prettystylinson

status: katie is hanging out at discord.gg/stylinson

katie • 25 • any pronouns • author • singer/songwriter • larry/ziam/niam/ziall shipper •

im seeing louis in chicago!!!!

fics, tags, etc under the cut ۶ৎ

absolutely, and i think that’s probably the most important thing to keep myself in check about. context can absolutely become confirmation bias if you’re not careful. if i already believe something about a person or situation, it’s very easy to look at a new piece of information and immediately think, “see, this fits,” instead of asking whether i’d interpret it the same way if i didn’t already have that belief.

for me, the biggest thing is separating “this is interesting in the context of everything else” from “this proves what i already believe.” i try to look for alternative explanations and ask myself whether something actually adds new information or if i’m just using the existing narrative to make a completely neutral thing feel significant. i also think being willing to say “actually, i don’t think this means anything” is important, even when you really want it to.

the biggest thing they miss is that pattern recognition isn’t the entire thought process. a pattern is usually where the investigation starts, not where it ends. you notice something, you look at the surrounding context, you compare it to previous examples, you ask whether there are reasonable alternative explanations, you look at how often the same thing happens, and then you decide how much weight you actually want to give it.

no, not every single thing is “proof.” larries can absolutely disagree with each other about what something means, how significant a particular moment is, or whether something is intentional at all. that’s kind of the point. there’s a huge difference between “i noticed this and it fits into a larger pattern” and “this one random thing happened, therefore larry confirmed.”

antis also tend to remove the context that made the observation interesting in the first place. they’ll isolate one instance, make it sound ridiculous on its own, and then act like the person who noticed it is incapable of understanding basic reality. meanwhile, if you put the same thing back into the larger timeline, alongside years of interviews, behavior, imagery, industry context, and other recurring patterns, suddenly the reasoning makes a lot more sense.

i think my “opinion” has changed quite a bit, but mostly because i was a child when i first got into larry. back then, i obviously didn’t have the perspective or understanding to look at any of this beyond “i think these two like each other and there’s something more going on here.” a few years later is when i really started noticing the patterns and looking deeper into everything, although at that point my focus was heavily on management and the industry side of things.

as i’ve gotten older, though, my understanding has become much more nuanced. what i still see at the core of it is the possibility of two queer individuals whose identities and/or relationship have been heavily suppressed and managed for years. whether they’re together romantically today or not doesn’t necessarily erase everything that happened before, and that distinction has become much more important to me as i’ve gotten older.

where my opinion has changed significantly is in how i view the actual relationship itself. when i was younger, i think i had this very idealistic idea that they had been together all these years without ever breaking up, hurting each other, or really experiencing anything beyond the occasional obstacle. i don’t believe that anymore. i don’t think that’s a particularly healthy or realistic way to look at any relationship, let alone one involving two incredibly famous people who have potentially spent 16 years navigating closeting, intense media scrutiny, management, distance, and an enormous amount of pressure. i think there have probably been bumps. i think they could have hurt each other. i think they could have broken up, gotten back together, struggled, changed as people, or experienced periods where things simply weren’t good between them.

so my core belief hasn’t necessarily changed as much as my understanding of it has. when i was nine, my entire perspective was basically “they’re in love 🥺.” now i’m looking at a much bigger picture involving queer identity, celebrity culture, management, privacy, relationships, and the psychological impact of being publicly controlled for years.