who did this to you?

dissecting tiktok's parasitic relationship with media about the author

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/welcome

keen eyes will notice that this blog is on tumblr. i did this for a few reasons, the first and foremost being: i know how to use tumblr's coding system.

the second (and equally as important) reason is because tumblr is free. the codes for themes and extra pages are free. there are no paywalls or subscriptions you have to pay for to be able to fully customize your blog.

lastly, the content i'm producing has a larger audience on tumblr than on something like wix, where i would have to promote my writing on another platform. with tumblr's tagging system, my posts can be circulated throughout the website itself.

the use of lowercase letters and more 'tech-focused' language is my attempt to match the rhetoric and tone of not only the subject of my blog, but to match the fact it's a tumblr blog itself.

that's it! if you have any questions, my ask box is open.

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shifting tiktok: you're not dreaming (probably)

for my last ever post, i wanted to focus on the topic that i originally intending on covering first, but felt it was better as a grand finale: reality shifting.

putting it briefly, shifting is a tiktok-centric phenomenon wherein you put yourself through hypnotic-like rituals to move your consciousness into a different reality. is it real? no. will people die on the metaphorical hill that it is? oh, you bet. this is tiktok. the truth literally never matters.

so, when someone 'shifts' realities, the most popular theory says that it is someone's consciousness shifting into a different universe in the 'multiverse.' the multiverse theory says that there are infinite timelines coexisting, and shifting just allows you to enter one different than your own, whether it be fictional, the past, present, or the future.

most shifting tutorials include the following:

1. scripting - the process of writing out the life you're trying to reach. it goes from big things like what time period or fictional universe you're traveling to, all the way down to the finer details, like what job you'll have and who you're dating. 2. manifestation - while writing down your script, you can listen to subliminal audio videos. very long and complicated story short, they are videos with various tones playing at different frequencies while subliminal messaging is either shown on the screen or whispered in the background. things like "i will shift" and "my shift will be successful" are common ones. when typing in "shifting" into the youtube search bar, these are the first two suggestions:

the following are the first few search results for "shifting subliminal":

3. hypnosis/meditation - after scripting your DR (desired reality) to get out of your CR (current reality), you are ready to shift. there are countless methods describing how to do this, but the bare bones is guiding yourself through meditative journey. popular ones include imagining yourself entering a room in your CR and exiting it in your DR, and some other methods are just repetitions of affirmations.

here's a link to the following tiktok, which is a short summary of shifting as a whole:

lexa's tiktok - if you are thinking, wow, this all seems like a very concrete way to fall into a deep sleep, you (and these comments) would be right. that's all that these people are doing. falling asleep and having incredibly vivid dreams.

shifting is notoriously difficult, and people will beg and plead for methods and helpful advice to do it correctly. which makes sense, as it's an impossible desire made true: changing the universe around you to meet your exact wants and dreams.

liz's tiktok - this shifter is crying while claiming they shifted, they shifted, they shifted! it goes to show the endurance needed for a pseudoscience like this, and the reward you feel after forcing yourself into a lucid dream. notice the comments, the first fulling buying into not only transferring universes but worried about the risk of getting stuck in one, and the last comment, self-aware and knowing that all of this is "just a dream". the middle comment is all of the rest of us, wondering "how did we got here? this certainly cannot be the right classroom."

as far as 'shifting' goes, the biggest population of shifters are cosmically traveling into the harry potter universe. other tropes include shifting into a reality where you're famous, and, my personal favorite, (the presence of which is antithetical to the core message of the entire series) one where you win the hunger games.

one of my favorite shifting tiktoks i ever came across was a girl warning her fellow shifters 'not to shift into the trojan war' because 'even though you're a medic' it's still 'very traumatizing'. i can only find a link to a reaction video, but i promise it was an earnest tiktok when it was posted.

the most common defense of shifting is in reference to a mysterious scientific study that seemingly everyone cites but no one has an actual link to.

wa gè's tiktok - the trend implying shifters are effortless and lowkey about their knowledge, whilst 'anti' shifters boast their rhetoric superfluously. here are the comments on this tiktok:

notice anything? all requests for proof are acknowledged (liked by creator) and left unanswered, or responded to with a 'i'll find them later.' wouldn't solid evidence of something you do that is constantly under intense scrutiny be always on hand?

some of the other 'defenses' of shifting fall into a very dangerous line of thinking: "well of course it's real. that's why so many people say it's not...because they're afraid of the truth." this conspiracy theory way of rationalization can lead to very scary places; if someone convinces you something is true purely based on the fact everyone is saying it's false, it can lead to the belief of pseudoscience and harmful conspiracy theories.

luckily, the venn diagram of young women shifting into gryffindor tower and flat earthers are very far apart, but it's a way of interpreting the world that can be harmful in the long run.

originally, shifting boomed during the pandemic, a time of peak loneliness and isolation. there's actually a great study posted on the national library of medicine dissecting this exact relationship:

link to study - it's part of the library's "covid-19 collection" and incredibly detailed and sourced. the study also debunks the mysterious 'scientific data' that shifters are always referencing; simply, it's a profoundly misunderstood physics concept, and to quote the above article in reference to said theory: "The theory does not posit, however, that individuals can create their own realities and is considered unfalsifiable and thus questionable by some in the mainstream physics community."

there are still active 'shifters' on tiktok, though shifting reached its peak during the pandemic. people are still getting famous, dating fictional bad boys, and surviving the zombie apocalypse; you just aren't part of that reality, so you haven't heard about it. shifting is the ultimate "you wouldn't know my boyfriend, he goes to another school" card.

building upon everything we've learned from this blog, we know people will always want to insert themselves into realities they love and are currently not existing in. whether that be hogwarts, a mafia house, or the avengers tower, people in pain will always dream of someplace better, and i think we'd lose some of our humanity if we told them not to (just maybe just tone down on the pseudoscience, guys?).

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y/n tiktok: being everyone, everywhere, all at once

we've covered quite a few fandoms across this blog so far: harry potter, marvel, and call of duty, to name a few. there are hundreds of characters between these universes, but someone who was present in all of these, in perpetual ubiquity, was you.

though touched on briefly, y/n, or your/name, is everywhere. it's the anonymous self-insert character that anyone can ascribe to, as it's what's written on the box. the character is you, they have your (/) name!

quick disclaimer: i am going to be using she/her pronouns for y/n, as most of the characters 'she' is are women using those pronouns.

as y/n represents the watcher (originally, the reader) on tiktok, she can, quite literally, be everyone, everywhere, all at once. this omnipresence finally answers the age old question of: if a tiktok falls on the for you page, can anyone hear y/n? yes, she's the tree, the forest, and the noise (all at once).

i pulled the below tiktoks out of the #ynstan and #ynlife tags, the former having a total of 16 million views, and the latter, 124 million. most of these videos involve a carousel of photos with a text overlay, which harkens back to a simpler time of the internet, when these kinds of videos were posted on youtube:

Harry Styles Love Story~part 1 from magan stylinson on youtube (and also from 11 years ago.)

so, for over a decade (probably around two, at this point), these self-insert videos have existed on the internet. what makes tiktok's iteration of this genre so interesting is its reliance on what amounts to glorified digital LARP-ing.

LARP stands for Live Action Role Play, and is an umbrella term for people who like to live out fictional worlds in real time. some might attend a renaissance faire or go to a murder mystery party, but LARP-ing is most popular with a fictional element attached. so, you are not attending these events, but the fantastical, crime-solving, suave version of yourself is.

from underworld LARP - a group of LARP-ers. (weapons and beards might be made from craft foam, but the love and passion are very real.)

cosplay is tightly interwoven into LARP-ing, and offshoots of this genre include games like dungeons and dragons, big gatherings of fans like comic-con, and hobbies like digital roleplaying.

roleplaying, traditionally, has more than one party. you make up a persona (or inhabit a favorite fictional one) and interact as the character you're impersonating, with other people doing the same thing with other characters in that universe. digital roleplaying is much of the same, just instead of group hangouts, you're all on the same forum together.

LARP-ing, specifically, on tiktok can take many forms, mostly hidden under the thin veil of the 'POV' hashtag, but the elements and purpose are all the same: to imagine yourself in a fictional universe, experiencing made-up situations.

it's weird to imagine yourself LARP-ing as, well, yourself, but a majority of popular y/n 'tropes' include being famous and/or dating someone who is, so your life is then fictional (to most people).

these tiktoks are very similar to y/n fanfiction, as the video tends to just be the visual interpretation of the 'what if my favorite celebrity was in love with me and my mysterious charm' concept.

tiktok, however, takes this imagining a step further and instead of any random photos as the background for their story, they pull real photos and videos of celebrities and supercut them together to fit the proposed narrative.

what makes this roleplaying and not just pov is the fact that a lot of the accounts producing this content aren't labeled as 'fandom' or 'edit' accounts. they're advertised as y/n's own account. so, when a video like this pops up on your feed, you're not watching an imagine, you're suddenly shoved into the spotlight, and boom, you're the star, somehow watching your own video.

here's an example, where you seem to be a hidden kardashian/jenner sister:

y/n jenner's tiktok - notice the name but the contradicting caption. the name hints at this tiktok being y/n jenner's, but the caption is out-of-universe, designating the video as a classic tiktok 'pov'. the comments are turned off on this post as well, usually indicating some hard-fought digital battle has taken place. with pov tiktoks, these battles tend to take form as a bunch of people flooding the comments, making fun of the situation or the creator.

you'd be hard-pressed to find y/n tiktoks that aren't y/n being a famous musician/actor/model/humanitarian and having a social circle full of today's biggest celebrities. below are some examples.

stay with me here, here is a tiktok describing what would happen if k-pop idol y/n joined tiktok:

tadukim's tiktok - the caption is in turkish, and roughly translates to "voted the best k-pop idol in the world". you might notice the fact that, apparently, 31 billion people follow y/n. possibly going intergalactic, you have quadruple the amount of followers than people on planet earth. that's pretty impressive, congratulations. commenters really had two opinions about this:

this is a good summary of y/n tiktok as a whole: some disillusioned by the fantasy of it, and others, completely submersed. it's like a silent disco.

y/n has lived a lot of lives and, for some reason, a lot of the popular ones are very sad.

here's one describing hardships celebrity y/n has gone through:

anni's tiktok - there's a larger list, all including real footage/pictures of people's hardships. the above "got cheated on" background is an actual video of singer madison beer and her ex-boyfriend arguing. another 'pain' y/n went through was losing her best friend, and the video behind it was a clip from a youtube video posted by (ironically) jubilee, 'people read the last texts from their lost loved ones'. so, real pain and real loss, all stitched together to form your, apparently, very tragic background. the comments on these videos are sometimes hilarious though, and speak to the broader y/n community at large:

my favorite being loreena's very simple "no i don't" - what don't you do? need therapy? have all these hardships? we'll never know. (the '1 reply' is a helpful "Its a pov" from another user) this is the issue with making the audience the subject, it's assumed they give up some of the customization guns as they're already the protagonist, but them demanding the creator make the story customized to their history is just asking for an aspirational autobiography.

next, finally, you die. there are quite a few tiktoks showcasing what would happen if y/n died from [insert dramatic cause here]. these videos mostly comprise of various real celebrities crying with beats of story/dialogue written atop them.

here's one where you're a famous k-pop idol who died in a car crash:

y/n's tiktok - (do i need to keep linking it? it's your tiktok. rest in peace, by the way.) a few key things to notice: the search suggestion being "y n deaths scene", the caption remarking the creator should be giving "cr", or credit, to some original creator but they "don't remember😭", and the fact the video they used for the BTS members is obviously some heartfelt and happy dedication/awards speech, as they're referencing their fanbase (ARMY) in the very visible captions. this video was one of the first i saw highlighting this weird mix of y/n-LARP tiktok culture, and the comments are really what inspired this whole post:

the use of personal pronoun "i" with something as definitive and past tense as dying in a car accident, is endlessly hilarious to me. the fight between commenters saying, in reference to the y/n-verse as a whole, "i am tired of dying again and again", mixed in with the in-universe comments of "is it's true?? 🥺🥺🥺" create a funny comment section, but damn the whole concept to be a confusing tableau. and there are victims of these unsaid and very flexible rules of digital LARP-ing, note wonyooung_au_'s comment, "I thought it only on au and I also thought y/n didn't exist". this comment, in and of itself, admits to two contradictory things: 1) this commenter is confused because someone they thought fictional had apparently, very much actually, died and 2) that fictional person was themselves. you can interpret other comments like "who is y/n" and "when?" as either conforming to the story, thus acting like any other comments on a celebrity death announcement, or, as regular tiktok users confused, asking when this person died and who, exactly, is "y/n"?

sometimes commenters don't know that these tiktoks are supposed to be from fictional universes, so they break 'character' and ask questions. this tracks with real-life LARP-ing, wherein people will say "hold" to temporarily pause the story so they can ask a 'regular' life question, like how much is parking, or if anyone has blister bandaids (here's a glossary of LARP terms, there's quite a few).

while tiktok doesn't have a version of "hold", the non-fictional nature (i.e. based in reality) rhetoric of most social media allows for the presence of comments to be the "hold" themselves.

this dichotomy is the give-and-take of roleplaying on the internet. on one hand, fictional social media accounts can seem very realistic because the 21st-century version of seeing if someone exists is finding their instagram. but, on the other hand, people know this is a fictional situation. being shown an account acting as if it's real could be confusing and dissuading to a lot of watchers.

the internet is (in)famous for its community, so fostering a strictly-fictional-yet-you-centric environment can isolate users. having one foot in an illusive fictional world and the other on a public social media account can eliminate the space for reality-based commentary that watchers might have (which will tank popularity, as this is what fandoms are built on).

so yes, y/n tiktoks are a unique form of media borne of the internet's need to write stories, but i'm done being the star. someone else can go on sold out stadium tours and date sebastian stan. this y/n is busy.

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call of duty tiktok: ghosting your boyfriend

call of duty is a first-person shooter video game that was released by activision in 2003. COD (acronym pronounced like the fish), originally, focused on a WWII storyline involving a fictional military unit fighting historical threats. activison has since expanded outwards to other various battlefields – all centering around a team of deadly soldiers and a playable hero main character.

COD has been wildly successful; guinness world records marks it as being the best-selling first-person shooter series of all time. all of this violence and war has been marketed as more masculine, but there have been non-male fans of the franchise since its conception.

a popular character that has been present in the series since 2009 is simon “ghost” riley. he’s a british special forces operator with just about as much trauma as lazy writers can force on one character – one peek at his character wiki will leave you either breathless or with a headache.

simon "ghost" riley - photo: activision

here’s a quick, but by no means definitive, list of things that have happened to mr. riley across the franchise:

1. traumatic childhood 2. tortured (but never successfully brainwashed) by his turncoat unit leader. this leader is then killed by another boss and ghost is buried alive in his leader's casket, breaking out using the rotted jawbone of said former leader 3. temper-management issues 4. family killed by previously mentioned brainwashed comrades and ghost is framed for it 5. prevented nuclear war 6. shot point blank in the chest with a .44 7. snowmobile accident (blown up by a man named templar, who, if you can believe it, belongs to the enemy group ‘five knights’)

a lot of people separate ghost into '2009 ghost' and 'current ghost', in reference to the remaster of his original game. this allows for ghost to not only have a melancholy air, but melancholy potential. something that fans everywhere are chomping at the bit for.

ren's tiktok - notice the spelling of 'kill', 'prostitute', 'die', 'overdose', and 'murder'. there’s a lot more lore about this character, but the gist of it is that he’s a tragic anti-hero that is trying his best to do good (remind you of any other topics on this blog?)

on archive of our own, there’s about 8,000 pieces of fanfiction centering around ghost and his scottish squadmate, john ‘soap’ mactavish. there’s a substantial amount of fanfiction dedicated to ghost/female reader - that being a fanfiction about ghost written from a second person pov, with the protag having female characteristics - hovering around 2,500 works.

ghost is a growing character in terms of fanfiction, with a lot of the most popular pieces written in the past year or so, despite the character originally debuting almost 15 years ago; soap being introduced two years before that in 2007. i don’t think activision set out to create intense homoerotic subtext in their war-idolatry games, but, hey, it happens to the best of us.

what i’m discussing here is a more recent addition to all of this fanfare: the existence of ghost tiktok. the interesting thing about COD tiktok is that it's a growing female userbase slowly infiltrating a traditionally masculine part of the internet.

there are a few kinds of tiktoks that populate the ‘#simonghostriley’ tag. the major ones being edits of ghost clips from the newly remastered modern warfare 2 (released in 2022), or, more notably, tiktoks showcasing ghost cosplayers. cosplay, is of course, a portmanteau of ‘costume play’, describing the action of real life humans dressing up as their favorite (mostly) fictional characters. think comic con – anime, video games, movies.

ashanyx's tiktok - note the 2.7 million likes and the commenter 'Buzzarre'; i believe he is said boyfriend.

(there's also a smaller community of ghost fanfiction writers on tiktok. they post their work in sections screenshotted off their phone and put in a photo carousel. it's an ease-of-use thing - being able to read the fic without switching apps - and most ghost fanfiction exists in other corners of the internet which is why i didn't include it in this post.)

i want you to know, on a exclusively personal note, that these cosplay tiktoks were very hard to watch. i don’t know what it is, but the confidence that these (mostly) men go at these cosplays makes me itchy. explore at your own risk - and heed warnings, a lot of creators tag their content with 'MDNI' or 'minors do not interact'.

tiktok user 'smollgrim' - one of the pinned videos on his account describes his 'boundaries' - which he usually reiterates in shorthand in all of his tiktok descriptions.

this confidence is one of the reasons ghost tiktoks are so popular. ghost is a masked character that’s cocky with plenty of pre-recorded dialogue. combined, these things make him extremely accessible to cosplay. all you need is ghost’s iconic skull balaclava and you’re set. if you’re wondering why he wears a mask, the answer is sexy mystery (or facial scars. or as a intimidation tactic. you decide).

ghost, as a character, has all of our favorite love interest characteristics. powerful, aloof, and most importantly, being misunderstood. the mask allows him to remain emotionally anonymous, maybe he's smiling at a joke you made, or secretly blushing. this ambiguity is alluring to an audience, as they can project anything onto ghost - allowing for multiple interpretations from the same video clip of him.

ghosty's tiktok - see the diverse interpretations of the same clip of ghost killing an enemy: either he's angry because you're incompetent or he's protecting you. ghost sits at the same table as our favorite mafia bosses, the avengers, and draco malfoy.

while there is a larger community of 'real life' ghosts - cosplaying him involves a little bit more fanfare than the usual bad boy. since ghost is special forces, he wears a lot of military gear. this results in wannabe ghosts fully decking themselves out in tactical outfits - which they then use to play pretend in front of a camera with lights blinking on and off in the background.

these are two different tiktoks - jewels' has the search suggestion of 'call of duty cosplay x y n sad', which is very telling of what people are trying to get from these videos. cupid's tiktok has an audio saying 'this is a homicidal maniac! no you cannot date him.' - which is also very indicative.

the harsh contrast of these smug ghost cosplayers and the brutality of the media they're adopting remind me of a quote from the preface to the picture of dorian gray:

"We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless."

which, to me, means, yeah this might be ridiculous, donning face paint and night vision goggles to get compliments on tiktok, but life is ridiculous. that's kind of the whole point.

i can only see ghost getting more popular; famous internet personality brittany broski is infamously in love with these cosplayers and talks about it all the time on her various platforms.

(1) (2) - these are very popular ghost videos, and mentions of brittany flood the comments and search suggestions.

if i have learned anything from this research, it's that anti-heroes with lots of power will always be attractive to a large audience. no matter the melodrama, the violence, or the miscommunication, if bad boys exist, fandom spaces will be created - and i commend the internet for that.

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mcu tiktok: finding your super-family

the marvel cinematic universe, or the MCU, is the universe that most marvel movies inhabit; begining with iron man in 2008 stretching to the most recent guardians of the galaxy movie in 2023.

what this means is that every movie, no matter whom it is about, takes place in the same reality as the other superhero films. the first avengers film is the capstone of this concept, with all of our favorite heroes uniting to fight together.

the avengers, 2012, marvel studios. photo: handout/reuters

the mcu fandom is massive, with the 'marvel cinematic universe' tag on fanfiction website archive of our own hosting almost 500,000 pieces of writing. (the most popular fic, with over a million hits, is an 'extremely nsfw fic' from the perspective of a character named groot, who only says 'i am groot' in varying cadences and is also a tree.)

technicalities aside, what the mcu has done to fandom at large is immense. the sheer amount of characters, relationships, and fantastical superpowers are fertile grounds for fans to stretch their creative muscles.

because of these characteristics, the mcu community on tiktok is huge. what makes this chapter of fans unique not only to its platform but also to its fandom is the presence of short, video povs.

these mcu tiktoks are very similar to the dracotok videos previously discussed - muted audio, captions, superimposing into movie scenes, etc. dracotok and mcutok, because they are both based in popular films, require the watcher to self-insert themselves into the story.

something distinctive to marvel povs is that while they do oftentimes encapsulate romantic relationships, what they highlight the most is the use of a trope called found family.

a found family is, at its simplest, a family that you’ve created yourself that isn’t blood related to you. think close friends, spouses, mentors. the concept of ‘found families’ has its roots in the LGBTQ+ movement, where people found their own families that love and support them, because their blood-related ones might not.

when it comes to the mcu, the found family trope is usually applied to the avengers cast. iron man, captain america, black widow, the winter solider, spiderman, the list goes on. with the amount of trauma that these superheroes go through, they are irrevocably bonded and thus a found family is born.

the avengers found family concept originated in the copious amounts of fanfiction written after the initial 2012 release of the film, and has evolved to fit new fandom spaces, like long-lasting media always does. common tropes included hawkeye (clint barton) working his way through the vents of the avengers tower like a hamster, thor (thor) having an obsession for poptarts, and steve rogers (captain america) being a secret artist.

i reached out to one of my former roommates, a former avid marvel fanfiction reader and someone who would like to remain anonymous, to ask why exactly some of these tropes existed. they responded to my inquiry with:

the idea of domesticated avengers was super big... there are so many stories of them living together and being roomies. and then in 2013 the humor was a weird mix of like just general internet mustache humor but also the general trend of making like tough scary characters seem like big softies.

in the modern day, a lot of the mcu pov tiktoks focus on these fabricated domestic relationships. while romance is there as well (you would be hard pressed to find a fandom space that does not revolve around it), there’s a substantial population of family-focused content (content about families, not content that is family-friendly).

these videos tend to play out a situation wherein y/n (your/name, the ubiquitous protagonist of all fan content) is the focus of a problem or joke, and the mcu cast around her (it’s always a girl) reacts accordingly.

like dracotok before it, these tiktoks do not usually have audio dialogue. there’s text up on the screen overlaying clips from the movies, with a trending audio backing.

for the mcu, these audios tend to be in one of two categories: badass montage music, or a hilarious dialogue snippit to emphasize the sarcastic nature of y/n’s relationship to the avengers. some newer tiktoks use AI voice generators, but they’re not very popular as they balance the precarious line of what content is deemed 'canon' and what can be manipulated.*

popular mcutok tropes include:

1. tony stark (iron man) as a father figure

notice the call out: "for all my daddy issues peeps out there" - an accurate callout, as most desire for a found family comes from the lack of a foundational accepting one. being accepted despite being 'too much' is attractive to a lot of watchers, as extreme fans (of anything) tend to be condemned as 'too much'. also, if the line "your beauty never ever scared me" seems out of place for a marvel movie, it's because the line is from mary on a cross, a song by heavy metal band ghost. it's also the audio playing in the background of the tiktok, so, instead of whatever he was originally saying, tony now comforts someone who previously thought they weren't worth the trouble.

2. y/n is injured/suffering/otherwise hurt and hiding it

the caption summarizes another popular trope: y/n not wanting to 'worry anyone'. pretending to be fine but actually being the opposite is commonplace for heroes (and traumatized young adults), so imagining someone, especially your favorite character, taking notice and worrying over you, fills a gap of previous neglect the watcher may have.

3. an avenger (in this case, captain america), as a concerned older sibling

the use of movie clips shows the round robin of characters (minus, thankfully, captain america) taking a drink to admit they've kissed y/n. this tiktok hints at a promiscuous, but fun, adult life with the avengers. one that includes kissing and drinking games - a y/n life filled with respect, and more importantly with a found family trope, familiarity.

3. y/n is a badass superhero

this tiktok includes non-marvel movie clip (scandalously, it's a clip from DC's suicide squad) - to showcase y/n's super abilities. again, with emphasis on power and respect, y/n initially seems like a normal girl, but has backing by captain america and is obviously important enough to be interviewed by some sort of nondescript agent. it gives an air of effortless power, something the avengers embody and y/n tends to perpetuate. per usual for tiktok, there's a dramatic song playing in the background. this time it's all the good girls go to hell by billie eilish, which includes the lyric "don't say i didn't warn you". a lot of these tiktoks have dialogue following the lyrics of songs playing in the background, even if it makes the whole piece sound stilted and awkward. the untouchable cool that comes with your own backing track is one of the hallmarks of marvel movies that permeates even the micro-media of tiktok.

4. an even more do-it-yourself trope; the creator posits a situation and doesn't tell you who the watcher is supposed to be. in the comments, the watchers guess at their own pov - almost like a community suggestion board.

in this tiktok, tony, while hanging out with the other avengers, hears an enrapturing voice coming from inside his house.

notice the description: #POV: ??? - the woman's face is never revealed, all you see is a cunning smile with perfect teeth.

and the comments:

people are writing multiple sentences to set up this situation, ending comments with numbers, indicating is more written as a reply. these watchers are almost micro-dosing fanfiction, quickly typing out a pov for others to enjoy before scrolling on. casual watchers who might not normally comment can read these situations while the tiktok plays over and over again in the background. this not only creates more engagement, but allows the watcher to think of the video from multiple povs as they listen to the audio repeat itself.

overall, these tiktoks are a symptom of the very basic human desire to belong. while the avengers are superheroes, the heart of these povs are love and support - your dad comforting you, your older brother worrying about your love life - the super strength and flying robots are just added bonuses.

*one of my favorite pieces of academic writing ever, "Disappointing Fans: Fandom, Fictional Theory, and the Death of the Author" by Lesley Goodman for the Journal of Popular Culture, expands more on this concept.

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mafia boss tiktok: sexy violence is still violence

booktok (or book tiktok) is a populous community full of a multitude of different types of content. book reviews, lists, promotions, and something very uniquely booktok: POVs as recommendations.

detailing a scene or trope in a book, these POVs allow watchers to experience some of the story and thus compel them to read the rest of it - usually the book title is in the description or finally given like a blessing from above after hundreds of people comment "title?"

one of the most popular genres on booktok is 'mafia romance'. within this genre, there is a couple: one of which is part of a crime family and the other is not. it's usually the man being some sort of powerful mafia authority figure, and the woman being the everyday, doesn't-know-better, citizen. the two opposing ways of life meet and shenanigans ensue.

if you were to sit down and think of what reminds you of a mafia boss, ‘secret soft romantic' and 'protective humanitarian’ are probably not the first things that would come to mind. the readers of booktok would disagree with you, though, as mafia romance novels say these bosses might be misunderstood and violent, but it's for the right reasons.

(when i say mafia bosses, i mean the ones written in kindle unlimited novels or wattpad stories. there’s probably people in the depths of tiktok romanticizing al capone, but the bosses discussed below are purely fictional.)

mafia boss tiktoks are incredibly formulaic. the most popular ones all involve the following: 

1. blurry photos of a man in a suit and a woman in a dress, usually ripped from some place on the internet. no faces are shown, and the picture tends to be blurred. this gives the illusion of a ‘real life’ situation but also, with the lack of identification, the ability for the watcher to superimpose themselves into the story.

2. text on the photos, describing a situation, usually in multiple parts. tiktok recently came out with a slides feature, wherein the user could post a carousel of photos that the watcher can flip through at their leisure. older tiktoks did not have this, so the photos changed automatically, as the slideshow was artificial and just an edited video. > the first photo tends to have an establishing piece of narrative or dialogue ex. you’re sitting in a restaurant with your arranged-marriage husband, the biggest, scariest mafia boss in town. the waiter brings out lobster, but you’re allergic. > the subsequent slides are a foil to the first, usually contrasting the intensity of the ‘mafia boss’ situation ex. you think your husband doesn’t care but then he grabs the waiter and says, "get her a new meal or i’ll kill you."

3. a tiktok audio of a song (a lot of the times it’s selena gomez, for whatever reason) that’s slowed down and then sped up OR it’s a part of the song that has a quick tempo change. the slideshow of pictures usually changes in beat with the music (you have to do it yourself if it’s a carousel of photos), to further dramatize the situation.

these tiktoks allow for potential readers to peek into the story, usually at a very intense scene. it's the literature equivalent of seeing a very fast sports car zoom past you. you wonder, who's in there? what's their motive? why do they look so cool and effortless?

a lot of these recommendations showcase the mafia boss committing acts of violence as reaction to something negative happening to our heroine. it’s usually something the girl pushes aside, saying it’s not important or something he doesn’t have to worry about, but he does, and he usually like kills someone or sets something on fire. this disproportionate reaction, the ruthlessness as result of secret love, is what draws readers to these mafia romances. 

link to nicole fox's tiktok - note the use of emojis and punctuation in 'deathly' and 'mafia boss' to circumvent tiktok's rigorous and famously inconsistent content flagging system

there is attraction in someone who is seemingly awful to everyone else but loves you. with the added status and money that comes with the mafia boss profession (fictionally) - and the mafia being far enough way in history to modern middle class american women that it has intrigue but little-to-no truly negative connotations – mafia bosses are the perfect recipe for 'realistic' romantic anti-hero.

link to bookish94's tiktok - note the spelling of 'kidnapped'

the situations that these women are put into (by majority female authors), and their subsequent POV tiktoks, are incredibly violent. for example, the girl could be assaulted or threatened at the club she works at, and the mafia boss that owns the club sees it, gets incredibly angry, and kills the man that attacked her. because the initial violence is remedied by additional violence (though in the opposite direction), these stories are labeled ‘edgy’, ‘dark’, and ‘not for everyone’.

link to romance book recs' tiktok

as someone who grew up in domestic violence, these stories make me nervous. not personally, but for the audience of readers that consume them. a violent man is a violent man, no matter where that violence goes to or comes from. i cannot imagine these mafia bosses have a balanced head on their shoulders (people in power rarely do), so their violence, i imagine, isn’t balanced either. 

the mafia is not that far away nor nearly as romantic as it seems, it was just in 2010 that the infamous calabrian mob was taken to court for drug smuggling, business extortion, and arms dealing. a lot of the key players that exposed these crimes were women - the new yorker has an incredibly detailed account of the whole situation. 

italian prosecutors said, about women in the calabrian mob, “[these] women led tragic lives. but many didn’t consider the women to be of much use in their fight; they were just more victims….the women don’t matter.”

later in the article, author alex perry describes: “women who did not uphold exacting codes of respect were beaten, often in the street. wives who were unfaithful, even to the memory of a husband dead for fifteen years, were killed, typically by their closest male relatives, and their bodies were often burned or dissolved in acid to be sure of erasing the family shame.”

the fictional mafia (and the real one) works a lot like an abusive partner would: privately, intensely, and with overpowering authority threatening violence. an elusive and romantic fictional mafia boss might threaten to kill your ex-partner, but so would a very real life abusive boyfriend.

while researching for this post, i came across the following search results. this is on the first page of links for the google search ‘mafia domestic violence’:

news articles detailing real violence, followed by books romanticizing it. (also, I read the sweetest oblivion by danielle lori. it was bad.)

i worry that these POVs and books will teach a younger generation of women that violence is okay. that killing or harming without second thought, to defend or remedy a situation that did not need it, isn’t a sign of instability, but a sign of passion.  

comment found on the above nicole fox tiktok

link to 'best mafia/mob romance books' goodreads list

stories like these, i believe, are borne out of the need to understand something illogical: senseless violence against women. romanticizing a mafia boss allows readers to believe that there is purpose to this violence. that men don’t actually baselessly hate and assault people, it’s just that they’re misunderstood and protective.

money and power do not grant you authority over your partner, even if it’s in a sexy way backtracked to a selena gomez song. no one should make you feel unsafe, especially if that person is your partner. you have the right to safety, always and forever, from all angles – no matter what your mafia boss boyfriend says. 

domestic violence resources:

national domestic violence hotline: [phone] thehotline.org

[692blog]

dracotok: a golden era in tiktok history

if you’re here, i doubt i need to introduce you to tiktok: the video sharing app. the ‘algorithm knows me better than my best friend’ app, the ‘spread misinformation with vigor’ app, the ‘yeah! i saw someone talking about it on tiktok’ app. the reason i chose it as the main subject of this blog is because while it is relatively new - compared to long standing things like twitter (or x), instagram, and tumblr - tiktok has a grip on the conscious of american consumers like nothing else.

the app is rife with content, absolutely saturated with users, and growing every single day. it’s hard to find someone born after the millennium that doesn't either 1) love tiktok and spend hours on it or 2) absolutely hate tiktok and continue to refuse to download the app.

something that will be mentioned on this blog that (at face value) has little to do with tiktok is the coronavirus pandemic. the spring of 2020 is when i finally folded and downloaded tiktok. i had a weird sense of superiority abstaining from the app previously, when it was still called musical.ly (and was mostly comprised of teen idols lip-syncing to justin bieber), but suddenly the pandemic hit and i, like everyone, was alone and stuck inside. thus we all turned to our phones and found solace in tiktok.

downloads of tiktok absolutely boomed in the first two quarters of 2020 and because of this parasitic takeover of the internet, previously existing groups of fans inevitably moved over to tiktok. this migration thus creating an entirely new and dominant chapter of fans on the app. one of the most infamous examples of this population increase is the subject of today’s blog post: DracoTok.

DracoTok derives its name from two things: Draco Malfoy and TikTok.

Draco, of course, being the popular antihero from the fantasy series Harry Potter and known for being not very nice but oh-so-very mysterious.

most communities on tiktok are called by their subject matter, followed by the suffix ‘tok’ (examples: booktok, cleantok, sportstok).

DracoTok was unique because it was the first time that a (quite large) section of the app was dedicated to one (fictional) person. amongst edits and fanfiction, the primary type of video posted on dracotok were P.O.V.s (point of view) tiktoks.

dracotok #povs (pronounced "pee-oh-vees", or "pahvs"), at their simplest, were videos putting the watcher (or the creator) in the position of someone adjacent to draco (mostly his girlfriend, but also his sister, best friend, etc.). situations and events (canonical, or more popularly, non-canonical) would occur and 'you' would be reacting/talking/acting with draco and then the video would end. it was formulaic but such is tiktok. and so, in 2020, with nothing but time on everyone’s hands, dracotok quickly infested the entire app.

within dracotok povs (and also povs at large), there are two main visual categories.

the first being you (the watcher) as y/n (your/name, a common placeholder for the watcher to inject their own name):

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you could be either a blank space in the video, meant to be a spot for your imagination to insert yourself in (sitting next to harry in your hogwarts robes) or you could be a pre-existing character, retrofitted with y/n and previous character traits erased (common characters to replace: hermoine, luna, etc.). thus the movie scene would play and you could pretend you were right along with the cast as whatever situation unfolded.

ara's video - note the acknowledgment of the 'old dracotok'

secondly - later and more elaborately, tiktok creators started superimposing themselves into the harry potter movies:

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creators would buy prop costumes and wands and would record themselves against a green screen to later edit themselves into movie scenes. these creators obviously were not in the original filming, but with color grading and convincing costuming, it looks like they were rubbing elbows with draco himself.

cherrie cherry's video | atina's video

the audio portion of these povs were usually whatever songs or 'audios' were trending at the time. 'audios' are what make tiktok iconic – they're short clips of music/talking/dialogue that are either original or pulled from somewhere else on the internet - and tiktok encourages you to record videos against these ‘audios' (it’s what makes up most of the app).

because audios are tiktok's bread and butter, the dialogue exchanges in dracotok povs are usually purely in writing – captions written in time to the characters moving their mouths - with some morose song or badass quip playing over the scene. this allows for audio freedom and personalization – you can read your pov damsel in any voice you want.

these videos, at their core, are exercises in escapism. life in 2020 was strange and very scary, so people turned to the things they knew - characters they loved from childhood. it's an understandable evolution of content and a perfect encapsulation of pandemic loneliness.

there is a larger conversation absent from this commentary about fan-made work in general - but that is a very long post for another day.

this combination of pandemic free time, childhood nostalgia, and internet access allowed dracotok to thrive. now, people look back on the ‘dracotok era’ of tiktok and sigh wistfully, wishing for the simpler times of three years ago (when nothing stressful was happening at all).

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this comment was on a tiktok dedicated to the third anniversary to dracotok, which, apparently, was celebrated recently on august 22nd - i'm sorry you missed it.