Sydney Sweeney & Twitter Situations

Hot Ones, counterpoints, allusions

On January 25th, actress Sydney Sweeney appeared on the web series Hot Ones, which revolves around a bald man named Sean asking a celebrity thoughtful questions while they eat progressively spicier chicken wings. The idea is that when you’re reeling from the impact of an extremely hot chicken wing, it’s hard to give the canned, artificial kind of answer celebrities usually give.

Sydney Sweeney, who starred in Euphoria, is a pin-up for many Gen Z and Millennial men. She seems to have a playful relationship with what must be a very weird kind of fame — as evidenced by how she promoted her Hot Ones interview. She
“did this one for the boys,” according to her Instagram caption.

The boys (and others) online turned the main promotional image from the interview into a meme. Here’s a paradigmatic example:

This meme’s trajectory is a good case study in a specific pattern that occurs on Twitter (or, *sigh* X). The meme starts out setting up one kind of situation, and then is assimilated into the…