#ziam day

[theeliampayne]

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[hl-obsessed]

✨ I don't know how else to sum it up 'Cause words ain't good enough Ooh, I can't explain your love, no It's better than words Better than words ✨

for Hani @theeliampayne as always 💕 just because i can

[behindthesefangirleyes]

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[pathetic-dreamy]

hello! i just wanted to tell you the (tags) classifications of my quotes.

i’ve curated them throughout the years and thought it’d be cool for you guys to know all of them:

[kaylashouse]

they are soo cuteee

[youmakemestrong]

punching the wall repeatedly because zayn wanted to make up with liam and now he'll never get to

[rubdown]

The fact that that Mikey Way was playing bass for Fall Out Boy on stage n getting passed around like a salad and Liam commented on Zayn's post then Zayn replied to his comment like what year is it, the 1990s??????? And I'm supposed to sit here on my hands instead of blowing up

[yaz-the-spaz]

ok but the rainbow background on this post is sending me 🌈 😂

P.S. anyone else been thinkin bout how Liam's new "where dark meets light" tattoo has the same energy as Zayn's yin yang tattoo and the light and dark line in pillowtalk or is that just me 👀🤔💭

[moonsaurora]

what is the one moment of proof or evidence that is undeniable to you? it’s hard to explain what i’m asking lol but the one thing that you’re holding onto that has you like - yes. they’re real. they’re together. maybe the one moment that when you were getting into them that made your jaw drop and make you believe completely, like you don’t think it could be explained away at all. for both larry and ziam

[quietzap]

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[douxnoire2025]

My whole thing is this: This happened in front of an entire camera crew, who then kept it in the commercial that aired worldwide.

No one else is standing as close as they are together, because that’s just what Zayn and Liam do, disregard all personal space. Then Zayn takes it upon himself to rub Liam’s chest. With Modest breathing down their necks, I seriously doubt the director told Zee to do that.

He just did it. So the crew was A.) dense enough to think that was a friendly gesture, B.) oblivious enough not to notice, or C.) too done with them, because THIS was the LEAST sexual take of the bunch.

But either way we get Zayn plastered onto Liam’s back like a koala, rubbing his chest and nipples for the entirety of the free world to see.

Y’all do realize, that whether or not Ziam was or is official, that��s not a platonic gesture whatsoever. I’m not gonna just rub against someone’s chest that I’m not interested in or haven’t done something with. Most people wouldn’t. Let alone for an audience of millions.

And before anyone says anything about how they’ve all grabbed each other’s nipples and the like. THAT is not the same! There’s a playfulness with rest of them. This is just straight up ‘what can I get away’ with lust.

That’s for me the most Ziam-proving gif: In the last part Zayn knocks himself against Liam’s back. Ok, so far, but then, he slides his hand down Liam’s chest, over the nipples, and that’s… you just dont do that i an asexual way.

I do that, with my husband. Not with my brother or my friends or a sexy guy in a club. When Im drunk out of my mind and in a touchy mood, I might prod somebody’s muscles, on the upper arm, but not like that. At all.

It’s so… comfy and sort of familiar, what Zayn does.

[djtommotomlinson]

x

[autumnrory]

i know i'm biased as they have always been my faves and the real person ships i've been most interested in but like i GET people still being larries and kaylors because there was always sooooo much evidence for it but i'll see stuff about a ship i didn't think that was big and people insisting they're still together and i'm just like what are you on about

[pathetic-dreamy]

*After a fight*

Liam: You’re not invited to my birthday party!

Zayn: Have fun with three guests who will drive you nuts after an hour!

Liam:

Liam: Okay fine but you get no cake!

[comradeocean]

"I have found myself talking out loud to you, hoping you can hear me" is a bonkers way for a celebrity to begin a public memorial statement less than 24 hrs after the death happened by someone who has possibly not personally spoken to the dead person in question for almost ten years. I cannot stop thinking about it.

In 2013, Channel 4 did a documentary called Crazy About One Direction that featured a number of high octane waaaay out there fans. I think the band was asked about it during an interview; Louis and the others basically disavowed it, saying it was an unfair representation of girls who like One Direction and the fanbase in general. He wasn't being totally selfless in sticking up for the fans, because some of those girls were profoundly sad and lonely, maybe unwell. And if your mission is to be marketed as a fun-loving carefree boyband, the last thing you'd want to be associated with are young, maladjusted, friendless girls.

Anyway, at one point, one of the girls interviewed says:

Twitter is like a prayer place. When you go to a prayer place, you feel like you’re connected to God. So when you’re on twitter, you feel like you’re connected to 1D. You just have hope. [audio description alt-text: an image of Louis as Jesus Christ]

Zayn is also the only one of the boys to have crossposted his message to twitter.

The thing about One Direction being an accident, sure, a manufactured accident, but an accident nonetheless, is that they were guileless going in, and it showed. I've been mainlining old videos this week, trying to compare those early xfactor days with their contemporaries who were trying to break out around the same time. With everyone else, it was always a band full of Liams: intensely driven little freaks. Sorry, freak is maybe too mean a word to describe that particular mix of hunger and desperation to be accomplished, to be famous, and at the bottom of it all: to be liked. There's been a conscious shaping of the persona in service of those goals: they've learned to dance, to perform, to give pitches, soundbites, hit camera marks on cue. Most of them were also older, in their early to mid twenties. It's not inconceivable to imagine such a trajectory for the most diehard theatre kid you knew from school who decided after uni or whatever ~ to follow their dreams ~. That was the more typical boyband background. (not Liam though. lad was fourteen. he was closer to another subspecies of the genus: the child star)

And 1D in contrast were unpracticed, unstudied, as Zayn put it in that slightly off-kilter way of his (which I always imagine to be indicative of a disjunction between the vocabulary one encounters in school and what everyone around them is used to speaking), "novice children."

Like, truly, they did not give a fuck cos it hadn't yet occurred to them they were supposed to. Liam aside, industry norms were a complete mystery to them, and for many years, they managed to inhabit that sweet spot of flippancy without contempt, whether it was about the project, themselves, or their audience. Liam tells the story about being the go-between for xfactor stylists and the boys and getting into so much trouble on their behalf for wearing human-sized babygrows during a video diary. "Because Westlife would never wear those." [The punchline he then delivers is that Westlife members were pictured wearing onesies soon after. (quite possibly due to how viral anything 1D-related got)]

The boys were so immature. The whole boyband thing had fallen into their laps. They were just happy to be there! This thing that they didn't even know they wanted, they somehow got, and it took the shape of four other boys in exactly the same situation. It comes across very strongly how taken they were with themselves and each other. Find yourself a guy who looks at you the way blah Larry Stylinson blah blah Ziam blah blah blah. Never mind that cos they were all actually so hyped with each other. Any time any of them says anything remotely clever, or funny, or notable, the rest of them lose their shit like they're in on the same hilarious joke. Even if there was no actual joke. Their entire existence at that point was the joke bc how on earth had they landed from where they'd been — small deadend towns hollowing out from deindustrialization — to where they ended up — the xfactor house headed for the very top about to win it all, in the way they did — saved from bootcamp elimination at the last minute, with who they did — four other working class boys they would have never been friends with in another life. It must have been a high like a kind of limerence, like finding long lost family members on the exact same wavelength, like love.

And that was the other key thing about the stratospheric rise of One Direction. We didn't love One Direction only because we loved this or that member. We loved them because they loved each other, because they loved themselves, because they loved us. And they used the internet to show it.

In 2010, mass social media platforms were in their nascence, which is to say, the exploration of how to be a person, with other people, online, at a broad level not limited to specific subcultures, was in its nascence. For many years now, given the levels of extreme over-exposure, the dominant mood has become the mortifying ordeal of being perceived and so on. We've somehow all adopted mini-celebrity mindsets of our own, weary of being exposed to the maw of an unseen public. To be known is to be surveilled.

But the boys individually and at the collective level invited surveillance back then. Because the inverse — to be surveilled is to be known — seemed more relevant for that moment, at the beginning. They made a point of living their newfound lives at least partially online.

They were constantly on twitter, they livestreamed with a dedication that rivaled x-factor video producers, and none more so than Liam. It was already reality tv, this was just the next bleeding edge of "real": the unfiltered, unedited, direct sharing of yourself and what you loved in the last days of the old free-as-in-freedom internet.

When they said, over and over again, that it was all about the fans, it was meant in a very literal sense. Social media and the reality it created produced a feedback loop between the love they had for each other and the band, and the love we had for them, until it was inseparable: their relationships, our relationships, the process itself. Parasociality as it is currently manifested might have found its first mass expression through One Direction.

In separate interviews from This is Us (2013) deleted scenes, Liam and Louis say that Zayn wears his heart on his sleeve. Yet within the best-friends-slash-brothers-for-life schema cultivated as the One Direction vibe, he did not seem necessarily exceptional in his frequent declarations of love and fellow-feeling for various band mates. What he did ultimately end up doing was pulling the trigger on the contractual form their relationships were bound within, such that the I-love-you's inevitably passed from unpracticed to rote to a mandatory matter of their livelihoods. Someone had to be the first to explicitly and consciously decide that this "love" was no longer something they could continue participating in.

From the same set of deleted interview, in a somewhat fitting twist of symmetry, Louis and Zayn go on and on (much longer than Niall or Harry) about how Liam had been the serious and sensible one, but they've managed to corrupt him a little. It makes sense to assume that Zayn is referring to the band in general, but one can also read it to mean the two of them specifically, being the eldest, and their meta-cognition of the terms and conditions imposed by One Direction as a phenomenon.

The love the members of One Direction had for each other and the band and the fans was undeniably "real." The making of that "realness" was conditioned by the x factor throwing together four boys who had very little reference for what the fuck they had gotten themselves into, and Liam. Liam was the intermediary. He was already a creature twisted up and contorting, trying his level best to wedge himself into whatever spaces there could be found in the juggernaut of the entertainment industry. His neuroses and anxieties made the rest of One Direction possible, made One Direction "real" and "not like the other boybands" because that DNA, that what-not-to-do instruction manual could just be crammed into him, and the rest of them could be let loose into the world, unburdened by expectation, free to not give a fuck.

Louis and Zayn's raw, unpolished, typo-ridden letters were the most direct and irrefutable way they knew to swear fidelity to the boy they knew, the band they built, and the lives they lived together. The unfathomable ether of the internet, of the fans, of the massed publics seen and unseen made them, it destroyed their senses of self in ways they could weather until they couldn't, and it's into this ether they send their words, their grief, something real of themselves. Because in the universe of One Direction, this is the orthopraxis by which one proclaims one's faith and one's hopes. This is the prayer place that transcends distance, time, even death. This is how their brother could somehow, some way, still feel their love.

[watchingsunrises]

Ziam is real, climb on board

For the first time, we’re experiencing a genuine influx of people looking into Ziam, the real relationship between Zayn and Liam. And honestly it’s about time. It’s always been so beautiful and devoted and consistent and visible to those willing to invest and find out for themselves. It’s also been so unseen and dismissed and a bit buried by Larry too. I’m a Larry too, but right now I’m all about Ziam. I’m really happy Ziam is getting there deserved time seeing some light.

I’m not here to convince anyone. Ziam isn’t new, it has been around and discussed and real since 2012 when we believe their relationship started extending beyond friendship. There is an existing treasure trove that can be sought out by people willing to open their mind and examine it, especially from Zayn and Liam themselves. Right from the start and up until present day. 

The truth is we are experiencing a moment we weren’t expecting. First with Liam’s death. Now with Zayn touring for the first time ever as a solo artist. 

People are interested in Liam and that is a normal reaction. People are noticing a lot of things that don’t make sense and are curious and questioning that. People can’t make sense about his relationship with his “girlfriend”, the public PR performance at his funeral of a select group of celebrities (all aligned with Modest, Simon Jones PR or existing narratives regarding the boys) and of course the narrative around his “son” Bear.

Usually when things don’t make sense, there is a good reason, we know this with Larry too, and so in the same way people should look and critically engage. Gaps can’t always be filled when we are dealing with public media narratives that then clearly don’t align with who a person really is consistently as a human. It's pretty hard work for all involved to contain a decades plus closet, in times like this. That is a big part of what people are noticing with Liam. They should question public narratives and media. Liam wanted to be seen and heard for who he really was, and celebrating and talking about Ziam right now is one of the biggest parts of seeing and knowing Liam. Its not disrespectful if you've done the work to see and know, just like with Larry.

Now we also finally have Zayn touring for the first time ever as a solo artist. Seeing him on stage after a 10 year wait is kind of exhilarating and like any of the boys you get a reminder on stage of who the person really is, really leaning in and hearing the lyrics live and seeing his being. Zayn is very definitely coding to us in a way that he hasn’t been able to do so before. He knew we would be looking and he wants to be seen. He is literally telling us that he is honest and truthful in his music. Zayn’s public narrative has never made sense either, it's all the same closeting stuff. Copy of a copy of a copy.

The narrative set up for Room Under the Stairs was actually quite strange, and in reality it translates very poorly to the lyrics and the emotions. So many gaps and things that don't make sense. In the future I will share some analysis on RUTS. I’ve been immersed in the album non-stop since May. The album to me is mostly about his closet - the pain it has caused him, the effect it has had on his relationship, the pain and effect it has had on his long term partner, the ways in which he has had to reframe his mindset to live within the reality of his closet, the ways he has changed his lifestyle to focus on the simple things in life to help his mental health impacted by his closet (and other things). Yet throughout all that heartbreaking pain, he still talks about his person, his lover, he refers to 'they' in many key lyrics, he brings his partner into the lyrics clearly, lyrics that clearly refer back to past and present times. Its the same person, it always has been in Zayn's lyrics. He tells them and us that he wouldn’t change anything despite all that pain, that their love has been worth it, that he is devoted, that their love was like stardust from the start until forever. The most specific songs relating to his person haven't been included on the tour setlist - How it Feels, The Time, False Starts, Grateful, Something in the Water and of course Stardust. They are the strongest songs on the album, the ones that have made me cry non-stop for the last 6 months. I suspect he rearranged the setlist, they would have been too hard to sing live. Instead we see a few B sides we wouldn't have expected on tour. I hope more people will listen to RUTS, it's absolutely devastating, empowering and life affirming and you can really see and feel who Zayn is.

Enjoy your Ziam journey if you decide to take it.