Understanding the Immersive Storytelling of the Long-Standing E-Culture “FlopTok”
“You’d have to be chronically online to understand Gen Z’s humor”.
An internet trend usually lasts about 2–3 months, depending on how fast the trend rose to popularity. FlopTok’s long-standing existence as an internet culture is commendable. It was started in 2021 when Chinese content-farming bot accounts posted TikTok videos about promoting products in unorthodox ways, such as comparing one’s product to an utterly ridiculous way of solving things, for example, covering a ladle/soup filter with tapes instead of replacing it with a regular ladle. TikTok mostly takes down those bot accounts, but the meme spread like wildfire with the sound “Jiafei Scream.”
The trend kept evolving until Jiafei was crowned as an icon of the meme, and song remixers such as RanVision started producing song remixes combined with vulgar phrases from the singer CupCakke. This is the point where the trajectory of the trend changed. The people who enjoy flop memes) came up with different versions of cohesive fictional stories about the fictional country “FlopTropica.” They envisioned it as a haven for the Floptropicans (they are primarily women and queer people), where they are free from everyday judgment, society standards, and just enjoying being weird.
However, there is no internet trend without some people finding it weird or cringe. Straight men were swarming into FlopTropican’s accounts. They were leaving comments about how cringe and vulgar the trend is, especially with the notorious and misogynistic “Women☕” comments. Surprisingly, the FlopTropicans decided to retaliate. The Flops labeled them as “DaBoyz”, a wordplay from the phrase The Boys. The Flops started to bite back the DaBoyz trolls because they don’t accept men ridiculing women’s hobbies and memes, even if they are weird. Shortly, the catfight turned into a full-scale social media civil war, and the Flops even wrote it as if it was an actual historical event called “The Badussy War II.”
From that point onwards, the Flops keep generating fictitious content about the Floptropica, its location, and its history. The projected and immersive world-building created a weird but cohesive trend that has lasted until now. The remixers keep generating new remixes, the content creators keep writing Wiki pages, and someone even built a fictitious official government site of FlopTropica.
Speaking of storytelling — if you listen to any digital content courses, you will find storytelling essential to composing any content piece that captures the audience, the algorithm, or the search engine. The haven for people with confusing narratives submerges the people into its world. Recently, I have been learning and re-learning about content creation and why content could gain a fraction of people’s attention in the fast-paced and instant content generator called social media. One of the things I learned is to create content to serve, not to boast.
Aside from its confusing parasocial relationship with its related celebrities and its weird nature, the immersive story of FlopTok has become a place where Gen Z queer and women find fellow weirdos and just have their fun without being interrupted or judged.
The long-lasting trend is still up now on TikTok. Mind joining me to FlopTropica?
“FlopTok seems like an insular haven for people (especially LGBTQ) to create media/myths about beloved celebrities and foster community in an often fractured and impersonal internet landscape,” said digital culture blogger Kieran Press-Reynolds.
(this post was also published on Medium)