Teens Are Having a Racist Meltdown Over Lorde's 'Ugly' Boyfriend

Holy shit, something’s wrong with the teens. The teens have gone mad. After Kiwi chanteuse Lorde apparently said (to someone, somewhere—I literally can’t find any sources on it besides teens on Twitter) that Justin Bieber and the members of One Direction are “ugly,” wounded superfans began firing back with a barrage of potshots at James Lowe, Lorde’s rumored boyfriend. In the way that the overemotional rantings of the ignorant so often do, the attacks turned racist almost immediately.

The onslaught is still going strong, bolstered by last week’s tabloid decision to post bikini photos of a 17-year-old girl—which included bonus pics of Lorde hugging the 24-year-old Lowe—as well as a photo of the couple Instagrammed by Tyler, The Creator with the caption “Hhahahahahah.” Good one, guy.

Most of the tweets simply call Lowe ugly and/or express bewilderment at the coupling—Lowe and Lorde, it seems, don’t “match” in a way that their brains can comprehend. I’ve mentioned before that I’m in a relationship with someone way more conventionally attractive than me, and the proprietary/borderline charitable way that conventionally attractive women interact with my boyfriend (like they’d be righting the balance of the universe by “taking” him from me) is astonishing. Our culture has a lot of social and literal capital tied up in the idea that conventional physical beauty is the defining factor in successful relationships. When couples like Lorde and Lowe violate that tacit social contract (by, you know, just liking each other a lot while being slightly different amounts of “hot”), the response is usually swift, bewildered, and thick with disgust.

Even the tweets that don’t specifically mention Lowe’s race, I suspect, are at least partially driven by our culture’s nasty stereotyping of Asian men as unsexy and sexless.

Basically, the whole thing is a complete shitshow:

Many of the teens seem simply confused:

While others can’t tell him apart from the one other Asian guy they know:

Some of the stereotyping is just lazy:

Some is weirdly specific:

And then some of these kids are just the fucking worst:

Luckily, though, a few valiant teens stepped in to police their own:

TOUCHE, TEEN.

Top image via Twitter and Instagram.