The lights have dimmed, the boys have taken their final bow, and OTRA is officially over – the last tour One Direction planned before their hiatus in 2016. Fans can still look forward to a handful of events that the boys will attend before the world slows down for Harry, Louis, Liam, and Niall for some well earned time off.
One thing that doesn’t seem to be slowing down however, is the media circus that has surrounded the boys since their quick rise to fame. In fact – it seems like it’s actually spinning faster – almost as if to cause a big distraction and have fans looking one way while we should be glancing another.
Louis, Harry, Niall, and Liam are no strangers to interviews; they’ve been filmed, recorded and put to print for years now, it’s as routine for them as waking up and brushing their teeth. They’ve also been misquoted, had key parts of their interviews removed, and been made to seem like alternate versions of who they really are; which is again nothing new for them. What is new is the magnitude in which these articles full of fallacies are being published, the desperation in trying to spread the messages, and the lengths “journalists” are willing to go to sell a particular narrative – even though the fans have been promised otherwise.
Their narrative? Liam, Niall, Louis, and Harry are just hollow shells of once vibrant young men who hate one another and have no real plan to return to fans – they just keep making empty promises to make as much money as they can before it’s all over.
Except, fans know their boys and that’s not the truth at all.
What is true is that the miserable self loathing people posing as ‘journalists’ who write these articles about One Direction are the ones who know their time is coming to an end. They’re the ones who won’t have “secret” information or “exclusive” stories to sell to a deluded group who only pick up their excuses for publications because, they too, feed off of nothing but drama and disdain to entertain their own boring lives.
It’s a sad, pathetic narrative – but it sells – and who better to sell it than people who have already shown themselves to be worried about nothing but money, regardless of who they hurt along the way?
That’s why journalists like Dan Wooton have made such a killing writing about One Direction, and other people – recently a Jan Moir – that he praises for their pieces on the lads follow the same suit as him. They have “insiders” and “sources” that never have a name, they go to shows and see a lack of emotion and an “already waiting to go solo Harry” alone on stage while Louis misses his lyrics and Liam tries to sell to his own fans and Niall just jumps around waiting to be off stage with a pint in his hand.
This is what journalists have reduced the lovely boys of One Direction to – a band of young men who are only together for selfish reasons until their time runs out.
This is the exact opposite of who Liam, Niall, Harry, and Louis have proven themselves on countless occasions to be.
Recently – one of Dan’s articles for The Sun caused such a rise in a pal of the boys that Ben Winston flew from LA to Sheffield to catch their last official OTRA date (because he is close to the boys, this wasn’t a total shock) but it was also in part to see if there was any truth to the total misguidance that he’d seen in print days prior.
Ben’s conclusion? What we all expected. Dan had absolutely no idea what he was talking about.
https://twitter.com/benwinston/status/660638996159143936
One Direction remain united and their sense of camaraderie has only grown stronger after their extremely stressful time on the road in 2015. The band has seen more changes in the last few months than they did in years prior – but it’s only brought them closer together – only made them more united.
This was a gesture that only caused Dan to be more upset and another article was posted this morning – instead of One Direction being the target of the result of Dan’s personal struggles, it was Ben himself. Dan states that Victoria Beckham thinks Ben is …. wait for it …. deluded about his friendship with David and that she is keeping an eye on the situation.
So now it’s being insinuated that Ben is a bit wacky and he should not be trusted. Why? All because he had something positive to say about Niall, Liam, Harry, and Louis. All because he isn’t trying to push the train wreck narrative that is making people like Dan, One Direction’s awful PR team, and many other behind the scenes individuals money.
The bad boy, hate in the band, dead beat father to be, party boy narrative does NOT help the boys. These images are false, but they are the ones being pushed and to the target fan base of One Direction – young girls. Why on earth would these stories encourage young women to idolize the boys, or more importantly, their parents to allow their daughters to buy merchandise, attend concerts, and support boys who were genuinely bad at heart?
It wouldn’t, but people don’t stop and think about that. Instead, the majority of people outside of the fandom see an article that speaks negatively about the boys and due in part to the normal human reaction to be interested in drama and partially to their own self deprecation; they buy these stories because it’s easy to hate people you don’t know for your own struggles than address them within yourself.
There will be, no doubt, more articles that try to destroy the boys, make the fans look crazy, and sell false images of who Louis, Harry, Liam, and Niall are. They will try to drag them down and devalue the things the boys say, the gestures they make to fans, and the promises that are given by their loving hearts.
What also will exist though is a fan base who knows better than to read into the bull, and instead take the time to realize that the boys are simply tired and in need of a bit of time off due to the exhausting and stressful lives they’ve been existing in for the last five years. The fans know that the true problem behind what’s been wearing on the boys and fans alike isn’t a series of demands given by the people who truly care about them, but a high mark to be met by people who should have looked out for them but didn’t.
Fans know better. Harry, Louis, Niall, and Liam know better. Love wins. Truth wins. One Direction comes back from this, and fans – we do too.
Harry said it himself – love wins; always.