I haven't been completely honest with you.
At this point, you know I am capital-G Gay, know more about Miley Cyrus than I do about myself, and always-always-always write lesbian romances. But there is one fandom that I joined, that I used to ridicule (fine, that's all my fandoms).
I can finally say that I am a fan of One Direction.
Nine years late. Allow me to explain.
My early memories of One Direction are sparse. When I was younger, I knew that they made "What Makes You Beautiful" and I thought it was a fine song. I was also aware that there was a Harry Styles in the band, thought I had no clue which one he was, and I knew that there was somewhere between three and six people in the band. And that they were from an English-speaking country.
When I was in fifth grade, a sixth-grade friend of mine (who was old and therefore cool) really like One Direction and tried to show me the music video from "You and I." It's the type of music video where someone who thought they were clever would comment "Editor: How many effects do you want? One D: Yes." They had this cool thing where the first guy would put his hand up over the camera, and when he pulled it away, he was someone else. When that happened, the first time, I said "Ooh," because it looked cool, and the friend asked me, "Do you think he's cute?" I was mortified because I was a fifth grader and there was no way I would ever be into boys. How mortified? Well, I still remember it.
Beyond that, there was a short time in 2016 when I really liked "Drag Me Down." Actually, a crush of mine said that she liked it, so I decided to hate it, and then I listened and got addicted, but it was during the time when Demi Lovato's Confident was my life, so I didn't take that chance to become a true fan. I did, however, memorize the lyrics to "Drag Me Down" and considered making a cover of it several times.
And that's it. I would have continued my no-direction life as it was, if it hadn't been for Wattpad.
You see, I found this really great short story by ArcticStars called "Worst Story on Wattpad." I thought it was really funny and set out to create the worst fanfic on Wattpad. Since that title was already taken, the finished "Second-Worst Story on Wattpad" is waiting for me to finish my legit stuff so that it can be released chronologically.
In order to create a really bad fanfic, I needed to go to the stereotype of fanfics--that is, One Direction.
Yeah. I wrote a One Direction fanfic before I became a fan.
What I did was, to get in the mood, put on a One Direction shuffle, and found that I really, really liked the music. It was exactly the type of upbeat pop that I love to create. I then took the time to learn who the people are (guess what! There's five of them! And also four! Turns out that they broke up a few years ago). I watched the creepy "Night Changes" music video and the weird "Best Song Ever" music video (and some others). I read the Wikipedia pages on them to find out how to portray them as characters, because I didn't want to offend anyone, and found out that they came from The Voice (which Miley Cyrus judged for!). I realized that Taylor Swift's "Style" was written for Harry Styles and sounds suspiciously similar to One Direction's "Perfect," where they shout out Taylor in a lyric.
So, yeah. I am now in that fandom. Because I wrote a fanfic.
