Sold to One Direction: a very deep dive

This is going to be a Sold to One Direction trope deep-dive. This piece isn’t interested in moralising RPF, Dark Romance, or anything like that — smarter people have already explored this enough. This is just going to be a very thorough but also very stupid analysis of the trope. It’s a very “walk with me” experience. That said, I have some content warnings. Within the context of Wattpad fics, we will be discussing kidnap, SA and the Holocaust.

I have a confession to make. This isn’t the first orange-and-white writing app I’ve had a viral post on. In 2013, when I was 15 — the perfect age for a Y/N — I threw my hair up into a messy bun and wrote a multi-part fic about being kidnapped by One Direction.1

I can’t claim to have engaged earnestly in the One Direction fandom, nor did I know very much about them at the time (I inexplicably thought that Niall was named Dexter?) but I was a teenage girl of the hater variety. Predictably, I also thought sparkly vampires were lame and Justin Bieber was cringe. (Ironically, these are also classic traits of a Y/N.) When I first found Wattpad, I was so overcome with hater energy that I seemingly blacked out for five minutes and returned to consciousness with a multi-part parody complete and posted.

My fic followed the popular Wattpad formula: Y/N wakes up, observes her sapphire orbs in the mirror, then goes downstairs to get traded by her mother for crack. I’m not proud of it. The “satire” was about as heavy-handed as you’d expect, but the world was full of hater-variant teen girls, so the fic racked up a few million reads.

It was sheer luck that made me parody the Sold to One Direction (ST1D) trope and not any of the other popular formulae that existed on Wattpad — in 2012, BuzzFeed wrote a piece called Why Justin Bieber Keeps Dying In Fan Fiction — but it turns out I’d backed the right horse. In the 13 years since, the ST1D trope continues to be parodied across the internet, even developing its own canon of sub-tropes like the broke mum (never a dad, mind you!) and the messy bun Y/N always “throws” her hair into. I started thinking about all this again when I saw that the Heated Rivalry fandom were writing fics about Shane being sold to One Direction (but in a hockey way, not for crack). Something about this trope has clearly imprinted on us.

Henry Jenkins, writing on fan culture in 1997, said, “Fan fiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by the folk.” So why did the folk decide that the best corrective myth involved a mother selling her daughter for crack cocaine? How did a bunch of teenagers across the globe collectively invent a folklore so distinct it remains instantly recognisable today?

Like most folk stories, Sold to One Direction has recognisable stock characters. First, there’s Y/N. While we might expect her to be a Bella Swan style blank slate for readers to project onto, I would argue that across fanfics, Y/Ns have far more in common than just their messy buns. They share a cluster or core traits such as being shy, stuttering and not like other girls. “P-p-please,” they stammer petitely, “I-I-I’m just an ugly girl with an oversized band T-shirt and naturally lilac eyes!”

The boys were equally stylised. Their fic personalities tended to be worlds apart from their label-mandated ones, either through subversion or exaggeration. While the label emphasised the boys’ cheeky cuteness, a lot of fics pulled instead on their wealth (the boys often live together in a giant McMansion) and their danger. A great deal of these stories portray One Direction as persistent sexual harassers (“bad boys”) whose rakish ways are only reformed by the power of True Love.2

In 2016, three researchers at Stanford studied 1.8 billion words of Wattpad fiction to see how men were presented in comparison to women. They found that Wattpad boys tended to growl, bellow, roar, thrust, chuckle, beat, hurt, smirk and abuse, whereas the girls tended to shriek, squeal, cook, sob, faint, gush and cry. Boys were described as perverted, muscular, and often gay. Girls, on the other hand, were described with a broader range of words. They could be feisty, insecure, naive, slutty, frail, independent, captive, curvy, delicate, goth and captive.

I have to presume that a few of the feminine words (bitchy, motherly, meanest) were mostly pulled from descriptions of side characters. Y/N is far better described by words that the researchers grouped as “submissive” (helpless, shy, timid), “dependent” (clingy, vulnerable, desperate) and “childish” (naive, silly.) She often spends most of the story screaming, fainting, or being shyly chaste — totally normal reactions to being sold for crack.

But this cluster of traits struck me as familiar. Y/N wasn’t the first virtuous, brunette 15 year-old to be sold to a rich man with a big house. Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (first published 1740) centred around a teenage girl who is bequeathed to a wealthy landowner. Throughout the novel, the landowner harasses Pamela relentlessly, even disguising himself as a maid so he can spy on her boobs. She only escapes his attacks due to the author’s overuse of deus ex ‘Y/N passes out’. Eventually, the landowner is so impressed by Pam’s chastity that he ends the novel by marrying her, making her the mistress of his giant house that she didn’t even need to share with 4 other boyband members.

I was surprised to learn that a romance which reads to me like a horror story (it’s also sort of written in the style of a creepypasta3) had a huge female fanbase. But I shouldn’t have been. Although Pamela was written by an 18th-century male ex-entrepreneur, this story hit a lot of the same beats as the Wattpad fics written by and for teenage girls in the 2010s. A fifteen-year-old girl is transferred into the household of a wealthy, sexually aggressive man. She resists him through innocence rather than power, and he reforms. Virtue: rewarded.

When you consult the Wattpad word cloud, you’ll find that a lot of the female words describe Pamela too. In fact, if you said “squeal, shriek, faint” I would think of her instantly — it reads like her daily agenda. But the word that describes her best, even more so than “teen” and “captive” has to be “naive”. Just like y/n, her naivety and innocence are what get Pamela in trouble but also what end up leading her to the good life without the ostensible indignity of being a scheming gold-digger. Look, she didn’t want this! She’s just a simple girl with blue orbs and a messy bun!

But Y/N’s innocence and chastity is only half of the story. As the meme goes, “it’s always ‘why is this mom selling her daughter’ and never ‘why is One Direction buying a person’.” Y/N isn’t even a constant in ST1D stories. Sometimes the members of One Direction were sold to one another, such as in Little (2017) by @-kingnarrie, in which Niall is sold to Harry.

Harry Styles is often the purchaser of slaves in these fanfics. (The merchant often varies, but it’s usually Y/N’s mother, or some sort of manager figure.) This is far from his only felony. There’s a whole fanlore page about Dark Harry, the popular fandom reimagining of Harry Styles who does crimes ranging from petty theft to human trafficking. He runs mafia nightclubs, he serial kills, he makes dioramas out of dead butterflies. Romanticising villains is a time-tested romance trope, from early Gothic antiheroes to the rakes and sheikhs of 1970s bodice rippers, but nowhere will you find more sympathy for the devil than on Wattpad.

In Romancing the Camp: Genres of Holocaust Memory on the Story-Sharing Website Wattpad, Stéphanie Benzaquen-Gautier studies the popular genre of Wattpad romances between concentration camp prisoners and their Nazi guards. Just like the ST1D girls don’t actually want to be trafficked to One Direction, none of these writers really want to find love in a death camp. Benzaquen-Gautier argues that the emotions of these teenagers feel so intense that they feel like they need such an extreme setting to represent them. Added to that, I do get the feeling that a lot of young writers didn’t yet have a developed understanding of this period of history, given that some of their representations of death camps served prisoners bowls of chili con carne. 4

Benzaquen-Gautier writes, “...the anonymous mass of Nazi perpetrators symbolises the frightening unfamiliar world of men,. (...) [T]he Holocaust functions as a projection that helps adolescents reflect on questions of gender construction, the relationships between men and women, and adulthood.”

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While ST1D fanfic addresses a smaller-scale horror (in these fics, there’s usually no indication that anyone else but Y/N has ever been sold), the fictionalised doppelgängers of One Direction are still scary, sometimes even bypassing the broke suburban mother merchant and kidnapping Y/N directly, often pressuring her into sexual situations. But I think the same logic applies.

Teenage girls aren’t deaf to all the cultural messaging around them that men are dangerous and full of violent, criminal impulses — 30% of girls surveyed by Girlguiding first experienced sexual harassment when they were 11 to 13 years old. But what can you do with that information to feel like you have any sense of agency? Well, you can explore these difficult ideas safely in the world of fanfic. From the teenage writer’s perspective, the celebrity is someone she has a parasocial familiarity with. Yes, the ‘real person’ part of RPF sits on ethically thin ice, especially if you’re making them a sex offender, but a familiar face can make exploring these dark themes feel safer, or more exciting. A sexy Virgil leading you through the circles of Wattpad. 5

Fic writers could have just made One Direction kidnap Y/N outright, but so many stories insist on framing the girl as something with monetary value, usually equivalent to an undefined quantity of crack. Not only do these fics acknowledge the fear of being commodified but they allow girls to process the fear, moulding it into something a bit more digestible. Yes, you’re a commodity, but One Direction can see that you’re undervalued, at least by the people in your life (why didn’t your mum sell you for something a little more upmarket than crack, hm?) You don’t know you’re beautiful, but they do.

If we can accept that ST1D fic responds to these gendered fears, we can ask: Is Sold to One Direction fanfic a utopian corrective fantasy to the patriarchy? If it is, then it’s a limited one. It corrects patriarchy emotionally rather than politically, allowing you to feel better without anything having to change. Is your man possessive or just devoted? Is he controlling you, or just protecting you? Does he have coercive power over you, or are you able to turn your brain off while he does all the blue jobs?

Obviously the former, in all cases where Harry Styles keeps you in a human-sized birdcage in his mansion, but this very flawed lens provides a way for teenage girls to find some ownership over systemic forces they don’t fully understand. Men are allowed to growl, bellow, roar and kidnap, but it’s okay — if you squeal and faint hard enough, they might give you a mansion. So who really wins?

I’ll tell you who doesn’t. If you remember the word cloud, you might recall seeing some negative adjectives like ‘bitchy’, ‘slutty’, ‘meanest’, ‘fake’, or ‘spoiled’. These words usually describe Y/N’s romantic rival. While the rival girl exists to emphasise Y/N’s chastity and virtue, she also provides a window into the writer’s underlying ideological assumptions about girls who have sex.

Unlike Y/N, who virtuously rejects One Direction’s moves (or is, at least, surprised by them), the ‘bitchy’ rival will take sexual agency and make the first move. To put her in her place, the writer will usually have the boys reject her, often with disgust. Meanwhile, Y/N is probably having the same amount of sex, but because she didn’t set out to get it, she can’t feel guilty for having it — sort of like Pamela and her massive house. The ‘sold’ fantasy lets girls assuage guilt for wanting sex, or dodge any blame for being ‘slutty’.

The world of ST1D usually comes steeped in layers of ambivalent sexism, a term coined by psychologists Peter Glick and Susan Fiske. Ambivalent sexism encompasses hostile and benevolent sexism. Benevolent sexism is the idea of holding the door open only for women not because women are fragile and weak but because they are delicate flowers who need to be protected. Hostile sexism is the idea that women are scheming jezebels who only want your money, man.

“By accepting the ideology of benevolent sexism, women more readily excuse acts of hostile sexism committed by the intimate men in their lives,” Psychologist Jacqueline Yi writes. “[T]he endorsement of benevolent sexism is associated with placing blame on female victims (…), while dismissing the intentions of male perpetrators.”

Dark Harry Styles will shank a guy in a motorcycle fight and kidnap a teenager, but Y/N can at least agree with him that Tiffany from school is a massive desperate slag.

Even if Sold to One Direction wasn't a particularly good answer to the anxieties it explored, it was an extraordinarily effective language for expressing them. It compressed a whole constellation of adolescent fears about sex, value, danger, love and growing up into an absurd internet folktale that’s still instantly recognisable more than a decade later.

Henry Jenkins argued that fan fiction allows people to reclaim myths from corporations and return them to the folk. I can’t help but find it almost beautiful that teenage girls took five commercially manufactured pop stars and turned them into avatars to explore teenage fears and wants. One Direction may have been owned by labels and management companies, but Dark Harry — crack seller, mafia boss, human trafficker — was owned by the people.