A Guide to Children’s Culture for Adults Out of Touch With Reality: Who Are the Ninjas?
This week, kids test each other’s loyalty via TikTok, poke fun at a gamer for not knowing female anatomy, and celebrate their fathers by digging up an old disco song.
Celebrities You May Not Have Heard Of: Ninjas
If you haven’t already, you should know about Ninja. Richard Tyler “Ninja” Blevins has been teetering on the edge between the real world and internet celebrity for years. The accommodating gamer has over 17 million followers on his Twitch channel , making him the most viewed streamer on the platform, but he’s also done a lot of things offline. He has appeared with his family on Celebrity Family Feud , has been featured on the cover of ESPN magazine for his esports career, has been named to Time’s 100, and has even appeared on The Masked Singer . Is this enough to become a real celebrity, or should people over 35 also know it?
TikTok Loyalty Testers
The LoyaltyTest tag has over 730 million views on TikTok and it’s pretty creepy. It works like this: people in a relationship ask—and sometimes pay—a stranger to look into their partner’s private messages to see how they react to the stranger flirting with them. Sometimes a scammer is caught . Sometimes useful things happen. Sometimes there are shocking plot twists . Be that as it may, the most popular videos in this genre seem to rejoice in the suffering and misfortune of others. All of this speaks to the casual brutality that comes from being both connected and isolated at the same time. I don’t think I like the future, so let’s look into the past, shall we?
The founders of TikTok challenges
Not understanding what is going on with young people often results in breathless media and police warnings about dangerous, silly teen trends, Tide Pod call , milk crate call, Kool Aid Man call, etc. today, here are some quirks from the distant past that were just as stupid and dangerous as anything you see on TikTok:
- Flagpole Sitting: In the 1920s, attention-starved sailor Alvin “Shipwreck” Kelly popularized the task of pole-sitting, which consisted of staying on the platform on the pole for as long as possible. The longest time was achieved from 1982 to 1984, when H. David Werder lasted 439 days .
- Phone Booth Filling : The phone booth challenge originated in post-war America and was to see how many people you could fit in a phone booth. The record was set in 1959 when 25 young people in South Africa fit into a telephone booth.
- Belladonna Eye Drops: No beauty trend on TikTok is as troubling as the Victorian practice of dropping lethal nightshade into the eyes to dilate the pupils and create doe-like eyes… and blindness if you use too much.
- Marathon Dance Contests : ” Seeing How Long You Can Dance ” was no fun little thing. It was a grueling, nightmarish freak show put on by desperate people during the Great Depression. Watch how horses are shot, isn’t it ?, a great depressing film on this topic.
- Swallowing goldfish : I’m all for this fad. Yes, it’s cruel to goldfish, but it’s so stupid and disgusting that I can’t help but admire it. Record ( somewhat controversial ) – 89 fish.
- Panty raids : I’m glad we live in a society where this kind of nonsense will be considered a felony and not entertainment for college students.
- Streaking : Breaking something while running naked was a huge deal in the 1970s, our most inexplicable decade. It still happens occasionally today at football games and the like.
A gamer learned about the anatomy of women through taunts on Twitter
Maybe people are being too hard on this random Twitter guy , but when you post that epitomizes the worst stereotypes of gamers so perfectly, you can’t expect people to not take a swing. Peach-fuzz-gate began when @9santy1 posted a still from a promotional shot for the just-released video game Horizon Forbidden West with a message that translates something like this: “Since when did [the game’s female protagonist] Aloy get a beard? ” with a helpful circle drawn around the offending hair. She does not know; but the graphics are now good enough that we can see the peach fuzz on her cheeks. This dude, as many Twitter users have pointed out, has clearly never been close enough to a real woman to notice. @9santy1 doesn’t seem to mind the ridicule. He pinned the tweet.
Viral video of the week: Zach Montana and his disco dad
The viral video this week belongs to Zach Montana of TikTok. A teenager discovered a forgotten recording of the disco song “Surrender to Me” that his father recorded 43 years ago and excitedly turned it on for his online audience. The song is bop, as they say, but it’s made even better by Zach’s wild reaction to it . The video went viral, the song reached over 500,000 streams on Spotify, and Zach and his father performed it live together on Jimmy Kimmel Live . If this turns out to be a carefully planned and coordinated media move, I won’t be surprised – everything looks pretty convenient. But for now, it’s fun.