Crazy About One Direction

Crazy About One Direction is a British documentary that aired in 2013 on Channel 4. It received backlash from the One Direction fandom, and the backlash was covered in the popular press at the time, as well as in journalistic and academic publications later on.
==Fan Reactions and Alleged Suicides==
Asserted to be "the most tweeted about documentary ever on television" (Accessed 10 Sep 2019), it quickly resulted in hundreds of thousands of tweets, many including the hashtags #thisisnotus, #channel4thisisnotus and #RIPLarryShippers. (#thisisnotus is a reference to One Direction: This Is Us, the Morgan Spurlock One Direction documentary released later that same month.) "SecondSync, who analyze the relationship between Twitter and television, recorded 368,000 tweets about the documentary, peaking at 6,141 tweets per minute as the program ended. The hashtags #thisisnotus and #channel4thisisnotus also generated 176,000 tweets within SecondSync’s monitoring window."Jones, B. (2016)
One Direction fans who were featured in the documentary as well as the filmmaker and Channel 4 were harassed online. (Accessed 10 Sep 2019) Many Larry shippers reported being bullied following the documentary, and #RIPLarryShippers trended on twitter with claims of larries committing suicide. According to the filmmaker:
ONTD readers on LiveJournal were unimpressed by the suicide claims. One commented, "Whenever there's something negative about the 1d fandom, mysterious tweets about how girls have killed themselves because of the negativity crop up.", comment by aquaecolore in ohnotheydidnt, 16 August 2013. (Accessed 15 January 2023.) A Daily Dot article pointed out that "One Direction fandom is no stranger to unsubstantiated suicide rumors" and identified an August 7 tweet as a likely source for the "14 suicides" claim. by Gavia Baker-Whitelaw, The Daily Dot, 16 August 2013.
Although some people called the rumors out as false and attention-seeking, tweet by beliebeonkaty, 15 August 2013., tweet by DorsetGirly, Aug 16, 2013. or argued that spreading fake suicide rumors only proved the documentary was right, tweet by HeatherNekole, 16 August 2013., tweet by saylorsaturn, 16 August 2013., it appears that many people did think the #RIPLarryShippers suicide rumors were genuine"It’s been like a week and people are still dead set convinced that 42-100 people killed themselves in a day over 1 Direction and nobody in the media has noticed it." , by kaputalism, 23 Aug 2013.. #RIPLarryShippers was covered by news media., The Huffington Post, August 16, 2013., The Atlantic archive for The Wire, 16 August 2013. Even band member Liam Payne heard the rumors and tweeted, "Really hope this isn't true"., 16 August 2013. Two years later some fans on twitter still appeared to believe that the rumors were true., tweet by parisstan13, 9 March 2015., tweet by theavocadochick, 15 August 2015.
The day after the documentary aired, Liam Payne sent a series of tweets addressing 1D fans:
The filmmaker Daisy Asquith authored a chapter in Seeing Fans in order to "conduct a reflexive postmortem on this fandom crisis of my own causing."Asquith, D. (2016). Crazy About One Direction: Whose Shame Is It Anyway?. In L. Bennett & P. Booth (Eds.), Seeing Fans: Representations of Fandom in Media and Popular Culture (Ch 7, pp. 79-88). Bloomsbury Academic & Professional. Notably, she asserts that some fan reactions may have been due to internalized shame, that she meant Crazy About One Direction to have an "affectionate humorous tone", that there was pressure from the network to place more emphasis on extreme fan behaviors, and that her choice of title ("I Heart One Direction") was changed by Channel 4 on the very last day of the edit to "Crazy About One Direction". Asquith also discusses documentary filmmaker ethics and fandom as performative, and notes that some of the fans criticizing the film hadn't watched it and that the subjects of the documentary were not the ones who objected to it.
== Further Reading/Meta ==
*Wikipedia:Larries
*Everything I Need I Get From You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It by Kaitlyn Tiffany: pp. 195-197
* by hellotailor on tumblr (August 18, 2013)
*Jones, B. (2016). "I Will Throw You Off Your Ship and You Will Drown and Die": Death Threats, Intrafrandom Hate, and the Performance of Fangirling. In L. Bennett & P. Booth (Eds.), Seeing Fans: Representations of Fandom in Media and Popular Culture (Ch 5, pp. 53-65). Bloomsbury Academic & Professional.
*Asquith, D. (2016). Crazy About One Direction: Whose Shame Is It Anyway?. In L. Bennett & P. Booth (Eds.), Seeing Fans: Representations of Fandom in Media and Popular Culture (Ch 7, pp. 79-88). Bloomsbury Academic & Professional.
*Tumblr: crazy about 1d and crazy about one direction tags
* by tumblr user asschlin (August 15, 2013)
*anon1d thread discussion: (2013-08-15)
== References ==
Category:One Direction
Category:2013