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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/actually_a_demon on 2024-03-31 10:32:56.

First of all: hello everyone! I was a lurker in this sub for quite a bit, but this time i finally decided to leave my contribution to the community with a music related drama that i feel like a lot of people don’t know/don’t talk a lot about. Before starting however, i want to clarify that english is not my first language so sorry in advance for any grammatical errors i might make. All good? Perfect. With that in mind, let me spill the tea.

Introduction: who the hell are Fifth Harmony?

Fifth Harmony (often shortened to 5H, wich i will use everytime i need to refer to them for the sake of brevity) was an American girl group based in Miami, composed of, you guess it, five girls: Ally Brooke, Normani, Dinah Jane, Lauren Jauregui, and Camila Cabello. You might know her for her solo career (mainly the hit songs “Havana” and “Bam Bam”) and because she actually left the group in December 2016. The history of why and how she left and all the mess behind it is a whole another can of worms which i don’t have the time to explain here, so i will greatly gloss over this. The thing yall need to know for this story is that the group signed a joint record deal with Simon Cowell’s label Syco Records and L.A. Reid’s label Epic Records after forming in the second season of 2012 American edition of The X Factor. Basically, it was the female american equivalent to One Direction.

They were a big deal in the following years, at least for a girl group perspective, relasing their first EP “Better Togheter” and touring in some low-budget concert in various malls in certain zones of America, to build a fanbase. This fanbase was composed for the vast part by teenage/preteen girls, and they begin to call themselves “Harmonizer”. They will grow a lot in numbers in the follwing years, and they will also develop a full on parasocial relationship with the girls. This was that period of time in the music industry when celebrities where actually very active on Twitter and the girls will engage personally a lot with the fandom. Keep this in mind because it would be VERY important later. In 2015 they released their debut album, “Reflection", and their singles “Worth It” and “Sledgehammer” became immensely popular not only in America, but also in Europe. They actually won a Grammy in 2014, so it was kinda a big deal. In 2016 they released their second album, “7/27”, with the single “Work from Home” which peaked at number four on the Billboard Hot 100, making it the first top five single by a girl group in a decade on that chart. However, Camila Cabello left to pursue a single career and the remaning girls will go on to make another album the following year, their last one: “Fifth Harmony”, with the singles “Down”, “He Like That” and a feat with Pitbull, “Por Favor” (which is the most 2017 thing i have ever heard, but i digress). Right now the group is offically “on hold” and every single one of the girls is doing something solo with various degrees of success: Camila Cabello made three albums and she is going to drop a fourth, Lauren Jauregui started to make R&B under an indipendent label , Normani should drop her debut album this year (hopefully), and Ally and Dinah made a bunch of pretty underwhelming singles. Now that you know all of the (really watered down and drama-free) history of the girls, let’s jump right in the real reason you clicked on this.

The beginning of the end: the rising of lesbian shipping and “Camren”

Remember when i said that the fandom developed a parasocial relationship with the girls? You also remember how i said they were basically the female version of One Direction? Well, that resulted also in the rising of: shipping. Now. I need to be completely fair here. Shipping members of boybands/girlbands was always a thing and it wasn’t a such mind breaking news, neither was invented by 1D fans. Also the lesbian/gay rumors about members of said groups were made since the dawn of time (remember the Spice Girls lesbian rumor that turned out to be true?), but in this specific case there were a lot of similar fandom dynamics between Harmonizers and Directioners. You will soon see why.

Since their early formation on X Factor 2012, an initally small subsect of Harmonizer started to ship togheter Camila Cabello and Lauren Jauregui. It started fairly tame, with video compilations , gifs, pictures of them and things of that sort. The girls themselves were asked about this phenomenon during an interview and they seemed ok with it, if not downright amused, stating that the fans could do “wathever makes their boat float”. Is important to note that they were actually very good friends at that time and that they were visibly close on camera, showing affection, hugging and things of that sort. Keep also in mind that they were minors. This will be important later.

Now, the term “Camren” was not even invented by fans. It was Lauren Jauregui herself to coin it on a Twitter post and since that day it became the official name of the ship. Even Dinah was actively playing with fans on Twitter about this, embracing what at that time was basically a meme/inside joke in the community for basically the entire course of 2012-early 2013. To be fair, they were other ships between the girls (Camila x Dinah, Normani x Dinah, Normani x Lauren) but Camren was the “main” ship that at this point every Harmonizer knew. During this period of time it was treated as and inside joke by the majority of the community, like i said earlier. No one was getting hurt and the girls seemed to have fun with it, sometimes actively fueling the speculations with certain snapchat photos and Twitter exanges. You noticed how similar it is to the Harry Styles x Luis Tommlinson situation? Well, if you are familiar with that story you can imagine how things went down in the following years. Spoiler: they got progressivly worse for everyone involved.

The Gate of Hell Opens: the Sun and the Moon and the Gay Drawings

Now we are in late 2013. The girls are doing good: their popularity was growing and they were doing small concerts and meets and greets. Even when they started to slowly gain fame outside the X Factor circle, they continued to have the same kind of relationship with fans and being active on Twitter, answering to them and whatnot. But Twitter was not the only social 5H used: they also had personal Tumblr blogs Camila and Lauren in particular were VERY active on the site, posting poetry, drawings, quotes, typical Tumblr edgy teen stuffs. (ssweet-dispositionn was Lauren’s blog and waakeme-up was Camila’s, now deactivated) But hey, it was the norm in 2013 after all. Not that deep, right? Oh no…oh no. You are all so wrong. It was a matter of time since that particular subset of Harmonizer (wich from now on i will call “Camren shippers”) started to notice something interesting in their Tumblr posts. Now, before going on, is important to specify that the Camren ship affair begin fairly tame and small, but it started to rapidly grow in intensity during late 2013. This was also due to some videos the girls posted on their official youtube channel, in wich they would do cover of songs, vlogs and things of that sort, it’s also worth mentioning some old twitcams in this discussion. Camren shippers at that time were analizing those videos and basically everything that this two poor girls posted in search of “proof” that their ship was real. They analized looks, body language, things they said and everything that was potentially “alluding” to a romantic relationship. It was not a joke or a meme anymore, people were absolutely serious and 100% sure that Camila and Lauren were in love with each other and that they were keeping it secret because…management bad or something. This was the main point shippers used to justify their research of “proof” (read as: obsessive behaviour) and “hidden signals”, because in their mind the girls were “trying to tell us without being explixit about it to avoid the anger or management” (how convinient, am i right? lmao). Basically the same things Directioners were saying about Larry.

That being said, let’s return to the main point: those people quickly started to not…

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