TikTok’s newest viral famous person is Reesa Teesa, a Georgia girl who posted 50 movies — slightly below 10 minutes lengthy apiece — chronicling her tumultuous relationship together with her ex-husband. That’s over six hours of content material, all a couple of stranger’s expertise dwelling with a compulsive liar. However thousands and thousands of viewers are consuming it up, clinging to Reesa’s each final phrase on a platform with a status for ruining our consideration span.
I can’t go for a stroll with out headphones (lest I be alone with my very own ideas), so I’m continuously listening to podcasts and audiobooks. However Reesa’s movies marked the primary time that I went for a stroll whereas listening to TikToks, my telephone tucked away in my pocket. And apparently, that’s what the storyteller supposed.
“The series, ‘who the f— did I marry,’ is not something that you have to sit down and hold your phone and watch,” Reesa stated in a TikTok on Wednesday. “I did it the way I did it so that way, you actually can listen to it as an audiobook, chapter by chapter, in order.”
This format could be unconventional, but it surely’s working. Even by TikTok’s requirements, Reesa’s rise is meteoric. She had 50,000 followers on Friday; now, lower than every week later, she’s about to hit 2 million. And Google Trends says that “who tf did i marry” is the most-searched merchandise associated to marriage this week.
TikTok inherently calls for our consideration. You’ll be able to’t watch TikToks picture-in-picture in your telephone, and on the For You web page, the identical video will play again and again till you scroll to the following one, so you must manually swipe to see extra content material. However Reesa is profiting from TikTok’s playlist characteristic, which transitions from one video to the following so as.
“I let all 50 parts play while I was washing dishes, cooking, everything,” one commenter wrote on TikTok. “My son was like, part 38, you still watching the lady??”
Confessional, diaristic movies have been common because the early days of YouTube. However the genre has evolved from bed room vlogs into story time TikToks, which are sometimes filmed within the automotive — a impartial, quiet place with good lighting. Often, although, these sorts of vlogs are posted in actual time as diary entires, and subscribers tune in and catch up when a brand new video is posted. However Reesa posted her 50 movies all inside the span of some days, speaking about an expertise she had a few years in the past, giving her a bit extra time to course of the occasions. We see her in numerous phases all through her day: She drives to work with hair curlers in, data some extra movies together with her hair and make-up accomplished, then goes house to inform extra of the story in her pajamas. It’s a dual-sided memoir: She’s speaking concerning the previous, calmly, persistently and in chronological order, however the movies themselves present us her current, as she’s going about her day-to-day life.
After we watch Reesa do mundane issues in her TikTok “audiobook,” she subtly indicators to us that irrespective of how dangerous issues acquired together with her ex-husband, she’s nonetheless standing.
