Every couple of years, I find myself fully immersed in yet another One Direction YouTube rabbit hole. I've already found all the unreleased songs, already tabbed all my favorite interviews, and yet somehow I always return with the fresh-eyed fervor of a novice.
I suppose this was (somewhat) understandable when One Direction was actually... you know... an active band... but now that they've been "on hiatus" (read: broken up) for longer than they ever were together, my re-entry into the fandom only hurts more every time. Like yes, these boys were once this young. Yes, this music is that old. Yes, the camera quality was this bad the last time I was here. Yes, while these five haven't spoken to each other in five years, while they've been off growing up and reaching all new career-highs, I've been here. To quote Taylor Swift, right where you left me.
I saw a girl that I knew in elementary school again the other day. I don't know if she recognized me (I don't think she did), and for the second I couldn't place her face, I was flooded with despair: how is this possible? Only yesterday I knew her cubby number and seat in our fourth grade classroom, and now her smile is only vaguely familiar, her voice far deeper than I ever remember it being.
My friends and I have this theory that our kismut is to be forever be the last great dynasty; we joke with each other that Smith has severely deteriorated since we left, Science Olympiad sucks now and whatever did happen to MATHCOUNTS? Of course the year we leave, everything is suddenly worse. But perhaps what strikes us as worse isn't the fact that it's deteriorating, but the fact that it's changing at all. Perhaps the Knight Bus painted on the doors of the Smith office is actually quite wholesome, and those teachers that moved away were given opportunities that we should be proud of them for. Perhaps, as much as we want those we knew and loved to stay the exact same -- largely so that we can say that we know and love them, they're entitled to their own change.
Perhaps there's no world we know better than the one inside our heads, and perhaps this is true for all eight billion of us.
There's this BuzzFeed article that suggests that if we don't regularly evaluate whether or not we're in the wrong, we quickly devolve into the antihero. I think about this often. When I was younger, I wrote the script for the next Marvel movie in my head -- where the villain origin story (hamartia) is simply that he bought too strongly into the false consensus effect, that he refused to see how he could be wrong. I thought this narrative arc to be far more fascinating than the typical ones, if only because I saw myself toeing the very same line too often. Isn't this just a variation of the victim mentality?
And thus, with this, I must confess: I was trying to write this blogpost about the toxic "shippers" of the internet, specifically those who edited clips of the One Direction boys together in creepy, fetishized ways. I had done research, even had specific images in my head to insert. Ahhh, the best laid plans. Much like our best intentions, often go awry. Or is it that they pave the road to Hades? I can never quite remember.
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