes with a built in Larrie audience. Catering to them is a given for a marketing team.

But would LOUIS want that? I don’t think he would. I think Louis wants Oasis’ audience. He’s delusional if he believes he’ll ever get it, but it’s 100% what he wants. His marketing team is being paid by him so they’ll do what they’re asked to do, even if they don’t agree with it. This is what Larries get so wrong. They think his team forces him to do things but imo it’s the other way around.

I think 1D’s team would’ve killed to be able to use Larry as bait for fans. It’s what dreams are made from when it comes to marketability in a boyband. Shipping is some of the best engagement content an artist can get. But I think after 2012, Harry and Louis reached a point of no return and they realized they were absolutely not game for doing that.

2. Do I think they do specific things to Larrybait? Eh, some small stuff. The tags thing I mentioned in YouTube for instance. Stuff that his team can do without necessarily consulting with Louis. I do think Louis would shut down any ideas that flat out cater to Larries.

3. The specific things you mentioned were absolutely not attempts to bait Larries. You sent a follow up ask saying you’re convinced it’s the case. Which is fine. I’m not going to try to change your mind. But you’re asking for my opinion and I’m going to give it to you straight: you’re wrong.

You’re falling for the Larrie narrative that these men live and breathe their conspiracies. If they had to avoid everything Larry related they’d never leave their houses, with the amount of obscure “signals” Larries create out of thin air.

In fact, I think if anything, Louis is subtly trying to do the opposite. His shady comments about Harry do not encourage Larry at all.

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did Harry and Louis really know "freddieismyqueen" YouTube channel (and maybe Tumblr account??) existed??

It's considered a staple Larry proof that freddieismyqueen was kind of monetized by Harry? Louis? But I always found that theory overstretched

Could you maybe debunk that? Thanks!!!

Also, love your blog, really educating!!!

The reason people believe that Harry and Louis "approved" of that deranged Larrie, Freddieismyqueen was that she posted this on Twitter:

Which is her lying through her teeth and making no sense.

Harry's label always tends to monetize fan videos that use his music.

For instance:

The video is monetized, and it literally links to Harry's song:

ALL artists tend to do this, btw. This is a Haylor video that uses one of Taylor's songs and is monetized in the same way:

Here's a monetized Haylor video with They Don't Know About Us by 1D as background music, also monetized, also linking to the song (1D was under Columbia, the same label Harry is under):

Literally a Haylor video with Two Ghosts:

This happens automatically. Typically, no human being is reviewing these videos. YouTube has a copyright detection system and clears the videos with the artist's PRO—we went over what PROs were in the first post about Louis' songwriting, but to summarize, Performance Rights Organizations or PROs collect $$ on behalf of the artist for the reproduction of their music in whatever media they're reproduced. It can be an ad, a TV show, the radio, YouTube, Spotify, whatever.

For most artists, what happens is that they allow the video to stay up as long as it's linked back to them and it follows YouTube's general guidelines.

Some artists split the revenue with the uploader, in that case, the video shows up as monetized. Some others don't. In that case, the video shows up as not monetized (YouTube still shows ads, though, but the money goes to YouTube and the artist, not to the person who uploaded the video).

Why do artists share revenue? Multiple very simple reasons:

The video still generates money for the artist. If the artist doesn't split the revenue, then the uploader loses a huge motivation for keeping the video up. The artist loses a stream of revenue for no good reason.

When you split the revenue, it gives the uploader motivation to potentially use the artist's music again, or for other YouTubers do replicate it and use that artist's music as well.

If the video goes viral the song can become more popular.

The views from these videos count for Billboard charts

As long as the song is linked in the description (like I've been showing you) those streams will tally up on Billboard and other official charts that incorporate YouTube in their charting system (which is most of them). It's internally tracked by SoundScan.

If the revenue is not shared, it's likely that it was reviewed and manually decided. In FIMQ's case, it's possible the reason Medicine wasn't monetized was that it was... Medicine. An unreleased song. I don't know why that stance was different, but it was definitely an exception and not the rule.

But let's put all of that aside and use our thinking caps for a second.

If Harry's label, Columbia (under the umbrella of Sony) holds the copyright for those songs, then they can strike the channel, or demand that she removes the music if she wants to keep the videos up. Correct?

Alright, so if Columbia/Sony was/is heavily closeting Harry and Louis. Why didn't they fucking do that?

How is it PROOF in favor of Larry that THE LABEL allowed FIMQ to use Harry's songs for her videos? Can someone please explain me that thought process? If Harry has the autonomy to force his label to allow Larries to use his songs and share revenue as some sort of gesture (instead of reality: that is the standard of how they behave), then why doesn't Harry have the autonomy, to, idk, go grocery shopping with his boyfriend of fifteen years? Follow him on instagram?

I feel like I've said this so many times in these posts. So, repeat after me:

YOU

CANNOT

HAVE

IT

BOTH

WAYS

You can't! Either they're "free" to give revenue of their own songs, songs that they've LICENSED TO THE LABEL!

to Larries to show their appreciation for their "analysis"

Meaning they're also free to choose to stay in the closet, so, so deep that they can't even be seen grabbing coffee together once in TEN YEARS. And they're free to use their money and influence to have women posing as their significant others, knowing fully well that they'll receive a barrage of a buse for the entire time they're linked to them. And not only that, but—at least according to Larries—they won't even put the most minimal effort to look believable in these relationships and grow so irritated by them that their "body language" will give them away.

Like, they're actively choosing to stay in the closet (according to this branch of the theory) but still they despise the women they hire to play their girlfriends.

And do not get me started on Louis, pretending to have fathered a nine-year-old child whose entire fucking life will be affected by this "stunt." Because Louis went as far as putting him in his documentary. Not to mention all those trips to England, spending precious time during the holidays with people he's never met.

Like, sure, Freddie's family would be awful, but how come Louis is not accused of being just as guilty?

Larries cannot form a coherent argument.

Lastly.... because I know his nasty ass fans will try to twist this into "Sony using Louis and Larry to promote their cash cow" instead of acknowledging that sharing revenue with fan-made videos is standard practice.

These are the tags on Louis' YouTube video for his song Two Of Us.

Yep, Harry Styles (none of his other bandmates) and Larry Stylinson

This is from Silver Tongues

Audio for High In California

I'm not coming for Louis, btw. This is his team. The same one that's "closeting him" according to Larries. That's the contradiction I'm trying to prove.

If it was up to the labels/their teams, they would both (Harry and Louis) use the attention of Larries to get ahead. Because they're not closeting them. Because they're not a couple. Louis is straight. Harry is... well, Harry is Harry. They're not together. They never were.

Revenue-sharing with FIMQ was standard practice. The tags thing not so much, but, eh, whatever. It all falls in the same category.

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Josh is the boy harry went to school with. There's a few pictures that fans have used over the years as proof of him being out and with josh before x factor. And it's always followed by a delusional "HE WAS OUT, HE WAS FREE, THEY FORCED HIM BACK INTO THE CLOSET" as if Harry has no say in his own decisions

Do you mean this? Cause that's not Harry.

I should charge for the debunking service, because it takes ages, and I'm very efficient.

I found the original person who posted the photo. It's a random Belgian boy.

The photo was posted for the first time by a Tumblr blog that went by "hixitsxmitch" on July 13th, 2012.

The blog has since changed names and Tumblr hid it for m*ture content. But you can find an archived version of it from January 2012 on the Wayback Machine here. This is at the bottom left of the archived blog:

That's Mitch. He was a Belgian boy. The one on the right in the picture of "Harry and Josh."

As I said, his blog changed names and was flagged, but it's still up. This is that same archived post on the "new" blog. Notice how the date matches, January 2012, and the photo is the same.

Ok, so we've established that "hixitsxmitch" and "ftstityg" are the same blog, just changing names. Cool. What's this got to do with the Josh photo?

Well, this is the OP. I can't link directly to Mitch's post because he deleted it. Maybe he ended up breaking up with his boyfriend. But you can still see his original post from July 13th, 2012 in the reblog of it I'm liking. The reblog is from July 18th 2012.

He reblogged himself. For some reason Tumblr updated the URL in the original post but not on the reblog.

And just to erase any minuscule doubt you might have... Here is Mitch, same haircut, same jacket, same blog, 10 days before the "Josh" pic:

"myfaceontumblah" was a sideblog Mitch had, which he reblogged to his main. He seems to have deleted it, but, once again, it's been archived by the Wayback Machine. For some reason it only flashes for like a second before it says the content can't be displayed, so in case you can't catch it on the link, here you go:

And in case you still had any doubts, here is Mitch saying he's gay:

And that he has a boyfriend:

Other than Mitch signing an affidavit confirming that it's him, I'm not sure what else I could do.

The photo was first posted by Mitch on Tumblr in July 2012. It got 54K notes. Then Larries made it about Harry.

That boy does not look like Harry. This is Harry at around the same age. Does that look like the same boy to you? His hair is several shades darker and if it had been that long, it would've started curling. Not to mention that Harry's jaw was prominent even at that age.

That is his girlfriend at the time, Abigail.

Anyway, this is the first instance I can find of someone claiming it for Harry—August 2012, five weeks after the photo was posted (they acted fast).

Why they did that? Who the FUCK knows with these people?

Because I'm not satisfied with just debunking the photo, I'll also debunk the "openly bi" claims and the "boyfriend Josh" claims.

That tweet does not mention a Josh. I'll get to the bottom of that later. But to start... where did they get that a friend of Harry's had said he was openly bi in school?

I looked up "Harry openly bi" on Twitter limiting the date until August 15 and found this:

Which had a tumblr link. So I clicked it, and it led me to this:

Which is not the original post, but a reblog. And the OP's blog had changed names. So I liked the post and went on the app to try to find the OP's new blog by looking at the reblogs. I ended up finding a reblog where you could somehow see the new name of OP (I really don't understand how Tumblr decides which names they update and which they don't)

This was the original post, but the OP deleted it:

https://www.tumblr.com/sunflowervoltwentyeight/29413432832/friendly-reminder-that-harrys-friend-said-that

Hmm. Why did they delete it? Well, I went on OP's archive to see what else they had posted that day (you add "day/yyyy/mm/dd" at the end of an the URL and it shows you all the posts from the day) to see if anyone had asked them where they got that.

They did. Obviously. And the OP answered this:

Wow! Super reliable! Of course! Two and a half hours later OP reblogged this:

So it wasn't a friend of Harry's who was "definitely not a fake" who had a blog. It was an anon claiming to be Harry's friend. You know, anons on tumblr. Incredibly reliable!

I think we can put the "openly bi in school" thing to rest...

Now, the boyfriend Josh? Where did that name come from?

I searched Twitter for "Harry boyfriend Josh" limiting the results until August 2012, to see if anyone had already mentioned it.

No. They hadn't. I got zero hits. The tweets that did mention the three terms were completely unrelated. And if they had to do with Harry Styles at all they were Larries tweeting at Josh Devine (1D's live drummer) that Harry wasn't interested in him because he already had a boyfriend (meaning, in their delusional brains, Louis).

Like this:

So where the hell does Josh come from?

So I used several different dates on Twitter to search for the first instance of someone claiming that Harry had a boyfriend called Josh and found this, June 1st, 2013:

The same wording as in 2012 ("friendly reminder") but suddenly he wasn't just openly bi, he also had a boyfriend, and his boyfriend's name was Josh. Who the fuck is Josh and where did he come from??

No earlier mentions of this. It seems like the culprit was "Zarryunderwear" (the tweet I added here is quoting them, because they have since deleted their account). They also added a photo, which is now not available, but I think I know what the photo is gonna be...

I searched for other mentions of Harry having a boyfriend called Josh around the same time, and I found this one, two days later, June 3rd, where you can see the photo (which I presume is the same one Zarryunderwear used):

BLOOP.

Okay, so this person is just repeating the rumor from that 2012 anon. Where the fuck did Josh come from???

And then I remembered.

In 2013, a Larrie got an anon claiming to have found Harry's old tumblr. Most specifically, March 22nd, 2013:

Hm, why do I have a feeling that louiskissesharrystears created that blog and sent an anon to herself? Have I told you I'm cynical?

The blog got archived on the Wayback Machine the next day, March 23rd, 2013, and subsequently deleted.

This is the archived version of the blog (Larries claim to this day that it was real) on Wayback Machine. We have three pages archived:

Page 1:

Page 2:

Page 3:

That's all there was to the blog. Just three pages. All the posts are from 2010, specifically from before October 2010. And it is there in plain black and white that the blog predates The X Factor airing (which started later in October 2010).

So... it was real? Harry had a Tumblr? Where he posted about his ex boyfriend and said he was gay?

Well, no.

The person behind the blog did something quite "clever" by changing the dates of the posts, which is something tumblr always allowed you to do. In fact, you can still do it. I just made this post, but according to Tumblr it was made on Harry's birthday 2009.

Okay, so there was a way to pretend to have an old blog. But just because there was a way to pretend doesn't mean it was fake, right?

Like, look at this post on page 2 of the blog:

That's such a rare picture. I don't think I've ever seen it before. And that's definitely Harry. Posted before One Direction was formed. With a plain black and white caption claiming that his White Eskimo bandmate was his ex.

How do we know for sure it's not real?

Look closely. Bottom left. I'm copying and pasting the same photo from the Wayback Machine. You can do it too.

You see it? Still no? Ok, let's zoom in:

And just in case... you should be able to see it very clearly now:

So how in the fuck did Harry post an old photo of his with his "ex" on his tumblr before the band with a watermark that read niallssmile...??? Did he watermark it himself? He met Niall the week of Bootcamp, so right around the time that "he" posted that photo, but what a fucking odd thing to do, to post a photo with your ex on your blog, and before posting it, for some reason??? Adding a fucking watermark with the name of a boy you've just met on a singing competition?? Like??? And it's not even Niall Horan, which would be bizarre enough. But Niallssmile???

Well, obviously he did not fucking do that. Because he didn't fucking post that. Some bored Larrie decided to fabricate "proof" of Harry being queer to validate Larrie delusions. The reason they most likely fabricated proof of Harry being queer instead of Louis is that Harry in 2013 was plagued with rumors of hooking up with girls (and a lot of them were true, he was a bit of a manwhore that year). Larries in 2013 saw Louis being queer as a given (some of them still do—the ones clinging onto his old persona)

But ANYWAY, in case that still wasn't enough, on the third page of this blog, "Harry" reblogs this post:

With the date July 1st 2010. Cool.

Except the original post wasn't created until July 29th 2010.

What a magical blog Harry had. It time-traveled! He was able to reblog posts that didn't exist yet°

+So, this blog was bogus. How we got from Harry being openly gay with his ex Nick to Harry being openly bi with his ex Josh? I don't know. I presume Zarrysunderwear mashed the anon rumor from 2012 + poor Mitch's old photo + Bluejuggling and ended up with this fucking salad.

Not knowing where she got Josh will probably irk me forever.

So, to recap:

The photo was a Belgian boy called Mitch with his boyfriend.

The "Harry was openly bi in school" thing came from an anon on Tumblr in 2012.

Once that Tumblr post went viral, people randomly attached the photo to that rumor, even though there was a massively popular Tumblr post directly from the OP, who had his name and a bunch of other pictures of himself, circulating on Tumblr. Like, what a brazen lie.

In March 2013 some bored Larrie created an "old blog" of Harry's where he talked openly about being gay and his ex boyfriend Nick.

In June 2013 some other bored fan linked everything we just mentioned and got the name Josh from the depths of her own ass.

Harry was not openly bi or openly gay in school. Harry went to school in the 2000s in a tiny, minuscule town in the North of England. Even if at the time he had been fully realized in his own sexuality, the chances that he'd be openly queer are insanely small.

And Harry mentioned going through a journey in terms of his sexuality a couple of years ago. And he was writing songs about "I figured out I kinda liked it" in 2016. Why would he write that at 22 if he was all figured out at 15?

Let's stop talking about this pls.

And for the love of God, when do the Larrie lies end? Do you realize how exhausting this is? They literally pulled every single thing out of their ass and to this day they repeat it as fact.

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Harry and Louis... lived together? - Part III

You can find the first two posts of this debunk here:

Part I

Part II

In this part—the last one—we’ll tackle all the Larrie lies about this subject.

Larries muddy the timeline

Larries use anything they deem “contradictory” to claim that the whole thing must be fake, and they do this a lot with Harry and Louis’ housing situation. For this portion of the post, I’m going to analyze this timeline by Bulletprooflarry and all the times she claims there’s a contradiction that makes no sense in the way the events unfolded.

She also mentions other things that "make no sense" but I'll tackle them in the latter part of this post with the rest of the made-up Larry "proof."

They were never planning on buying Princess Park

We talked about media literacy before—how not every source and every rumor is created equal.

The media outlet we need to talk about right now is The Daily Star, which is bottom of the barrel when it comes to “journalism.”

They’ve had beef with a lot of celebrities, but with Harry in particular, they have a pretty horrid history. Harry literally sued them for £100,000 for publishing on the cover that he had shared naked pictures of himself, and the newspaper had to issue an apology. They’ve always had either bizarre or downright rude made-up stories about him.

On January 5th, 2012, The Daily Star reported that Harry and Louis wanted to buy the apartment “they” were renting in Princess Park (which we know they didn’t rent themselves). The article is no longer online, but Daily Mail republished it, and it said this:

The pop group all live in the block, the same one that Girls Aloud lived in when they first hit the pop scene, and Harry and Louis are currently renting the penthouse for £3,000 a week. But now they want to fully own the home, which, according to the Daily Star, they call their ‘pimped-out penthouse’. They threw a New Year’s Eve party there for 50 of their friends which ended up costing them hundreds of pounds to clean, and Harry loves the place because of the connection to Cole. A source told the paper: ‘Harry and Louis are living the life of luxury and loving every single minute. They had a wild bash with Louis hiring a coach to bring his old school chums. Harry was telling everyone he’s fallen head over heels for the flat, and loved the fact Ashley Cole used to live there.’

With this sort of low-stakes media, usually one outlet will publish something, and then all the others replicate it, citing the original article. In these cases, it’s not that “all these media outlets are claiming the same.” Unless each outlet labels the news as exclusive or mentions that their own sources have verified it, then it’s just a replication. It’s not multiple media outlets reporting it independently.

You always need to consider who the main source is, and that will be revealed in the story itself. Daily Mail isn’t exactly a great source either, but they do break stories from time to time—so they’re at least a step above The Daily Star in terms of believability. In this particular case, they weren’t claiming to have their own sources. They were just replicating. No other media outlet backed up The Daily Star on this story.

Bulletproof claims that this report of Harry and Louis buying an apartment together was published by Daily Mail “and other outlets”—this is wrong, as we just covered. Of course, she knew it would sound less reputable to say, “The Daily Star reported…”

ANYWAY, she also said the initial reporting came from an independent journalist called Mark Meets.

She noted that Mark Meets claimed Harry and Louis were eyeing an apartment in Chelsea, not the Princess Park apartment (which was in Barnet—a completely different part of London). She suggested that the other outlets might’ve gotten confused because Ashley Cole, who The Daily Star cites as the reason Harry wanted to buy the Princess Park apartment, used to play for the football team Chelsea.

For some reason she posts a screenshot of a quote tweet, even though the actual tweet is still up. Who the hell knows.

But that aside, I mean, wow, she was probably right... right?

Well, no. He tweeted after the article from The Daily Star came out.

Compare the timestamp with Mark Meets’ tweet—it was 29 minutes earlier.

This was the original link to the now-deleted Daily Star article:

http://dailystar.co uk/goss/view/228518/Toyboy-Harry-Styles-3m-Ash-pad/

You can find it linked as a source in the article where The Huffington Post replicated it.

So, Bulletproof had it the other way around—Mark confused The Daily Star reporting on them wanting to buy Ashley Cole’s old apartment with them wanting to buy an apartment in Chelsea.

This might seem too long and winded for something inconsequential, but I personally find it important. As I said, her timeline has 2,000 notes, and what Bulletproof claimed in her blog became Larrie lore over the years. She was considered one of the most trusted sources among Larries, and her posts have been taken as undeniable proof of a conspiracy theory that has harmed a ton of people, including a nine-year-old child.

And she was verifiably wrong over, and over, and over again with stuff she claimed with absolute certainty.

No, Harry and Louis were never planning on buying that apartment. Or any other apartment.

Harry and Louis still lived together. Not.

Bulletproof then says that on April 6th, a bunch of gossip sites published articles claiming that Harry and Louis lived together when they weren’t on tour.

Which is a hilarious show of her poor research skills again. She linked a PopDust article that has now been deleted, but you can find it with the Wayback Machine.

The article did not claim to have any insider information whatsoever. It reported on the video that was published by One Direction’s official account, the interview for VEVO LIFT I have referenced several times already. (It is now the third time in as many posts that I insert this video):

As you can see, the video was posted on April 6th:

The lack of media literacy in fandom, particularly when it comes to conspiracy theorists, creates so much confusion. They basically demand for articles to follow a linear narrative, as if reality were some sort of scripted drama series. They seem to not be able to grasp that articles are written by people, and that, particularly smaller or less serious media outlets, are not scouring the internet for every minute detail.

PopDust simply took the video posted by One Direction’s official account at face value. In it, Harry said that he and Louis lived together. It’d also been widely reported that they did, and they talked about it in other interviews.

Yes, it had been reported in February that Harry had bought an apartment to move out of his and Louis’ shared one. But when Harry recorded this video, he hadn’t moved out yet.

This article by PopDust wasn’t a contradiction. It just meant that Emily Exton, the person who wrote the 295-word article for PopDust, watched the video and wrote a quick summary of it for clicks instead of fact-checking that nothing had changed since the video was recorded.

Bulletproof also says that there was “series of articles” claiming they still lived together. For the record, it would be perfectly normal if a bunch of smaller media articles echoed a video published by One Direction's official YouTube account without fact-checking. The thing is, though, it doesn’t seem like that happened at all. I can’t find any articles at all about it:

Bulletproof mentioned Sugarscape as a site that had an article about it. Sugarscape’s website stopped existing years ago, but their Twitter is still up, and they used to tweet all their articles—a lot of them multiple times—particularly when it came to 1D or Harry and Louis (because of the amount of attention they got).

I searched their tweets during those days and there’s nothing. The one article about them on April 6th—the one about them “tying the knot”—was a spoof article with photoshopped pictures of “a Larry wedding.” No mention of them living together in it.

The Wayback Machine has an archived version of Sugarscape’s website from April 7th, where you can see all their articles as far back as April 4th, and still the one Bulletproof mentions doesn’t exist.

They stayed together at a hotel? No, they didn’t

Bulletproof then goes on to claim that Harry and Louis were both separately spotted at the same hotel in London on July 21st and 22nd. Right, well, first of all, she gets it wrong because the photos she’s referencing are from just one day, and that day is not either of the ones she mentions—it’s July 20th.

They’re these pics.

Second of all, while Harry was spotted leaving a hotel, Louis’ photos are not in a hotel, but in the recording studio they were frequenting at the time, which, according to the Wikipedia for their second album, Take Me Home, was called Wendy House Productions.

Same flooring, same white walls with white windows, the same curved green gate. In fact, in the last picture of Louis’ set, you can spot the same building right outside the studio on Street View.

The other guys were also spotted at this same studio a bunch of times during these weeks.

Why was Harry in a hotel that day? Who the hell knows. It could’ve been something as simple as a photoshoot or meeting, or visiting a friend, or maybe there was some problem with his apartment, or maybe he’d already rented it out—remember the point we made in the other post about it.

The Mirror makes a mistake, cue conspiracy music

She then cites an article by The Mirror where they talk about Harry buying his new house and say that he had bought an apartment in East London "last year" and lists it as a contradiction. See what I mean?

It's a mistake. Whoever wrote the article in The Mirror made a mistake. They're clearly referencing the apartment he bought in February. But apparently, if a human being who writes an article about something makes a mistake, then now that whole thing is sus, in the eyes of Larries.

The Daily Star as a source. Again

Bulletproof then takes another report by The Daily Star as “proof” of “how it’s all fake.” They claimed that his house only had one parking space, and since Harry had more cars than that, it was causing chaos in the neighborhood. But it had been reported in other articles that he had more parking space than that.

As I said, The Daily Star just makes shit up. The article came out in April 2013, and Harry had not moved into his house yet.

She also links to another article by The Daily Star about Harry staying over at Nick’s. Harry did spend a bunch of time at Nick’s, but The Daily Star would have no sources regarding that. I cannot emphasize enough how much BS they make up.

But why did he never sell it? Hm?!

Bulletproof then makes a point of saying that so many publications mention Harry buying his East London apartment, then buying his Hampstead house, then renovating it and moving in, but that they never mention him selling the apartment. That’s apparently “a contradiction.”

Uh, huh, so... maybe they haven’t reported on him selling it because... he hasn’t sold it? Just a thought.

Maybe he still owns it. He owned it by 2016 at least, considering he lent it to Mitch. Maybe he rents it out. Maybe he just gives it to friends who need a place to crash.

It’s funny because somehow the thought of him just continuing to own the place doesn’t even cross her mind. Most Larries—she included—believe that the houses we know Harry and Louis own are just “public houses,” and they have an entire separate house they live in. Meaning, they own, maintain, and pay taxes on three properties just to keep up appearances.

That, to them somehow makes perfect sense, but they draw the line at Harry owning and possibly renting out an apartment he doesn’t live in.

Never forget a detail

In 2017, Harry had his first solo Rolling Stone cover. It was written by Cameron Crowe, an incredibly renowned journalist and filmmaker.

What Bulletproof notes about the article is that it mentions Harry stayed with Ben for 20 months instead of the 18 they usually claim. Like I said, Larries follow these details to a T, and anything that doesn’t flow with exact accuracy is deemed a contradiction.

Ben is the one who says 20 months in the article, and he’s not actually wrong. Harry has mentioned coming back from a huge stadium show in Brazil to Ben’s house. The only time 1D went to Brazil was in May 2014.

If Harry bought his house in mid-August 2012, 20 months later would be April 2014.

So why did they say 18 months other times? For the same reason Ed said Harry stayed with him for a while. For the same reason he stayed with Nick or Lou. Because he probably bounced around a bit! And he probably hasn’t sat down to count exactly how many days or weeks or months he’s spent at any specific house. He just tells the story, throwing a ballpark number, because it’s his lived experience, not a fucking script where he needs to nail a timeline.

I personally like timelines because they keep things neat and organized and help us understand context better, but who the hell tells their own life story as a timeline?? Who keeps track of what happens in their life to such a specific degree?

He also probably doesn’t want to tell us every detail. So he abridges or simplifies stuff for the sake of a story he’s telling to an audience of millions.

Just imagine having someone keeping tally of everything you say and pointing out every time you make a mistake regarding your own lived experience, and then telling you you’re lying about it because of it. God, this whole thing is exhausting.

On the same vein, she mentions Ed saying Harry stayed with him or reports that Harry stayed with Nick as “contradictions” to the “official narrative” that “Harry lived with Ben.” Jesus fucking Christ.

Let’s move on to...

The ridiculousness of Larry evidence

Harry's reno

As we saw in the last post, Harry said that when he first bought his Hampstead house, the plan was to do a bit of painting and moving in—that he thought it was going to take him a couple of weeks, but he ended up gutting the whole thing and it took him a lot longer.

Bulletproof uses an article from The Mirror in 2015 where they talk about his past renovations and mention that he planned on adding an underground bar in his house as some other form of contradiction. It’s probably just BS from The Mirror, but even then, they don’t claim that he’s still renovating the house. They talk about his renovation in the past tense and say that while he was renovating, he got the idea of doing an underground bar, so this one is on her for lack of reading comprehension.

But more importantly, Larries take Harry’s long renovation as some sort of red flag. Like it didn’t make sense that it would take that long...

Because of London regulations in the area, if you want to do certain types of work on certain types of properties, you have to file for permits, and those permits are public information. It’s currently happening with another property Harry owns in the same area.

But the point is, the plans for his renovation became public and were reported by the media. He literally changed the location of the kitchen. That implies moving the literal plumbing of the house and a lot of its integral structure. He also took out most of its internal walls to make it more lofty and airy and did a bunch of other really, really big renovations. There are pictures floating around because someone found his architect’s website where all of these big and little renovations are detailed. I’m absolutely not going to share those, but suffice it to say that it makes perfect sense that it would take that long to do those renovations.

Now, I ask Larries, can they explain why he spent so much time and money renovating a house where he was never planning on living?

Food for thought.

But it’s so public!

That’s something that Larries scream about constantly. How public Harry’s house is. How his front door is right up on the street (it’s not—there’s a gate). How there’s, GASP, a bus stop across the street!

Of course, most of these Larries are American and don’t understand that a lot of British houses just... are... like that...

This is Zayn’s old house (he sold it years and years ago, which is why I’m posting a photo):

It had a gate, a couple of feet, and was also right up to the street. Just like Harry’s. I’ve never seen a single Larrie claim that this was “too public.” His address was also public.

Harry moved to his Hampstead house in 2012. He was eighteen. He was obviously a private guy already, but he was not Current-Harry levels of private. He probably just liked the neighborhood and the property, and that was it. He knew that it didn’t really matter what he bought; the address would be public anyway because those transactions simply are public in England. He also probably knew that, in London, unless you buy a compound like Ed Sheeran or a penthouse like Liam, most houses will be somewhat exposed to the public.

It does seem like he’s now taking steps to make his living space more private. As I said in the last point, details of his new renovation came out. The property he’s renovating is on a private street, but very close to the house he currently lives in. He’s also reportedly investing £30m into renovating this property. Is that also a public house? Or will Louis secretly live there as well? How will Larries explain it when Louis is literally never spotted in the neighborhood? Stay tuned.

Erskine

Harry’s house is called Erskine. A lot of houses in London have names. Harry named his record company and his other personal companies after his house. Somehow, this is #LarryProof. Why?

Well, Larries decided that, because Harry doesn’t actively post his house on social media or talk much about his personal life, that meant he was so extremely private that he’d never in a million years live in a house like Erskine (see point above) and that naming his companies that way was just calling attention to where he lived.

Or... and hear me out... he knows his address is already public? His address became public in 2012. He named his companies after his house in 2016. I think he knew the cat was out of the bag by then.

He probably liked the name and it’s NOT THAT DEEP.

The injunction

In late 2013, Harry got an injunction against four paparazzi.

One Direction’s Harry Styles has won a rare court order banning some members of the paparazzi from pursuing him in the street or waiting outside his house. The 19-year-old asked the High Court to intervene after trying to persuade the photographers to change their behavior, according to his lawyer. The order prevents unnamed photographers from pursuing Styles by car or motorcycle, placing him under surveillance or loitering within 50 meters of his London home.

“But…” Larries pointed out, “wasn’t Harry living with Ben Winston in late 2013? You can’t get an injunction on a house you don’t own!”

Of course, they got that argument out of the depths of their own ass. Harry’s injunction was extended in March 2014, and the BBC reported that:

They had all also agreed to a permanent order under the Protection from Harassment Act 1997 to stop pursuing him through streets in the UK, putting him under surveillance at and near his home, and general harassment.

This means Harry’s injunctions fall under the Protection from Harassment Act 1997, which states:

The following are examples of acts or omissions which, in particular circumstances, are ones associated with stalking—

following a person,

contacting, or attempting to contact, a person by any means,

publishing any statement or other material—

relating or purporting to relate to a person, or

purporting to originate from a person,

monitoring the use by a person of the internet, email or any other form of electronic communication,

loitering in any place (whether public or private),

interfering with any property in the possession of a person,

watching or spying on a person.

---

The photographers were prohibited from loitering in any place, whether public or private. I presume Harry did give out a set of addresses to the court, such as studios he might be working in, a gym, his sister's house, and yes, Ben's. The article mentions “his home” but doesn’t specify what that entails. The most likely scenario is that it entailed wherever Harry was staying—whether his own personal house, a friend’s, or a hotel.

Harry didn’t get an injunction specifically for his address. He got an injunction for himself. They can’t follow him. They can’t wait around anywhere he is.

This misunderstanding on Larries' part is just par for the course. They act like experts but don’t bother actually researching.

Another part they misunderstand when it comes to this injunction is that Harry didn’t get a blanket injunction against all the paparazzi in the entirety of London and beyond. He got an injunction against five specific paparazzi.

This is also from the same article by the BBC:

The singer had gone to the High Court to prevent paparazzi following him in the street and taking pictures near his home. But the four photographers, who weren’t named in court, have agreed to stop harassing the 20-year-old, the court heard. (...) The court was told that four unnamed photographers had been identified using vehicle records from the DVLA. (...) A fifth photographer is yet to be identified. The judge, Mr. Justice Dingemans, adjourned the case for four weeks while efforts continue to trace him.

A while after the first instance of his injunction got granted, Harry was photographed by paparazzi walking dogs with Meredith, Ben Winston’s wife:

Immediately, Larries shouted, “But didn’t he get an injunction against paparazzi?! Hmmmm??!”

Yes, Patricia, he did. Against five specific paparazzi. I know this must be really hard to understand for Larries’ minuscule brains, but… there are more than five paparazzi in London.

Harry buying stuff for his house

A while after purchasing his Hampstead house, Harry was supposedly seen antique shopping. And Larries exclaim, “But wasn’t he living with Ben Winston at the time? Where was he going to put all this stuff?”

I’m sorry, but they’re truly the most idiotic people on this planet. How is it contradictory to buy décor for a house you’re renovating? I feel like I’m going insane. He was gonna put it in his fucking house.

"Nobody knows where we live"

In an interview with the Italian radio station KISSKISS on November 1st, 2012, Louis said this while talking about having privacy in their homes and how important it was:

Larries claim that this was him “mocking the narrative” because everyone knew where they lived. That he was implying that they had private houses nobody knew of…

Except, nobody knew where Louis lived at the time. And he is the one talking. His address would become public later, but at the time he said this, it was true. He didn’t need a “private house.” By the time he said this, The Sun had only reported he’d bought a house in North London, which was replicated in media outlets. But people didn’t even know he lived in Barnet back then, let alone its full address or photos of it.

His comment makes even more sense in the context of Louis going there straight from Princess Park, where fans would camp out every single day to get a photo.

“Looking after Louis and H’s house”

Louis’ stepdad tweeted this on March 12th, 2012.

Of course, Larries then claimed that it contradicted the fact that Harry had gotten his own apartment (which was reported in February 2012). We went over why it didn’t in the last post, but just to refresh your memory, Harry did get a new apartment in February, right before they went on tour for two months. He didn’t move into that new apartment until they got back from that tour in late April. There’s no contradiction here.

Domestic bliss

I’m honestly exhausted by this post, otherwise I’d probably spend a lot more time debunking this part. But I need to put this out and get it out of my system already.

There are a bunch of interviews and social media interactions where Harry and Louis talked about living together. Even though it was very short-lived, it was while they were promoting their debut album, so of course, there’s a ton of content about it.

As I said, I’m exhausted, so take this blanket statement: it’s fan service.

That’s what it is. It’s fan service. Harry and Louis got along more than fine, and they surely enjoyed living together, but all of these little things that fans use as “proof” happened in HARD promo context.

I already put this up in the other post, but this:

This hashtag, #welivetogetherdealwithit, is taken as some kind of bold statement of rebellion on Louis’ part. But look at the context. He’s PROMOTING THEIR ALBUM. Specifically, he’s putting up a version of the album with a Harry slipcase.

Do you think this wasn’t sanctioned by their label? That Louis spontaneously crafted and tweeted a promo link without the label’s approval? Do you, really? Are you a fucking idiot?

Do you think the multiple interviews where they’re asked about living together and they discuss it somehow slipped through the cracks for the label? That they were heavily closeting them and forcing Harry to “fake” relationships with women twice his age, but somehow allowed them to openly discuss their domestic bliss? I’m going to ask this one more time: are you a fucking idiot?

“We still live together”

In this interview, which was done on September 22nd, 2012, the interviewer asks them what the biggest changes have been since they started with 1D. Niall says that moving to London was one of them, as they were all from pretty small towns. The interviewer asks, “You all live together?” to which Niall replies, “No, we used to, but we’ve branched out.”

Then Harry says something unintelligible, laughs, and then does an exaggerated wink.

Larries decided that Harry said, “No, we still live together,” and that the wink was specifically at Louis. You can watch the interview here—this specific interaction happens at around 2:30 minutes.

For the first claim, that Harry said, “we still live together”… well, when the interviewer asked if they lived together, Harry was the first one to deny it. He’s not fully in frame because the cameraman kept panning side to side, but you can see how he shakes his head and hear his voice saying, “No.”

I’m not sure what he says later, but going from automatically saying no to contradicting that five seconds later doesn’t make any sense. It was probably some inside joke, and Larries wrote fanfiction about it, like always.

As for the wink: He doesn’t wink at Louis. He winks at all four of them. It’s literally two seconds, but he even manages to look at Niall, who’s right beside him, even though he’s angled in a way that makes it awkward.

He was not looking at Louis specifically. This gif is not sped up, btw. It’s the actual speed in which this happens. Larries just slow all their gifs down.

“They correct themselves”

For this one, they use two specific interviews.

The first one is this one, where they’re talking about their new dolls. They had released a version of dolls in 2012, then they released a new one in 2013.

Interviewer: What is it like to have these new versions of yourselves? You seem really excited. Harry: It’s a little bit—[Interviewer: Overwhelming?] Yeah, if you go into a house, and you walk in, and now we have multiple dolls. It’s almost like we have too many. Interviewer: Yeah, you have too many. I think that’s pretty cool. Louis: [To Harry, joking] Only in your house, and not across them all [market?]

Larries decided that Louis said that because Harry had “fucked up” and said “our house”—even though it really doesn’t sound like “our,” and even if he had said that, considering he was talking about the entire band, it wouldn’t have been a “fuck-up” anyway.

Louis was clearly joking: “Only you have too many dolls—our fans don’t have too many. They have to buy them.” He reacts later, not when Harry says the “house” part. He’s joking about selling the dolls.

The other interview is this one:

The interviewer asks them what their favorite TV show is. Harry first says Friends, then asks the interviewer if he’s ever watched Gogglebox, a British TV show. Louis chimes in with, “Gogglebox is great.”

Then the interviewer asks, “When do you get to watch it? Or do you just watch it online?” To which Louis replies, “When we’re home—when we’re working from London we don’t work that late, so we get to watch shows like that.”

Larries take him stopping himself after saying “home” and switching to “working from London” as him correcting himself because he fucked up. Once again, that’s not what happens. Louis reworded the answer specifically to explain that he gets to watch the show after working.

Even if he had corrected himself, would you blame him? Considering Larries read so much into everything? I mean, literally read this post and you’ll have your answer. Larries make them paranoid that every single thing they say will be twisted and used as “proof,” and when they act paranoid, that’s proof as well. Insanity.

And I don’t even think that’s what’s happening anyway.

A summary

Before I close with the final point, which I think is important to have on its own, I’ll put this video here:

A lot of what I’ve debunked so far, though definitely not all, was used as an argument in this pretty terrible video with 100K+ views. This person used Bulletproof A LOT. There are a couple of minor things towards the end that I’ll address quickly here.

1- “Harry and Louis kept their public houses to use as a decoy. People posting photos from them is proof that they don’t live there.”

Do you guys hear yourselves? Like, do you? So the proof that you live somewhere is not having proof? How convenient, because in that case, any proof is dismissed, and the lack of proof is filled in with whatever is more convenient for you.

2- The huge estate that they claim Louis bought “near Harry’s favorite restaurant” in late 2015 was actually in Calabasas, where Briana lived. Briana, the woman who would give birth to his child a couple of weeks later. Further, the article that claimed he bought this house also said that he put it up for rent six months later and bought another house nearby (Hollywood Hills is a 20-minute drive from Calabasas).

Just five months after buying the home, he put it on the rental market for $60,000 per month. In late 2016, Tomlinson reportedly picked up a 6,000-square-foot home in the Hollywood Hills for $7.3 million.

And even more so, Harry owned a separate house in Hollywood Hills, which he also purchased in 2016. So, Louis owning a $7.3 million house and Harry owning a $6.87 million house in the same area, just to use as a decoy, is not an INSANE theory for you guys?

3- The interviewer asks them if they have somewhere to live. Harry says they do. Louis adds, "It’s nice," and somehow that means that IT = a single house. They live together! Have you guys NEVER had conversations with anyone ever?

4- I’m not even going to bother with the blue and green keys thing. The entire blue and green thing is infuriatingly ridiculous.

Here, have Harry with some purple and yellow keys that say Jefe, as in, Jeff Azoff. How do we choose which ones have a deeper meaning and which ones don’t?

5- This is literally an outright lie:

The “prank photo” was posted in May 2015, while Niall, Liam, and Louis were in the studio. Louis didn’t own that house back then. He bought it in December. You literally said in the video that he got it in late 2015. Do you know how calendars work?

That could’ve very well been Harry’s car. They were in the studio. He was bound to be there eventually. But from what I remember, that car is actually Liam’s. It’s a Range Rover. They all look pretty much the same, but if I recall correctly, Liam himself said it was his car. Not that it matters.

I just remember fans really wanting to prove it was Harry’s car because that meant they were all hanging out together, and the fandom desperately wanted to feel reassured after Zayn’s departure.

“Harry forgets the official narrative”

In this interview, Harry and Niall talk about a variety of things, and one of them is Niall saying that he saw a photo of Ronnie Wood wearing a One Direction scarf, and how crazy it was that one of the biggest bands in the world was wearing their merch.

Harry then jokes, “And now I have that picture above my bed.” To which Niall and the interviewer simultaneously reply, “Do you?” Harry says, “No, I don’t have a house,” to which they all laugh.

This happens at around 7 minutes:

Cue Larries claiming that Harry “forgot the official narrative”—some others claim he’s mocking it.

It’s A JOKE. He obviously wouldn’t have a picture of Ronnie Wood wearing a One Direction scarf hanging above his bed. I can’t believe I have to explain this.

This joke aside, why would this even be an official narrative? He owned a house. Why would he need to pretend he didn’t live in it? How does that make ANY FUCKING SENSE? Even if he and Louis did live in domestic bliss together, if Harry had bought a house specifically to keep up appearances… why… wouldn’t he just claim he lived there? Why would they have to go the extra mile and claim that he was living in someone’s attic?

In the video I posted above, the claim was that it was to cover up for him not being seen in the house or in the area. But... Ben lived five minutes away from that house. How would that lie even help in that regard? And if him not being spotted at this house was an issue, wouldn’t be being spotted wherever he lived in domestic bliss with Louis then have to be an issue? How do you reconcile that? Did they own invisibility cloaks? If it’s a problem one way, it has to be a problem in the opposite direction as well.

They claim this about all the other times Harry joked about not having a house. Because he did joke about it a bunch of times. He was perfectly aware of how bizarre it was for him to live in someone’s attic. Of course he’d crack jokes about it. HOW IS THAT PROOF OF ANYTHING?

We have concrete proof that he did a ton of intense renovations in that house. That he still owns it 13 years later. That he’s talked about living with Ben Winston in depth. And that since he finished those renovations, he’s seen around that Hampstead house ALL. THE. TIME. Fans wait outside for him or in the Regent’s Park area, or in the pub right next to the house, and consistently meet him there.

There are leaked pictures of him and his family there. Gemma has posted pictures from inside this house (before we could identify it by comparing it to the leaks). His girlfriends have posted pictures from inside this house. Jason Sudeikis claimed Olivia Wilde’s children were living in this house in a court affidavit. One of Harry’s stalkers broke into the house while Harry was in it. This same stalker is someone Harry met when they were sleeping in the bus stop across the street from his house. Harry offered them money to get shelter and food, and they’ve been harassing him ever since.

Harry employed a night guard and put up a lock in his bedroom. Fans from around the area will tell you they see the night guard every single night.

-------

Harry lives in his house. He has lived in this house for over a decade. He and Louis only shared an apartment leased for them by the label in the same complex as the others for about two and a half months all in all. And you have not stopped going on about it ever since!

[stylesclarified]

Harry and Louis... lived together? - Part II

We left off with Harry and Louis moving into their shared apartment in Princess Park, alongside their three other bandmates.

In this post we’ll go over these major points:

The actual time they spent living together

When and why Harry moved out

What happened afterwards

The actual time they spent living together

October 6th–October 20th, 2011

As we established, they most likely moved into their new place around this time. They spent most of these days in London.

The exceptions were when Louis went to Luton for a couple of days—October 10th/11th—to party with his friends, and when they both went to Manchester on October 17th to watch Ed’s show (with Eleanor), which I talked about here.

October 21st–October 23rd, 2011

Both went to their respective hometowns (Harry/Louis). Louis took Eleanor with him.

October 24th–December 17th, 2011

This long stretch of time was mostly spent in London.

The exceptions were:

When they went to Wales for a couple of days—October 30th and 31st—to film the intro video for their upcoming tour (you can see parts of the video here).

When they went to Dublin to do a signing—November 19th and 20th.

When Louis went to party in Luton again on November 21st, this time with Zayn.

Another short trip to Ireland—November 25th and 26th.

A short trip to Germany to perform at a show called The Dome 60—November 30th.

As you can see by what they were doing when they weren’t in London, these months were filled with promo stuff, interviews, recording content, etc. Their debut album came out November 17th.

They were also rehearsing for their upcoming tour, which is where we're going next.

December 18th–23rd, 2011

They did the first five shows of their first headlining tour. They only had December 20th off.

December 24th–31st, 2011

They went back to their hometowns—for obvious reasons.

Something Larries never talk about… Harry and his family spent Christmas with Nick Grimshaw and his parents.

Odd that Harry chose to spend Christmas with a friend instead of “his boyfriend” who he was so committed to that they lived together. Must have been that pesky Evil Management™️, huh?

After Christmas, Louis went to Paris with Eleanor for a couple of days. They went to Disneyland—December 29th/30th. I guess that was probably Evil Management™️ as well.

Harry stayed in Holmes Chapel until the 31st.

December 31st, 2011 - January 2nd, 2012

Harry got back to London, and he and Louis hosted a NYE party in their apartment, as I mentioned in the other post. Afterwards, they spent two days in London.

January 3rd - January 26th, 2012

They resumed their tour. They did an astonishing 18 shows in 24 days all over the UK and Ireland.

January 27th - February 2nd, 2012

They went to LA. Jan 27th - Feb 2nd. Wikipedia says their second album was recorded between May and August, but I think they were probably doing some work on it already.

February 3rd - February 11th, 2012

They were in London doing promo, filming content, and performing, except for a couple of days when Harry went back home to Holmes Chapel to celebrate his 18th birthday with his friends from back home (February 6th and 7th). Note that “his boyfriend” did not accompany him on this trip.

Harry also celebrated his 18th birthday by going out to Shoreditch House with Nick Grimshaw and that gang, February 5th. Once again, Louis, “his boyfriend” was not there. I guess Evil Management™️ didn’t allow him to be there?

It's so weird how Evil Management™️ didn’t seem to have a problem with them promoting their debut album like this:

Or with Harry discussing living with Louis in that VEVO LIFT video they posted on their official YouTube account, which we discussed in the other post, recorded a few weeks after Harry’s birthday.

I wonder why they drew the line at Louis spending an important milestone birthday away from his love.

It’s weird, right? Almost as if their label and management had nothing to do with any of this and they were both acting out of their free will...?

Nah, that cannot be.

Bonus fact! As far as we know, Louis has attended exactly zero of Harry’s birthday parties since his 17th. Harry turned 31 this year.

February 12th–February 20th, 2012

They were all over Europe doing promo. A couple of days in Paris, one in San Remo, a little bit of Stockholm. I presume they were going back and forth to London for some of these, but essentially, they were on the move this entire week.

February 21st–February 22nd, 2012

These would be their last few days in London for a very long time. The BRITs 2012 were on the 21st.

February 23rd–April 9th, 2012 One Direction were the opening act for Big Time Rush—a band that came out of an American sitcom—between February 24th and March 9th. They then stayed in New York until March 23rd. After that, they did a couple of events that were called Bring 1D To Me. They went to Texas, Minneapolis, Toronto, and Montreal between March 24th and March 27th.

They then went to LA from March 28th till April 4th. Fun fact: this is when Harry met Taylor Swift. They were in New York from April 4th to April 9th, where they did SNL for the first time.

I’m not linking “proof” of any of this because I’m tiiiiired of sourcing these things. It’s easily verifiable.

April 10th–April 22nd, 2012

They resumed their tour Down Under.

— — —

After this, they went back to London. But the timeline ends here, because at this point, Harry had moved out of their shared apartment.

In fact, news of him buying a separate apartment and moving came out in mid-February, but I’ll get into that in a second. First...

— — —

So, how long did Harry and Louis live together?

October 5th–February 22nd.

Which is a grand total of 141 days. Less than five months. About 20 weeks.

But that includes entire weeks when they weren’t in London because they were on tour. If we subtract that, the new total is 111 days. And, oh, well, they also weren’t in London during the holidays, so that’s 104. Plus there was that week in LA? So that’s 96 days. Oh, and that other week of promo in Europe? Hm, that’s 88 days, then.

And those 89 days are counting all the other little trips they did in the middle. If we take those away, the total is now... 73??? There’s no way Harry and Louis only shared an apartment for less than two and a half months and we’re still talking about it FIFTEEN YEARS LATER?

Of course, I’m being facetious. You don’t count the amount of time you live with someone this way, for one. For two, it’s probably less than that, since I’m not actually digging deep, and they most likely spent more time away from London. I’m just going off the timelines provided by your fellow Larries (I’m fact-checking them, as I said before).

What I’m trying to do here is show you how insignificant this whole “living together” thing was. It was literally a blip in their lives.

Why and when did Harry move out?

On February 25th, The Sun reported that Harry had bought an apartment in East London and was moving out. The Sun published a second article about this apartment a few weeks later, on March 6th.

In the timeline above, you can see that this is right when they left London for several weeks (until late April). Of course, Larries cried that the apartment was fake and it was all a ploy by Evil Management™️ trying to hide that they lived together.

That is a hilarious concept considering this video, which we already saw in the other post—where Harry discussed living with Louis and “Larry Stylinson”—was filmed on February 28th, three days after the article:

Look at the outfits they’re wearing and the date in the post:

Larries, I’m going to go blue in the face repeating this: YOU CANNOT HAVE IT BOTH WAYS.

On February 25th, they supposedly put out a fake article about Harry buying a fake apartment to hide the fact that he lives with his boyfriend. But on February 28th, they interview him and directly ask him about living with Louis, edit it, then put it up on their official channel a few weeks later.

???????????????????????????

Larries love to act like this sort of thing is a contradiction as well. We’ll see more of these in the future, so let me dumb it down: Harry bought an apartment in February, but hadn’t moved out yet. It says so in the article. After he bought the apartment, they went on tour for about two months, so he wouldn’t have moved out until after he got back to London, in April.

And continuing on that topic, Larries think that him buying an apartment right as he was going on tour for two months made no sense.

And I’m here scratching my head, trying to understand their faulty logic. He was leaving for two months... he... was planning on going back to London at some point... Why would going on tour preclude him from buying property there?

We know for a fact that Harry bought an apartment at some point because…

HE HIMSELF SAID HE OWNED AN APARTMENT IN LONDON! EIGHT YEARS LATER!

“Mitch moves to London, and he moves into my old flat in London, so I introduced him to my friends who live upstairs, and they start taking him out, showing him around and stuff.”

In that video, Harry is talking about the East London apartment. How do we know this? Well, there isn’t any other.

The apartment Harry and Louis shared in Princess Park didn’t have upstairs neighbors—because it was the fucking dome. Also, Harry never owned that apartment. He never even rented it. I don’t think this needs to be proven, but I actually will later in this post.

Mitch moved to London in 2016, when Harry started recording his debut album. At that time, Harry had only been reported to buy the East London apartment mentioned above—and a house in Hampstead later that year (we’ll get to that). Mitch obviously wasn’t staying in his Hampstead house, so...

In early 2016, there were reports that Harry was buying a luxury apartment in Battersea. Those reports were denied by his publicist (though they resurface every three working days on TikTok, each time as a “new investment”).

Property ownership information can be accessed with just a couple of ££ in England. For that reason, and for gossip purposes, every time a big celebrity buys property there, it gets reported in the media. Harry had not been reported to buy any other property in London by 2016.

The fact that Harry, in the Mitch and Sarah video, said he’s friends with his upstairs neighbors most likely means that he actually lived in that apartment. At least long enough to meet and get along with his neighbors. So it’s not even a situation where he bought it as an investment.

Furthermore, after Harry bought the Hampstead house, Ed Sheeran said the following:

“The strangest thing about Harry is that he lived at my flat for a while, but, like, he had a house—well, he had two houses. This is, like, a couple of months ago. He had two very posh houses in London but he’d just come and stay.”

This interview was on January 31st, 2013. Harry bought the East London apartment in February 2012, and the Hampstead house in September 2012. Meaning, “a couple of months ago” counting back from January 31st, Harry owned two properties in London. Colloquially, two houses. (Of course, Larries take the fact that Ed didn’t specify “a flat and a house” or “two properties” as another “contradiction.”)

So, Harry buying that East London apartment is pretty fucking obviously true. I’m not sure what else we need to conclude that... the land registry title?

Why did he move out?

I don’t know. My guess is that it was a combination of things.

As I mentioned in the last post, the apartment in Princess Park had a very inconvenient layout.

Fans knew exactly where they lived and would camp outside, waiting for them every single day. Since Princess Park wasn’t their personal property, there was nothing they could do about it.

Syco would probably need them to vacate soon anyway.

It was a good investment.

I don’t think he and Louis were that close anymore.

I’m not claiming they had beef, though The Sun would later claim that they did and that was the reason for Harry to move out. I’m not even claiming they weren’t friends anymore, but I do think they had drifted apart.

While The Sun claims there were specific reasons for the end of their friendship, that’s not something either of them has discussed, and I don’t feel comfortable writing fanfiction about it. But the truth of the matter is that in late 2010/early 2011, they were super close. They spent a lot of time together outside of band stuff. I mean, they most likely chose to share their apartment. But as time went on, they spent less and less time together, interacted less on social media, and well, we know the rest.

Larries have tried to claim that this shift was pushed by their management, but that makes no sense. They had joint interviews at the same time as their social media interactions dried up. Louis missed Harry’s birthday celebrations at the same time as official video introductions were recorded, asking them about Larry Stylinson. I’ve always thought that, if it was up to the label, they would’ve baited fans more with the idea of Larry, just like it happens with K-pop bands. I think they didn’t because it was obvious that Harry and Louis weren’t comfortable with it, and it made things awkward.

What happened later?

The apartment went up for rent – March 2012

In April 2012, Daily Mail reported that the apartment Syco had leased for Harry and Louis had been put up for rent. They linked directly to the listing, which is obviously not online anymore, but thankfully, Wayback Machine saved it a couple of times.

The listing shows that it had been up since March 7th.

The apartment being up for rent doesn’t necessarily mean that Louis had moved out as well. It’s certainly possible that’s the case, but he wouldn’t be reported as having bought a new house until a few months later.

It’s possible that the agent listed the house to promote it, making a note that it wouldn’t be available until after a specific date. In fact, Wayback Machine captured the listing again in March 2013, and it seems that it was never rented in the middle, giving the listing history.

We only knew what specific apartment Harry and Louis lived in because of how peculiar the dome was. It’s likely all the other 1D apartments went up for rent at the same time—the media didn’t know which specific ones they were in, so they didn’t report on it.

Louis bought himself a house – June 2012

On this subject, Louis was reported to have bought his current house in Barnet in June 2012. The address would be made public years later, and people now know exactly where he lives. In fact, Louis made a lighthearted joke about how he once tweeted he didn’t have any milk and a while later someone was knocking on his door offering him some. At the time he purchased the house, though, people only knew the general location.

Zayn also bought his first home in June. We don’t know exactly when Liam bought his penthouse, but he was looking for one in July. Niall apparently bought Marvin Humes’ old apartment in November.

Harry bought himself a house – August 2012

Now, Harry. We know he bought his apartment in February and likely moved in when he came back from tour in April, but by July he was already looking for another property.

Once again, Larries claim that this proves the apartment didn’t exist. It did. We went over it. The most likely scenario is that Harry didn’t like the area, since he started looking for houses in North London instead. First, he looked for properties in Primrose Hill, and then he moved further up and ended up buying a house in Hampstead Heath.

He bought that house in August. He told this story in an interview with Howard Stern, which we went over in my post debunking Harry’s drug issues. This is what Harry said:

Well, Ben was making a documentary with the band, and we’d met a couple of times. He tells the story about me asking to move in with him, and I cannot believe that I would have the gall to ask him after only spending a couple of days with him, so I’m pretty sure he offered. But I was moving—I’d got a house in his area, like five minutes from his place, and I’d moved out from my last place. I basically had, like, two weeks where I was gonna do some painting and stuff in the house, and the painting turned into ripping the insides out—the full thing. So, I moved in for a planned two weeks, and I’d never met his wife. We’d met for coffee just so I’d met her and stuff. And yeah, two weeks just turned into eighteen months.

He most likely rented out his apartment, so he had to move out. Ben Winston started working with 1D in 2011. He produced One Direction: A Year in the Making, a documentary for the one-year anniversary of the band. My guess is that Harry confused this documentary with the second one Ben produced—This Is Us—which started filming in 2012.

We also heard from Ed that Harry was staying with him despite having two houses. We’ll see in future timelines that he spent a lot of time at Nick Grimshaw's house, and there were rumours that he also stayed frequently at Lou Teasdale’s. We don’t know exactly when, but at some point in late 2012, Harry more or less permanently moved in with Ben and his wife.

What else?

There’s nothing else to report in terms of Harry and Louis living together. But there’s a lot to debunk when it comes to Larries and their behavior. We’ll get into that in a third and final post, which you can find here.

[stylesclarified]

Harry and Louis... lived together? - Part I

I got a question asking me to debunk a bunch of Larrie myths. I answered half of them in the ask itself, and you can find that here, but one of the things I was asked to debunk was this:

3) why Harry moved in with Louis?

This idea that Harry and Louis lived together—the whole Princess Park thing, the alleged domesticity, and the romantic framing of it all—has been a long-held belief among Larries.

It’s wrong, of course. It’s entirely based on taking things out of context and making a lot of ridiculous assumptions. But debunking it means I have to untangle the web of lies told by Larries one by one and show you what actually happened.

I think the best way to do that is with a sort of timeline of events, with some side notes here and there to clarify specific things. Let’s go.

Summer 2010

Harry and Louis both auditioned for The X Factor, where they were later put into One Direction, in the summer of 2010.

Harry’s family was from the north west of England—Holmes Chapel, Cheshire. Meanwhile, Louis’s was from a town about two hours away—Doncaster, South Yorkshire.

The X Factor held auditions in a bunch of cities across the UK and Ireland. The one closest to both of their hometowns was Manchester.

Here you can see both counties in relation to Manchester and London:

[Zayn also auditioned in Manchester. He was from Bradford, which is in West Yorkshire—the county just above South Yorkshire on the map.]

The guys did individual auditions in June and were put through to the first stage of the show, called “Bootcamp,” which lasted about two weeks in July. By the end of Bootcamp, they were eliminated as solo artists but offered the chance to continue as a band—which they took. After that, in late July or early August, they moved on to the next stage: “Judges’ Houses,” where they auditioned as a group with the rest of the bands at Simon Cowell’s house. They made it through and advanced to what’s known as the “Live Shows.”

The first auditions, Bootcamp, and Judges’ Houses were all taped in advance. They aired during the first few weeks of the show, which began broadcasting on August 21st. The Live Shows, as the name suggests, were live, airing every weekend from October 9 through December 12, with contestants being eliminated weekly. Since One Direction made it to the final (where they came in third), they stayed for the entire competition.

Mid-September - Mid-December, 2010

One Direction moved into The X Factor house—which was located in London, near the studio where the Live Shows were filmed—a few weeks before those shows began airing in mid-September. The X Factor house was where the contestants lived while they were part of the show.

For perspective: Harry’s first time in London was during Bootcamp, so moving into the X Factor house marked only his second time ever setting foot in the city. He was 16. Louis was 18.

Mid-December 2010 - Mid-January, 2011

As I said, One Direction came in third, but they were still offered a record deal. The deal was with Syco, the record label tied to The X Factor’s production. That contract was signed the day after the show ended—December 13, 2010. I went over this contract in my post debunking the idea that Harry “backstabbed” his bandmates.

Afterwards, the guys returned to their hometowns and stayed there for the rest of December, aside from a couple of one-off shows in Scotland at the end of the month.

They also spent the first few days of January 2011 back home with their families.

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FIRST ASIDE: Larries take things out of context

The video below was recorded on February 28th, 2012, and posted a few weeks later on 1D’s official YouTube channel. In it, Harry introduces himself and the band. The video was made for VEVO LIFT. To understand what he’s saying—and why—we need to explain what VEVO LIFT is. Naturally, Larries never bothered doing that.

VEVO was a company created by Sony Music and Universal Music Group—two of the “Big Three” record labels (Warner Music Group, the third, joined in 2016). The name stands for “Video EVOlution,” and the company was launched to tackle copyright issues on YouTube, which was quickly becoming a go-to platform for music videos.

VEVO LIFT was a promotional series for up-and-coming artists. It featured performances and introductory videos designed to launch these artists to larger audiences. When One Direction recorded their VEVO LIFT content, they hadn’t yet released their debut album in America and were opening for Big Time Rush.

VEVO LIFT was 100% scripted. You can even tell in Harry’s interview that he’s answering off-camera questions that have been edited out. Each band member had to give a quick intro about themselves, the group, their role in it, etc. It was a way for new fans—mostly American—to get to know the band better.

Of course, Larries completely ignore that context when they analyze what Harry says in the video.

Considering they believe Evil Management™ wanted to closet them—and that this closet supposedly tightened when they started trying to break into America—this video directly contradicts everything they claim.

This is a transcript of what Harry says, but you can watch the video below:

“I was in a band—we were called White Eskimo. There was a battle of the bands competition at school and we formed just for that and we ended up winning.

I went to The X Factor just to get an honest opinion—if I was any good or not. It was something I’d grown up watching, so for me to be on it was crazy.

When they said that we should be put in a band I was completely upfront. You know, everyone enters the competition trying to get as far as they can. Either we left the competition as solo artists or we carried on in a group.

The fans call me and Louis Larry Stylinson because we get on really well. Since we started in The X Factor House, me and Louis had always said that we wanted to move in together. That was pretty much it—it just kinda happened.

I actually really like London. Before The X Factor I hadn’t even been to London, and now I’m living there, which is pretty crazy.”

So what were the questions he was responding to in order to give those answers?

First question: most likely something like What’s your background in music? What did you do before The X Factor and 1D?

Second question: Why did you audition for The X Factor?

Third question: How did you end up in a band if you auditioned solo? What did that feel like?

Fourth question: What’s the deal with “Larry Stylinson”? You and Louis live together?

Fifth question: How do you feel about living in London?

To glean something romantic from this, you really have to do the absolute most. He’s directly answering a question about his friendship with Louis—just like he’s answering the other questions. This video was recorded and posted by One Direction’s official team—the same team that Larries claim was forcing them into the closet, making them interact less, and faking relationships with women. Larries… you cannot have it both ways. Either management was an evil closet-enforcing overlord, or Harry was not only allowed to openly talk about moving in with Louis in official promotional content, but encouraged to do so.

Go watch Louis’ interview for this same VEVO LIFT series. It follows the same structure: he talks about getting the Danny Zuko role at school, then auditioning for The X Factor, then getting put into the group. He doesn’t bring up “Larry” because Harry already did in his video—Louis instead gets asked about What Makes You Beautiful, their debut single.

Now look at Zayn’s interview. He doesn’t seem to have—or want to share—anything about his musical background, so when he’s asked about life before The X Factor, he just says he was shy and didn’t do much, but that the show helped him. He also talks about why he auditioned, what it was like being put into the band, and then about his style and love of comic books.

The first three questions seem to be the same across the board, while the last two rotate depending on the person.

So with all that in mind… let’s analyze the weird-ass mind of Larries.

What they get from this video is twofold.

First, Harry says, “We said we wanted to live together since we first moved into The X Factor House.” Larries never pause to consider the context of it. Do you really think that, at 16 years old, Harry—who had literally just met Louis—was so head-over-heels in love that he decided he wanted to move in with him? Have you ever met a sixteen-year-old boy? Does that sound like their thought process? And even if that were the case, would it line up with something he’d later casually share in a public interview, all while being forced to fake relationships with women twice his age? In an official promo piece, run by the very same team that was supposedly shoving him into the closet?

What if instead of filtering every single moment through fanfiction goggles, we just look at what Harry said like normal people? Two teenage boys from working-class families, both from outside London, both absolutely stunned to be given a shot at something bigger than they’d ever dreamed of. Maybe they just thought, “If this X Factor thing doesn’t pan out, we should still move to London and try to make it work.” Wouldn’t that make a lot more sense?

The second thing they cling to is the line: “That was pretty much it—it just kinda happened.” They wave this around like it’s some profound romantic confession. In reality, Harry is simply explaining that, because they had talked about living together back in the X Factor House, they followed through. When it came time to pick roommates, they picked each other. That’s it. That’s all. The whole quote is only romantic if your brain is running on AO3 logic 24/7.

But don’t worry, we’ll dig deeper into that later.

Let’s continue with the timeline.

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Mid-January - Mid-February, 2011

For most editions of The X Factor, the contestants who made it to the Live Shows went on a tour across the UK and Ireland that lasted about two months. Each contestant performed a couple of covers at every concert.

Because they were getting ready for this tour, the guys had to head down to London to rehearse. During this period, they stayed in hotels. Towards the end of January, they also traveled to LA for about a week—likely to start working on their debut album—then returned to London to continue rehearsing.

February 19th - April 9th, 2011

You can find a detailed breakdown of the entire X Factor Tour here. It ran from February 19th to April 9th, with very few days off in between. During this time, they were staying in hotels all over the UK and Ireland.

Despite the fact that Louis had been dating a girl named Hannah since March 2010—so, before joining One Direction—he met a girl called Eleanor during the Manchester stops of this tour (around March). Eleanor was a university roommate of Alana Burton, a girl who used to work with Harry at a bakery before he was famous and became friends with him. Harry invited Alana to the show, and she brought some of her roommates—Eleanor included. This story has been corroborated by multiple sources, including Louis himself. I talked about this before, but I’ll go over it in more detail later in this post and link my in-depth analysis there.

Louis would continue dating Hannah for a few more months. She visited him on tour and would post pictures of them together sporadically. It’s not really the point of this post, so I won’t go into detail unless it becomes relevant.

Harry was also linked to a few girls during these months, but nothing too serious, so I’m not really going to talk about it, for the most part.

Here’s One Direction performing Grenade by Bruno Mars at The X Factor Tour in Aberdeen. Because why not?

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SECOND ASIDE: the many Larrie lies

Larries have a habit of making wild assumptions and filling in the blanks with whatever best suits their fanfiction-fueled fantasies. Unsurprisingly, the whole “living together” topic is no exception.

A couple of tweets from Louis’ mom have been used to build an absolutely bonkers narrative by a bunch of Larries.

The first one is this tweet, sent while the guys were still on The X Factor Tour:

A lot of Larries—but one in particular, who I’ll get to in a minute—decided this tweet confirmed a fantasy. They assumed that:

“The boys” = Harry and Louis

“Their flat” = the apartment they were planning to move into together

“It” = Louis’ things.

So basically, the belief was: Louis' stuff was being stored at Harry’s mom’s house while they were on tour, and once the tour was over, Louis and Harry would move in together and put “his stuff” in their shared flat.

Let’s unpack this mess.

First of all, who decided that “it” meant “Louis’ stuff”? Where are we pulling that from? It didn’t mean that. And it’s not hard to find out what it actually was.

“It” = a painting. A fan-made painting. Fan art.

How do I know that? Because there’s another tweet from the same day, replying to the same fan account, that literally says:

This fan, Ellie, and a friend of hers called Hann, made a bunch of scrapbooks and paintings for the 1D guys and Olly Murs. Here’s her friend tweeting about making a painting for Liam with Ellie and handing it to him at the X Factor Tour show in Newcastle.

Now to the second point, “The boys” did not mean “Harry and Louis,” as Larries were assuming. It meant One Direction—as in, the entire band.

At first I was willing to give this the benefit of the doubt that it meant specifically Harry and Louis, because Johannah is the one answering and she’s saying “it” is at Anne’s. So Harry and Louis’ moms.

But then I found this:

Remember when Ellie’s friend said that they’d given the band the paintings in Newcastle? Do you know when One Direction was in Newcastle? March 26th. The same day that One Direction’ official account tweeted at Ellie and her friend Hann thanking them for the painting and included a photo of it. Sadly, the photo is no longer available. Of course, the 1D account could be just tweeting a painting of Harry and Louis, right?

Sure, but they didn’t.

When Johannah tweeted that “their flat” tweet, this was the reaction from fans:

The 1D boys, not Harry and Louis. Fans who saw the painting in real time as Johannah replied to that fan said “the 1D boys.”

But I wasn’t satisfied with that, and after a lot of digging through old blogs, I actually found the fucking painting.

The watermark is no longer accurate because OP has since change names, but thankfully, it’s still up with the original post from that day (March 26th, 2011) stil intact:

So, to recap, a fan asked Johannah if she’d seen the painting she’d made of the entire fucking band and Johannah politely replied that the band would hang it up in their shared flat. A flat that they were never planning on getting all together.

Do you understand how Larrie fantasy is constructed?

Somehow that got twisted into some kind of domestic bliss AU where Anne is a doting mother-in-law storing her son’s boyfriend’s belongings while they flat hunt together. Ridiculous. Fucking. Nonsense.

Moving on. We haven’t reached this part of the timeline yet, but since it’s just around the corner, I’m going to take this little aside to address these two tweets, because (shocker) they were also wildly misinterpreted. Tweet 1 / Tweet 2

The assumption made here is that Johannah was referencing house-hunting—first with Harry and Louis, and then the next day with Anne and Gemma—which Larries interpret as a whole family affair of flat-hunting for Harry and Louis in London. Cue the “they were going to move in together” theories.

Now, I’ll admit, this one is slightly less deranged than the painting theory. At least the word “real estate” is involved. But it’s still very much a reach. And, as usual, it leans heavily on fanfic logic: no context, wild speculation, and total disregard for actual reality. If filling in the blanks with fanfiction were a paid job, Larries would be millionnaires.

What everyone conveniently ignores is this reply from Gemma (Harry’s sister) to Johannah’s second tweet:

Now, let’s look at what’s actually going on here.

Johannah’s second tweet included the hashtag #totallyexactlysweetie.

Gemma responded with “Well exactly dahhhling”, adding that exaggerated “dahhhling” spelling that screams tongue-in-cheek.

Put all of that together—the repetition, the spelling, the absurdly posh phrasing—and it’s very clearly some kind of inside joke. Maybe they were mocking a movie character, maybe someone they overheard, or just being silly. Who knows?

It’s the kind of thing people do when they’re cracking up over a ridiculous accent or quote that somehow became a group bit. And that makes far more sense than assuming they were all out together looking for apartments for their teenage sons.

Also, let’s not forget:

There’s nothing else—not on social media, not in interviews, not in photos—that backs up the idea of them looking for apartments.

At the time (April 2011), the guys were still living in hotels. And would continue to do so for several months to come.

When they did eventually move somewhere more permanent, the apartment was provided by the label, not rented by them.

The label had an agreement with a real estate developer to host their talent in a specific property. They’d done it with other acts in the past (specifically with JLS between 2009 and 2010). The 1D guys were most likely fully aware of this fact.

They hadn’t released a second of music yet. No singles, no album, no music videos. In other words: no guaranteed income.

Now—could they have been apartment-hunting? Technically, I suppose it’s not impossible. But these tweets are absolutely not enough reason to believe so, given context, when they could mean so many other things.

Why on earth would two teens—barely out of reality TV—be making long-term housing decisions in London, one of the most expensive cities in the world, without any assurance of financial stability? Especially when housing was already provided by the label? Let’s say the two teens were stupid and inexperienced and making rash decisions... why would their moms go along with it?

Short answer: They wouldn’t.

The OG Larrie I mentioned earlier was Bulletprooflarry. She began creating so-called “timelines” to “prove” Larry was real sometime in late 2012 or early 2013, right around when she launched her blog. And she kept up this harmful behavior until around 2018 or 2019, when she finally abandoned the blog.

A lot of the nonsense still repeated in the Larrie fandom today originates with her. She’s the source of so much of the Larry lore—some of it absurd, some of it straight-up fabricated, and all of it drenched in delusion.

She started twisting these tweets in particular in January 2013, when she created her “April 2011 timeline” (which has over 1,200 notes) and continued to periodically lie about them for years. This post in particular is from 2018...

Let’s count the lies in that short little paragraph:

“Louis was keeping his things at Harry's house” Nope. We’ve already been over this. The “it” in that tweet was a fan painting. Not Louis’ things. Nothing was being stored.

“Which indicated that Harry and Louis were planning to move together by that point” Literally no such indication. You have to twist the tweet into a pretzel and read it with Larrie goggles on to arrive at that conclusion. There’s no evidence for this. Zero.

“After that they lived in a London hotel for about 2-3 weeks total.” This one’s gonna be debunked shortly. Spoiler alert: they lived in those hotels a hell of a lot longer than 2–3 weeks.

“Then they look for apartments” All of this based on an out of context joke, mind you. Again, they didn’t go apartment hunting, and when they finally did live somewhere more permanent, the label arranged it. It was never about them choosing or renting a flat themselves.

She also tries to use the VEVO LIFT video (which we’ve already gone over) as “proof,” conveniently ignoring the actual context and source of that video. Once again: dishonest framing, selective quoting, and fantasy sold as fact.

This is exactly why you cannot take anything a Larrie says at face value. Bulletprooflarry branded herself as this “expert researcher” who was just presenting the facts. But when you take a closer look, her “facts” are riddled with baseless assumptions, deliberate distortions, and outright lies.

Anyway—back to the timeline of events.

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April 10th - April 18th, 2011

After The X Factor Tour ended, the guys had a few days off. First, they each went back to their hometowns from the 10th to the 12th. Then, from the 13th to the 19th, they went on a short vacation. They, as in Louis, Harry, and their respective best friends Stanley Lucas and Jonathan Harvey (Jonny from Harry's Love of My Life).

The four of them went on a ski trip to France.

Now, of course, the Larries turned this into some kind of secret romantic getaway, despite the very obvious, very platonic vibe of the entire trip. Because apparently, in their world, bringing your two straight best friends on your first big romantic holiday with your secret boyfriend (while you’re both still teenagers) makes perfect sense...

While they were there, Louis posted a video to his old YouTube channel on April 15th—the same channel he had before joining 1D, where he used to post song covers. Harry is the one filming. Louis is sitting to his left, Jonny to his right. The guy dancing is Stan.

Some Larries paused the video when it pans to Jonny and swear that the purple thing next to him on the couch is a dildo. It’s most likely just a Wii controller. You know, like the ones people use to play video games. But I guess when you’re desperately trying to turn a lads’ holiday into a sexy secret couple’s retreat, anything vaguely cylindrical becomes “evidence.”

Imagine being this far gone: believing that two teenage boys were not only in a committed very adult relationship, but went on a romantic trip together with their straight best friends, and casually left their sex toys out on the couch for all to see. Do they even hear themselves?

Harry and Louis were clearly close friends. Nobody is denying that. But there’s nothing romantic about this trip. It looks like what it was: a group of teenage lads on holiday, being silly and having fun. The romantic undertones are 100% fabricated by Larries, who are constantly trying to inject meaning into moments that are completely mundane.

April 19th - April 22nd, 2011

After their ski trip, they were back in London during this period. They were spotted at studios, which tracks perfectly with the fact that they’d started working on music around this time.

This is also when Johannah posted the tweets I previously addressed. So, we know their families were visiting London at this time too.

April 23rd - April 28th, 2011

They had a few days off, and they each went back to their respective hometowns. On April 25th, Harry was spotted in Holmes Chapel. Meanwhile, Louis spent Easter weekend with his girlfriend, Hannah Walker. On April 24th, her sister tweeted a picture of the two of them together.

After that, Louis went on another trip with his best friend Stan this time to Jersey. Not a single Larrie called this one romantic though. Curious!

April 29th - May 11th, 2011

They were consistently spotted at various London hotels and recording studios during this time. And by consistently, I mean fans were clocking them daily. Why so many hotels? Because fans had developed a knack for crowding lobbies, so they had to bounce around—a new hotel every few days just to avoid chaos.

Likely, the very first sessions happened back in January, when they took a short trip to LA. And again, in mid-April, when they were seen heading into studios around London. But this period—late April and onwards—is when things really kicked off in earnest.

The album they were working on, Up All Night, was primarily recorded in London and Stockholm, because Swedish producers basically run pop music (think of the likes of Max Martin, Shellback, Rami Yacoub).

May 12th - May 21st, 2011

The guys travelled to Sweden for the first time. Harry later mentioned how wild it was to be recognized there.

In case you’re wondering how I know the exact dates, I’m referencing two Larrie blogs that tagged everything by date—but I’m fact-checking as I go, cross-referencing social media posts, interviews, and other reliable sources.

This part of the timeline is especially important because it highlights just how ridiculous the whole “they lived together” narrative is. When I walk you through how little time they actually spent living together—plus, what they were doing during that time, and what the broader context was—you’ll see how insignificant that brief living arrangement really was. Once we get to the end, you’ll understand the perspective a lot better.

May 22nd - May 25th, 2011

They had a few days off and each went back home to visit their families. Louis. Harry.

May 26th - June 3rd, 2011

They’re back in London for, like, a day—just enough time to attend the premiere of JLS’ movie. Then they head to Brighton for a couple of days. No clue what for, but definitely work related. Brighton’s a coastal town in the south of England.

After that, they return to London again, and once more, they’re spotted staying at hotels. Remember how Bulletproof claimed they were only in hotels for a couple of weeks and had already moved into “their flat” by late April or early May?

Yeah… that was a fucking lie.

June 4th + 5th, 2011

Another quick trip back home. Harry (bonus: you can see his old terraced house in the background). Louis.

June 6th - June 10th, 2011

Back to Sweden to continue recording the album. Fun fact: Zayn started singing What Makes You Beautiful in front of fans months before it officially came out.

June 11th - June 25th, 2011

Back to LA for more recording.

June 26th - July 4th, 2011

They arrive in London, but immediately go to their hometowns for a few days. Harry. Louis.

July 5th - July 29th, 2011

I’m grouping this entire stretch together because they were clearly still in album mode. They were back in London and, once again, staying in hotels. They remained in London until the 7th, then flew to LA until the 14th. During this trip, they filmed the What Makes You Beautiful music video in Malibu.

They got back to London on the 15th. Louis popped back to Doncaster for a day, while Harry seemed to stay in London. This is also when Louis apparently broke up with Hannah.

On July 16th, with Louis back in London, they did an interview with Teen Now and immediately flew off to Sweden. At the airport, Harry and Louis were gifted “His and Her” towels, and of course, the fact that they didn’t reject the gifts has been endlessly spun by Larries as #LarryProof.

They stayed in Sweden until the 20th, then returned to London and—shocker—back to hotels.

We’re now at the end of July and still no sign of that mythical shared flat Bulletproof swore they’d moved into back in early May. Curious how she missed this, considering she did such thorough timelines and was such an authority. We’re off by over two months already—and trust me, it’s only going to get worse.

July 30th - August 1st, 2011

Louis was newly single after over a year of dating Hannah. As mentioned in the post I linked above, he already seemed to be getting involved with Eleanor—whom he’d met back in March during the X Factor Tour stop in Manchester—but I doubt it was anything serious right off the bat.

Harry went back home to Holmes Chapel. Louis, meanwhile, did what any freshly single 19-year-old guy would do: he went to Ibiza with his mates (you can spot Stan to his right). The fact that Larries are so blinded by the idea that he was partying with male friends (like 99.99% of straight men tend to do?) that they completely miss the painfully obvious cliché—breaking up with your long-term girlfriend and heading to a party island with the lads—is honestly hilarious.

August 2nd - August 15th, 2011

Back in London. On August 2nd, they did an interview with Chart Show. They were still being spotted at hotels (just dropping a few pics here: August 3rd, August 8th, August 10th), much to Bulletproof’s dismay.

Louis—still very much newly single—went on another party trip, this time to Magaluf. In fact, he tweeted Harry in the most bro way possible while he was there.

Aww, so romantic!

Fun fact: Harry didn’t even reply. He, instead, tweeted at his new bestie Nick Grimshaw five minutes later. You’ll never see Larries address how ridiculous all of this would be if he and Louis were so in loooooove.

They did an interview with The Mirror on August 9th.

Larries—particularly Bulletproof—take this interview (where they’re asked whether they’re looking into moving to London) and combine it with Johannah’s tweets to claim they were apartment hunting. No.

They don’t mention apartment hunting in the interview. The interviewer simply asks if they’ve looked at houses. It’s very likely that, at this point, they’d already been told by the label where they were going to live (you’ll soon see why), and that’s what they meant. Johannah’s tweets—which were almost certainly unrelated to any apartment search—were from three months prior to this interview, and since then, there has been literally ZERO indication of any of them doing any sort of apartment or house hunting.

Bulletproof ignores the fact that she's been proven wrong about all her other timing theories, of course. Her post, the one I linked, has 6,000+ notes. That's how far and wide disinformation travels in Larrie-land.

On this same day, we also get the whole #Olive thing (Harry, Ed Sheeran, and Louis all tweet about olives). Larries take the fact that all three tweeted the same thing to mean that Harry and Louis were living together and Ed came over to visit them. Nope. Louis came over to visit Harry and Ed. But I’ll get to that in a second.

Meanwhile, throughout all of this, they were still in London—recording the album, doing bits of promo, and even shooting an ad for Nokia on August 15th.

August 16th - August 23rd, 2011

They did a mini radio tour around the UK and Ireland to promote their upcoming single What Makes You Beautiful on multiple stations. I’m not going to link all of that because it’s messy and, more importantly, they were obviously not living together in London—which, again, is what we’re addressing right now. Harry met Lucy Horobin during this promo tour, which I already went over on this other post.

The video for this song came out on August 19th, but the single itself didn’t drop until September. This will soon become relevant.

August 24th - September 24th, 2011

During this month, they came and went, but were mostly in London. I’m not going to post more hotel sighting pics and tweets—it’s tedious to find, and it’s no longer relevant. You’ll see why in just a second. But yes, they were still staying at hotels.

Harry and Louis (along with friends) went to Leeds Festival for two days (August 27th/28th).

They then did a bunch of promo for their single, which came out on September 11th and went #1 in the UK.

-----

THIRD ASIDE: The Shape of Delusion

One thing Larries either fully ignore or brush off as irrelevant is the fact that, while 1D was staying at hotels during this very long period of several months (as opposed to the 2–3 weeks Bulletproof insisted on), Harry… well, he often wouldn’t stay in these hotels.

I’m not saying he never did—there are pictures of him with fans outside the hotels too—but he frequently chose not to stay in them when they were in London.

We don’t know why. Maybe he didn’t like the hotels. Maybe he didn’t like that so many fans waited outside. He never explained it, so we’d only be guessing.

Instead of staying at the hotels, a lot of the time he would choose to stay with friends instead. Apparently, there were a bunch of them (rumor has it he stayed a lot with Lou Teasdale and her boyfriend, Tom Atkin, though I don’t have concrete sources for that). However, we do know of one for sure—because the friend talked about it: Chris Leonard.

Chris Leonard is a guitarist and songwriter. He first met 1D while working with them on The X Factor. He continued working with them as they started recording their debut album, and he even wrote songs with Harry later on (ones we sadly never got to hear).

Chris Leonard co-wrote Lego House with Ed Sheeran (one of Ed’s first hits). Ed was “homeless” in 2011. His family was from Suffolk, a town a couple of hours from London, so while he was working on his music—before he made it big—he often stayed at Chris Leonard’s house.

That’s how Harry and Ed met…

This is something Ed himself confirmed. In an interview he did with Popstar!, he said:

Can you tell us about your friendship with 1D?

“I just started hanging out with Harry from—I lived on my friend’s Chris’s sofa and Chris played guitar for those boys. And I lived on that sofa [gestures horizontally] and there was another sofa there [gestures in front of the previous spot], so sometimes I’d wake up in the morning and there’d be this, kind of floppy-haired dude on the sofa opposite.

And I knew it was Harry—I didn't watch The X Factor, so I didn’t know what One Direction was. This was way before they’d had any kind of singles out or anything.

And, you know, we started hanging out, and Chris was like, ‘Oh, he’s in a boyband.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, that's cool man. That’s fun.’ Then I met Louis and started hanging out with him as well.

And then they said, ‘We’re looking for songs for our album. Can you give us any songs?’ And I gave them a demo CD of songs that I was pitching at that time, and they chose Moments off it, and then two songs on the new album [1D’s second album] from that same demo CD.

So, yeah, it just came through that. But it’s a lot more of a friendship than it is a working relationship, even though I give them songs from time to time. They are really nice guys, and I like hanging out with them.”

(He continues talking about Harry bringing a melon to the studio, but I figured this was enough for now. 😂)

Of course, Larries take the fact that Ed singles out Louis as some sort of #LarryProof. When all it means is that Harry brought who we know was his close friend to meet his new mates. Harry and Louis were besties at that time. ONCE AGAIN, NOBODY DENIES THIS.

Anyway, Harry and Ed became close friends thanks to that connection. Ed confirmed it again in a podcast interview in May 2023:

“There was a guitarist that knew both of us called Chris [Leonard], that I wrote Lego House with. He used to play for the One Direction lads, and me and Harry used to sleep at his house together.”

Now, why is this so relevant?

Well, because��� if Harry was itching to move in with his boyfriend—who he was supposedly so in love with—then why, when he had the opportunity to stay at a hotel with him, did he choose to crash at some random dude’s house? On his couch, of all places?

And Larries (spearheaded by Bulletproof) can try to claim that “it was only for like a day or two” all they want, but that doesn’t make it true.

We have that tweet from Harry’s in March 2011, meaning this goes as far back as then. (1D was still on the X Factor tour, but the tweet came right after a show in London, so the timeline tracks perfectly.) And we also know for a fact that Harry was still staying at Chris’s house by mid-September!

Chris himself said so!

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Chris Leonard (@mrchrisleonardpics)

Caption:

Another little story for you. This pair of hobos didn’t seem to have homes of their own at the time so mine became a youth hostel for pop stars. We’d been out for drinks at the Durrell the night before and Ed and Harry crashed over at my place. What Makes You Beautiful was number 1 in the singles chart and + was number 1 in the album chart so we used this to decide who slept where. It was deemed that albums were more important than singles so Ed got the sofa and Harry slept on the floor. This photo I took is of Ed testing out the orgasmatron head massager I’d just bought off eBay on Harry

Both What Makes You Beautiful (1D’s debut single) and Ed Sheeran’s + (his debut album) went to #1 in the UK the same week. So they sorted out who got to sleep on the couch and who had to sleep on the floor—based on which achievement was more impressive.

They decided an album trumped a single. So Ed got the couch, and Harry slept on the floor.

(I presume that by this point—between March and September—Chris had gotten rid of that second sofa he once had. Rude.)

That means Harry was still crashing at Chris Leonard’s house and had not moved into his apartment when WMYB and + went #1. The week this happened was September 23rd, 2011 (the chart gets published on Fridays).

Singles chart. Albums chart.

Remember the pic Chris posted alongside his anecdote? Of Ed using the “orgasmatron” on Harry? Well, he originally tweeted that same pic on September 19th—four days before the charts would’ve been publicly known. So they were already staying at his place days before that little floor-vs-couch game. That means Harry was spending multiple days a week at Chris’ place, not just popping by.

Obviously, Chris wasn’t tweeting about it every time Harry or Ed stayed over, but here you have a small sample of a few of the times he did: (Jul 6th / Aug 5th - Aug 6th)

On August 9th, 2011, when all three—Harry, Ed, and Louis—tweeted “#olive,” despite Larries fighting hard to make that this weird Larrie “moment,” where some insist Louis and Harry lived in their magical love nest, and were being visited by Ed, the reality was that Harry was staying with Ed at Chris’s house, and Louis just came over. That’s it. That’s the real, grounded, non-fanfictional version of events.

Before we continue with the timeline, let’s recap:

Harry and Louis didn’t plan on moving in together during The X Factor because they were so in love. Most likely, it was a backup plan in case the show didn’t work out and they didn’t make it in the industry.

Anne did not store Louis’ things “until they moved in together.”

They weren’t actively planning to move in together in the spring.

They didn’t go apartment hunting in the spring.

They didn’t move in together in April or May.

For the majority of that time, they were on the move—constantly. And when they were in London, they stayed in hotels.

And, crucially, Harry would often stay with friends while they were in London—not at those hotels. He did this consistently for about six months.

This paints a completely different picture from the Larrie fantasy timeline.

Not one of star-crossed lovers who moved in together secretly in the spring, but of two teenage bandmates navigating sudden fame—living in hotels, crashing on friends’ couches, figuring out their lives, not building a domestic love nest in the suburbs.

Let’s keep going.

-----

September 25th - September 29th, 2011

One Direction flew to New York through Montreat to film the music video for their second single, Gotta Be You.

Wikipedia claims the video was filmed in October in Lake Placid—but that’s... incorrect. 1D didn’t go to New York in October. They did go in late September. They arrived on the 25th and flew back on the 29th.

Fun fact? This video shoot would be the moment where Harry met Emma Ostilly.

September 30th - October 5th, 2011

One Direction went on a short promotional tour across Europe. During this time, they visited Sweden, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands.

-----

FOURTH ASIDE: We’ve come so far from Princess Park

So, we’ve arrived. We made it to Princess Park. Let’s talk about it and put it in perspective.

What was Princess Park?

Princess Park Manor used to be an asylum called Friern Hospital until it closed in 1993. It was sold in 1995 to Irish property developers Luke and Brian Comer. The Comer brothers had (probably had, at this point—considering The X Factor has been canceled and Syco Records doesn’t exist anymore) a long-term agreement with Syco Entertainment to house their artists. They also had agreements with other record labels and football clubs, and housed a lot of major UK celebs, such as Cheryl Cole and footballer Ashley Cole (this is allegedly where they met).

Kimberley Walsh, a member of Girls Aloud alongside Cheryl, said this about it:

“There’s a crew of people that kind of just know each other a bit, because we just used to cross paths so much. We all used to live in the same place as well. We all used to live in this mental hospital. All of us, like all these pop bands at the same time. McFly were there for a bit. We lived there… The Sugababes, JLS for a bit. It was a fun time in a way, because if you all got back on the side of Saturday night and everyone was still ready carrying on, then just pick someone’s flat and carry on there. I went to a party at McFly’s once. I can’t remember what it was in aid of!”

JLS were signed to Syco—they competed on The X Factor in 2008 and came in second.

Did Harry and Louis rent an apartment there?

No. Syco gave all of the 1D members apartments in this complex under their agreement with the property developers.

All five members of One Direction moved into Princess Park Manor at the same time. Niall, Liam, and Zayn had separate apartments, while Harry and Louis shared one.

When did they move there?

Well, Harry had this exchange with Lou Teasdale, One Direction’s stylist on September 4th:

Harry is essentially apologizing to Lou for making her climb so many stairs while she was pregnant with her daughter Lux. Lou is telling him she won’t be able to come over until she’s given birth, and that even then she’ll struggle with the stroller, but that the place is really nice. This tells us that they had absolutely not moved before September 4th. Lou and her boyfriend lived in London and saw Harry almost every single day.

Furthermore, it’s unlikely they moved in by this time either, and he was most likely just showing her around the place where he would live soon.

For one, we know Harry was still actively staying with Chris Leonard pretty often at this point. But for two, Louis would give a statement to The Sun about them in this article that came out on September 13th, 2011:

Most 18-year-olds are still living with their parents or moving in to student digs, where finding a clean fork is considered a luxury, but as their debut single is released, the One Direction lads are set to settle in to swanky London flats. Simon Cowell has sorted the boys out with an apartment each in their own private block — except for youngest member Harry Styles and the group’s caner Louis Tomlinson, who will share. When they’re not all doing their hair, the band have a gym and cinema room for their personal use. Louis said: “Me and Harry are sharing a flat and the other boys have their own. At the moment they are a work in progress but the cinema room is a really cool place. “It’s on the top floor of the block. “We’re going to get all of our mates round to watch a film in it. “It’s amazing — not that I want to brag.”

“At the moment they are a work in progress” and “setting to settle” both suggest that they hadn’t moved in yet, but that the move was imminent. As I’ve said multiple times in previous posts, The Sun functioned as an unofficial mouthpiece for the band at the time—which is perfectly illustrated by the fact that Louis gave them a direct quote.

Since we know Harry was spending time at Chris Leonard’s during those weeks, and the band would be travelling for a couple of weeks afterward, we can reasonably infer that the moving process likely began in mid-to-late September. They probably fully moved in after the brief European promo tour I mentioned earlier in the timeline—around early October 2011.

Why did Harry and Louis share while the others didn’t?

We don’t have an official reason. Since Syco had an arrangement with the property developers, a reasonable guess is that only four apartments were available as part of that deal. Given that Harry and Louis were close and had previously talked about moving in together if things didn’t work out with The X Factor, it’s likely that when the label said two of them would need to share, they volunteered.

The fact that they were the youngest and oldest could’ve contributed to why the label would agree to this. Keep in mind that, by the time they moved—October 2011—Louis was 19 almost 20 (he’d turn 20 in December), Zayn was 18 almost 19 (he’d turn 19 in January), and Liam and Niall had recently turned 18 (in August and September respectively). Harry was still a few months away from turning 18.

Since his name wasn’t going to be on the lease, it most likely wasn’t a legal issue. Louis didn’t have to be Harry’s guardian—no matter how many times Larries repeat that. If Harry didn’t need a guardian to stay in hotels, then he certainly didn’t need one to live in a house that was leased on his behalf. And if, hypothetically, a guardian had been required, it would’ve been someone from the label or management—not another teenage member of the band. That’s just common sense.

Of course, this is all speculation. We don’t have concrete answers for any of this—mainly because, in an ideal world, these wouldn’t even be questions we’d have to ask. As I’ve said in other posts, I often feel like I’m forced to debunk the Larries’ wild imagination and fanfiction. And to do that, I end up having to lay out my own version of events—just… more grounded in reality, and supported by actual logic.

What Larries never seem to consider is this: they believe Syco was forcing the boys to stay in the closet and to publicly date women—Louis was first seen with Eleanor in mid-September, and Harry started openly flirting with Caroline around the same time.

But at the same time, they also believe that Syco allowed the “happy couple” (Harry and Louis) to live together—and not just in secret, but to advertise it on social media and talk about it in interviews.

I keep saying this, but you can’t have it both ways. Either the label were evil overlords who forced a 17-year-old to fake two relationships with women nearly twice his age to hide the fact he was queer and dating his bandmate… or they let that same 17-year-old live with that same bandmate and be public about it.

Pick one. Logic demands it.

Details about the apartment

The reason their apartment had so many stairs is because they were given the dome. I’m specifically referring to this part:

You can find some photos of the place here. Here’s one of the cinema room that Louis mentioned in the article I posted above:

Harry and Louis had a New Year’s Eve party at the apartment in 2011 and invited a bunch of their friends, as well as the other 1D guys and their live band. Because of that, we actually have several photos from inside the apartment.

You can see the wooden structures in the background here:

And the cinema room’s screen in the back here:

This is a picture of the kitchen in that apartment:

Picture of Harry in the kitchen:

This apartment was actually really inconvenient. There were two bedrooms on the first floor, both with ensuite bathrooms. Then on the second floor, two more bathrooms plus another bedroom. The kitchen was on the third floor, the living room on the fourth, and the cinema room on the fifth. No wonder Harry apologized to Lou for all the stairs.

(And just to be clear: none of this is secret or new info. We knew about all of it as it was happening. There were loads of articles at the time.)

I’m adding all these details to help contextualize the situation a bit more. Most Larries who are active now weren’t around back then, and they have no idea that it was a massive, multi-storey apartment inside a literal mansion, paid for by the label. Over time, the actual details have been warped or forgotten, and now a lot of them genuinely believe it was some cute little love nest Harry and Louis rented together because they were so in love.

Habit

Years later, during his solo career, Louis released a song called Habit, which includes these lyrics:

I took some time ’cause I’ve ran out of energy Of playing someone I heard I'm supposed to be But honestly, I don’t have to choose anymore And it’s been ages, different stages Come so far from Princess Park I’ll always need ya In front of me, in front of me

Of course, Larries took this and ran with it. BUT...

Remember when I mentioned a couple of times how Louis cheated on Hannah and said I would go over that in more detail later? Well, here we are. This is my in-depth post about it, in case you want to read it, as I’ll only touch on the subject here.

Louis started dating Hannah in March 2010, before he even auditioned for the show. They dated throughout his time on The X Factor and during the first few months with the band. Hannah would often post pictures with Louis. She visited him when they were on tour with the other finalists and when he was recording in London.

Still, as I mentioned before and in the post I linked, Louis met a girl named Eleanor in March 2011. He broke up with Hannah in July, and a couple of days later, he started openly interacting with Eleanor’s cousin. We don’t know the details of his and Eleanor’s relationship, but logic tells us that they were in touch between March and July, that they likely cheated to some degree, and that after July, they pursued some sort of relationship. They made that relationship official on November 17th, since a year later, that would be the date of their anniversary.

As I said before in this post, right after breaking things off with Hannah, Louis had a few cliché newly-single weeks in August, where he flew first to Ibiza and a few weeks later to Magaluf. Both of those are party destinations, and he went there with a bunch of friends. Notably, not Harry.

He started to be seen with Eleanor in mid-September, around the time that Princess Park was being set up for them to live. In fact, he was first seen with Eleanor on September 15th. Remember, the article with Louis’ quote about Princess Park came out on September 13th...

Princess Park represented the inception of One Direction’s career. They, all of the band, were in that apartment when they released their debut album (November 2011) and when they started their first headlining tour (December 2011). They were also there when Louis’ relationship with Eleanor turned serious.

As I have proven in this post, Larries twisted everything around Harry and Louis’ living situation to sound romantic when it wasn’t. They changed dates, ignored context, outright lied about what happened and when at times.

For instance, here is Harry tweeting a photo of Louis and Eleanor watching X Factor at their apartment (Eleanor literally trying to hide):

Louis is not responsible for Larries changing facts about his own life and experiences. Larries will tell you, “He knows what Princess Park means for us.” And I’ll reply this...

He probably has some idea, for sure. He has shown that he’s aware of (and annoyed by) some Larry theories in the past, but he is absolutely not reading your Tumblr essays. Be fucking for real.

Because he’s aware of how insane you are, he’s also probably aware of the fact that you guys twist everything. His clothes, his favorite number, his tattoos, his lyrics, his every word, his every facial expression. How is he supposed to avoid triggering Larries?

Further, why should he censor his own lived experiences when expressing himself in his art? Just because you, a stranger, unilaterally decided to make insane theories about them?

How is that fucking fair and not a ridiculous expectation?

-----

With this, we end this section of the post, since it’s already so long. In the next one, we’ll go over when they actually did move into the same apartment, how long they lived there, and what happened after.

You can find that post here. Part III here.

[stylesclarified]

You guys are so desperate for a crumb, it’s actually kinda sad.

“Harry is wearing a Cartier watch”

Listen, he might be. But you ran over here based off of these pictures

That’s a beautiful watch. I can make out so many details of it 😍😍

“called The Louis”

You do know that the founder of Cartier was called Louis… correct?

Cartier designed the first ever wristwatch in 1904. It was called the Santos. Before that, watches were worn on chains.

The second ever wristwatch they designed was The Tank in 1917. And it was designed by Louis Cartier himself.

The Louis is just The Tank but made out of gold. The other Tanks are usually made out of vermeil (sterling silver coated in gold) or stainless steel.

The Louis Tank is one of the most popular watches when it comes to people with money.

Like Timothée Chalamet (he's wearing two in this picture, because why the fuck not)

Jacob Elordi

Jackie Kennedy

Andy Warhol

Mohammed Ali

Literally Princess Diana

Angelina Jolie

Tyler The Creator

Tae from BTS

Harry's idol, Steve McQueen

And literally hundreds of other random celebrities.

The Louis version of The Tank is the most popular one among celebs, which is why GQ is guessing that's what Harry is wearing, even though we don't have any good pictures of it.

There are other versions that came later that aren't that popular, and Harry could very well be wearing one of those. The fact that GQ is guessing that Harry is wearing the Louis version with this little info tells you exactly how popular this model of watch is.

Harry is now banned from wearing one of the top 5 brands of watches in the world, and more specifically, their most popular and renonwned model, even though literally almost every other celeb male his age is wearing it. If he does wear it, then that's proof that he's in a hidden romantic relationship with someone who he hasn't spent any time with other than in funerals in ten years.

It's funny what Larry has been reduced to, numerology, colors, and the fact that "Louis" is one of the most common names in the world.

[stylesclarified]

Your brain is fried. Like, fully cooked.

Go out and repeat what you just said to me to literally any normal person. They'll think you need to be institutionalized, and I'm not exaggerating. You sound legitimately insane.

"Stunt" in this context is literally something conspiracy theorists made up. It's not a thing. It doesn't exist.

They look more than fine to me:

He's smiling in most pics, she looks just... normal. That's just her resting face. They're squinting because... of the sun...

This is Zara and her ex Sam Thompson the first time they were spotted holding hands in London:

I guess that was also "the most obvious stunt" since they look exactly the same. Wait till you hear that they dated for five fucking years. But I mean, I supposed that could also be a stunt for you. Since you're an insane person who has lost all touch with reality.

3. "Fake pap walk." Hilarious. You're so fucking threatened by the sight of Louis holding hands with someone with a vagina that the completely made up term of "pap walk" wasn't enough. You had to tack "fake" in there as well.

A "fake pap walk" as opposed to what? A real one? Isn't the term "pap walk" which, once again, is a made up term by conspiracy theorists, enough to convey how "fake" the whole thing is?

Ma'am, I beg you to go outside. Breathe fresh air. The black mold is affecting all your cognitive functions and you're wasting your entire life crying about two strangers' love life, deeming everything they do regarding that fake, when you could... stop and have a life of your own.

[stylesclarified]

about the rainbow bears "Unless Mark was spending all his free time trawling Tumblr and Twitter to read all these fan theories in detail, he would have no idea how seriously Larries take this stuff." agreed but there was a tweet of a laptop with a tumblr tab in november so by that point he probably had some idea?

there are also more similarities with harrys handwriting https://x.com/severushes/status/1584589778829266944/photo/1 the N, 2, 9

https://mermaidsonships.tumblr.com/post/164998809498/mr-styles-harry-styles-album-booklet-by-molly the E especially

agreed but there was a tweet of a laptop with a tumblr tab in november so by that point he probably had some idea?

Having 1 tab open with Tumblr means you read fan theories and know all about them? The tab was him searching Rainbow Bear on Tumblr. Most likely scenario, he just did that because he saw Tumblr all over his notifications and played along.

there are also more similarities with harrys handwriting

No offense, but... are you blind?

These all the repeated characters on the receipt (left) vs the "certificate" (right).

The E in particular is COMPLETELY different. The R is as well. The 2—Harry's are tall and the Bear's are short and stumpy. Harry's 5 is straight and RBB's is rounded. With the A, it seems like Harry does the vertical stroke from left to right and the bear does it the other way around. The only characters that are similar are the 9s, and they don't have any quirks.

And here's a comparison of the song lyrics (left) vs the "certificate" (right):

It looks like Harry is doing the Bs in a continuous stroke, while the Bears do the vertical stroke and then the rest of the letter. Harry's Ns are wider, while the Bears' are thinner. Harry's Ss are inclined, while the Bears' are straight, also, Harry seems to start from the top and the bottom is more of an afterthought, and often ends up open and away from the rest of the letter, while the bear loops it closer. The Gs are completely different. Harry does them all in one stroke, which makes them end up looking like a C with a stump—the Bears' do the C shape and then add the horizontal stroke. The Fs are also completely different. Harry seems to start from the vertical stroke of the letter and work upwards, and then loop the top horizontal stroke with the vertical one, which means it ends up a little curved. Meanwhile the Bears' F is fully straight, with the top horizontal stroke clearly done separately from the vertical one.

I stopped the comparisons there because, frankly, this already took way too much of my time. The Es in this second one do look similar, but they looked completely different in the last comparison, so you can't cherry pick which ones to compare.

Clearly calligraphy isn't the way to prove this in any way.

I love how you fully ignored every other very concrete piece of evidence listed, such as Mark living 10 minutes away from the pic posted by the Bears after tour was over, and then an hour away from the other pic. All the while, Harry and Louis were hours and hours away from those places, sometimes in different continents altogether.

Or that you ignored that Mark was literally in a video with the bear. Or that he owns the same watch. Or that Louis was in a completely different place at the same time as the Bears were spotted elsewhere. Or that the Bears showed up at Mark's next place of employment. Or that the crew had a different mascot right before starting with the bear, and even had both at the same time for a few weeks.

Or that, quite literally, Harry said THAT THE CREW HANDLED THE BEARS. And that Mark WAS A MEMBER OF THE CREW.

[stylesclarified]

Can you debunk the tattoos? Because let's be honest, those tattoos do match, and matching tattoos aren't a typically platonic thing. At least, that's what my sister says, and she's not 100% wrong.

Harry and Louis don’t have matching tattoos.

They both have tattoos with a slight pirate-y/nautical theme, just like Zayn, Liam, and Justin Bieber. It’s a pretty popular theme, and since they both have dozens of tattoos, you can tie them together to some extent. But honestly, you could do that with literally anyone else who has a similar theme.

In fact, Harry does have matching tattoos... with Zayn.

Solid black heart

2. Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon prism

3. Skull with a top hat

4. Single rose with stem

5. Tiger

Let me make it clear—it should be clear from the start—I don’t think Harry and Zayn are in, or ever have been in, any sort of romantic relationship. And I don’t think they purposefully got any of these matching tattoos. I’m just pointing out how easy it is to find a pattern where there is none.

With that out of the way...

Larries claim that Louis and Harry have “complementary tattoos,” and that those tattoos are more significant than matching ones—because matching tattoos are platonic, and complementary tattoos are romantic.

That’s an absurd conclusion—very typical for Larries. Couples can get matching tattoos, and friends can get complementary tattoos. There’s no such rule. They made it up because they work backwards from the conclusion.

In any case, Zayn and Harry also have "complementary" tattoos, at least by Larry standards.

6. Harry's pirate ship + Zayn's "A pirate's life for me" (bonus, they got these on the same day at the same tattoo shop)

7. Harry's bird cage + Zayn's bird

8. Most importantly (because I do think this one was possibly done on purpose). Harry's "Might as well..." + Zayn's "...don't think I won't"

Supposedly, they actually tattooed these on each other, and it’s in each other’s handwriting. There’s no way for us to verify that—but Zayn has tattooed Harry in the past (they got a tattoo gun), and the handwriting does look similar. I don’t care to dig any further. It doesn’t matter. Only they know.

But anyway—maybe Louis shares Harry with Zayn? Maybe they’re poly? I mean, if tattoos alone are enough proof...

Or, perhaps—and I know this is wild for me to say—but... maybe we just don’t know these people, and assigning meaning to their body art and affirming that they got something permanently inked on their bodies for a specific reason is pretty fucking weird.

Also—and while we’re doing this—let me debunk...

You’ve seen this a bunch of times...

“Oh my god, Harry and Louis got the tattoos on the same flash by the same tattoo artist and if they hug they line up!”

I’m so sorry to be the bearer of bad news but... that’s not Harry’s tattoo. In fact, it’s not even close to Harry’s tattoo.

This isn’t a case of the design changing a little bit. Most tattoo artists do tweak their designs when actually putting them on clients. The lettering on Louis’ tattoo is also different—similar, but not exactly the same.

But this is not one of those cases. The design isn’t just a little different. We’re talking about completely different insects.

Harry’s tattoo is a butterfly. The tattoo in the “It is what it is” flash is a moth.

Imagine if instead of a moth and a butterfly, it was a parrot and a chicken. Or a horse and a zebra. That’s the type of difference we’re talking about.

It’s why, when Harry first got the tattoo, Larries insisted it was a moth—despite Harry himself calling it a butterfly from the beginning.

Would any winged insect count to consider them matching tattoos? What if the flash had a fly? Or a grasshopper? A mosquito? A bee? A wasp?

Furthermore, Harry’s tattoo artist confirmed that the butterfly tattoo was inspired by the book/movie Papillon.

“We started off with a butterfly on his torso based on an old French prison tattoo inspired by Papillon. Traditionally it would mean the wearer is a thief—something to do with the double meaning of ‘je vole’, which translates as both ‘I steal’ and ‘I fly’—and is commonly tattooed on the throat.” — source

This is a still from the Papillon movie from 1973, starring Steve McQueen:

Harry has a long-documented admiration for Steve McQueen. In fact, the profile picture of his (old?) finsta was a photo of McQueen.

The original Papillon book is an autobiography by a convicted felon named Henri Charrière. Naturally, the book is in French—Papillon literally means butterfly—and the real-life Henri actually had a butterfly tattoo himself, placed closer to his throat.

And of course... Henri is the French version of Henry. Harry is traditionally a nickname for Henry. Like, Prince Harry’s name is actually Prince Henry. Harry Styles’ legal name is Harry, because over time “Harry” became its own standalone name—but for all intents and purposes, they’re the same. I’d bet Harry was tickled by that little coincidence.

The book and film tell the story of Henri being wrongly convicted of murder, and follow his incarceration and eventual escape from prison. One of his close prison friends was a man named Louis Dega.

Naturally, when Larries found that out, they almost had a heart attack from the excitement.

As always, though, the problem is that they analyse everything just enough to connect it to their conspiracy—never stopping to actually look at it.

Henri and Louis’ friendship begins as one of convenience, with Louis paying Henri to protect him in prison. While Henri is innocent, Louis is guilty of embezzlement.

Further, in the book, Louis doesn’t play much of a role. He’s one of many side characters, apparently created by Charrière to tell the stories of multiple prison mates.

In the movie, he takes on a slightly larger role—most likely because he was portrayed by Dustin Hoffman—but his story is incredibly sad. Just as Henri is about to escape, Louis begs him not to do it, because to do so he has to literally jump off a cliff. Henri decides to go through with it anyway, leaping to freedom and leaving Louis behind.

So romantic! Eternal separation! Swoon!

So what does this mean in Larries’ wild interpretation? That Harry got a tattoo to remind himself of escaping... the closet? I presume?—even if it kills him—but that his boyfriend is too afraid to do the same? ’Cause that’s fucking dark.

They can’t have it both ways (though they always try). Either the names of the characters and what happens in the movie are significant, or they aren’t.

Let’s take Louis out of the equation for a moment and look at it from the perspective of Harry as an individual (I know that’s extremely hard for Larries, but bear with me). Harry/Henri is the protagonist. Louis is a side character in his story—the actual plot is Henri’s escape from prison. In fact, the movie focuses on solitary confinement and other forms of suffering only he experiences.

“Prison” for Harry could be a metaphor for so many things: fame, pressure, expectation, success, prejudice. Doesn’t it make so much more sense once you take the Larry nonsense out of the equation?

As I already showed you, though, the tattoo in the slide was a moth. In order to make these tattoos work together and fit the movie narrative, you’d have to do some serious mental gymnastics—like Simone Biles-level contortionism.

And it’s not even a wild coincidence that there’s a winged insect below the tattoo Louis would eventually get. Liam Sparkes draws a lot of bugs and insect tattoos. That’s his thing. It’s part of his flash portfolio—multiple moths, butterflies, bees, beetles. Picking one of them doesn’t turn it into a soulmate tattoo; it just means you picked a bug from a flash sheet... like hundreds of other people have done.

Anyway, the other tattoos Larries claim are matching or complementary between Harry and Louis are:

Harry's pirate ship + Louis' compass

They like to claim that the placement is a sign of their connection, too, because they got them on opposite arms. But, let’s be real—they’d say the same thing if they got them on the same arm. That’s the thing with conspiracy theories: everything can be "proof" if you try hard enough.

The placement argument is especially hilarious when you consider the wild differences in scale, not to mention the fact that the tattoo styles are completely different.

When they got these tattoos (late 2012), they were still friendly. Harry told his tattoo artist that, "He wanted a realistic looking English ship, because he misses home and needs to remind himself that he's homeward bound." And Louis' compass points to home.

Ok, guys, let’s pack this up. Larry proven, our job here is done.

Except… let’s do the exercise I always ask you to do: look at this without the Larry lenses. Harry wanted an English ship, as in England, because he missed home. Because he was away a lot. Because he was always traveling with One Direction. But, um, wasn’t... Louis right along with him when he was traveling away from home? How did Harry manage to miss Louis when they were literally breathing the same air 24/7? And what does England have to do with any of this?

"But Louis got the same concept tattooed." Yes. Exactly. The same concept. They were friends. They were friends who traveled for work a lot and were away from their respective homes a lot. What’s more likely? Them getting tattoos in completely unrelated sizes and designs because they missed “home” as in each other, even though they spent every waking moment together... or... them talking about missing their families and discussing getting tattoos related to that? Like literally any pair of friends would do! Similar concept, but separate tattoos?

Anchor and rope.

I mean, these two go together as much as Harry and Zayn's do.

The part that’s kind of funny is that Larries claim they got them so when they held hands, they matched, but the scale and the positioning aren’t even close to matching.

Louis’ rope is on the edge of his wrist, and the lower part of the anchor is at the same height on Harry’s, meaning the hole through where the rope would have to loop is too high to line up if they held hands.

Given the fact that I’m supposed to believe these are carefully planned couple tattoos by two insanely wealthy people, that is pretty shoddy execution.

The scale is also way off. A rope that thin with an anchor that big would split in two seconds flat.

Oops and Hi

Literally fanfiction. I don’t have any other way to describe this. It’s just fanfiction. They’re both words—that’s the extent of what these two tattoos have in common.

Louis said that his "Oops" tattoo was because the tattoo artist made a mistake when doing his stick figure. The line below the stick figure is supposed to be the ramp where it’s skating, but it doesn’t match.

Louis thought that was funny, so he got an "Oops" tattoo.

We don’t know the meaning of Harry’s "Hii" tattoo, but the most likely scenario is that it’s simply because "Hi" became kind of his catchphrase.

Larries made up an entire scenario where Harry and Louis met in the toilet, and Harry peed on Louis, so the first words they said to each other were "Oops" and "Hi," so they got them tattooed on each other.

The evidence of that? Louis saying they met in the toilet (no mention of urinals, peeing, or first words, or anything). And Harry tweeting this:

To Larries, if Harry tweeted a quote, that quote came 100% from Louis. It’s funny because just the other day, I proved how Harry was actually citing Cara Delevingne in one of his quote tweets.

There is no indication Harry tweeted that because Louis said it or that it had anything to do with the first time they met. Literally any of his friends could've said that. Who would even be "his" in this scenario?

They did meet in the toilet... that’s all the truth there is to this whole thing. Everything else is literally just a headcanon that Larries decided was actually true. There’s no indication these tattoos are related to each other whatsoever.

As I said with the Snapchat of Harry joking around with Lottie, I can’t debunk Larries' imagination.

Rose and dagger

This one’s pretty easy. While a rose and a dagger surely can be an awesome tattoo together:

The same can be said about a dagger through a skull.

Liam, Harry, and Zayn all had skulls tattooed.

The same thing can also be said about a dagger and a feather tattoo.

Liam had a very famous feather tattoo.

I could do this all day, by the way. Just grab two tattoos of these four very tattooed men and relate them to each other.

Like, Louis has two quotation marks on his wrist…

People relate this to Harry's "I can't change" tattoo (the one he covered with the anchor), but… Liam also had a quote on his wrist tattooed.

The style actually fits a lot better with Liam's quote than with Harry’s, since Harry's looks a little bit rougher and both the quotes and Liam’s tattoo look a lot neater.

There are other pairs, but they're even worse reaches than the ones I mentioned and most Larries don't believe in them, so I'll leave it there.

The Concept of "Placement"

Larries claim that Harry and Louis get tattoos that complement each other through placement. "If they hold hands, they line up" or "if they hug, they line up," etc.

Babes, given the amount of different possibilities for PDA that exist, any placement for any pair of tattoos could result in them "lining up." Larries often have to resort to things like, "If Harry hugs Louis from behind" and such.

You guys are not serious people.

As for “Harry has a lot of tattoos on his left arm, while Louis has a lot of tattoos on his right arm”... okay? And? Many people who get tattoos choose to place them close together, especially when it comes to the arms, because of the possibility of creating a sleeve. Once again, if they had both tattooed the same arm, that would also be considered proof—just as much as opposite arms are now considered proof.

Both Harry and Louis have a lot of tattoos on both arms nowadays, anyway. Plus, Harry has numerous tattoos on his collarbones, ribcage, and thighs, while Louis has tattoos on his arms, one on his collarbone, and two small ones on his ankles. So what happened there? Did they decide to stop the correlation? Does it not matter anymore?

The entire tattoo argument with Larry is ridiculous once you actually take a step back and analyze it.

I’m not sure why my inbox is suddenly flooded with requests to debunk Larry stuff. I don’t mind doing it, but it can get tiring for the readers of the blog, so maybe let’s try to get some other questions in too.

That said, I already have a bunch of questions to debunk, and I’ll be working on those. Some take a bit longer because I need to source videos, pictures, etc.

But rest assured, EVERY SINGLE LARRY ARGUMENT can be debunked. You just need context and logic.

[stylesclarified]

RBB: The Myth, Debunked

I got this message asking if I thought Harry and Louis might have been somewhat involved with RBB—maybe just as a funny inside joke.

At first, I was going to reply directly under that post with a quick answer. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized it deserved a proper debunk. So here we are.

First: What was RBB?

RBB, short for Rainbow Bondage Bear, was a rainbow-furred Build-A-Bear stuffed animal thrown on stage by a fan during One Direction’s Where We Are Tour in 2014.

The crew kept the bear and used electrical tape to give it a kind of bondage outfit. Then, they created a Twitter account for it and started posting pictures. Most fans didn’t think much of it—until Josh Devine, the drummer in 1D’s live band, posted a picture with the bear and tagged its Twitter account.

Fans started calling the bear Rainbow Bondage Bear, and the crew adopted it (though it wasn’t a far cry from the name the crew had given it). It started appearing in the tour scaffolding during Where We Are, though not consistently—and eventually, the bear’s Twitter account was deactivated.

WWAT ended in October 2014, and soon after, One Direction jumped back into the usual cycle: new album, promo, new tour. Their next tour, aptly named On The Road Again, kicked off on February 7th, 2015, in Sydney, Australia.

That’s when RBB made a comeback—this time with a makeover, styled very obviously to resemble Freddie Mercury.

Eventually, the bear got a new Twitter account, a companion—a tiny rainbow bear fans named Sugar Baby Bear (or SBB for short)—plus other friends, props, and increasingly elaborate set-ups. They’d consistently appear in the scaffolding during shows.

Of course, Larries being Larries, didn’t take this as a goofy crew joke or a tour mascot. No, they decided it was Harry and Louis communicating with them via stuffed animals. Maybe with a little help from crew members, sure—but ultimately, it was Larry behind the account.

Well… no. It wasn’t. And there’s actual concrete proof of who was behind it.

MARK LITTLEWOOD. Let's list the evidence.

1 – RBB is front and center in this video where Mark Littlewood, One Direction’s FOH engineer, talks about the equipment he uses.

A FOH Engineer is a Front of House Engineer—they control what the audience hears during a live show. They’re basically the most important sound person on tour. The monitor engineer is also crucial, since they mix what the artist hears in their in-ear monitors (which can absolutely affect the performance), but the FOH engineer is in charge of the final product the audience hears.

Some Larries tried to argue that the accessories the bears wore must have cost a fortune, and then concluding: “Would a sound guy be able to spend thousands of dollars on a joke?” The answer is: yeah, actually, he would be.

A FOH engineer working for a big country act in 2010 could earn around $100K a year—and that’s with all expenses covered while on the road.

Mark Littlewood was with One Direction as far back as 2013 and worked both of their stadium tours in 2014 and 2015. As FOH engineer for one of the biggest touring acts in the world, his annual pay likely more than doubled what I just mentioned. And let’s not forget—FOH engineers are often kept on retainer between tours to make sure they don’t get scooped up by other artists.

After 1D, Mark went on to work with Little Mix and is currently working with Niall.

2 – RBB was seen wearing the same watch Mark is wearing in the video.

Larries used this watch as proof that it had to be Harry and Louis because it’s a Rolex.

Uh...

How did they know it wasn’t a knock-off? Did they take it to a jeweller for appraisal or something?

Even if it was a real Rolex, someone in Mark’s position and with his CV could definitely afford one.

He literally had the same watch. It was most likely his watch the bear wore.

3 – The official Twitter account run by the Bears posted a photo at a Jobcentre Plus.

On December 15th, 2015, they changed the profile picture of the entire account to a close-up of the Jobcentre sign.

And then tweeted this picture on December 16th:

The location of that Jobcentre is in Chorley, Lancashire. It’s since changed a bunch of things, but older photos (from 2019 and prior) match the RBB photo exactly. You can literally find it if you search “Jobcentre Plus Chorley.” The link to this shop is what was making this post get deleted, so I can’t include it.

Mark Littlewood has a company registered in Chorley, Lancashire—about 10 minutes from that Jobcentre. It’s public information, and if you Google “Mark Littlewood engineer,” you’ll find it easily, but because it includes an actual address, I’m not linking it here. I didn’t dig this up myself—this came from an anonymous “anti” back in the day.

The timing of the bear’s Jobcentre photo is also telling for two reasons:

It’s a joke. Mark handled live sound for One Direction. The tweet was posted on December 15th, 2015. 1D’s final live performance had aired two days earlier (The X Factor, December 13th), and their last media appearance—Carpool Karaoke—aired on December 16th. So what’s the joke? That now that the band’s no longer performing, he’s “out of a job.”

Harry and Louis weren’t anywhere near Chorley when that picture was taken. They also wouldn’t have had the time to drive up there in the weeks prior to the photo being posted because of how busy they were.

Larries tried to link the photo to Harry’s hometown, Holmes Chapel (about an hour from Chorley), but forgot a few key things. For one, his family moved away from the village a couple of years after the band formed. For another, Harry was photographed in London that same day—four hours away.

Considering Harry was also in London for The X Factor performance two days earlier, and before that had been relentlessly doing promo or touring, when exactly would he have found the time to drive four hours to Chorley? And more importantly—why would he drive all that way just to take a random picture of a bear? Surely he’d have a Jobcentre closer to wherever he was, if he wanted to make that joke.

As for Louis, we don’t know exactly where he was on the 15th, but he was obviously also in London on the 13th, and he was spotted in Chicago on December 18th. So what are the odds that in that tiny time frame, he drove up to Doncaster (3.5 hours) and then to Chorley (another 2 hours)? Slim to none.

So what’s more likely? Two millionaire popstars using their tiny window of downtime to drive to a random northern town just to stage a photo of a stuffed animal?

Or Mark, who lived 10 minutes away, doing it as a joke because the tour was over and he had some time to kill?

Now, Larries do say that while Harry and Louis were “behind the bears,” they did have help from crew members.

Uh huh, okay, but what kind of “help” includes crew literally taking the bears home with them? If RBB was this sacred coded tool of fan communication, why would they risk it being lost or misplaced by giving it to someone else?

And again—Mark wouldn’t have had time to drive home and take the Job Centre picture while the band was still performing live, because if 1D was doing a show, Mark was there too.

With no upcoming performances for the band, how would Harry and Louis get RBB back? And what was the need for Mark to take it home anyway?

Three/two days after that Job Centre photo, the bear’s Twitter account posted this one

Larries have analyzed every single item in this photo to death. It's honestly hilarious knowing they were out here hunting for secret messages thinking they were getting a peek inside Larry’s house, when really they were just staring into the media rack of some random dude from Lancashire.

Before we close this section, some Larries tried to link the Jobcentre thing to Liam, since he tweeted (obviously as a joke) that he’d go to a Jobcentre after 1D’s final performance, but Liam was in London that day as well.

4 – The bears once posted a photo with two drag queens. A Larrie realized she went uni with one of them and decided to ask who gave them the bear for the photo. The drag queen answered “Some old guy.”

Pic of the Bear with the drag queens:

And here are the posts from the Larrie: 1/2

According to his business entry on Company Check, Mark was born in April 1970, which means he was 45 during the RBB era. And as you saw in the earlier video, he very much fits the description of “some old guy.”

5 – One Direction’s crew had a very recent history of inventing mascots.

In the summer of 2014, just before RBB appeared, they had an inflatable toy they called Erik Da Palm Tree. And yes, they also gave it a Twitter account to interact with fans.

In fact, it had the exact same humor as RBB. This was RBB’s first tweet, August 12, 2014:

Erik Da Palm Tree made the same exact joke, three days earlier:

Fans didn’t really latch onto Erik, but they did latch onto the rainbow bear—so the crew ran with it. It’s honestly as simple as that.

6 – After 1D’s tour ended, RBB was spotted at a Little Mix concert—where Mark Littlewood just so happened to be working.

Larries screamed that this was #proof because “Louis and Perrie are best friends. which is not true by any stretch of imagination. Perrie dated Zayn for a very long time and Louis was his bestie, so they did get on well. They also shared a taxi, with the other Little Mix girls, after the BRITs in February that same year—six months before this video was taken, and Louis liked a couple of her posts. That has no correlation to a stuffed bear appearing in the scaffolding during a concert of her band’s tour.

Louis was literally partying in Ibiza when this concert happened.

You know who was there though? Mark Littlewood, FOH engineer for Little Mix’s Get Weird Tour.

CONCLUSION: I think it’s pretty clear: Mark Littlewood—probably with the help of a few other crew members—was behind the bears. Not Harry. Not Louis. Not any other member of the band.

----

Still, Larries want some other questions answered, and I’ll oblige. I’m going to paraphrase the question so I don’t get got for misatribution.

“Why would someone in his 40s want to teach 1D fans about gay culture and industry abuse?”

I don’t even think that was the purpose of the bears. I think he was just having fun. But even if it was—why wouldn't he want that? And why is his age relevant, exactly?

“Why did he pretend to be Louis and Harry?”

He didn’t. He pretended to be a stuffed bear. Just like the crew pretended to be a palm tree. It’s called a joke. We just went over the whole British humor thing.

The guy never once acted like Harry or Louis were behind the bears. That part was 100% Larrie projection. He mostly alluded to queer culture. Even if he did allude to Harry and Louis (we’ll get that in two seconds), he didn’t allude to them being behind the bears.

“Whoever was doing it was purposefully connecting the bears to Harry and Louis, that’s undeniable.”

I must confess I didn’t pay close attention to the bears while it was happening, so I had to do some digging to respond properly.

What I found is that the Bears account posted for both Louis and Harry’s birthdays: Divine blowing out candles for Louis, and two pictures of the bears with cake and “22” candles for Harry’s 22nd. After that, the account was deactivated. Some antis theorize the “22” candles were too much and Mark was told to deactivate, but I’m skeptical.

They also once liked a tweet that said “Larry ok”, and at some of the concerts the bears had stickers on their shoes—either blue or green emojis.

Were these allusions to Harry and Louis? Sure. There were also allusions to the whole band—like when the bears cooked the 1D potato (which is too long to explain if you don’t already know the lore). I’ll even concede that the blue and green stickers were meant to symbolize Harry and Louis—those were their mic colors, and the main sound guy would absolutely know that.

But to answer the question of why. What was the motive? Probably just having fun. Joking around. Most fans that interacted with the bear were Larries, so he would obviously lean into that. Not out of malice, but because he couldn’t have imagined that you guys were serious... Unless Mark was spending all his free time trawling Tumblr and Twitter to read all these fan theories in detail, he would have no idea how seriously Larries take this stuff.

That’s a recurring issue with Larries—they wildly overestimate their own relevance. You think that just because you obsess over your theories, so does everyone else. That because you catalogue every remotely Larry-adjacent moment, others are doing the same.

I was recently asked to debunk the idea that Harry’s Peace ring is tied to Larry, and someone popped into my inbox saying, “Even if it’s not, Harry knows what Larries think about it.” Does he, though? Just because you read every masterpost and spend 12 hours a day analyzing fan theories doesn’t mean Harry is reading them too.

Further, if Harry and Louis had to avoid everything Larries have arbitrarily decided is “proof,” they’d never be able to do or say anything. But I digress.

The Bears’ account received a massive number of notifications, mostly from Larries. The odds that Mark would sit down, read them in detail, and take what he read in them seriously, instead of glancing at them and thinking “oh fans joking”—are slim to none. A regular adult would assume it was just typical fandom over-thetop-ness unless explicitly told otherwise.

He likely knew “Larry” meant Louis and Harry—as portmanteaus are common for celebrities—but that’s a far cry from understanding that, in Larrie lore, “Larry” means “they are in a secret relationship, forcibly closeted by their label, faking their entire personal lives including a child.” That’s an enormous leap.

“Why would Harry and Louis allow it to happen without intervening? Even though they knew fans thought it was them behind it.”

This is such a self-aggrandizing take.

Harry and Louis were barely active on social media at that point. They both had important things to worry about, such as Robin being diagnosed with cancer, Louis’ impending fatherhood, planning the next step of the rest of their lives, as well as writing and recording an album, doing a bunch of promo, interviews, recording music videos, doing photoshoots, touring the fucking world, and having their own personal lives. Once again, unless they came online and read all your theories, how would they be aware of the fact that a couple thousand fans (in their fandom of millions) were doing all that with some stuffed bears? You’re assuming they know your fan theories because part of being a conspiracy theorist is being self-aggrandizing.

Even if they were aware of what fans were saying, what were they supposed to do? Approach an important member of their crew and tell him he wasn’t allowed to play with toys because a tiny portion of the fanbase was behaving insanely? Do you realize how ridiculous that sounds? How uncomfortable and insane that conversation would be? Even on the off chance that they became aware of the extent of Larry theories, it would’ve been because of how often they’d seen Larries behave insanely, creating a worrying precedent, and they would never expect every crew member or person in their team to know as well.

They had no authority over Mark. The label organized their tours, which is something they stipulated in the contract they signed in 2013. Mark was not employed by them, so they couldn’t exactly tell him what to do or how to do it anyway. They would’ve had to escalate it to the record label and have them handle it. If the potential conversation between them and Mark I described in the point above sounded awkward, imagine snitching on the guy and then having to be around him every day? And how would the rest of the crew feel if that happened? What are the chances that the rest of the crew would also be aware of Larries insanity and not think, instead, that Harry and Louis were massively exaggerating? The label was not going to fire their FOH engineer in the middle of a fucking world tour over some stuffed bears.

“Why would they feed the theories?”

Well... they didn’t. You’re mistaking silence for participation. And you're mistaking your own obsession for evidence of theirs. Nobody “fed” anything. It’s not like Harry or Louis were posing with the bear on stage or giving any sort of hints about it.

“When they had the chance to explain, Harry started stammering like, ’Umm I think it’s someone from the crew? Yeah, it’s someone from the crew.’ Instead of, ’Oh, those theories are crazy. It’s absolutely not any of us. People from the crew are joking with the fans. It’s not us.’”

Why do they have to deny things with your specific wording? And as if they were aware of the extent of things to the same degree you are? Why is their concrete denial not enough for you? Who do you think you are?

Where is the “uhm hm ahnn” part? There’s no hesitation in his voice whatsoever. If you have to make up stuff that doesn’t happen, then you probably don’t have a good point to begin with.

As I said, they were most likely not aware of your insane theories. Also, Harry’s motto is “Never explain, never complain.” Even if he did know about the crazy theories, then he’s not gonna bring them up in an interview and bring more attention to them. And the funny thing is that if he had said what you’re claiming here he should’ve said, you would’ve instead laughed at it and say that he was too defensive. “If it’s not real why get bent ot of shape over it?” Like you do every time Louis issues a Larry denial.

Harry not denying Larry is proof (Harry did deny it a couple of times, though). Louis denying Larry is proof.

The funny thing about conspiracy theories is that they’re by definition unfalsifiable.

The title of this video (because it was uploaded by a Larrie) is “that stressful time they were asked...” what’s so stressful about the video? Actually watch it without looking for proof. Larries spent days talking about how Harry whipped his head to look at Liam. How stressed Louis looked. But that’s because you guys are conditioned to look at things through that lens. A normal person would watch this video and think literally nothing of it.

Harry does look at Liam as he hears the question, likely to see if he’ll be the one to answer it, because it’s an open question and any of the four of them could’ve answered. Usually Liam answered the more general questions. They seem to agree silently that Harry will. That’s all that happens.

The stress and the hesitation and whatever else you want to ascribe to this video is simply in your imagination.

“That is how you should deny things!”

Who died and made you the queen of denials?

“Does that man even look like someone who would spend hundreds of dollars in accessories for toys and create social media accounts for them? That he would create tableaus for the better part of a year? Does that sound possible?”

I mean, we know that the crew created a Twitter account that interacted with fans with the Palm Tree guy. So... yes? In fact, Harry’s current crew also has a mascot called Stage Left Doris, a blue llama, and they created an Instagram account for it.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Doris (@stageleftdoris)

It just so happens that Mark was more intense than whoever handles the Doris account, but that doesn’t make what he did in any way abnormal. And I must say, Harry's crew isn’t exactly super chill either.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Doris (@stageleftdoris)

And what exactly makes you think he wouldn’t spend a couple hundred bucks of his very hefty salary on a couple of toys? Maybe he has children or nephews/nieces who would want to play with it later. Maybe he just likes to collect stuff.

It’s a particularly weird argument to make in light of the fandom that Larries are in. How many older, middle-aged women are there in the Larrie fandom? Women that collect stuff or get dupes of Louis’ clothes, or even get tattoos related to Larry? Who are we to police this random man’s interests?

----

I’m not content just with showing you proof that Mark was behind the bears (proof that’s pretty uncontestable), or with giving answers to Larries stupid questions. I will also debunk the “proof” Larries have that Harry and Louis must be behind the bears.

----

Other "proof"

1 - “The RBBSBBOfficial was deactivated and the username was supposed to become available after 30 days but it never did. Louis and Harry must have contacted Twitter directly to ask to lock it.”

Pretty fucking funny, but, actually, Twitter has an internal protocol. Some accounts that garner a lot of attention, when they deactivate, their users never become available again.

For instance, this account:

Used to be a big viral account that posted... videos of people’s hoverboards catching fire. It deactivated years ago but the username never became available again.

Twitter never explained why, but the most likely reason was that it was referenced in the news quite a lot with pretty serious stories, so a new person catching the @ and posting something completely unrelated in it would lead to confusion.

This is something that’s triggered by Twitter’s backend and it’s not something they necessarily notify. The RBBSBB account had become quite big among fans, so that’s probably why Twitter decided to never make it available again. This is obviously just a theory, because we don’t have confirmation of it. It’s much more believable and logical that Harry and Louis asking Jack Dorsey to save the @ though. Why would Elon Musk continue to grant their wishes?

Another possible theory, which I mentioned in passing before but I personally don’t subscribe to, is that 1D’s publicists were monitoring the situation and allowed it while Mark had plausible deniability but that once he posted the 22 cake they asked Twitter to take it down. I think if that were the case, it would show up as suspended. I don’t think that happened.

2 - “The phone number for the bears was active for years!!”

[For context: the bears showed up with a cell phone to a couple of shows, and they had the phone's number taped to it, so fans could text it. It was a beaten up old iPhone. Allegedly you could text it until 2023.]

Ok. And?

I’m not sure why this is supposed to be proof. You have no idea how or why that number came to be. It could be a second number for Mark. It could be a burner he used for whatever. It could be just a SIM he got specifically for the purpose of the bears, and then decided was useful for whatever reason.

And that is if the number was consistently available to receive SMS/calls, which we have no confirmation of. If it was a pre-paid and he didn’t top it up for a while, then it would eventually circle back to a new line. Unless fans were consistently trying to reach it (they only were at the very beginning), they wouldn’t know when it switched to someone new.

This is the typical Larrie MO. Remember when we covered fallacies? This is a glaring fallacy. Just because, in your opinion, A is a good explanation for B, doesn’t mean it’s the only explanation that exists or even the best one.

3 - “The bears account posted a photo in a hotel near Holmes Chapel!”

On January 8th, 2016, the bears account posted this photo outside of a hotel near Holmes Chapel, Harry’s hometown.

As I said, Harry’s family doesn't live in Holmes Chapel anymore. They moved a couple of years after Harry became a part of 1D because of the amount of fans that would go there just to wait around his house.

Harry was also not in Holmes Chapel when this was posted—he was in London with his friend Tomo Campbell.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Tomo (@tomocampbell)

London is like a three-hour drive to Holmes Chapel. Harry was also in London the day before and the day after. In fact, he hadn’t been back home (which, as I’ve already said, is probably in the area of Holmes Chapel, but not in the actual village anymore) since Christmas. Immediately after Christmas, he went with his family (and Kendall Jenner) to St. Barts/Miami, then to London. So unless he spent his Christmas trawling around Holmes Chapel with a stuffed bear dressed as Freddie Mercury to find the perfect scenary for a photo, and then happened to snap it without being noticed by fans, saved it, and uploaded it weeks later, then... I think we can rule him out.

There’s also the fact that the last person who had the bear in his power was... Mark Littlewood. Who had posted from Chorley just 10 days prior to Christmas, on December 15th. So did Harry meet up with Mark over Christmas so he could hand him the bear? Do you realize how ridiculous this sounds? And how did Harry give back the bear later so Mark could put it up at the Little Mix concert? What would also be the purpose of all this? Just to deactivate less than a month later?

Wouldn’t it be a better explanation that the bored engineer, who we know had the bear December 15th and lived in Chorley, less than an hour away from Holmes Chapel, was probably visiting the area for whatever reason (because we do not know this guy and what his life entails), saw the hotel and thought it was funny?

He posted a bear’s head with the Bear’s Head sign in the background. It is simply NOT THAT DEEP.

4- “But the bears were so much more than just some fun! They were signaling stuff! They were communicating with us!”

Oh, yeah? What were they communicating? When they posted “Nut Tree” what did it mean? What was the countdown for? How many things did you try to decode and tie together regarding the bears only to find yourself completely stumped?

You know why that happened? Because as I just said, it wasn’t that deep. It was just some bored middle-aged guy. He wasn’t using a secret code. It wasn’t a secret tool of communication between two international superstars and their avid fans who wanted to avenge them. The bears were handled by a bored crew member who wanted to have some fun.

The most likely scenario is that he had no fucking idea you guys were being serious. He couldn’t have imagined it wasn’t all fun and games, because normal people don’t see a stuffed animal and think secret communication. So why the hell would he? Yes, he probably received a million unhinged messages and saw your mentions with a thouosand theories, but unless he sat down to read those unhinged theories and take in the fact that the whole thing wasn’t a huge joke and that you took it completely seriously (and let it consume your entire life), he wouldn’t fucking know!! Nobody that doesn’t live and breathe this fandom would believe the level of crazy Larries are.

5- “But the selfie! The reflection of Louis’ t-shirt in the sunglasses!”

Larries zoomed in on a reflection of RBB’s sunglasses on a pic, saw a skinny guy with a black shirt and white lettering, and because Louis once wore a black shirt with white letttering and was skinny decided that it meant that he was taking the photo.

That does not look even remotely like the same design. And it actually looks closer to the Harley Davidson logo warped by the lens.

It also looks like the person is wearing a hoodie with the sleeves rolled up (like Mark in the video with the bear).

In the following pic Larries circle a random darker dot I think trying to claim that it’s his card suits tattoo? Which is ridiculous because you cannot fucking tell what it is. But also because that's the wrong wrist for that tattoo, since he has it on his left hand and this isn’t a selfie, meaning it’s not flipped, so we’re seeing that person’s right wrist. On his right wrist, Louis has a rope tattoo that circles the whole wrist and does not look even slightly like what we see in the pic.

If it’s not just a random smudge, it might just be a watch...

6 - “RBB wore aviators and so did Louis!”

Yes, so did a ton of other people. Aviators are the most popular sunglasses in the world.

You know who was famous for wearing aviators? Freddie Mercury, the idol the bear was cosplaying.

7 - “But Harry’s handwriting!”

They compare Harry’s handwriting to this “certificate” that showed up around the bears once.

And it’s completely off. Not a single letter looks similar, but the L and the G in particular are complete opposites.

8 - “But Harry’s childhood friend took a pic with the bear! And the bar in Newcastle... the same lightning and Louis was across the street!”

Larries claim that this guy is Harry’s childhood friend:

Of course they cannot produce a name for this guy or proof that he’s actually childhood friends with Harry. Someone just said that and it’s been repeated ever since.

They also claim that they recognized the pub and that it was across the street from where Louis was seen that night. The pub where the bear was seen was a gay club called Sunset Boulevard (it has since changed names, then permanently closed, and there’s now a convenience store there). The club Louis’ was at was called Digital.

Is what Larries are claiming true? Was Louis partying across the street from RBB? Wouldn’t that be actual legitimate proof of—

No.

I mean, yes, for once what Larries are claiming is true and the bear was most likely at that gay pub, and Louis was indeed partying across the street. However, both places were a less-than-10-minute walk away from the arena 1D was performing at. Because they were on tour. In Newcastle. And that particular spot was (and still is) a pretty big hub for clubs and bars.

Louis was spotted in Digital the whole night. He was not spotted across the street. There are a bunch of pictures of him that night with fans and the like. So... what are we supposed to do with this? Two people who were part of the same tour partied 10 minutes away from the arena where the last show was held. Someone stop the presses!

This is one of those things that Larries say that they think sounds like a mic-drop but I’m just left confused as to what the hell I’m supposed to do with this information and how the fuck it proves their point in any way.

8 - “Louis named his fake child Freddie Reign to mock the narrative that he was about to become a dad by linking it to the bears!”

First of all, anyone who’s still banging on about Freddie being a fake child nine years later has severe issues. Second of all, Briana said Louis came up with the name Freddie while she came up with Reign. Larries mocked this, but failed to connect something pretty blatant. Briana was a twentysomething white girl from Calabasas who prior to having Freddie worked as a stylist... You know who her most likely inspiration would be for names? The Kardashians.

You know who one of the most recent Kardashian child was in January 2016? Reign Aston Disick, Kourtney’s third child, who was born about a year prior, in December 2014.

Larries decided that instead, Louis was doing some word-play and naming him Freddie Reign for Freddie Mercury because a queen reigns, and Freddie was the lead singer of Queen. And the bear cosplayed as Freddie Mercury. That is some ASTOUNDING reaching.

It’d be entirely possible for Louis to have had Freddie Mercury in mind when naming him that. Freddie Mercury was a musical legend, after all, but Louis has not expressed any particular interest in Queen or Freddie.

Freddie has been consistently one of the most popular baby names in the UK.

----

One thing Larries often act incredulous about, is why Mark would use so much queer imagery. I don’t know. Maybe he’s queer? Maybe he likes queer history? Or has a queer kid that he supports a lot? Maybe he was working with some other member of the crew who was queer? Who the hell knows. Mark doesn’t seem to have any sort of public social media, so there’s very limited information of his available, and still, it’s pretty undeniable that it was him who handled the bears. Like, impressively airtight proof.

There is zero indication that Harry and Louis were connected to these bears other than fans really, really wanting that to be the case.

---

Lastly, what Larries often tout (not just with the bears, but with everything) is this idea that, “Even if the bits of proof we have are not indidividually compelling, the fact that there are so many bits must mean something.” I emphatically reject that.

There isn’t “so much proof.” Larries just pick the result they want and work backwards from it to prove it. They went into the bears trying to prove that they were related to Harry and Louis, as opposed to being an innocent crew mascot, so every little thing the bears did, they actively tried to forcibly make it into proof of their conspiracy theory.

It’s why some Larries were still trying to find explanations for the whole Nut Tree thing when Louis released FITF. Eight years later.

Of course, with that goal in mind, you’re always going to believe you’ve found connections, patterns, and whatever not. Because you’re actively trying to.

Remember the watch we mentioned earlier? That’s a good example of the Larrie method. The bear was seen wearing a watch. The result they want: Harry and Louis are handling the bears. So what’s the method to get that result? Well, Harry has worn a bunch of watches over the years, let’s try to find one that looks similar to the one the bear wore. Bingo. Now this is proof that the bear wore Harry’s watch.

Nevermind the fact that the picture of Harry they used is from March 2014, after tour rehearsals for their WWA tour, but that the bear wore the watch for the first time in August 2015, an entire year and a half later.

Or the fact that Harry hadn't worn that watch or a similar one since the March 2014 pictures were taken (you can fact check me if you want). Or the fact that, by 2015, Harry hardly wore watches at all.

And let’s ignore the fact that 1D was in the middle of a world tour, and that the particular stop where the bear wore the watch for the first time was in Chicago. Did Harry take a quick trip to London to fetch a watch he hadn’t worn in 18 months and then back to the States? What’s the explanation and the logic here?

I’ll tell you what: none whatsoever. The details don’t matter.

The fact that, as shown above, we know Mark had the same watch during that same tour and we have video of him wearing just three months later, it is the perfect illustration of why the Larrie fandom is so ridiculous if you scratch the surface even a little bit.

[stylesclarified]

Hi. I'm having lots of doubts about Larry these days, especially reading your posts. But their one thing keeping me in the fandom is Louis's unreleased song, All Along. Can you debunk that because I'm trying to be rational but I can't think of an explanation for it.

Hi! I presume the main part of the song that you "can't think of an explanation" for is:

We saw Ed in Manchester I held you while he played Every time I hear his songs, it takes me to that place Even after all we've done, I had the nerve to say I wish I met you later, I wish I met you later

Larries claim that Louis went to see Ed with Harry in Manchester and that Eleanor wasn’t there, but, uh... yeah, she was. It’s pretty clear she was.

The show was October 17th, 2011, and it was held at Manchester Academy 2.

Manchester Academy is a concert venue with three separate halls: 1, 2, 3, and Club Academy. It's located inside the University of Manchester.

Eleanor studied at Manchester University between 2010 and 2014. She studied Sociology.

According to this brochure for abroad students that you can find online.

The semester started on September 19th, 2011, and Christmas holidays didn't start until December.

October 17th, 2011, was a Monday. Why wouldn't Eleanor be there? She was literally a student at the university, attending classes on the same day the concert was happening.

Larries claim that because the two fans who posted pictures with Harry and Louis at the concert didn't pose with Eleanor or tweet that she was there, that means she wasn't there.

They think the world works like this:

Here's the thing: reality doesn't stop being reality just because we don't personally perceive it. If a tree falls in the forest and all that.

Louis and Eleanor had only been seen together twice at that point. TWICE. Two times.

The first time was on September 15th, 2011, leaving Niall's 18th birthday party.

The second time was on September 30th, 2011, at Hyde Park in London:

That's all. No other sightings.

They'd be seen together again a few days after this concert, on October 21st, 2011, when Louis went to Doncaster to visit his family:

So, let’s get some perspective here:

Louis and Eleanor had only been seen together twice up to this point.

Barely any fans even knew she existed, let alone knew her name or face.

And a very important detail…

That Louis and Harry were not massively famous yet! They were just one of many participants in The X Factor in 2010. They had one song out. One. What Makes You Beautiful. It had gone #1 on the charts, and the guys had a loyal fanbase. But they were far from ubiquitous.

Think about the songs you hear on the radio. How many of them are by people you could never pick out of a lineup?

This was especially true for the audience at the show they attended. Since it was held inside Manchester University, most of the people in attendance were students, meaning 18 years old and older. Most of One Direction's growing fanbase at the time was either pre-teens or in their early teens.

The audience at this show was also pretty small. While Ed Sheeran's album had gone #1 and he had a growing fanbase, he was still not a household name. Academy 2 has a total capacity of 950.

So, in that context, what are the odds that someone would recognize Louis, plus his girlfriend, plus pay attention to what they're doing during the show, plus tweet about it? Almost nonexistent.

The odds of someone recognizing them and taking a picture without really noticing who they were with or what they were doing? Much higher.

And that's exactly what happened.

But how can that one picture prove that Eleanor wasn't there? It's not like we have detailed reports of what Louis did or videos of him and Harry in the audience.

Furthermore, Eleanor met Louis through Harry. Her roommate at Manchester University was Alana Burton, who was Harry's friend. It's likely that not only Eleanor was there, but also Alana—and maybe other friends, too. Keep in mind, Harry grew up just 20 minutes away from Manchester and has said he used to frequent the city quite a bit.

Let's put this into context: just a few days ago (2025!), Louis attended a concert with his girlfriend, and there’s only one picture of him there. We know Zara was there because she literally posted a video of the concert, but there are no pictures of her.

And if that’s not enough for you, let me blow your mind with something that Larries completely ignore because they can’t explain it.

Right as What Makes You Beautiful was being released, One Direction went on a small radio tour in the UK and Ireland. One of those interviews was at Key 103, a Manchester radio station now known as Hits Radio Manchester. I can’t find the actual video for the life of me, but anyway… The woman in the picture above is Lucy Horobin, and she was 31 at the time of the picture, close to turning 32 (this will be relevant in a second). The interview took place on August 16, 2011.

The GIF below, of Harry clutching his chest and mouthing "I love you," is absolutely real. This happened during the interview.

Harry was a cheeky little flirt back in the day. He used to flirt heavily with interviewers. Obviously, 99.99% of the time it was just a joke—his frontal lobe was years away from fully developing, and he had zero experience in the industry. So yeah, he hit his head against the wall a few times with this one. He learned quickly that it wasn’t a good idea and that it portrayed him in a way that wasn’t... well, the best, let’s say.

He spent years trying to walk these little things back, and to a degree, he still is. But in the end, I honestly don’t think it’s the fault of that seventeen-year-old kid.

ANYWAY. We don’t know exactly what happened after the interview. Tabloids said that they flirted off air and then flirted on Twitter and Facebook (which, by the way, Harry did not have a Facebook account). So, yeah, take that with a grain of salt.

1D had a second interview on the same radio station on September 14th. That’s Lucy in the middle:

In June 2012, a scandal broke. Harry Styles had slept with a married radio DJ named Lucy Horobin. The first few stories were as benign as a story like this can be.

“Lucy and her husband were estranged and weren’t living together,” and “Harry had come into her life at just the right time and charmed her,” and “she and her husband reconciled later, and she told him about the affair.”

At the time, a 17-year-old boy sleeping with a 30-something-year-old woman wasn’t seen as such a bad thing. It was, don’t get me wrong, but age gaps in general weren’t as condemned as they are now, especially when it was an older woman and a younger man. In fact, the tone of the articles didn’t focus on Harry being taken advantage of (which HE WAS, regardless of how much his seventeen-year-old brain told him it was great). The tone was that Harry was a homewrecker.

I’m not going to get into the details of what transpired between Lucy and her husband because it’s irrelevant to this story. Harry hasn’t said a single thing about any of this, but “sources close to him” claimed that she had told him she was separated and he had no idea she was still married. The same thing happened with another very young boybander named Harley, from the band Rizzle Kicks. She also got with him, told him she was separated, and he was also over a decade younger than her. Regardless of what Harry did or didn’t know, let me say again that he was seventeen.

The fandom has long repeated that Harry was named as the catalyst in divorce proceedings (as in legal filings). I couldn’t find anything even remotely official that supports that. What I did find was the husband directly saying this affair happened in an interview. Not “a source close to the husband.” The husband himself speaking. Keep in mind, the guy is not famous and has no career in the industry. He had literally nothing to gain from this other than humiliating his ex and dragging Harry’s name through the mud.

The husband claims in his interview that Lucy told him she didn’t love him anymore on a Wednesday, and three days later, she slept with Harry. Those three days later were three weeks before her birthday. This is starting to sound like a math problem, but to simplify: three weeks before her birthday would be the last week of September. The Wednesday of that week would be the 21st. Three days after that would be the 24th.

One Direction was in Leeds on the 23rd, performing at an ASDA House, and went back to London on the 24th. Leeds and Manchester, where Lucy lived, are about an hour away from each other. Her husband claimed that she booked herself “a posh hotel in Manchester” and slept with Harry there. He also claimed that they’d been flirting over text for weeks.

The husband is telling this a year after it happened. He’s pretty damn accurate with his timing, all things considered (even if he’s an idiot for blaming the 17-year-old). Most Larries simply ignore all of this, but there’s one blog I’ve seen try to muddle the timelines and call it all a confusing lie. The timelines are crystal clear.

And you’re gonna ask... why the hell are you telling me all of this? Why is this relevant in any way? Well, Harry and Lucy slept together again. This time, on her birthday.

When is her birthday?

Yes, the same day as Ed Sheeran’s Manchester show. The one Harry and Louis attended. Where was Lucy from? Oh, right... Manchester.

"But, but, but, but... this could all be a lie."

I mean, it would be a very weird fucking lie for the husband to tell the tabloids, and for Lucy and Harry to never deny. But, sure, it still could be, I suppose.

Except...

The tweets are real and they're still up. And the person who tweeted them...

That is a close friend of Ed's who was at the concert that night, who Harry follows on Twitter, saying that "a 17-year-old slept with a 32-year-old married woman." He'd already tweeted this on the 17th.

The stories wouldn't come out until eight whole months later. Lucy turned 32 that same day.

The handful of fans that noticed and discussed those tweets took from them that Harry had slept with Lucy in Ed's tour bus and that he had left the used condom below the guy's pillow. That's disgusting, insane, and ridiculous. He did leave an opened condom below his pillow (that's what the second tweet is about), but it wasn't used. The photo is lost to time, but I saw it years ago. Fans back then were so young and sheltered that they had no idea what the difference between a used condom and opened one was. Plus, the husband said himself that Harry and Lucy slept together in a hotel.

In any case, the relevant part of this is that we have a first mention of Harry sleeping with Lucy but without using any names, on the exact day her husband said it happened, in the exact location, by someone who was there and who Harry 100% knows and is familiar with.

I'd love to hear the twist and turns Larries take to explain THAT.

Wanna make it even worse? What about Lucy tweeting #FF to Harry and "twitter cougars" about a week after they supposedly first slept together?

#FF was "Follow Friday" a sort of tradition where you recommended your followers with new accounts to follow.

Absolutely shameless.

Hmm, maybe this tweet will do the trick? Ten days before they slept together again on her birthday?

Yes, that's a dick pun. Cox Apples. Cocks. Haha. You're thirty-two married woman openly making sexual innuendo to a literal legal child that you've been sleeping with.

It's insane to me that the tweets are still up, but they are.

And, yes, that is absolutely her real account:

Larries, as always, will somehow find a way to claim that this is fake, for PR, for attention. Lucy Horobin was crucified for this. She gained nothing from it. Neither did her husband.

It definitely didn't benefit Harry. In fact, One Direction's camp did not comment on it, and their friendly tabloid, The Sun, who was always given alllll the exclusives about the band, barely touched the subject. The exclusive went to their rival The Mirror.

There is no scenario in which this was set up or done on purpose. Lucy was just a terrible human being with no sense of self-preservation, her husband was an idiot, and Harry was a child.

ANYWAY.

So, considering Harry's activities after the Ed Sheeran show, and considering the fact that the show was in Eleanor's university, I think it's safe to say that the person Louis held watching Ed in Manchester was ELEANOR.

To make matters even funnier, Louis and Eleanor were literally photographed late-night shopping in Tesco a few months later.

We stayed up ‘till six Just watching shit TV in bed Late night drive to Tesco To buy cigarettes and bread I remember clearly how I turned to you and said I wish I met you later, I wish I met you later

As for the rest of the song, he and Eleanor met when Louis had just turned 19 and Eleanor was 18 (March 2011). He's saying he wishes he'd met her when they were both older and more mature to handle a relationship. It's a common theme in his songs.

If this song made you hold on to Larry, maybe... you can finally let go.

PS: If anyone comes here defending Lucy or her husband in this situation—literally anyone other than the 17-year-old, you'll just be blocked on sight. I'm not going to engage with that conversation. It doesn't matter if he "liked" older women. It's the adult's responsibility to not engage with this sort of thing. I'm not equipped to diagnose mental health issues, but a very young person seeking romantic or sexual relationships with older individuals is probably going through something deeper, and the last thing the adult has to do in that situation is take advantage of that.

[stylesclarified]

Do you have any opinions on the 'cakegate'?

By Cakegate do you mean Harry's tweets?

Those tweets are about Cara Delevingne and Kendall Jenner. He was hanging out a bunch with them around that time.

The date of his first tweet is January 16th, 2015.

That same day, Cara posted this on Instagram:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Cara Delevingne (@caradelevingne)

Caption: A bunch of buckets

The day after, Harry tweeted this:

Which Kendall retweeted (and no, it's not Photoshop, you can see it in the WayBack Machine)

Cara and Kendall went by CaKe—that was their ship name.

The second tweet, Cake-gate, was on January 24th, 2015 (eight days after the first one). The 24th is the day after Jeff Azoff's birthday, which is January 23rd. It's just an inside joke between them. Probably some pun about their ship name being CaKe and Jeff's birthday cake, which Harry seemed to be in charge of.

This pic is of the celebration:

Harry was spotted at Party City earlier that week and also perhaps shopping the cake?

Kendall's family is very close to the Azoff family, so she would've definitely been at Jeff's birthday party, and she and Cara were hanging out almost every day during that time.

In fact, they went together (and with Shelli Azoff) to Sam Smith's concert at The Forum a couple of days later.

And they were both at his 21st birthday party a couple of days after that. Cara posted this pic with Samantha Ronson, Rashida Jones, Kelly Osbourne, and Kendall on Feb 2nd. All of them were at the party haha.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Cara Delevingne (@caradelevingne)

If you meant another cake-gate, I don't know what you're talking about, but enjoy your Harrylesson anyway.

[stylesclarified]

Hi! I really like your blog and your responses.

I Never was a fan of Larry but still curious about it. Most things look very far fetched to me and I don’t understand how people believe in it.

But there are a few things that keep me uncertain and left me wondering:

1) when fetus Harry answered that he and Louis are dating. Like why?

2) Mario interview when they used sex innuendo (who push who)

3) why Harry moved in with Louis?

4) Adore you my and book Louis the fish references

Can you please explain/debunk them? Tell what you think?

Hey, thanks! I'm glad you like it.

I hope you realize that each of these debunks, by definition, has to be quite long. We're talking about a decade and a half of lore. It's quite a bit of work. I'd appreciate it if from now on, you'd send them in separate asks, because I don't really know if I can fit it all in one post.

1- "When fetus Harry answered that he and Louis are dating. Like why?"

First of all, I hate the term "fetus Harry." I hate this whole classifying Harry by "eras" as if he was a Pokemon that evolved. It's dehumanizing.

Harry did not say that he and Louis were dating. That's a typical Larrie lie—taking what actually happened out of context.

Let's actually give it the context it needs.

From late 2010 on, fans "shipped" all the guys together in a bunch of different pairings. Larry was the most popular one, with Niam—Niall and Liam—not far behind. Harry and Louis were actually very close friends for a hot second, and the band in general was very online. They did Twitcams all the time, and followed and replied to fans constantly. One Direction and Justin Bieber spearheaded what's today known as Stan Twitter.

Larry was a joke everyone participated in. For instance the following two screenshots come from the same blog.

The post about Eleanor is from February 24 2012, and the post about Larry from February 27. Same year, same blog—three days apart.

So, how did it go from a joke to a conspiracy theory?

When One Direction first got put together, Louis had a girlfriend called Hannah. For the most part, fans of the band really liked her. Louis met Eleanor in March 2011, seemingly cheated on Hannah with Eleanor, broke up with Hannah in late July 2011, and by mid September 2011 was openly dating Eleanor.

Fans did not take well to this (even though the whole cheating thing wasn't really known). In fact, in late 2011 and early 2012, the main issue Louis defended Eleanor from wasn't conspiracy theorists, but fans of Hannah that wanted her back.

When he tweeted this—note the YOU in all caps...

It was because that day was Hannah's birthday and fans were tweeting up a storm about wanting Louis and Hannah back together. They were also tweeting pictures of them together and allegedly even sent those pictures to Eleanor directly.

Louis felt bad and defensive, so he decided to tweet that.

Parallel to this, since about late 2011, a group of people on Tumblr were taking the whole Larry thing seriously—going from joking about it to trying to prove it was actually real. It was a very small number of weirdos, and it would've probably never taken off had this whole Eleanor/Hannah thing not happened at the same time as Harry was starting to date Caroline Flack, who was 15 years Harry's senior.

Harry had been linked to other women before, but he was seen with Caroline a bit, was asked about it in interviews, and they interacted some on social media, which enraged fans. They mostly claimed it was the age gap (which would've been a fair criticism), but it was clear that for most the problem was jealousy (which is not fair at all).

In the context of Louis dumping the girlfriend the fandom liked and getting with someone they didn't, and Harry dating an older woman they definitely didn't like, impressionable fans started to get swayed more and more by conspiracy theories.

At first, it was a majority of jokes and a small number of people believing the conspiracy theories, but over time, slowly, it started to shift. Between 2010 and 2012, you could be just "A Larry shipper"—someone who liked them together and joked about it. From 2013 on, Larry shippers were basically extincted, replaced instead by "Larries", conspiracy theorists who truly believed they were together and tried to prove it.

When it was mostly jokes, Harry, Louis, and their friends and family, would go along with them. Almost all of "Larry proof" is those early stages, when there wasn't an actual conspiracy theory that was widespread yet and everyone followed along with the jokes.

Harry and Louis were close friends, and their moms also became quite close (they were of a similar age, similar area, background, both divorced, etc). Everyone went along with it. Until it started to get out of hand.

Now, if Louis was defensive about the whole Louhannah thing, I think you can only imagine how defensive he would get about the whole Larry thing when it started to cross over into conspiracy territory...

Fans not only insulted Eleanor, but started to directly harass her. They would email her university to "prove" that she wasn't who she said she was. They made theories about who her father was (Eleanor has posted her dad on Snapchat—it is not, in fact, a billionaire working for Jive Records). There was a whole whack ass theory about her having a twin/triplets... They started involving Louis' family—mainly his mom and sisters. They would pressure them to "confirm" Larry, and they'd get upset whenever it was denied.

Louis' sisters were quite young—Lottie was 13/14, Fizzy was 11/12, and the twins were 9/10 when all of this was brewing. They looked up to Eleanor, who became like an older sister to them, and they got pretty defensive of her, as little kids often do.

So, in turn, Louis got more upset at the whole thing and would often go on rants on Twitter to deny it. Eleanor and Louis' best friend, Stan, would also tweet alongside him. Sadly, this contributed to the proliferation of the conspiracy. The more attention he brought onto it, the worse it became. I don't blame him for it, to be perfectly clear, but that's just a version of the Streisand effect.

This whole thing unfolded between late 2011 and late 2012. It wasn't immediate. It wasn't that one day everyone was joking and the next everyone was a conspiracy theorist. It shifted slowly.

So, that's the context.

The interaction you mention happened March 17th 2012. One Direction was doing a signing in Boston. Their debut album, Up All Night, had come out March 13th in America, so they were signing that. A fan approached the table and talked to all the guys. Harry was last in line. When she got to him, Harry gave her a smile and she asked him, "Are you and Louis dating?" Harry looked quite tired (they all did) and didn't seem particularly amused by the question. He just nodded. The fan pressed, "You are?" to which Harry gave her a lazy, "Yeah." Then the fan said, "I figured," and, as she was ushered to leave the line, Harry gave her a lazy smile.

Here you have the video. The specific interaction starts at 1:03 mins.

Here you have it in gif form

He didn't say they were dating. He just went along with a fan who joked about it. She was JOKING.

This is from the fan who asked this question, THE DAY after she asked the question. Not much of a Larrie if she's fantasizing about Harry romantically, huh? But I have more confirmation.

She actually thinks it's ridiculous that people are still going on about it, and thinks her question was "stupid". She quite literally wanted him to date Taylor Swift later that year...

She also confirmed that Harry was "being sarcastic":

So the fact that thirteen years later we're still having this conversation is insane. This is the person that took the video. She was never even a conspiracy theorist to begin with. She just liked them together.

And this is 100% the same fan. Her name is the same in both accounts (Daena), and she linked her old Twitter handle in the description of the video. It used to be YMCMBelieb. She has changed her Twitter handle since 2012, but if you search the old one on Twitter today, you'll find people replying to "Pogue_Malone."

Larries take Harry smiling at her "I figured" as him "being moved by her support." He was smiling at a fan who had paid to get his signature. He smiled at her when she first approached him, then smiled again as she left. The fan DIDN'T EVEN ACTUALLY THINK HE WAS WITH LOUIS. She was JOKING.

I'm going to answer #2 in this post but I'll move to separate posts for the other two.

2- Mario interview when they used sex innuendo (who push who)

I'm adding this one here because it's just the same exact thing as we just went over. It was a joke. Harry and Louis are BRITISH.

British humour carries a strong element of satire aimed at the absurdity of everyday life. Common themes include sarcasm, tongue-in-cheek, banter, insults, self-deprecation, taboo subjects, puns, innuendo, wit, and the British class system. These are often accompanied by a deadpan delivery which is present throughout the British sense of humour.

The "Mario Kart" interview happened in February 16th 2012. Combine your typical British humor with the context of how the fandom treated the whole "Larry" thing in early 2012" and you have your answer.

They're just joking. I don't know what else to tell you. They're joking. They're not openly discussing their sex life in an interview. Larries need to choose—were they a closeted couple that was forced to have fake girlfriends and limit their interactions in public or were they telling the world what sexual positions they favored? You can't have both at the same time.

Here's the interview:

It was posted in March but recorded in February. And they thought it'd be funny to joke about bumfucking. Because they were British boys.

I'm almost finished with the third question, but it'll have to be done in two separate posts if I want to be thorough.. I'll also do a separate post for the fourth one.