#LarriesAreOverParty: What is 'Larry'? Here's why former One Direction member Louis Tomlinson really hates it
On Tuesday, December 15, #LarriesAreOverParty was trending on Twitter. At the time of writing this report, close to 10,000 people were tweeting under the hashtag. And there was a great deal of bile directed towards the “Larries”.
“I hate Larries sm. I hate Larries so much. when I see Larries my blood just boils. I feel my skin burning and my eyes watering, my heart drops and I feel like fire is consuming my entire body. why are Larries so evil and cruel? I hate them. I hate them. #larriesareoverparty,” wrote a Twitter user. Incidentally, this message was copy-pasted by several other Twitter users.
But not everyone tweeting under the trend seemed to agree with this hatred. One Twitter user wrote, “The fact that people under the #LarriesAreOverParty says that Larries are fetishising Larry and stuff makes me wanna laugh. Don’t they see how we actually care about their well being? We just want them to be happy.”
i hate larries sm. i hate larries so much. when i see larries my blood just boils. i feel my skin burning and my eyes watering, my heart drops and i feel like fire is consuming my entire body. why are larries so evil and cruel? i hate them. i hate them. #larriesareoverparty
— ᴴsanne²⁸◟̽◞̽ (@notfinewalls) December 15, 2020
The fact that people under the #LarriesAreOverParty says that Larries are fetishising Larry and stuff makes me wanna laugh. Don’t they see how we actually care about their well being ? We just want them to be happy.
— Ash || she / her (@AshAdoreLarry) December 15, 2020
But this begs the question: What or who are Larries? Is it a group of people who all have the same first name, Larry? Unfortunately, no. “Larries” are One Direction fans who believe that former band members Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson are a real-life couple. They believe that the two are in a serious, committed, and long term relationship. They also believe that the relationship was covered up by One Direction management, Simon Cowell. Fans who “ship” them together are also often referred to as Larry Stylinson shippers.
In 2017, Tomlinson spoke to The Sun about his friendship with Styles. He said, “There’s no politics or anything. Inevitably in a band, you’re going to get some people who get on really well and some people who get on quite well. I have forever had a very, very high level of respect for Harry. He’s great in this situation, he’s great on stage, he’s a great musician and artist. It’s just one of those things that happens naturally in a band.”
He admitted the pressure from “Larry” conspiracy theorists was a factor in their friendship struggling, especially given the serious relationship he has with girlfriend Eleanor Calder. “I’ve never actually been asked about it directly. It’s a funny thing,” he said then. “It kind of happened naturally for me and Harry because a certain amount of the fans drew up this conspiracy. When it first came around I was with Eleanor, and it actually felt a little bit disrespectful to Eleanor, who is my girlfriend now.”
“I’m so protective over things like that, about the people I love. So it created this atmosphere between the two of us where everyone was looking into everything we did. It took away the vibe you get off anyone. It made everything, I think on both fences, a little bit more unapproachable. I think it shows that it was never anything real, if I can use that word.”
In 2019, when the HBO drama series ‘Euphoria’ showed an animated sequence of Tomlinson and Styles together, as imagined by a smutty fan-fiction writer, the singer reacted to it in an interview with The Guardian, even though he was supposedly wary of adding “fuel to the fire” by talking about it.
“I know, culturally, it’s interesting, but I’m just a bit tired of it,” he said. “Again, I get the cultural intention behind that. But I think... It just felt a little bit … No, I’m not going to lie, I was p***ed off. It annoyed me that a big company would get behind it.”