Trend Journalism

Rodent Boyfriends, Tide Pods, and Context Collapse

Settled at my desk with my iced Americano (splash of milk) and beige, knotted sweater, I am a vision from a Nancy Meyers film - or at least attempting to be one. I open my inbox like opening a Sunday paper, scanning through the subject lines of Substack newsletters and magazine subscriptions. Naturally, a couple of matching headlines catch my eye. “All anyone wants is a hot rodent boyfriend” reads one. Another one says “icymi, hot rodent boyfriends are in,” bookended by a grey, plump rat emoji. I take a sip of my coffee. In case I’ve forgotten what year it is, I’m quickly reminded, my brain plunged back into 2024 like an ice bath. 

Upon seeing headlines like these, I can almost always recall the tweet that spurred the article idea. In the instance of rodent boyfriend, I’m remembering a photoshopped image someone shared on Twitter of Stuart Little and Roddy from Flushed Away (2006) on a tennis court along with a caption along the lines of “I love Challengers (2024).” In case your Twitter feed looks different than mine, allow me to explain: many people online have drawn parallels between the appearances of these animated mouse characters and actors Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor who star in Challengers, one of the major blockbusters of 2024. Similar to rats, these actors - who are widely considered attractive - have rather round ears that stick outwards, as well as small mouths, angular jaws, and strong noses. I buy the comparison - the tweet is pretty funny. Other Twitter users build upon the “hot guys kind of look like rodents” narrative by contributing their own examples, including actors Barry Keoghan, Kieran Culkin, and Jeremy Allen White, all of which have one or two of the aforementioned features, or an otherwise crafty, mischievous rat-like personality. It’s all quite funny.

Acutely online publications, that are patrolling for these types of internet discussions, often catch wind of Twitter and TikTok discourse a few days or so after its inception. They then produce an article or string of articles declaring whatever phenomenon is buzzing at the moment as the “new Thing.” Suddenly it’s the summer of rodent boyfriends. It’s all anyone is talking about - didn’t you know? It’s time to drop your current mortal man and pick up a guy who looks kind of like a rodent, they half-jokingly suggest. In addition to crowning the internet topic as the Thing of the moment, these publications often attempt to provide justifications or explanations of why the Thing has taken off, to begin with. 

“Rat men, unlike golden retriever boyfriends, are a little weird – but, vitally, in a sexy, funny way,” Serena Smith writes for Dazed. “Like pet rabbits, rodent men [are] a lot more intelligent, witty, and self-aware than people give them credit for.” In other words, Smith is trying to convey that it’s not just the rodent man’s appearance that makes him attractive, but also his peculiar personality. Whereas a “golden retriever boyfriend” possesses a happy-go-lucky kind of aloofness, a rodent boyfriend has a bit more substance, due to his intellect and vague strangeness. Such explanations will also pull in pseudo-therapy language and/or film theories to help analyze the internet happening - in discussions of attraction, the male or female “gaze” is almost always brought to the forefront. And sure enough, it’s brought up in this Dazed piece.

“They’re flesh-and-blood iterations of men crafted through the female gaze,” Smith writes.

After the internet fad has made its rounds on the chronically online publications, it’ll sometimes migrate to the mainstream legacy media outlets, where it inevitably goes to die. About a month after the Dazed piece was published (a month is about an ion on the internet), the rodent boyfriend topic was broached on NBC’s Today with Hoda & Jenna, in which the hosts explained to their fellow middle-aged viewers that young people are now attracted to movie stars who look like rodents. “They convey the opposite of toxic masculinity,” Jenna explains to the audience, employing similar gender studies language that Smith does in the Dazed piece. The original tweet comparing the Challengers actors to rats is flashed on the screen - an innocuous tweet that’s now been made into the new Thing because “news” needs to be reported, ad space needs to be sold, and ultimately - above all - content needs to be produced. Most or all of these things must occur for internet publications and legacy media companies to stay alive. Nonetheless, once the dinosaur outlets stick their hands in the pot, the fun is more or less killed. It’s like a “cool” parent dropping snacks off at the sleepover and lingering with the kids for a beat too long, asking who’s crushing on who at school and what the newest Gen Z lingo means. It’s like letting everybody in on an inside joke.

Reporting on the internet in the 2020s is not without its many challenges, which is why these missteps occur so frequently. Over the past five years or so, legacy media outlets have repeatedly mistaken internet jokes as internet trends. In the late 2010s and early 2020s, such outlets exclaimed that young people were all eating Tide Pods and cooking chicken breasts in NyQuil as a part of an “internet challenge,” spurring such items to be locked behind glass doors in Targets across the United States. There were, in fact, some instances of Tide Pod consumption (a handful of which were indeed fatal) and maybe even some NyQuil marinations occurring, but not to the extent of a genuine epidemic, which is how mainstream news outlets reported on it. The sensational tendencies of common news broadcasting extend not only to reporting on violent crime but also to reporting on internet happenings. This exaggeration in news coverage doesn’t just transpire to grasp the audience’s attention; it occurs because of a fundamental lapse in understanding internet communities, specifically how they communicate and cycle through ideas.

Across the internet, a kind of nonchalance - a kind of casualness, a kind of sarcasm - is woven through correspondence, lending itself to the development of memes, which can become increasingly niche the further down the rabbit hole you propel yourself. It’s challenging to detect such internet snark if you weren’t raised to be literate in it, like so many teenagers and young adults today are. Such illiteracy can lead to grave misjudgments, including miscalculating the extent to which a teenager is willing to commit to a bit. A young person may film themselves biting into a Tide Pod, or perhaps sacrificing a chicken breast to a bath of NyQuil. But, and this is the key detail, they won’t actually broadcast themselves ingesting it, cutting the camera just before the purported consumption. Or maybe they will ingest it, to garner a few extra likes and laughs, but when the camera cuts, they surely aren’t going in for seconds. Young people online are often - above many other things - jokesters, and actors that operate with considerable unseriousness due, in part, to the vulnerability buffer of a screen. This is not a language that many offline people can speak if they haven’t subjected themselves to the necessary immersion.

Similarly, as our collective internet archive grows in both depth and breadth, it’s becoming increasingly self-referential. Many online jokes and sentiments require an understanding of past internet happenings. TikTok sounds often become increasingly distorted from their source. Memes of the moment intersect and interbreed, generating increasingly esoteric products almost unintelligible to someone from the outside (see: Kamala Harris x Von Dutch edit). One could easily identify “golden retriever boyfriend” as the predecessor to “rodent boyfriend,” as well as “cores,” “aesthetics,” or internet categorizations more generally. Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist, the source material for Rodent Boyfriend, are also a few degrees away from being A-listers, making knowledge of Challengers (2024) - and the online pandemonium surrounding it - also somewhat necessary to get the joke. Taking the phenomenon off Twitter - uttering the words “rodent boyfriend” aloud instead of typing them - collapses its context, making its mentions in mainstream news and casual conversation feel off.

The unserious and arcane nature of internet communication paired with algorithmic feeds and fast-rotating trend cycles is a recipe for an unpredictable cultural landscape. It’s harder than ever to predict what will stick and what will rapidly fade. What will be subject to overuse and mainstream exposure, and what will stay localized? In the 2000s and early 2010s, when social media feeds were consumed chronologically, it was much easier to forecast the fads of the moment. We were a simpler people, held together by a strongly knit fabric of jointly shared crazes - a time of Bad Luck Brians, Grumpy Cats, and black-and-blue or gold-or-white dresses. Today, we are an internet divided, siloed into our personalized feeds. Put simply, and in a chronically online fashion, one user’s Rodent Boyfriend feed may be another’s Huak Tuah Girl feed, or perhaps, all is happening to someone at once. Next week, everyone’s needle will move to something else entirely.

So a question emerges: what is the appropriate way to report on the internet? How does one write about what’s happening right now, knowing that it could become gauche in a mere week? How can one adopt a well-respected tone that also emulates the voice of the moment, striking a balance between a Close Friends story and a try-hard corporate TikTok? It might involve centering people who are literate in internet snark, who have a “pulse” on which trends have longevity. But I think it primarily requires an understanding of context - of the fact that the internet ebbs and flows in directions that are particular, unexpected, and exciting for the sheer reason that they don’t involve larger, more corporate entities.

The internet is at its most fun when it feels like a giant group chat, like a group of friends riffing off their jokes, iterating upon themselves until they’re speaking a language entirely their own. It’s a phenomenon that’s without sense in many ways, a ball that will constantly volley to and fro. And, incidentally, it’s lightning that’s very tricky to bottle. Perhaps the right way to report on the internet isn’t to nail down the next long-term Thing, but to simply muse on the thing (lowercase t) of the moment. Knowing that the pendulum will inevitably swing left as surely as it swung right.

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