Karla Brador-Diaz had an instinctual reaction to hearing about Liam Payne’s death last week.
“Hey, man, what do you mean Liam Payne just died? Like what are you talking about?” the 18-year-old said in a TikTok video.
“It’s true, it’s all over the freaking news!” her mom replied off-screen.
It just felt right to head directly to social media, Brador-Diaz later told The Washington Post – after all, that was where she lived out so much of her One Direction fandom.
“I genuinely couldn’t believe it,” she said, “So the first thing I thought to do was make a video and say, ‘Hey guys, this happened.’”
Gen Z creators have gone viral for social media posts reflecting on Payne’s death. The videos feature a mix of live reactions, heartfelt memorials and in come cases a twist of dark humor.
“One Direction isn’t just a band,” said Jamie Cohen, assistant professor of media studies at CUNY Queens College. “They are internet culture itself.”
No matter the nature of the content, fans and experts agree that these videos represent a reunion for an online fandom that was as much about the boys of One Direction themselves as it was about the community that formed around them.
ONLINE COMMUNITY
One Direction rose in popularity at the same time as new modes of media such as Tumblr and stan Twitter, said Lucy March, a postdoctoral fellow at the Center on Digital Culture and Society at the University of Pennsylvania Annenberg School of Communication. As a result, fans had unprecedented access to the band members.
“You could ask me where they were, what they were wearing, how much their outfits cost, where they got it from,” said Jacqui Gerlach, 26, while visiting Payne’s memorial in Washington Square Park in New York. “The amount of knowledge that we knew about them was crazy.”
At the same time, people typically became fans during their adolescence, which is a vulnerable time, March said. Many fans said One Direction allowed them to escape reality – a difficult childhood in the case of Brador-Diaz, a small-town upbringing in the case of Gerlach – and exposed them to different worlds.
Kyla Sieges, 30, was introduced to One Direction by her now-best friend as a college freshman in 2012. She said the two of them would spend hours watching the band’s video diaries (“their really early stuff,” she explained), and ultimately ran a Tumblr account called 5ladsand2fangirls.
Sieges calls her early years in the fandom her “adult awakening.”
“Going to a show was like going to a new city,” she said. “Making a friend on Vine was access to a new place.”
She added that growing up very Christian, One Direction also opened her worldview, as she made LGBTQ friends for the first time.
Ultimately, Sieges created her own account on Vine, a short form video platform that has since been archived, called 4ladsandafangirl (Zayn Malik had left the group), where she posted fan-edits; like other fans, many of the friends Sieges made online became genuine connections.
“It was just so nice to be around people that understood it and didn’t gaslight me,” said Aida Girmay, 22, of her early days engaged with the online fandom.
Girmay has visited Payne’s memorial in Washington Square Park every day since it was first constructed last Saturday. But before the memorial was constructed, Girmay said she found solace for Payne’s death where she had always found community around One Direction – on the internet.
“I feel like even now, with all of this, it’s been nice to revert back to that same community and have everyone who understands how you feel be around you,” she said.
USING HUMOR TO PROCESS GRIEF
But where the grief fans are feeling is real, the way this generation expresses this grief can be “grim,” said Cohen, the media studies professor.
“Gen Z, most specifically due to the covid break, has developed a new sense of cope that I don’t think we’ve seen,” he said. “There’s no way to translate it to any previous experience.”
In one of Brador-Diaz’s videos, she is crying while at the memorial to Payne at Lake Eola Park in Florida. But the video has an ironic soundtrack: Payne’s “Strip That Down,” a dance song with sexual lyrics, is playing at the memorial. In a follow-up video, her TikTok caption: “we cannot take anything seriously like.”
Brador-Diaz said a friend, whom she met through their shared love of One Direction, took the initial video without her realizing. But once Brador-Diaz saw the video – which now has over 6 million views – for herself, she knew she had to post it.
“I posted it because I thought it would bring a little bit of comedic relief,” she said, laughing. “I was crying to ‘Strip That Down.’ Like be so for real.”
Brador-Diaz belly laughed recalling another viral post (featured both on TikTok and X) that shows One Direction figurines having a funeral for Payne. In one photo, a doll of Payne is lying in a shoe box while dolls of the other four members kneel at the box’s side.
Posts like these point to the “wild west” mentality many users have on social media, said Cindy Ma, a lecturer in race and media at the University of Leeds School of Media and Communication.
“Constant exposure to funny, sad, rage-inducing, shocking, and aspirational content – back to back and without relief – can engender a kind of ‘numbness’ in users that encourages emotional detachment and the subsequent production of ironic or darkly humorous materials,” she said via email.
(Sieges said she asked her best friend how their generation processes grief, and both women simultaneously texted, “We don’t.”)
But at the same time, members of the fandom seem to implicitly understand that everyone grieves in different ways.
“The internet is weird, everyone’s grieving process is different, and sometimes you can see things that might rub you the wrong way, but overall, I really appreciated it,” said Girmay, who explained that even though non-Directioner friends reached out to her “it didn’t feel like they were going through the same thing.”
Payne’s doll funeral is decidedly grim, but you have to be a true Directioner to own the complete One Direction doll set.
LASTING LEGACIES
One week after Payne’s death, March said fans are increasingly invested in protecting his legacy.
“These fans are performing the important work of reputation management as a form of collective mourning,” March said.
Both Brador-Diaz and Sieges have posted TikTok videos clapping back at haters who have ridiculed them for their public displays of grief – even as Payne’s character was called into question in the weeks before he died.
Sieges acknowledged Payne’s shortcomings and said she relates her grief to a meme that she’s seen floating around: The first frame says “the girl who heard the news” with an image of the user in the present day; the second frame says “the girl who felt the news” with an image of the user back in 2015.
“In this instance, when I logged into TikTok, and I saw my other people crying too, I felt validated,” she said. “And in my grief, I felt like, ‘No, I’m allowed to be sad, and it’s okay that this is affecting me.’”
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