Maybe, yeah. But Louis’s “true fans” tweet seemed totally bizarre to me because I’m SURE they’ve all talked about how they find the real fans/fake fans distinction silly. I just - that didn’t sound like him to me, whereas the newer tweet does. I mean, it’s pretty bizarre for management to tweet the “true fans” thing as well, I’ll admit, but it could have been another attempt to put off the people who were tweeting stuff about Eleanor being a beard? I know it seems crazy that management would want to do anything negative towards the fans, but they seem weirdly panicky about people speculating that Louis and Eleanor’s relationship seems fake. And like, the only options they have are either to ignore it or react to it.

This kind of thing has been going on for a while now, right, and they’ve mostly ignored it. Their reaction has been to have Eleanor around more, so we see more photos of them together and the two of them being a bit more touchy-feely. But as far as I can tell it hasn’t done much to dissuade the non-believers and I think management are kind of doing this as a last resort? They’ve realised that the pictures and stuff aren’t enough, so they need to actually start directly responding to what people are saying. And it works out pretty well because it does come across as an emotional response, the kind of thing someone might genuinely DO if they were sick of people calling their relationship fake, but personally I can’t see Louis reacting that way especially because I believe that the relationship IS fake. Like lbr, he really doesn’t put a lot of effort into the whole Eleanor thing, so DMing someone to have a full argument about it, blocking someone, making this weird passive-aggressive Tweet - it just doesn’t really fit for me when he can barely be bothered to hold her hand, you know?

I think it’s the combination of all the weird Twitter stuff that’s been going on lately that makes me suspicious of it. If he’d just tweeted the “true fans” thing, and none of the other stuff had happened, I might’ve gone “huh, that’s unusually sassy for Louis” and wouldn’t have thought much more about it, but it’s the context it’s in. I’m not saying I 100% believe it was real or fake either way, I just find the whole thing STRANGE and it makes sense that management could be just freaking their shit over all the speculation, and this is their last-ditch attempt at trying to convince people.