About

Stan Twitter Girl, also known as Bag Girl Meme or Fangirl, refers to a meme featuring the influencer and TikToker Arii (real name Ariana Renee Trejos) who posted a series of photos posing in front of a blank wall with a white hoodie that says "Realist" and a black purse, one of which became widely used as an exploitable format 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, followed by another notable resurgence in late 2024.

Origin

On February 6th, 2016, influencer and user from the late digital platform Musica.ly (now TikTok), theylovearii or @Arii,^[1] posted a series of photos^[2] on Twitter showing her new clothes and purse, comprised of a white hoodie with "Realist" on it, a black Michael Kors bag and black pants. The post garnered over 152,000 likes, 700 replies and 31,000 retweets in roughly nine years (seen below).

realist 💋 pic.twitter.com/2zZRtJwqzq

— ari (@arii) February 14, 2016

In particular, the image of Arii posing in front of the beige wall making a duck face-like expression with her right arm turned upward went viral and became a prevalent meme on Twitter in the following year (shown below).

According to an image search on TinEye,^[7] the earliest known example of the "Stan Twitter Girl" meme comes from a Tumblr post made on October 7th, 2016, which references Chinese rapper Zhang Yixing (seen below, left). On October 15th, a since-deleted Twitter user then posted another early example of the meme referencing the K-pop group Twice (seen below, right).^[7]

Spread

Arii's 2016 photoshoot continued to be used as an exploitable meme format going into 2017. Initially, it was picked up primarily by K-pop fans. For example, another early version of the meme in which the picture is photoshopped with images of the Korean K-pop girl group Twice appeared online in February 2017 (shown below).^[3][4]

In the following months, several other K-pop variants of the meme with Arii's picture were spotted on social media, like an example with the K-pop group Blackpink (seen below). This post, uploaded on We Heart It^[5] in 2018 by user @jmprk95, received over 220 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 (seen below).

The stan twitter meme girl had a resurgence in interest on December 4th, 2024, after Arii uploaded an Instagram reels^[9] joking about the meme, which some of her followers were unaware of. The video (seen below) gained over 4 million views in just a day.

Arii's Response To The Meme

On November 26th, 2023, Arii responded to the meme via a stitch on her @arii TikTok^[8] account, explaining that she is the girl in the meme and that she was 15 years old at the time, saying, "It's deadass just a picture of me being 15 and being myself." Arii continued, elaborating that she was going to dinner with her family and her "fit" was just the type of outfit she used to wear back then. She also noted that the photos were taken by her friend and that she casually posted them to Twitter, as well as adding that she loved that it became a meme.

The TikTok video (shown below) received over 5.9 million views, 780,800 likes, 30,200 bookmarks and 1,740 comments in one year.

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Various Examples

Search Interest

External References