If you can’t keep up with the Douyin memes, you can’t be an “ordinary person”

Douyin has a lot of popular memes, but there are various reasons behind each simple popular meme. This article analyzes the three aspects of Douyin people's popularity and finds out how these Douyin people are extraordinary. Recommended for friends who are interested in Douyin~

People who don’t use TikTok and those who are heavy users of TikTok have completely different perceptions of the world.

A typical Douyin user, in the morning, he first looks at Juanzi drinking water and sees what new chemical equation the mage is researching. At noon, he can go to Wen Shen's place and do some Subject 3 exercises to stretch his muscles. At dinner, he watches the live broadcast of the dark horse couple to see how much tricks humans can use to eat more. At this time, Wen Shen has switched to his EMO account Wen Huijun, telling the bitter past with face-to-face street photos.

In a little while, Zhang Beihai, Xiangla Xiaoyima, and Ling Xinru, who imitated street-walking foot-washing girls, will start a new day of work. They were hurt by the customers and entered the live broadcast room of teacher Wanyan Huide with you to discuss lonely (ethical) issues. Of course, starting from Wen Shen’s golden words, the content of the second half is not suitable for our Zi Han to watch.

Faced with the wild growth and rapid decline of Douyin memes, non-short video users always have no time to learn the old memes and are already wondering about the new ones. It’s okay if you don’t have information anxiety, but if you force yourself to use every new meme, you will really get tired of it.

Sometimes I follow Yu Wenliang to be a confident "ordinary person", sometimes I joke that "the world is just a huge Juanzi", and sometimes my friends circle is full of EMO Wen Huijun. It seems that without these Internet celebrities, we can neither figure out what we are thinking nor what we want .

In order to meet the demand for "forced sorrow", short videos continue to launch various templates to let everyone "write new words" and make everyone believe that they also have the opportunity to become a "lucky person". Juanzi drank water to make a Mercedes-Benz, and then Wen Huijun was sad and made 6,000 carnivals. In the traffic code and wealth legend, the "ordinary people Internet celebrities" created have paved a slide full of warmth and comfort, encouraging people to keep going down.

1. Wen Huijun, who was only popular for three days

Wen Huijun's popularity is definitely a strange phenomenon in short videos this year. On the weekend of December 17-18, he suddenly occupied WeChat Moments and Xiaohongshu, which made Hard Candy quickly get ready to start research. However, two days later, Wen Shen strangely fell from grace. He fell from grace so quickly, leaving us no chance to learn.

Its rise was rapid, and its fall was sudden. Wen Huijun is like the sauce-flavored latte that suddenly appeared. When you are still curious about the taste and whether it counts as drunk driving, it is sold out. When it is quietly put on the shelves again, you have lost the desire to try it.

Some people conclude that Wen Huijun's popularity stems from matrix operations. The three accounts each produce completely different content, which is equivalent to betting on three tracks. His main job is a driving test coach, and the account "Li'an Wen Huijun Driver Service Department" mainly updates his daily work.

The strength of Old Wen is that he turned the serious driving test into his own "Qu Yuan Za Tan". What to do when the candidates are on the line? Wen Huijun directly lifted the car up and said with a smile, "There are no candidates who can't pass the test, only coaches who can't lift it up." The pass rate of candidates is very high, but Old Wen is not happy. Because 8 out of 9 candidates passed, and the one who failed was his son.

The second "Wen Shen" account is a harbor for middle-aged people to let go of themselves. Although Lao Wen does not have the appearance and shyness of a scholar, nor the style and sadness of Jin Dong, he has an optimistic attitude and a chic dance posture. Subject three, cleaning the glass, clearing the air, whatever is hot, he dances. He is not a very good dancer, but his confidence and calmness are very contagious.

The real killer is the third account "Wen Huijun". There, he no longer has the passion to reprimand his rebellious son during the day, and his tired body can hardly dance, so he can only post a selfie that shows that he has experienced a lot. If you do this occasionally, people will say you are whining without reason. But if you post it every day, people will believe that you are a person with a story.

The background music is a textured female voice. "Flowers bloom and fall without regrets, fate comes and goes like water." The copywriting of Wen Huijun is "A long-lost name appears in the visitors list, I don't know whether it is heartache or joy." This video, released on December 24, instantly made Hard Candy Jun get Wen Shen's brokenness, which is stronger than the male protagonist with blood on the corner of his mouth in the fairy tale drama.

Netizens also found that the background of Wen Huijun's photos is relatively fixed, and it can be clearly seen from the buildings that it is always a street. People who are good at empathy gave this opening. "So many episodes were shot in the same place, so this place must have something that Uncle regrets." Someone broke the joke and said, "Auntie Chen in the park has never appeared since that autumn." The old online song "Autumn Will Not Come Back" is very suitable for Uncle Wen.

When Wen Huijun first became popular, there was a sentence that was frequently posted. "When netizens saw his works, they felt that they looked a bit like what the post-00s would look like when they got older, so they all posted his photos on their Moments." This is too unreliable! I can't say "This is what the post-00s will look like after XX" for every popular internet celebrity.

However, the reason why he fell out of favor is easy to find, that is, lack of scalability. When Wen Shen appeared in front of the public, he was already in the state of a "stalk" and could not be processed again.

2. Don’t create memes, just create raw materials

There are two types of amateur short videos that can become popular. One is to make people want to complain about you and create secondary works based on your laughter, anger and scolding; the other is to make people want to imitate you and find a sense of belonging and satisfaction in imitation.

The former are represented by Juanzi, Wanyan Huide, and the dark horse couple. If you don't watch them for a day, you will feel uncomfortable all over, and you are always looking forward to their new materials; the latter are represented by ordinary people Yu Wenliang, streetwalker Ling Xinru, subject three that everyone can jump, and Zi Han that everyone has.

Juanzi is a female internet celebrity from Yancheng, Jiangsu. Like Wenshen, she operates multiple accounts. The account named "It's Juanzi" is a water drinking account, mainly imitating Liu Damiao. The account named "Juanzi loves to eat" is a food account, basically plagiarizing Damengli. Such content that is completely borrowed from other bloggers and has no original content can become popular, which really shows that "the world is a huge Juanzi." Only a few people are sophisticated, and more people are just imitating the former, but in a low-profile, makeshift, and simple version.

Her daily tasks are to get up early, drink some black coffee, and then take a nap. When she wakes up, she has to say that she didn’t sleep well. She continues to tinker with the potion, goes downstairs to visit Huimin Supermarket, goes home to secretly learn Damengli’s clockwork works, and eats spicy hot pot in the middle of the night. In contrast to Damengli, Juanzi’s videos show the difficulties of “ordinary people imitating sophisticated people”:

Da Mengli is shirtless because her home has floor heating. Juanzi followed suit and shivered in the cold in Yancheng without wearing a coat; Da Mengli took the bread to be re-baked because she made it herself. Juanzi followed suit and re-baked the 3.5 yuan instant bread from Huimin Supermarket; Da Mengli ate standing up, facing the island at home. Juanzi followed suit, but netizens complained that "your home is a stove."

Every time I mercilessly mock the water god Poseidon, I feel that I am too petty bourgeois. Juanzi lives her life seriously. Even if she knocks her front teeth when drinking soy milk, eats potato flour as udon noodles, and drinks potions to get a glowing skin, she is just as stubborn as an ordinary person. She is also like "moss flowers as small as rice, but they also learn to bloom like peonies." The audience all laugh at Juanzi, and I am also Juanzi. The world is just a poor imitation show. From the perspective of allegory, Juanzi's originality is really strong.

The Dark Horse couple is another kind of Juanzi. They create completely in accordance with the opposite of the Internet love rules. Dark Horse is stingy and scrambles, but Sakurako never leaves him and has a feeling of "You eat, mom is not greedy". Sakurako eats the cake in one bite, and Dark Horse is anxious to pry open her mouth to pick the food out; the two feed each other, and Dark Horse always uses his fingers to hold the bread, so that Sakurako can only eat a small bite; the two of them travel dozens of kilometers by bus and subway to Disney Town, but end up hanging around the door for a whole day. Is this "Three Times Passing Disneyland Without Entering"?

Netizens generally think that the woman is suffering, but from the fact that Sakurako scolded Heima loudly when she didn't turn off the live broadcast, it seems that this stingy couple is just a performance. Of course, the onlookers also did not lose out, as they improved their sense of happiness with food and gained a sense of moral superiority. It can be said that everyone got what they wanted.

3. Systematic imitation, fake jokes but true feelings

"Memes" were proposed in "The Selfish Gene". Richard Dawkins pointed out that they are replicators with replication ability in the process of cultural development. Last year's "Sheep Placenta" and this year's "Yu Wenliang" are both powerful Internet "memes".

In Wenliang, users are empowered to express themselves. Even if he doesn't care about his appearance, he can still have dazzling youth and the courage to record. Unfortunately, his early personality was too perfect. In his profile, he said he would not accept advertisements. Later, when he heard the other party say "I'm just here to make money" during a live PK, he actually said "You said what was in my heart." He received tens of thousands of yuan in rewards for a live broadcast, but he also lost millions of fans.

Those who imitate "street workers" are still proof that reality is too scarce and lacks a sense of existence. Only in fictional stories can people fully release the grievances that they try hard to hide in reality. Zhang Beihai filmed "Little Foot Bath Girl", and the character he created, Chen Na, worked hard to live and suffered the warmth and coldness of human nature; in "Midnight Female Rider", she was a motorcycle taxi driver braving the cold wind. "Those customers hugged me from behind, and I no longer felt so cold."

Zeng Xiaoyu wore a basketball uniform, white socks and high heels, and paired with "Yilan Love Story", he actually had a sense of time travel. A netizen wrote a short essay: "Later, Beijing was liberated. People around me gradually found other ways to make a living. Aunt Li next door also introduced me to a job, sitting in the store every day. That day, my old customer came to the store. Before leaving, he fixed his eyes on me, and I quickly buried my head. Looking at his back as he walked away, I suddenly felt very sad. Sure enough, I will never be able to walk forward facing the sun like they said."

The film "Fantasy" shot by blogger "Spicy Auntie" uses the form of a documentary to show the story of a protagonist who was deceived by a man and no longer believed in love. Netizens themselves felt that the viewing experience was strange: "What am I empathizing with, and what are you empathizing with?" As a sexual minority group, the address book bloggers are probably more able to empathize with the tinted glasses and exclusion encountered by the lower-class and marginalized people. Therefore, although the stories they act out are not the reality of most people, they can resonate with people's emotions.

If you don't understand it, it's a joke. If you understand it, it's life. The documentary "Life Shines 2023: Wanyan Huide is Troubled" shows the sharp split between Internet celebrities and hot memes. Wen Huijun's son Zi Han (that's his real name) tells his father how to make money on the Internet, but Wanyan Huide is clumsily doing what he is good at, fearing that he will be left behind by the times.

She told netizens that her mother would not bring her along when she got married because she was a burden, which made people laugh. However, Wanyan Huide used her own story as a substitute. After her father passed away, she said, "My mother also has her own life." As for the chicken feet she sold on the live broadcast, they were the food her father brought her every day when she came home from childhood. And the most popular "best friend enemy" was when she called her best friend after a car accident, but received no response.

The so-called "laugh at the meme but not at the person" is ultimately just self-consolation. The reporter asked her, "Don't you think (playing memes) is because I like you?" Wanyan Huide said, "I couldn't bear this kind of love in May and June, but now I try to understand the love of young people." She paused for a long time before answering, and the silence at that moment was deafening. Her eyes went from shock, thinking to relief in just a few seconds. She really wanted to be loved, but her childhood experience made her dare not believe that this could be love.

From Yu Wenliang to Wen Huijun, from Juanzi to Wanyan Huide, the "ordinary internet celebrities" who came one after another in 2023 have brought too many inspirations. Putting aside the platform inclination, company operation, communication chain, etc., the most important thing may be: before becoming the lucky ones chosen by heaven, they were all living clumsily. And the power to change them is contributed by other ordinary people .

Author: Xie Minghong; Editor: Li Chunhui

Source: WeChat public account "Entertainment Hard Candy (ID: yuleyingtang)"