#if this flops im gonna commit so many crimes

[annqer]

hes singing friday im in love the cure gyus

[yoongisgoawaydoormat]

Is it Harry you don't like or how he's been branded since the early 1D days? How the media pegged him as the front man when clearly there 5 great guys in the band? I'm just curious because I like Harry and the four other guys equally in terms of music, even before they started making solo music.

im gonna kinda combine this answer with an anon i should have responded to weeks ago “i've noticed you dislike harry, especially recently with him promoting his new music, but i'm not sure how/why it started exactly. could you explain??”

for me now it’s that i don’t like harry and that’s a position i’ve come to over the course of the past 2-3 years and i think i can break that evolution down into two broad categories: his relation to zayn (both pre- and post-march 2015) and how he has approached going solo (again both pre- and post-1d going on a break). 

and what’s most important about these two for me is that it is hard to explain away his actions in these categories as Harry Styles™; these are HIS choices, HIS words, HIS actions thus forcing me to dislike harry styles the person

for the sake of people’s dashes i’m putting a read more, but for those interested i’ve written a novel explaining these categories in more detail below (deadass i just copied it all into word and it’s 1500 words long..... im-.....)

1) how harry relates to zayn

i list his relation to zayn first because i truly believe this says something about his character. he has done things specifically re: zayn that have nothing to do with how he’s been branded in 1d or how the media has portrayed him; his actions that im going to discuss and that have most negatively affected my view of him are all on harry styles the person

it really started in the summer of 2014 when he waved the inflatable hammer of israel around at a concert during a time of heightened tensions between israel and palestine (and by heightened tensions i mean more war crimes and atrocities committed by the apartheid-esque occupational regime of israel). he asked those fans for that hammer, he is the one who has multiple zionist connections and could easily be considered a zionist himself. that’s on harry styles the person. meanwhile zayn tweets #FreePalestine shortly after that and is abused off of twitter. i recognize that the (racist) double standard here is not coming directly from harry but he benefits from it (and always has) and he plays into it and i can’t even imagine how zayn felt as a muslim man having to sit and watch his bandmate get a free pass for supporting a genocidal regime while he is eviscerated for one tweet of support. harry’s role in all this was the first moment i truly began to dislike him as a person

then we have his actions after zayn left. i will never claim to know what went down. im not sure we will ever know the whole ‘truth’ of zayn leaving and i’ve always said there’s shades of grey, no clear right and wrong, good and bad. it was messy but the bottom line is that zayn left (at least in part) because he was in an unhealthy state both mentally and physically and no one deserves that. so for all that the remaining four may have been justifiably hurt, confused, angry, etc. at things we can’t even possibly know about or understand re: zayn leaving, zayn deserves to be happy and healthy and people need to respect that. i do not think harry (nor his fans) respected that or zayn himself at all in the wake of him leaving. harry’s actions during mitam promo was, in my opinon, the most egregious and blatantly disrespectful. all four of them demonstrated sadness and/or bitterness at times but harry’s behavior (such as saying the ‘paperwork’ was the hardest part of z leaving, kicking a z mask off the stage, etc.) came across to me as petty, immature, spiteful and mean-spirited. it was not a spite that i saw in the other three. as a ztan (and also just a decent human?) i lost a lot of respect for harry in those months. i think these actions showed his true colors and those are not colors which i like very much.

also i’ve discussed this a bit on this blog but with the benefit of hindsight i do believe that a lot of those bitter actions re: zayn came from a selfish place of anger at zayn for ‘beating’ him to the solo game and from a place of ‘i’m going to villainize this person in order to make myself look better now and down the line.’ i think that was ‘proven’ for me when the build up for harry’s solo material included a LOT of very intentional mentions and comparisons to zayn. obviously that was something the media and people were going to do anyway but it was to a degree that felt sanctioned and encouraged; i think that comparison and that emphasis of ‘zayn as the evil judas who left, harry as the one who stayed until it was time’ was part of harry and his teams promo strategy (that backfired when SOTT flopped compared to pillowtalk, hence why i think those comparisons in big outlets have ceased, but i digress)... that’s a lot more of my own interpretation and my own reading of the info i have so it’s not as concrete as the stuff above but it does factor into my personal view of harry annnnnd it also connects nicely to my second point

2) his solo approach

now this is a more complex issue, and more of it *could* be attributed to Harry Styles™ but im going to preface my discussion by saying that harry chose his team. he’s been hanging with the azoffs on his personal time since 2013, his friendship with jeff has always been in our faces, he’s very clearly in the driver’s seat of his career at the moment, just as niall and liam appear to be (louis is a different and extremely nuanced conversation). he’s been angling towards his solo career for YEARS and while i don’t necessarily think that in and of itself is a bad thing (everyone in bands esp boy bands does that kind of forward thinking), i think the way he has gone about it is by stepping on his four bandmates in one way or another and i think that’s really fucking shitty. he has leveraged the existing Harry Styles™ frontman, standout image to catapult himself into this weird realm of ‘im above everything, im too cool, im already a legend’ promo.

on top of that kind of broad stroke stuff, some of his specific actions are just......... eye-roll worthy. i mean think about what the FIRST thing he did was after 1D went on a break? yachtgate. you can brush that off as a stunt all you want (and obviously in many ways it was) but it was a stunt that encouraged a certain solo harry narrative. it helped solidify him as the a-lister of the band hanging with jenners on fancy boats. it helped solidify him as a ‘star in his own right’ signing contracts and paperwork with jeff. it was a stunt that HELPED harry.

this is kind of a digression but i do think it’s important to note the nuanced difference between harry and louis’ ‘stunts.’ totally disregarding conversations of ‘real or fake,’ if we look at the major ‘stunts’ harry and louis have undertaken in their careers (and within this im including anything that could be construed as their ‘personal life’ being projected publicly i.e. eleanor, danielle, babygate, taylor swift, kendull jenner, etc.) harry’s stunts have always boosted his public image while louis’ have always hurt his. i know that’s an EXTREMELY broad and generalizing brush to paint with and im not trying to say that harry’s image has always been ‘good’, i remember the womanizer days i cant even imagine how much that hurt him and it sucks. but basically harry’s stunts have always made him more famous, putting him in an increasingly better position to convert Harry Styles™ into solo success. louis’ stunts have consistently done the opposite, giving him a SERIOUS uphill battle when it comes to the general public and mainstream media acknowledging his solo endeavors.

this is a discrepancy that exists between harry and ALL the boys, not just with louis (though the gulf between them is the most... extreme i’d say). harry has always been positioned above liam, niall and zayn too, and what i have a problem with is how that is being leveraged and leaned into rather than dispelled. harry could easily take the approach niall has which is constantly recognizing the good that one direction did for him. even if he didn’t want to be so overt he could have at least tried to be as polite and gracious as zayn was, who while recognizing that he wanted to do his own thing and his own music was very conscious to acknowledge the good bits of 1D. instead we have this weird almost antagonistic approach in his (sparse) interviews wherein it feels like harry treats 1d as this thing that was holding him back, something he is now free of. it’s a pretentiousness that i dont appreciate

the final thing i’ll add in this section is in how he and his team are treating the fans that he does have. i am not one of those people but at times i feel quite bad? and sorry? for harries who are investing their time and money and effort into an artist who seems hell bent on ignoring them. this aloofness is demonstrated on his social media, i mean has he taken time to interact with or thank fans once????? the whole tour ticket debacle sounds horrendous and im sorry for fans that don’t get to go because harry and his team bungled it. there’s just a distinct...... disrespect for the fans he was bringing with him from the 1D days and that’s frustrating.