One Direction were The Beatles for many digital natives. The death of member Liam Payne shows us the power of fandom and the faces of online mourning.

The “just about” worst day of my dad’s life was December 26, 2016, when George Michael died. Decades of loyal listening, of money spent on merchandise and CDs, and every passionate defence of pop music eclipsed into one moment on that day. The veil between the worlds of the dead and the living must have been at its thinnest then too, to allow such a force to pass onto the other side.

Dad was about 12 years old when he first became a George Michael fan, a dedication he’s kept well into his 50s. I was just a year younger when I first listened to One Direction in 2011, which launched a boy-crazed and chronically online three years of my life – a deep obsession I thought had wrapped itself up until the news of singer Liam Payne’s death on Thursday kicked up dormant feelings.

My first memory of One Direction is holding an iPad incredibly close to my face to soak in every pixel of the five boys through the screen. They were on the cusp of releasing their debut album at this point, so there wasn’t actually much original music to get you into the band. There were, however, many chaotic video diaries from the band’s X Factor UK stint, enough to convince yourself you knew these people and had fallen in love with them.

School was a hotbed for this obsession to bloom. Developments coming in from the UK overnight were discussed at length on the school grounds, and when the band came to New Zealand for the first time in 2012, I don’t think we thought about anything else. Rumoured girlfriends were savaged, song lyrics were dissected, the boys were talked about like closest friends and we all categorised ourselves by the bandmate we liked most: you were either a Harry, Liam, Louis, Niall or Zayn girl.

Infrequent purchasing of Girlfriend magazine became required reading with posters I gathered to plaster my walls with and scoops on what the 1D boys REALLY wanted in a girlfriend. “They all look kind of ugly,” my dad’s ex-wife said of my shrine. I thought the burning rage I felt at that comment would make me spontaneously combust, hopefully with an explosion powerful enough to also take out my stepmother and send her to the pits of hell. Any nay-sayer of One Direction was no family of mine.

It was probably a good thing then, that much of the One Direction fanfare existed online, where the only prerequisite for acceptance was a blind love for the boys. Being a One Direction fan was intrinsically linked to being Incredibly Online, because the internet is where we all hung out to discuss our lack of sanity in safety and express ourselves, whether that was by writing 20 all-caps tweets in a row defending the boys against HATERS or reblogging a million photos of the band on Tumblr. 

The online obsession of it all is well-recorded in Kaitlyn Tiffany’s Everything I Need I Get From You, a novel about the powers of fangirls in creating online culture, with the argument that One Direction birthed the intensity of internet stanning we see now. 

They were record breakers and award winners, who at the height of their fame constantly had their celebrity compared to The Beatles, because it seemed like nothing like the One Direction craze had happened since the 1950s. If The Beatles existed in the 2010s, we’d have endless George Harrison thirst tweets and countless John Lennon x Paul McCartney fanfics, too (I think these already exist, but it would be much worse).

Payne’s conflicting legacy

The chronically online will also know Payne was at the centre of some very serious allegations made by a former partner in the weeks leading to his death. His ex-girlfriend Maya Henry had reportedly sent a cease-and-desist letter to Payne days prior, following a TikTok video in which she accused the singer of incessant unwanted contact towards her and her family and friends following their breakup, and for “prey[ing]” on One Direction to mobilise them against her.

She expanded on the scope of the “abuse” in an interview with the podcast The Internet is Dead, in which she also talked about her upcoming fiction novel Looking Forward, about a young woman whose relationship with a former pop star turns abusive. As is a rite of passage for ex-girlfriends of famous men, Henry was almost immediately blamed for Payne’s death.

I think it’s possible to both mourn a pop star whose music represented something positive and real in childhood, even if they became something else entirely in adulthood. The Payne who first became famous at 16 when One Direction was formed was never going to be the same Payne at 31 years old, because celebrity and access is a beast and very few of us ever really stay the same. It reminds me of something Taylor Swift once said, that some celebrities are “frozen at the age they get famous – and that’s kinda what happened to me”.

My obsession petered out around the time Zayn left the band in 2015. I was getting too grown up for One Direction and the one true parasocial love of my life is Taylor Swift, anyway. I turned my nose up at the desperate obsession when I moved from my all-girls school in Wellington to Auckland, and started listening to whatever my peers there told me was cool instead, which were indie-rock bands and UK grime rappers.

If I’m being honest with myself, most of One Direction’s music doesn’t hold up (except for ‘Story of My Life’ and ‘Night Changes’, which are objectively perfect). But something inside me tells me the music was only ever secondary to the feeling of community, which was reborn following Payne’s death. Logging onto Twitter on Thursday was kind of like a family reunion for the most online and mentally ill young women you know, bonded over a love for a band some (like me) probably haven’t thought seriously about in years.

But in that vein, Payne’s death has also inspired an incredible amount of memes and general discourse online. Jokes about “at least it wasn’t …” were swift, as were complaints about the prospect of no longer having a 1D reunion, and the comparison of Payne’s death to John Lennon’s “but if he was Ringo” is a gag anyone could see coming from miles away. So many people shared screenshots of distant family and friends reaching out, while others revealed group chats where comedy was used to combat shock. A man accused of abusing his girlfriend deserves to be scrutinised, but not much can be achieved now that he’s dead.

I genuinely think that when Taylor Swift dies, I will be warped with a deep unspeakable and unhealable grief despite the fact that we’ve never met, probably never will meet, and even if we did meet it wouldn’t make us instant best friends. I don’t actually know what we would talk about, unless it was all about her – but that’s the point of being a fan.

It’s this ultimate unknowing which you convince yourself is actually some shared inside secret that keeps the cycle going, because nothing makes an impressionable young girl feel more seen than the talented pop star speaking to them by way of a YouTube video diary or Instagram story. You have found an identity through the celebrity of someone else. The thing about your childhood heroes though, is that they’re supposed to be immune to mortality.