Hello, everyone! Welcome back to WOR$T BLOG IN AMERICA. How y’all feeling because I am exhausted. Life got me walking around all over San Diego, going from school to work everyday like let me nap and listen to Ethel Cain in peace. Anyway, last week we briefly went over the topic of discourse communities and I wanted to expand on that a little following the discourse community that is Stan Twitter.
Last week I stated Stan Twitter is an online social gathering for people to try and prove that their favorite music artist is the best in the industry–but this was slightly misleading. Stan Twitter is for EVERYONE who has a favorite of something. It has a main focus on music artists, but it also consists of people pledging their loyalty to actors, actresses, films, games, influencers, or basically any type of celebrity that has someone appreciating their work. The main goal is to support their favorite and people do this by creating posts, which is also how the community communicates with each other, filling their posts with jokes coded with niche slang and terms that some may not know–which we will get into soon.
This platform has less document-based writing, and since it is a social media platform, it is more focused on posts. These posts focusing on opinions and jokes become a way of communication allowing others to reply and share their thoughts, as well. But it isn’t just some, “oh she did so good,” type of post. People find creative ways to praise celebrities like one user, @venussjmi, reacting to Zara Larsson and TYLA’s collaboration on a song saying, “They went to the bakery of hits and ordered a baguette…But the owner recognized their tiny waists & face cards and gave them the entire gagtory instead…” meaning that their song together was extremely impressive. This post sparked other members to comment and interact with others to share their opinions. People also create “threads” to share their thoughts about a certain individuals accomplishments, lyrics, films, etc. This can serve as either opinion or can give evidence to whether or not their favorite really is the greatest of all time.
As seen above in one of the examples I have provided, you may be able to tell that Stan Twitter has an interesting way of praising people. They have popularized certain terms and even made up words to joke about how their favorite is the best. Opening Twitter and seeing everyone using words like “mother,” or “gag” may be confusing to people who aren’t aware of their meaning, but these terms carry weight with the social media platform’s users. Terms like these are an amazing compliment, meaning that whatever they are reacting to are extremely iconic and deserves the nothing but respect. That’s why I describe people like Ethel cain, Taylor Swift, or Wanda Maximoff–AKA the Scarlet Witch–as mother, because that’s mama for real. This side of the internet has popularized itself in so many ways, it grows past the simple “stan” accounts and have created an entire discourse community with it’s own form of communication and language with certain expectations. But also, be warned, because if whoever you’re stanning on Twitter is unpopular, people will also make jokes about your favorite, just to uplift theirs, but there will always be a place of belonging with others that Stan your favorite, as well.
PS. Stan Addison Rae, she is also mother.
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