'No words can sum up what One Direction actually mean to me. So many people will say the same thing about how much they have changed their life blah blah blah, but it's true. They've made me be able to continue through the toughest times in my life and I wouldn't change them for the world.'
Meet Louise Jane (@fxckyeahharry – 21.7K followers), a 16-year-old One Direction fan – or 'Directioner', if we're being technical. 'I have no life,' reads her Twitter biog. 'I don't use Twitter for any other reasons other than One Direction,' she tells me. 'I use my Twitter every day on my phone, then when I get home I will come online. I'm on Twitter too much, I spend the majority of my time on it'
Earlier this month, Niall Horan, one of the five-pronged, smooth-skinned teenage phenomenon, said that being on *The X Factor effectively *robbed him of his childhood and that he had little choice about the fact that he was leaving school with no qualifications. But what need has he now for education? On October 5 he surpassed 20 million Twitter followers, and his words never generate fewer than 15,000 retweets. To his adoring fans he is a blonde slice of perfection, on whom education would be wasted.
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But who are the people who follow the boys and retweet their every word?
Simone Larsen (@flirtystyless – 19K followers) is 17 years old and a Directioner from Denmark. On her birthday this year – July 6 – she sent the same tweet to Harry Styles 200 times, begging him to follow her account. The previous day she sent virtually the same tweet 40 times. 'Just getting noticed' by her favourite band member, she says, 'would be a dream come true. If Harry followed me, I would literally scream and cry, and pinch myself to see if I was dreaming.' Harry Styles has yet to acknowledge any of Simone's tweets.
If Harry followed me, I would literally scream and cry, and pinch myself to see if I was dreaming.
Fans like Simone and Louise are part of a vast network of Twitter users who obsessively follow the members of One Direction, retweeting everything they say and talking to one another about their every move. This summer marked four years since Harry, Liam, Louis, Niall, and Zayn appeared on *The X Factor *and began to work their way into the hearts of teenage girls all over the country. The anniversary day itself – July 23 – was one of special importance, as fans gathered together to marvel at the history of their favourite quintet. 'Four years of One Direction',' says a user called @zarrylubetube. 'Did you mean four years of bad grades, tears, and no social life?' @LovePizzaNiall said this: 'NIALL TWEETED NOW WE ONLY NEED THE REST TO TWEET ABOUT THEIR 4TH ANNIVERSARY AND WE WILL ALL BE ABLE TO DIE HAPPILY #4YearsOfOneDirection.'
17-year-old Ashley Bello from California (@silly_addiction – 15.7K followers) tells me she is currently writing her own fan fiction about the group with her cousin. Louise, too, wrote some in which she toured with the boys on their X Factor tour. And why not? A 25-year-old fan called Anna Todd recently secured a six-figure deal to have her online fan fiction about the band published, to the astonishment of those to whom fan fiction still seems to belong to a strange, obsessive world. Some of the fan fiction available online is quite something:
Louise says that she finds many of the stories she reads 'frustrating because Harry is portrayed as something he isn't so it's more like a character with Harry's name and face not how he ACTUALLY is, he's like a little cupcake'. This is a common thread during my conversations with the Directioners; nobody knows the boys like their biggest fans, not even the other huge fans.
I don't really discuss One Direction with haters. They can hate all they want, but in the end, I think they do it to get attention
There are Twitter feuds with fans of rival performers, specifically those of The Wanted and Justin Bieber, says Aron Turno (@AjHoranlicious), a 17-year-old fan from the Philippines. Here is wonderful coverage of a feud with the hashtag #BeliebersHateDirectioners at its epicentre. These fights don't last forever, Aron says, because the fans' energy needs to be devoted to supporting 'the boys'. Simone, too, believes that it is a waste of her time talking to those who don't like the band: 'I don't really discuss One Direction with haters. They can hate all they want, but in the end, I think they do it to get attention, because of jealousy (obviously!) or because they have nothing else to do with their lives.'
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Aron, who has almost 100,000 Twitter followers, says that she argues with fellow Directioners about 'Larry' (Liam and Harry) because they are unsure whether or not the pair's relationship is romantic. The amount of time the girls put into tweeting about the band is absolutely staggering; they draw from a seemingly infinite supply of energy, capital letters and exclamation marks when lavishing praise on their saviours. They create photo collages and GIFs; they spend all night discussing the band. This is not surprising if, in Simone's words, 'They've changed my life,' and, in Ashley's, 'Without them I don't think I would be here today.' When I ask the girls what they would do were the band to split up, they can barely even entertain the thought. 'That would be hard for me to accept and I'd be crying for days,' says Aron. 'It's the worst thing in the world to think about,' says Ashley. 'I start to cry when I think about it.'
And, when I ask Louise what her parents think of her constant tweets about the band, she says, 'They have never really experienced it so I wouldn't expect them to understand.' In this sentence she manages to sum up a great deal about the experience of being absolutely devoted to someone: to the person going through it, there is nothing anyone can say to break the spell. To the Directioners, it really is only them and 'the boys'.
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** Follow Ralph on Twitter @OhHiRalphJones**
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.