Welcome to the Friday edition of Internet Insider, where we dissect the week online. Today:
- The reaction to ‘WandaVision’ is a cry for help
- This ‘Candyman’ TikTok is freaking everyone out
- Anya Taylor-Joy’s Globes win sparks discourse
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BREAK THE INTERNET
The reaction to ‘WandaVision’ is a cry for help
If it feels like you’ve hit a wall one year into the pandemic, you’re not alone. Just search social media and you’ll find many people revealing how stressed and exhausted they feel. We’re all reaching our limits and waiting for some relief. It’s in this environment that Disney+’s WandaVision came into the world. The series premiered in mid-January, and the last episode hit the streamer today.
Over the weekend, a line from the show about grief turned into a multi-day discourse. Although Twitter has always been a place for people to clash about their differing opinions, this internet drama feels like a product of pandemic fatigue. We’re all spending so much time indoors that we’re taking tweets about a series that we watch each week a little too seriously. That’s not to say that WandaVision isn’t a good show. It’s layered and well constructed, with complex women characters. But right now, our time indoors in warping our brains. The things we watch on our screens are a main source of our entertainment. There’s no more WandaVision to watch after today. But I’m sure the internet will find some other series or film to latch into; perhaps it will be a new murder show.
—Tiffany Kelly, culture editor
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HORROR STORIES
Woman finds whole other apartment behind her mirror
When New York City resident Samantha Hartsoe decided to investigate why her apartment was always freezing, she was not expecting to find a whole other apartment hidden behind her mirror.
It started when she realized there was a breeze coming from her bathroom, a place with no outside windows and so, theoretically, nowhere for that breeze to be coming from. After discovering the source appeared to be her bathroom mirror, Hartsoe took the mirror off the wall to find the stuff of nightmares: An entire empty apartment. Naturally, everyone who has seen the 1992 horror film Candyman completely freaked out when they saw this TikTok, leading to lots of memes and reactions. (You may recall that in the film, you can summon the killer by saying his name in the mirror.) It might be worth checking behind your bathroom mirror tonight. Just in case.
—Siobhan Ball, contributing writer
CULTURAL OBSESSIONS
People are mad after Anya Taylor-Joy is called a ‘woman of color’
Anya Taylor-Joy won the Golden Globe for best actress in a limited series or TV movie for Netflix’s The Queen’s Gambit last Sunday. Her Golden Globe win makes her the first Latina actress to win a best actress Golden Globe for a limited series. But in an article acknowledging this first, Variety also initially identified Taylor-Joy as a “woman of color.”
The story was quickly updated. But the paragraph identifying Taylor-Joy as a woman of color was screengrabbed and shared on Twitter, sparking a dialogue about who actually falls into the category. Taylor-Joy, who has Argentine ancestry and lived in Argentina for several years as a child, identifies as a Latina. Taylor-Joy has never described herself as a woman of color; she acknowledged her white privilege in interviews and has said that she doesn’t want to take roles away from non-white Latinx people. The snafu highlights the complications of talking about race and ethnicity as well as how one identification factor doesn’t immediately indicate another. But even with Taylor-Joy’s historic win, it’s also an indication that the Golden Globes still has a long way to go to make its winners reflect our own world.
—Michelle Jaworski, staff writer
MEME OF THE WEEK
Jason Sudeikis at the Golden Globes was a big mood.
