#oh bears

Hi anon,

I’d never talked or written much about the phone number being active, because it doesn’t seem that strange to me.  But I do put a very different interpretation on it from you - I don’t think it was about keeping The Bears alive. I think it was about control and ensuring that nobody else could use the number or the twitter (you could say that it was about ensuring The Bears stayed dead).

I think whatever you make of the bears - I think the ending probably has the same explanation.  By the beginning of 2016, they’d got too prominent and there was a lot of high stakes stuff going on.  I think when they were shut down it would have been very important for those doing the shutting down that no third party could ever get hold of any of The Bears’ accounts and try and imitate or use The Bears. 

They clearly negotiated with twitter to remove the account from circulation.  I imagine keeping the phone number connected was done with the same intention.  If the number had ever been allocated to anyone else, they would have received many text messages from people who were still messaging The Bears and the person who had the account could have used that in ways that were awkward.  I’ve never tried to keep a cell phone number from being reallocated, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the easiest way was to keep the account. And while that would involve some money, it wouldn’t invovle any remembering - you don’t have to do anything to keep up an account it just ticks over.

Oh The Bears - I've written quite a lot about them, particularly early on when they were still happening. You might find some answers to your questions there.

I've thought a lot about whether time has changed my analysis of the bears. At the time I thought it was very unlikely that it was happening without 1D members knowledge. It was always clear there was a team behind the bears (at quite a few venues they were in place before 1D arrived at the venue). I personally don't think crew members would represent Louis and Harry that explicitly without their knowledge. And I also think just in general, very little happens on a tour, without people knowing about it.

I've always thought the bears, particularly the tableaus at gigs were far more expressive than they were communicative. They were people having fun and exploring queerness. I've always rejected the idea that they had special messages that we were supposed to decode (nut tree never meant anything).

Some fandom arguments about why Louis and Harry were behind the bears are really really silly. In particular, the idea that they were the only people who could or would have paid for all that stuff completely misunderstands the economics (and the boredom) of a tour.

There are three things I've thought about a bit, when it comes to evaluating how I understood the bears at the time. The first is what happened to the bears after X-factor. At the time I assumed they were with Harry and Louis. But I think it's reasonably clear, since RBB was on stage in early January 2016 and then at a Little Mix concert some time after that at least RBB went with a member of the crew who continued to work gigs. I think that would probably change how I understood the twitter feed aspect of it all.

The second is that I wonder if I underestimated just how chaotic backstage of tour was by 2015. Was getting all four of them on stage the most anyone could manage (and not even that once) - and nobody really cared about some displays at concerts and a twitter account. I'm just sitting with that and waiting for Lima to talk some more before I figure out if the general chaoticness of that point should change the way I think.

The other thing I've thought more about with more distance is that there was a noticeable change in the sorts of queer history being referenced once they went off tour. The tableaus were very interested in older queer culture, pre queer liberation. The twitter feed was more interested in a pop culture understanding of queerness from the 80s and 90s. The twitter feed was more generic and less specific.

I think that means that a key member of the bears entourage was someone who was touring with them and who didn't travel with them to promo stuff (which the bears definitely did).