Admittedly, I am a frequent TikTok user. Like many other aspects of my life, I don’t participate in the trends and fads that seem to take the internet by storm, but I have spent an embarrassing amount of time watching them.
TikTok is a very versatile app, to put it simply; there are videos for any type of person and any type of community.
With the extensive repertoire of content based on a vast expanse of different concepts, aesthetics, and styles of humor, one facet of TikTok has become prominent in an array of these different corners of the app: the slideshow feature.
While TikTok has always been primarily short videos, 2022 introduced more aspects to the platform to increase viewership, like the story and slideshow features. Inevitably, I fell victim to the captivating appeal of such posts, primarily because of the fact that I am able to scroll at my own pace rather than needing to follow the pace set by the video creator.
Slideshows on TikTok may not be a new development by any means, but they have become increasingly more entertaining to me. The variety in these slideshows, in particular, is astonishing—and hilarious—to me.
Some slideshows are just dumb, to put it plainly, and that’s a topic that has been agreed upon by Gen Z to be undeniably funny for no reason. There are slideshows ranging from random photos of celebrities’ terrible promo pictures—my absolute favorites of all time being those of Michael Cera and Lin Manuel Miranda—to the “things my pet ate and still survived” and “my ancestors hunting prey…” pet trends, even to obscure compilations of unhinged tweets.
Those make my day, honestly. They’re so deranged and none of them make sense, but they make me so inexplicably happy because of how insanely random they are.
I cannot quite express why, but I will never not love the slideshows I’ve saved to my favorite videos.
And then, there are the ones that rip out my heart.
Some slideshows are the most gut-wrenching sequences; be it poems, quotes, photos, or whatever else, there are countless posts about this kind of thing.
Poem and quote slideshows are the ones that hurt me the most; there are always tweets strung together in chains of heartbreaking words from hurt people.
Yes, they have maintained a powerful depressing overtone, but they also have been bringing people together through these painful experiences.
There are just so many beautiful humans coming together and making connections with people that would never have encountered otherwise.
That being said, it’s also hysterical to see some of the most obscure “stupid tweets I found” and “embarrassing people I find attractive” slideshows that have absolutely no substance or importance to real life whatsoever.
The best part of it all is that there is such a vast spectrum of slideshows available on TikTok that I can go from sobbing on the floor to laughing so hard at something stupid that I physically can’t breathe.
