It’s been an eventful weekend for fans of One Direction. And the break-ups, tour quits and fateful departures from loving black-and-white Instagram filters, even, have proved to be quite a lot for their loyal fans, the Directioners. If you’re just a visitor to 1D fandom, looking to brush up on your knowledge of the band just as the odds on them breaking up in 2015 have been slashed to 4/1, here’s why everyone’s freaking out about them this week…
1. Zayn’s quit the tour
This is otherwise known as ‘Zerrie drama’, as Zayn Malik has quit One Direction’s On The Road Again tour because of ‘stress’. The Yorkshire lad has flown back to Britain where he is said to be in crisis talks with his Little Mix fiancée Perrie Edwards. Though he’s missed some promotional events before now, due to what Louis kindly called ‘a tummy bug’, and looked very surly in interviews (think Busted’s Charlie Simpson at his grumpiest), the trigger for this departure from the band was photos which emerged of him getting close with a girl in Thailand who definitely wasn’t Perrie.
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2. Louis has dumped his girlfriend
The self-appointed cheeky chappy of the group Louis Tomlinson was spotted by The Sun’s paps snogging a girl in the pool of his five-star Bangkok hotel. The girl looked quite a lot different to his girlfriend of four years, Eleanor Calder. But Louis hadn’t been cheating, oh no, because Louis has been quietly single for two weeks. Two weeks! That’s a very long time in Directioner years.
3. Louis is now single!
It deserves another number in this list, you see, because as sad as this news is, quite a few Directioners are very happy with this news. Like, the Larry Stylinson shippers, who ‘ship’ Louis and his bandmate, Harry Styles, instead of ‘Elounor’, the portmanteau of Louis and Eleanor. They’re overjoyed that ‘The Management’s’ ‘fake’ relationship is over, so Harry and Louis can now be together properly. Really.
4. Harry is now Instagramming in colour!
Despite taking an edgy six-month sojourn into the edgy world of the Willow and Inkwell filters of Instagram (the black and white ones, FYI) Harry Styles has added a splash of colour to his latest posting. Is it a picture inside M&Ms world? A beautiful sunset, a bunch of flowers or something else that’s just very colourful and otherwise not worth chatting much about? Um, no, it’s a meme about World Water Day. The heart-throb uploaded it, because it said: ‘It’s World Water Day! For every ‘LIKE’ this picture gets @LifeWaterUK will give 100 gallons of clean drinking water to someone in need!’
It’s a great idea, and Harry’s post got over a million likes. Which means 100 million gallons of water will be donated to those in need (if the charity Drop4Drop can fulfil these promises). But some fans seemed more into the scandal of Harry uploading a photo with a bit of blue in than the fact people around the world go without basic sanitation: ‘COLOR,’ reads one comment. Another exclaims, ‘Una foto en colour!! Me estoy muriendo,’ and ‘I really admire you for posting this even though it ruined the black and white theme on your feed.’
As for Liam and Niall? No change there. But if either of the two least-controversial members of the band are embroiled in a controversy by the end of the week, then you’ll just know it’s curtains for the band…
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.