Larrie
Part of speech: noun
Morphological type: derivation
Topics: lifestyle
Etymology: From Larry (“real-person fiction ship of Louis Tomlinson and Harry Styles”) + -ie (suffix signifying an associated person).
Base: Larry
Affixes: -ie
Inflected forms:
form: Larries
pos: noun
tags: plural
Senses:
gloss: A shipping conspiracy theorist who believes that former One Direction bandmates Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson have a long-term and secret romantic relationship.
pos: noun
tags: slang
examples: As 1D are now on a hiatus and band members are pursuing solo carreers,^([sic]) the Larries still live on as a community engaged with support for LGBTQ youths—and producing 1D-themed merchandise for charity.
Representation of the Larry fandom has gone beyond pathologizing fangirls to framing their shipping practice in terms of “fake news.” The conspiracy theory panic around Larries misses the complex ways that subtext and queer reading are mobilized within the fandom to invoke feelings of queer intimacy and belonging. Drawing on a digital ethnography conducted on Twitter with Larries, we argue that these fans engage in queer reading strategies to explicitly imagine and interrupt dominant heterosexual narratives, and thus queer the figure of the fangirl.
The theory is so popular that one of the most retweeted tweets of all time is simply Louis wishing Harry well with “Always in my heart @Harry_Styles. Yours sincerely, Louis,” sent in October 2011. Larries, or Larry Stylinson shippers, believe the message is indisputable proof that the two were and are together, despite the fact that neither party has vocalized an interest in men and have only ever publicly partnered with women. When Tomlinson began dating Eleanor Calder in September 2011, one year into the band’s existence, Larries believed she was acting as a beard, though Louis assured fans that he wasn’t hiding homosexuality.
While I mope my way out of junior year, my classmates meet a person worth skipping class for: our adolescent mainstay; Tumblr’s participation trophy; the face of all things wholesome yet perverse and totally, definitively, how-many-retweets-for-you-to-go-to-prom-with-me, fuck-the-larries-they’re-invasive, masturbate-to-a-Y/N, let’s-sell-out-a-Chelsea-boot, Internet. / Harry Styles.
There is some room, mostly in offline conversations, to equivocate about Larry. Mina Hughes, a student from Texas, told me she didn’t identify as a Larrie, but she was invested in the story. “I am a grown-up, and I am self-aware enough to know that it’s really childish to want total strangers to be dating,” she told me. […] She [“Lisa”] fields questions nearly every day from new Larries who don’t have the same knowledge of a decade’s worth of lore—if she’s in the mood, that is. Otherwise she might simply command them to “scroll down.” Her bio explains that she has been part of the fandom since 2012 and a Larrie “since day 1.”
From causing friends to drift apart, to committing oversexualization that disrespects Louis' and Harry's individual craft, Larries continue to exist and dominate spaces within the online world. […] “Louis and Harry are one day closer to being free” are the words tweeted daily by a Larrie twitter^([sic]) user @rogueskimo. While its realisation is yet to come, and the not-yet remains to be ever present, the Larrie sub-fandom, through occupying the field of romance and utilizing its unending potential will continue to yield a powerful noise that shall sustain not just their narrative of Louis and Harry’s relationship, but their very existence as a sub-fandom.
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