Trends of the Week

MANILA, Philippines - Twitter was a virtual glass case of emotion this week. Apart from One Direction fans still seething over the marijuana issue – cursing NGOs for demanding a pre-concert drug test, the CBCP for demanding a ban, and Palanca Award-winner Lourd de Veyra for weirdly devoting an entire week to making fun of them on Twitter – there were other sentiments beyond anger that needed sorting out. There was loneliness, denial, excitement, bittersweet love, and utter shock and horror that only Westeros can provoke. So as we look back at another week in social media, let’s talk feelings.

Being single is complicated

Twitter makes us feel connected. Twitter makes us feel lonely. These are both true and often converge into hashtags that scream into the void, like this week’s #ParaMagkaLoveLife and #SingleMoments, two trending phrases connecting single people like dots of loneliness laid out across the Internet. #ParaMagkaLoveLife started out as a call for help, an admission of defeat, that the single life is an empty cell from which people need to escape. A few hours later, #SingleMoments trended, filling Twitter with testimonials on the perks of singlehood, hoping to wash away the sadness and desperation that had already spread. This is the IRL (in real life) equivalent of crying alone in your room before getting a call from a friend to whom you brag about all the free time you have and the one-night stands that may or may not have happened. Being single is both a drag and a luxury. What ends up becoming more true depends on who you’re talking to.

Twitter can’t wait to cry its eyes out

The Fault In Our Stars trended a day before it opened, making it perfectly clear that people – and by “people,” I mean teenaged girls or women with highly active inner teenaged girls – have been dying to see this movie. Based on a young adult novel by John Green, The Fault In Our Stars is about a 16-year-old girl afflicted with cancer and a reluctant infatuation with a pseudo-intellectual jock. It recalls another celebrated tearjerker movie adaptation, A Walk To Remember, which is also a love story involving a terminally-ill teenaged girl. It’s obvious at this point that death and adolescent love is too intoxicating of a combination for young moviegoers to resist – the preciousness and perfection of youth heightened and immortalized by the same premature end that threatens it. So maybe it’s time to finally bury mainstream Philippine cinema’s remaining two tropes – the affair plot and the break-up/reunion plot – in favor of the terminally-ill love story. You’re welcome, mainstream film producers, the few of you who are still left.

‘Game of Thrones’ blows people’s minds

So what Game of Thrones related topic trended this week? Was it Prince Oberyn? “The Red Viper of Dorne?” “The Mountain?” Was it “Sansa Stark?” Or even “Khaleesi is going to die too, isn’t she?” Nope, it was simply: “Holy Game of Thrones.”

That pretty much sums up the show’s unfailing ability to reduce its audience into an inarticulate mess. It wasn’t really the phrase “Holy Game of Thrones” that trended, so much as the consistent combination of those words. It was the result of hundreds of permutations, from “Holy crap, Game of Thrones!” to “Just saw the latest Game of Thrones…holy weasels that was mind blowing,” to the more succinct “Game of Thrones holy sh**t.” So what elicited these reactions? The now beloved Prince Oberyn Martell, Tyrion Lannister’s champion in his trial by combat, was – SPOILER ALERT! – literally crushed to pieces by the murdering machine known as “The Mountain.”

People were speechless because they were shocked and also because they didn’t want to give away any spoilers, which is what’s making social media really inconvenient for the on-demand TV generation. Once you see a new TV series episode or a new movie, you are immediately compelled by social media etiquette to do something that is highly unnatural and antithetical to social media: shut up. Right now, public sympathy is tilted towards the late viewers, those who – due to work, family obligations, or whatever else happens in real life – cannot watch shows or movies right away. But lately on Twitter, the tide is slowly turning. Yes, spoilers ruin the fun for everyone else, but the ongoing spoiler embargo is also ruining the fun for early watchers. They can’t wait to talk about Game of Thrones with the rest of the world but Twitter just won’t let them. The frustration was boiling over this week, with people complaining about all the cool Game of Thrones memes that they weren’t allowed to post yet and all the clever tweets they already composed for naught. I feel a revolt coming soon. I think I’m going to watch the season finale as soon as humanly possible, just to be safe.