28: Airplanes in the Night Sky, Vine References, a Frog Glitch and more!
This one was a little too "online," even for me.
Hello and welcome to all you new subscribers!!
Night School is a bi-weekly newsletter covering TikTok trends, audience reactions, platform updates, and strange experiences.
I am currently sweating in my apartment as yet another heatwave has hit Seattle, this time with wildfire smoke! Before getting into the video content, here is a quick lesson learned about TikTok for business & copyright policy:
Copyright policies are currently in place as of May 2020, to prevent business accounts from using a rather large chunk of the audio catalog available to normal creators. It protects artists from large brands using music for advertisements without paying. For smaller businesses creating content intended more for entertainment rather than directly selling a product, it can be an unclear line. Small companies can get away with using a standard creator account up to a point. Once you start creating viral content, the risk is much higher.
A journey into a weirdly specific fan-culture meme trend (ugh, I know)
While I cannot replicate my FYP, I can replicate the experience of seeing something with 0 context. So without further explanation here’s the first video:
My initial reaction was a state of confusion while also suspicious of it being part of a larger joke I didn’t yet understand. There are two repeating elements that tipped me off including: purple & blue objects and and the use of “Airplanes” by B.O.B. (Feat. Hayley Williams of Paramore). Airplanes happened to be trending already, seemingly out of nowhere as it was released in 2010. I was surprised to find the “original audio1” used in the above video linked back to the start of this trend:
I immediately went to the comments and learned the cosplay/character to the Right is Mordecai from The Regular Show. To the left is Twilight Sparkle from My Little Pony. Yes, we have now entered brony adjacent territory. Apparently the two characters are often shipped2 together and as a couple are referred to as “Mordetwi.”
Bisexual viewers got involved due to the trend’s reliance on blue, pink and purple. For those wondering, the official bisexual flag contains blue, pink and purple stripes.
Some extra drama…
A thrift store find…
As mentioned in the first video, you will start to see them everywhere…
You can probably imagine the remaining hundreds of videos relevant to this trend are similar to those featured here. Explore the Airplanes audio to find more if you are so inclined.
Cowboy Hats
The next two videos are dedicated to my new cowboy hat earrings.
FilmTok: STAND UP MATTHEW
I lost my mind watching the following videos from @obsceneoracle. She’s so right though…
Mi Pan resurfaced
A viral TikTok audio from a year ago was reference in this extremely chaotic video:
Confused? That’s totally okay and normal lol. It blew up slightly before I started Night School, so I’ll take this as an opportunity to explain it a year later.
Mi Pan Su Su Sum went viral in August 2020, the song originated as a Kelloggs advertisement in Russia for a product called Miel Pops:
It didn’t blow up on TikTok until after @chernaya.princessa sang an acapella version which was then ripped and remixed. I scrolled through a year of content on her profile to find a video of her addressing it:
Uno Tarot
I simply cannot escape Tarot TikTok and parodies of Tarot TikTok. This one is imitating creators use the Live Stream feature:
Vine will forever haunt TikTok
Vine videos act as a foundational visual and audio language on TikTok and mainstream Internet culture. The difference between TikTok and Vine, in my experience, is the way content is spread and interacted with. TikTok has an emphasis on re-creating, re-enacted, and expanding audio & visual elements at an extremely fast pace. While Vine may have had the same potential before it was shut down, original Vine content is now mostly referenced directly without much expansion. When Vine ended, only a fraction of its content survived and gained popularity beyond the app through compilation videos uploaded to YouTube. Vine videos are still quoted, even in 2021.
Here are some TikTok videos that not only heavily reference Vine but either recreate or expand on the original content.
Two Free Tacos
The original:
This was a pretty direct re-creation:
And this one is very dramatic with a twist ending:
Road Work Ahead
The original:
aaand an absolute legend captured in the wild for TikTok:
A Skunk
For whatever reason, this account keeps appearing on my FYP featuring their Skunk friend.
A frog glitch
This one might only be interesting to hardcore TikTok people and fellow researchers.
I took this screen recording of a creator talking about experiencing a glitch when uploading a video. In my recording I scroll between the duetted videos, comments and associated accounts.
Ancient content palate cleanse
Simple but effective.
I hadn’t explored the origin of this video until now but there is an entire playlist of these and it was updated recently. See it here.
On TikTok, audio replication is used to play off of a trend or meme. To do so one just has to press the automatically scrolling text at the bottom of a video, which will take the viewer to a page featuring all videos using that same audio with the original video at the top of the page.
A ship or “shipping” is a relationship between two characters of a story or franchise that is not always necessarily based on the source material but is heavily supported or created by fans.