Tag Archives: tumblr

Hobama

HF: “I wanted to talk about the most iconic ship around…especially since it’s been resurfacing online through TikTok. Harry Styles x Barack Obama, aka ‘Hobama’. This ship has been around ever since I can remember, I don’t even know how I learned about it, but suddenly I just knew. This was way before TikTok, I probably heard on Twitter and Tumblr since most memes like this originated there. It was during the One Direction era when it started so probably around 2014-2015 was the start.”

Interviewer: What kind of memes was it? Did people actually see them hang out as One Direction meeting the President or something?

HF: “Hahahah, no no, that would’ve been amazing for the fandom though, I’m sure. They were photoshopped images, some goodish, some really poorly mad but they were equally as funny. I’m pretty sure there were even Wattpad/Tumblr short fanfics on them, too. The fandom took the bit and just ran with it.”

Interviewer: “Omg wow, that’s so funny. You mentioned earlier it’s resurfacing, could you please expand on that?”

HF: “Yeah, for sure. So there’s always the occasional edit from time to time, like since 2014, the fandom has kept this running, so out of the blue, you’ll find a great edit or photo. But recently, I’ve been seeing them in what everyone’s been posting about the new Tomodachi Life game.”

Interviewer: “Tomodachi Life?”

HF: “Nintendo released a game this year called Tomodachi Life, where you can make custom Mii’s, and it’s kinda like Sims, where you watch them live life and help them move the stories along. People are genuinely so creative and have been posting videos of their games and the Mii’s they’ve created, and how they interact. Oh, and the characters can fall in love with each other! You can’t make them, though – you can try and have them hang out until they do, but it’s all worth their coding like of the personalities you picked for them match. So, to my point, people have been making Mii’s of Harry Styles and Barack Obama, and they’ve been falling in love. So basically their love is universal haha….This fandom brought people together. Having a shared joke like this all over created a community, and I’m so happy to see it continue now.”

Context: This was a story told to me by my cousin. She is 25 now and was a prime target audience for One Direction, being a teenage girl during their peak years. On a phone call, we were talking about Tomodachi Life and the different characters people are making, and she mentioned Harry and Obama. I knew some of the lore, but knowing she was older and deep in this info during the prime of it all, I knew I had to ask her to elaborate for the archive.

Analysis: This shows how internet fandoms can take a completely random joke and keep it alive for years just because it’s funny and weird. It started on Twitter and Tumblr and has moved to every social media platform since then. Becoming a prominent part of the new viral videos of Tomodachi Life on TikTok proves how diverse its platforms are and how it will jump and continue anywhere. This fandom ship has had so much potential to break up, considering Obama has not been president, and One Direction has broken up for a while, but the ship is still prominent and not going anywhere anytime soon. Fans will always find new ways to keep them going. The strength of ships and fandoms is a force that should not be reckoned with.

Rise of the Brave Tangled Dragons

Interviewer: Can you please dive into what exactly is Rise of the Brave Tangled Dragons?

VS: A movie franchise that pretty much raised me. To be shorter, we can call it ROTBTD. It’s a mix of the movies Rise of the Guardians, Tangled, How To Train Your Dragon or HTTYD, and Brave. I honestly don’t think there’s any crossover between the movies, but they came out around the same time and have similar story lines with shared themes and animation styles. OH! And Frozen is sometimes included in there too, but isn’t a main one enough to change the fandom title.”

Interview: Ok, so interesting fandom them for such a random reason…how did the fandom grow and spread? Did people just know to watch them together, or where did you see it?”

VS: “Well I just knew haha, but that was through my older sister. She was old enough around then to have Tumblr and Twitter and read it through there. She would show me and my brother and just laugh, it was all so creative, honestly. The movies came out and people saw the similar styles and made this awesomely random connection to put them together.”

Interviewer: “What kind of things would you see?”

VS: “Ha it’s kind of what wouldn’t I see to be honest. There were edits of them – both photo and videos, Wattpad fanfics, AU stories on Tumblr of them all together in high school. People would ship the characters as well. It mainly revolved around the big four, like Rapunzel, Merida, Jack Frost, and Hiccup. I think Frozen came into it because people loved to ship Jack Frost with Elsa…rip Jelsa, that was a peak ship. Those edits were before AI and always edited so scarily accurate, like they were in the same room. Also, Rapunzel showed up in a blury background in Frozen during Elsa’s coronation scene. That’s pretty much the only part where Frozen’s in the ROTBTD fandom, it mainly consists of the big four.”

Interviewer: “Is it still a thing?”

VS: “Not as big as before, but it comes back sometimes, especially on TikTok. It’s very nostalgic.”

Context: My friend and I were watching YouTube videos together and saw the creator, Danny Motta (a movie and TV show reacter), had started a series on Rise of the Brave Tangled Dragons. We started watching his videos on the subject and started reminiscing about it from when we were kids. I was aware of the Jelsa part on the internet, but VS knew the true lore and crossovers of everything.

Analysis: This truly shows the power of fandom and that it can emerge from anything. These were four movies that seriously have barely anything in common, yet people put them together, and it took the internet by storm. It became a true fandom with fanfics, edits, ships, and AU (Alternate Universe) stories of them hanging out. It goes to show the creativity and extend the fan will go to create something new entirely for others to enjoy, and ultimately create a community. These characters have never interacted, so everything made was completely from the fans’ imagination, and one fan would build off the content from another fan. Communities and fandoms can be made from anything.

I Like Your Shoelaces

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Palo Alto, CA
Performance Date: April 16, 2021
Primary Language: English
Language: spanish

“You guys know the phrase that if you meet someone from the internet in real life you say “I like your shoelaces, where did you get them from?” “I stole them from the president.””

Thoughts: I managed to find the real post that this originated from:

I believe I have used this in real life in the mid-2010s. Deeply embarrassing stuff. However, beginning in 2018 and continuing through today, this phrase has taken on a more meme-like or ironic meaning. This phrase is no longer used to identify other internet users, but to mock people who once used it. In my mind, that makes this really emblematic of the culture shift as more and more people got onto social media, as well as the general growing up of the folk group who once used it and subsequently realized it was childish. 

Rose Christo and the My Immortal Authorship Debate

Nationality: American
Age: 20
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA
Performance Date: April 25, 2021
Primary Language: English

“My Immortal is a Harry Potter fan fiction that um is famously very bad. It trended and was popularized because of how famously awful it was. And one of the aspects that made it very popular in addition to its awfulness was that nobody knew who the author was. And for years in fan fiction it was a form of folklore *subject winks* who the author of My Immortal was, and people thought we’d never get the answer. But one morn….one week in 2017 a woman on Tumblr claimed that she was the author of My Immortal, and that her name was Rose Christo, and that she wrote My Immortal to be intentionally bad so it would become popular so she could reconnect with her long-lost brother who she was separated from in foster care. She made a bunch of wild claims in addition to that, um, like how in her foster care she was, she was abused for being Native American before it was revealed that she was a white woman completely lying, having never been in foster care. Um, to this day it’s still not known whether she actually wrote My Immortal, because she did have documents hinting that she did. But we do know that she was lying about all of her reasons for writing it.”

Notes: 

This is one of my favorite pieces of internet folklore. The author has gone through many permutations, from the screen name of XXXbloodyrists666XX to Tara Gilesbie to Rose Christo to once again a big question mark. Additionally, there’s the fact that it reportedly got deleted of of fan fiction.net, the original hosting site, twice. It’s one of the first pieces of internet folklore I can remember hearing about as a young teenager, after it’s deletion but before Rose Christo came out as the “author,” so I got to watch her rise and fall in real time. It’s certainly interesting — who would make the claim to be the author of such a notoriously bad piece of work? It’s fascinating to keep up with, and I’m eager to see who comes forward to claim it next.

For more on My Immortal, click here.

I’m honestly feeling so attacked right now

Nationality: N/A
Age: N/A
Occupation: N/A
Residence: N/A
Performance Date: N/A

Background

Tumblr user chardonnaymami posted a transcript of a conversation about virgin mai tias that included the phrase “I came out to have a good time and I’m honestly feeling so attacked right now.” Over the next several weeks, the phrase was used in thousands of copy posts, molding to fit any number of situations. It reaches a point where people began to parody the phrase often enough that it would be impossible to understand some jokes if you didn’t have the background knowledge to recognize the original phrase.

Context

This meme was spread mostly on the popular blogging website Tumblr. It would mainly be used after some sort of criticism to sarcastically complain about being criticized or challenged.

Text

Original Post

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Examples of the spread of the phrase

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466

Self-aware meme

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Thoughts

This piece of internet folklore probably caught on so quickly because it addresses a problem that many people face on the internet: trolls and incessant criticism. By enacting this popularly used phrase, users could playfully deal with situations that are normally uncomfortable and hard to deal with. Furthermore, once the meme reached a certain level of popularity, it became almost necessary to post some form of the phrase to establish one’s self as a real part of the community. If you didn’t get the joke, it meant you clearly hadn’t been paying very close attention.