No Strategy 1: Subtle Foreshadowing & Content Mythology
Studying and reordering
In meme lore, the fail meme is ancient. When the internet retooled the entire meaning of the word “share”, one of our first instincts was to pass around examples of our own mortification. You’ve Been Framed, but pixellated. Three decades later, and our familiarity with these fails - the pratfalls, misjudged tricks, staircase tumbles, chugged lemonade, whether they’re pre-existing memes or shiny new examples - is now the latest niche cultural product ready for remix.
The “subtle foreshadowing” trend on TikTok takes clips of inevitable stunt-gone-wrong situations, hubris karma, or simply very unfortunate missteps that leave the video subjects dangerously flung through the air, prostrate on the floor, crumpled just out of shot, edited so the painful crunch of the fail arrives in glitchy flash-forward, the true order of events unfurling in a chopped up time loop. The effect, archly dubbed “non-linear storytelling”, is funny, curious and jarring. Subtle, deliberately, is not the word - while the fail itself is spectacular, the foreshadowing is clunky, obvious, and the result tasks the viewer with repeatedly rewatching the mistake, and re-experiencing the second-hand embarrassment.
Subtle foreshadowing has already joined the meme journey from niche to major content trend, when it will eventually (two to three weeks, maybe? Longer on Reels, god bless) enter the internet culture library of editing-style shorthands we’re all fluent in. Its agreed meaning has gone mainstream and been slightly flattened. It’s been used to (pleasingly) take the piss out of The Idol, and pop-culture-at-large is now on board - Olivia Rodrigo made a foreshadowing edit of herself falling on stage in Melbourne to undercut any embarrassment, reassure her fans and show her hand as clock-app addict. At this point, my analysis of all of this could be a touch over-involved (welcome to my newsletter, No Strategy!), but I do see in the early days of content trends such as these that there’s some kind of undercurrent, some urgency running through them, in which we can intuit something more than faddiness within our latest content fixation.
The videos are prime slices of remixed media, and if you’re inclined (hi), add to the pile-up of curio illustrating our twisty, twisted relationship with what we watch online. I think the impulse to mine laughs and effect out of how we watch things as much as what we watch is a product of this content era, of scrolling and short-form video, and streaming, and the rest. If we’re as used to retooling media as consuming it, if we experience culture as non-linear, then subtle foreshadowing presents an opportunity for these days’ curatorial, repurposing predilections, imbued with internet culture’s slickly formless irony and insiderdom.
Beyond merely the magic of messing with stuff, this trend has made me think about the concept of content mythology - our (my?) impulse to interrogate and reorder the culture we consume so its meaning builds and mutates. The concept of foreshadowing signals a warning - this is coming, prepare yourself. But this edited foreshadowing places these videos in a longer arc of content manipulation, moving us back and forth across our expectations of what we’re looking at. The trending sounds that accompany these videos are usually various versions of an accordion sequence that signal to the TikTok devout other trends like corecore, nichecore and web weaving, internet scrap editing designed to disrupt viewers’ scrolling, and force them to contemplate their content reliances and feel something. Viewed in the context of these previous trends, subtle foreshadowing signals something more strange than funny, more concerned with our efforts to glitch our own digital consumption.
I read something yesterday that claimed that we’re passed the peak of mass trends on platforms like TikTok and Reels, which surprised me. I think that’s still the lifeblood of those platforms; all of us repeating phrases and adding our own twists, doing dances in our favourite outfits. The thing about subtle foreshadowing that sets it apart is that while the template is shared, the content of each example is so particular and non-replicable. It’s individualised chaos, and this time, the viewers are the ones who know how it’ll turn out. Only the people in the video are truly unaware of what’s coming - we discover it before them, get to wait for the now-inevitable, and feel a sense of reward when it comes to pass. It’s pro-spoiler, pattern-led content that hands the surprise element back to the viewer.
As we contend with Dead Internet Theory, enshittification, brain rot, etc., maybe our little exercises in UGC manipulation help us reclaim a bit of online space and agency. There’s something transgressive in upturning these mini-narratives, and visually it produces enough of a jolt to force a pause in scrolling, that little twitch when you remember to watch what you’re looking at. Another trend did something similar (but sort of backwards?) a few months back. A cabal of faceless TikTokkers were using AI to “time travel” through old videos from Vine - showing what happened once the little girl noticed all those chickens, or after the croissant was nearly dropped. The aim here was some kind of humour subversion, as with subtle foreshadowing, but the stakes were higher and the result more sinister. So beloved and familiar are the surreal, lightning-in-a-bottle vignettes Vine gifted to the world that the effect was fascinatingly unnerving. It was bewitching to see well-known clips, foundational pillars of what we understand as internet culture, invaded by jerky, unreal creatures, Inception-ing our in-jokes and playing with the content loops and timelines in our shared memory. It was a perverse kind of clever, and weird - i.e. Very Online, and the first time I’d seen AI-manipulated content on social media that felt of social media.
I really like that corners of internet culture are still reserved for these strange experiments in how we consume things, and how we mythologise the content we’ve amassed and lived through, making and performing odd little plays that don’t serve much purpose, other than reiterating that we can still be the arbiters of what’s funny, what moves us - in whichever direction, on any timeline we like.