TikTok’s newest viral famous person is Reesa Teesa, a Georgia lady who posted 50 movies — slightly below 10 minutes lengthy apiece — chronicling her tumultuous relationship along 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 tens of millions 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 consistently listening to podcasts and audiobooks. However Reesa’s movies marked the primary time that I went for a stroll whereas listening to TikToks, my cellphone tucked away in my pocket. And apparently, that’s what the storyteller meant.
“The sequence, ‘who the f— did I marry,’ will not be one thing that you need to sit down and maintain your cellphone and watch,” Reesa stated in a TikTok on Wednesday. “I did it the best way I did it in order that manner, you truly can take heed to it as an audiobook, chapter by chapter, so as.”
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 per week later, she’s about to hit 2 million. And Google Traits 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 cellphone, and on the For You web page, the identical video will play time and again till you scroll to the subsequent one, so you need to manually swipe to see extra content material. However Reesa is making the most of TikTok’s playlist characteristic, which transitions from one video to the subsequent so as.
“I let all 50 elements play whereas I used to be washing dishes, cooking, every part,” one commenter wrote on TikTok. “My son was like, half 38, you continue to watching the woman??”
Confessional, diaristic movies have been fashionable because the early days of YouTube. However the style has advanced 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 varied phases all through her day: She drives to work with hair curlers in, data some extra movies along with her hair and make-up executed, then goes residence to inform extra of the story in her pajamas. It’s a dual-sided memoir: She’s speaking in regards to the previous, calmly, constantly and in chronological order, however the movies themselves present us her current, as she’s going about her day-to-day life.
Once we watch Reesa do mundane issues in her TikTok “audiobook,” she subtly alerts to us that irrespective of how dangerous issues bought along with her ex-husband, she’s nonetheless standing.