Directioner or Directionator

Common Knowledge Or Nah

"OH EM JEE. DID YOU SEE HARRY'S NEW QUIFF?" 

"NO JIMMY PROTESTED!"

"LOOK! I FOUND NEW FETUS PHOTOS!"

"BRACES DIDN'T MAKE NIALL HOT. HE MADE BRACES HOT."

"CRAP. I MISSED THEIR TWITCAM AGAIN."

Sounds normal right?

These are some of the things that I would have said between the years of 2011 and 2014.

"Who would say things like this?" you may ask. Well, a Directioner would have.

You're next question is probably "what is a Directioner?" or something of the sort. I'm here, proudly ready to answer that.

A Directioner was a person who is a super fan of the British-Irish boy band known as One Direction. But you need to realize that we would emphasize the word "super" in that definition. 

Let me give you some details from the inside of the fandom about that word. That word wasn't used lightly. If you were called a Directioner, you had to prove it. You couldn't just say you were and go on about your day. No. You really had to prove it to be able to proudly label yourself with the sacred title.

In other words, you had to have been in the fandom since the relative beginning of their existence. You also had to know ALL the inside jokes, but not use the overused jokes from the early era too much, making yourself look like a carrot.

"What's a carrot?" you may ask. 

A carrot is what we would typically call the younger fangirls who used the overused jokes WAY too much in public, making them look like they don't know anything that would be happening in the fandom in the present. We, as true Directioners, would make fun of carrots, even though we were all carrots at one point.

You're probably now wondering what the early, now very overused jokes, were. Here are some of them: "no Jimmy protested", "how many R's", "Liam hates spoons", "Nandos", "Zayn is vain", or the ever famous "I like girls who eat carrots" (hence the term "carrot").

All of these jokes came primarily from the boys' video diaries. The video diaries were filmed during their X-Factor days. They were videos of the boys sitting on a flight of stairs in their house and they would talk about many things dealing with their time on the X-Factor as well as answering questions from fans. 

During the videos, they would be random and do adorable things that would entertain the viewer. Like the joke, "no Jimmy protested", was on a video diary. During the video, Louis Tomlinson was reading the book Meltdown by Ben Elton. After silently reading for some time, he cried out "no Jimmy protested!" which was a line in the novel.

Another joke that was in a video (but not in one of their official video diaries) was the "how many R's" joke. This happened in a video that Harry Styles and Louis made when they prank called 118. Louis was pretending to find someone's address, and said the person's first name was Terrance. When he was spelling out the name to the person on the phone, he said there was six R's when the person asked "how many R's?" in the name Terrance.

The other jokes are pretty similar to how they relate to the video diaries, and are just as overused. They were the primary jokes you learned when you were first becoming a Directioner in 2011 and 2012.

Now, after reading the title of this book, you're probably wondering what the difference is between a Directioner and a Directionator. Like I said before, a Directioner was a super, up to date, fangirl of One Direction. Whereas a Directionator was a person who doesn't understand the inside jokes, a fake fan, someone who confuses Liam and Louis, and someone who pronounces Louis as Lewis. Back in the active One Direction (or 1D for short) fandom days, some of the more obsessed Directioners would hate on Directionators, hardcore, sending unnecessary hate tweets, or lose friends for this. 

So there was some of the One Direction basics that was common knowledge back when the fandom was in its prime. There was so much more than what met the eye. We weren't just fangirls. We, as a fandom, were insane.