bulletproofhalo:
What’s the origin of the phrase “Larry Stylinson”?
We all know Harry tweeted this on 22 November 2010:
So I wondered when the first mention of the phrase on Twitter really was, and the results surprised me.
There’s only 1 previous mention on Twitter and it was nearly a month before this tweet on 28 October 2010:
The phrase “Larry Stylinson” was a Tumblr term, not a Twitter creation. In fact, when Harry tweeted his tweet mentioning the phrase, most of the replies were asking what it was or saying how cute the name it was. Many people hadn’t heard it on Twitter until that day.
The @Larry_Stylinson twitter wasn’t even created until a day after Harry’s tweet on 23 November 2010:
The link in the first tweet on Twitter leads you to a tumblr that is no longer in the 1D fandom, but was active in the early days of X Factor. They are noteworthy because they reblogged a lot of gifs and pictures of Harry and Louis from X Factor. At the time, many tumblr blogs focused on the group as a whole or on Harry or Liam. The emphasis on the early concept of “Larry” is noticeable.
The twitter post itself leads to this picture posted on 28 October 2010 (taken 4 October 2010 in Week 1):
With this caption:
So the first Tumblr to use the phrase appears to be the “fuckyeahharrystyles” tumblr, nearly a month before Harry & Gemma’s phone conversation. This is funny to me, because that’s the tumblr I linked to the 3 of the 5 pictures Harry posted to his yfrog on 19 November 2010 but never tweeted.
What does it mean?
I’m not sure, but I have a theory. So in a 3-hour window, someone uploaded 4 Harry pictures (some of them edits to include just Harry in the picture, and 1 edited picture of Harry and Louis). 3/5 pictures came from fuckmeharrystyles.tumblr.com, and one of the pictures included that watermark. I think it’s possible Louis did it as a bit of a flirty prank on Harry. He knew he would see it when he logged back into yfrog. Otherwise, Harry was trolling tumblr sites about himself uploading pictures of himself and never tweeted them. That seems a bit odd to me. I think, given the context of their time and relationship and age, that it’s possible this was one more way Louis was flirting with Harry.
So what does this all mean about the phrase “Larry Stylinson”? A couple of things.
Harry’s tweet did, in fact, light the “Larry Stylinson” engines on Twitter, ground zero of the fan base at the time. This happened in week 7 of the show, and everyone around it at the time was genuinely in love with the flirty relationship being played out on the cameras.
However, the origin of the term was tumblr, meaning Gemma most likely was around tumblr at the time, and told Harry about the term and the way fans there had noticed the special connection between Harry & Louis.
It’s clear that the early phrase and concept didn’t bother anyone in or around the group (and, in fact, didn’t until @Louis_Tomlinson called it “bullshit” almost 2 full years later). They knew about the context of the phrase being used on blogs posting pictures of Harry & Louis they found on facebook, cropping group photos to just Harry & Louis photos that Harry (or Louis) posted to Harry’s own yfrog, and posting gifs and edits like this:
There were certainly less “believers” back in the early days. The fandom, in its infancy, was much less rigid and divided. But on tumblr, especially, there were several blogs that noticed the less platonic and more romantic behavior of Harry & Louis at the time, and these blogs were the creators of the “Larry Stylinson” phrase.
To argue Gemma, who didn’t hear about the “Larry Stylinson” phenomenon on Twitter, didn’t understand the context around the phrase is unlikely.