TikTok’s Ugly ‘NPC in Real Life’ Trend
kotaku.com
kotaku.com
Supposedly ground-zero: https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1411339-npc-wojak
The most egregious recent example is probably the "virgin vs chad" meme. Within mere days of it being created, I was already seeing edits of it on various websites (mostly reddit) that completely missed the point of the joke and treated it as yet another "thing I do good, thing you do bad" image macro.
Adapting and evolving formats isn't "missing the point". They are two distinct audiences with two distinct cultures. Of course they aren't going to make the same memes.
People like to treat 4chan like it's this obscure, underground, edgy hacker place. but it's really just a website like any other filled with people who have too much time on their hands. It has the same amount of gore, porn, and bullshit that goes on in Reddit, (less, if you account for the fact that posts get deleted eventually and there's a limitation on how many threads are open, unlike reddit).
Your neighbours kids probably goes on 4chan, I know neighbour's does. And I'm a lot less worried about "avid 4chan users" than "avid reddit users"
Note: don’t be tempted by the audiobook! The real deal features illustrations by the author
A popular example of the last six months being "Slava Ukraine".
Repeating the phrase like a 2022 rosary prayer isn't going to do a single thing toward causing Ukraine to defeat Russia, any more than adding a Ukrainian flag to one's social media profiles will.
>And they update The Current Thing in unison.
I saw a good description (on /r/4chan, no less) of this: People who constantly check in on each other to see what the latest things are to embrace/avoid. What a miserable way to live.
Well I think this misses the point of the phrase entirely. It's not to help Ukraine defeat Russia, it is to advertise adherence to an ideology. It functions the same way as any other overt religious symbolism and sloganism.
When people say "current thing", I doubt that they are scoffing at the realpolitik calculations of the US and NATO that now is the time to make a stand or criticizing the arms shipments. Maybe they are, but there is definitely something about the situation that has nothing to do with public policy.
I thought about how to quantify the peculiarity without making vague statements about what I feel.
1. "Everybody is a Ukrainian" but not a Syrian, Chechen, Armenian, as evidenced by flags in real life in my area and on social media. Also comments by acquaintances that they know someone from Ukraine, as if it's supposed to be shocking, you know, this is real, this is serious. There are Armenians in this town! I have a cousin who lives in Boston, and most likely he knows some Chechens...
2. Some people spoke out and said "what about the Palestinians and the Israelis?" Including people I'm acquainted with offline/real life. I don't think you have to be particularly pro-Palestinian or agree that the Israeli actions are the moral equivalent of Russia's to observe an unexplained lack of public emotion in favor of Palestinians compared to Ukrainians. Empathy isn't something that hinges on complicated technical considerations. This is only one possible example of its absence, but more than one person called it out, and it's hard to call them apologists for Russia.
3. Online comments that presume that this conflict is/has been the only, or the only significant, brutal conflict involving the Russian Federation. That seems like weak evidence that the general atmosphere and media coverage is extracting Ukraine from all context. Grozny!
Of course, you can find coverage of anything, so what I'm saying is not that the media "ignores" anything, which is often accused but never true, but that if enough people are misinformed in a particular way then it suggests some sort of pattern in the media (or social media) climate.
That.
If Politician gets elected, then he will finally throw all those who don't support The Current Thing into jail, where they belong.
Support The Current Thing. It's the right thing to do.
The TikTok trend is "people acting like badly programmed game characters", the wojak comic is "people who disagree with me aren't people".
A normal conversational speaking rate for English speakers in the US is said to be about 150 wpm.
A typical novel is said to be about 95,000 words.
Therefore anyone who can read a novel in less than 10-11 hours must not have this "internal voice". A witch! Burn them!
I remember when I was a teen we used to do stuff like this. When with friends we'd often do weird things in public just to see how people would react.
Also when I was in school there was a TV show here in the UK called Balls of Steel which did the similar things to "NPCs" that these kids are doing today on TikTok, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5A_X1gwnR7k
Tiktok douchebaggery trends significantly increase the odds of random innocents being caught in this garbage, see the top comment who apparently got hit twice.
And then there’s the shit that’s actively dangerous to third parties. Like pretty much any involving cars.
In the examples here, the victims know exactly what they're seeing, which is yet another imitator who thinks being exceptionally rude is the same thing as being funny.
Their “direct” nuisance is the bigger concern.
It’s all just moral panic
Although maybe I'm being a bit too literal about it.
Yes, it's often used to dehumanize people. Sometimes it's just meant as a joke, but sometimes it's not.
I think it's better to raise awareness of people who are NPCs than to try to ignore it and pretend everyone in America's living the great life.
I don’t know what npc has to do with this. I guess I’m getting old.
It really seems to be special to tiktok, were there any crazy trends/challenges from other social media recently?
Again, I don't condone this type of behavior, just saying it seems normal for each generation relative to how my friends and I acted as pre-teens/teens and we are all just growing older/more aware of it.
It caught me by surprise when a 20 year old struck a conversation with me at a self check out at a store.
"Would you buy this for my girlfriend" and he showed me some flowers he had picked up.
"Sure, they're nice flowers".
Then he started scanning them into my cart. Then scanning all the other stuff he had in his basket. I tried to be nice and told him to go to the next checkout stand with his stuff.
"But you said you would buy it"
He kept making noise and being extra dramatic. I got really pissed and pushed him away. He came back telling the clerks that I was to pay for it. I was boiling red until i saw another kid capturing the whole thing and laughing...
Something similar happened a month ago. This time I was taking the elevator with my son and we saw tree kids in torn clothes.
The elevator was packed. They kept pressing the top floor, forcing everyone to go back up before they get a chance to exit. one was begging for money, while the other was yelling and making it very uncomfortable.
My 3 year old son, a big fan of paw patrol, decided to join in the fun. He pressed the alarm, press the emergency button and started yelling "help! Rescue team, fire fighter, help!" The operator answered immediately, that he is sending help.
The kids freaked out. One of them climbed the elevator to remove a hidden GoPro that was recording the whole thing. They apologized and said it was just for tiktok, before they ran out.
The rest of the riders cheered for my son.
It is not a trend. It has been happening all along. It is just more noticeable now anyone with a phone can participate. Before your tiktok reactions, I recall decades of 'funniest home video' and prank shows. Before that prank calls on radio. Before that trolls in newspapers. April Fool's Day. Most practical jokes seem to lack respect and empathy. It is still funny to many onlookers. To others it is akin to bullying.
Someone should have stopped the kid from taking the GoPro - it's like stealing since no one knows whose GoPro is it. That may have taught them a little lesson..
I know experimentally youtube nearly immediately deletes/unlists a few artists' songs, which i suppose one could use to test the theory.
And as usual there is an xkcd for it: https://xkcd.com/610
The NPC in real life videos are mostly play acted people doing NPC stuff like awkwardly running in place while colliding with an obstacle, or repeating gestures stiffly. Some of them are actually really well acted and look like Skyrim or something. The closest thing to what this article describes that I’ve seen usually appear to be a chance encounter with an irate “Karen” who is making incoherent arguments and threats that are reminiscent of the threats Grand Theft Auto NPCs make if you walk into them. It’s usually over something stupid like skateboarding in their neighborhood. Never seen one where they go out and do something mean to an old person and film it.
I've accidentally come across many examples of people harassing other people as a "prank", and my impression is that the harassers have been late or deficient in developing empathy.
An Airpod wouldn't even be close to being a replacement.
There is one like you describe where people act a GTA like scene while replicating animations that make no sense in real life. That’s cute and funny.
There is also a trend of people harassing unwilling bystanders. That’s shitty.
Also dangerous.
If we wanted to inform people of the "danger" tiktok poses to our country it would involve giving power to the public to see that we have domestic actors that are _nearly_ as bad...
Maybe I'm just biased because I love the NPC in real life trend as well.
Remember YouTube? Kids did stupid shit and harassed people for views. They still do.
New medium, new names, same kids doing anything for a few internet points.
Or are NPCs aware just enough to know they are the punchline of the NPC joke?