Fangirl

About

Fangirl refers to a meme featuring the influencer Arii, who posted a series of photos posing in front of a blank wall, one of which became widely used as an exploitable to express support for different subjects and media products, such as films, music and TV shows. The meme went viral beginning in 2017 on Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest.

Origin

On February 6th, 2016, an influencer from the late digital platform Musica.ly (TikTok), theylovearii or @Arii^[1], posted on Twitter a series of photos^[2] showing her new clothes and purse. The image below posing in front of a beige wall went viral and became a popular meme on Twitter, but this image's earliest use as a meme remains unknown. The post has garnered 21,600 likes and 8,700 retweets in six years (seen below).

realist 💋 pic.twitter.com/2zZRtJwqzq

— ari (@arii) February 14, 2016

Spread

The influencer photoshoot started to be used as a reaction image meme in early February 2017. At first, it was picked up primarily by K-Pop fans, like the example below. This image's origin currently remains unknown, but it's one of the earliest known versions of the meme in which the image is Photoshopped with edited images of the Korean girl group Twice.^{[3] [4]}

In the following months, several other K-Pop montages with the influencer's picture were spotted on social media, like the montage with the K-Pop group Blackpink seen below. This post, uploaded on We Heart It^[5] in 2018 by @jmprk95, received 225 likes in four years.

Companies have also used the exploitable image as content for social media, like the Brazilian bank Nubank,^[6] which referred to Lady Gaga's ARTPOP album being released on the same day the bank was created. The post received 8,000 likes and 3,000 retweets since the upload on April 13th, 2021.

Templates

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References