We’ve all seen the clip now. At a recent Coldplay concert, cameras scanned the crowd to look for cute sights to share on the big screens. It probably seemed perfectly mundane for the camerapeople to zoom in on a cute couple embracing as they danced to some toe-tapping pop-rock. Their reactions of shock and horror made singer Chris Martin joke about them having rumbled an affair. They had. Names were revealed, memes were made, and soon the male culprit was issuing a public apology to his wife that ended with a line from ‘Fix You.’ People were doxed, of course. The person whose footage of the moment went viral was interviewed and seemed proud of their, uh, involvement. Sides have been picked. Jobs have been lost. And it’s stopped being fun.
In 2019, the Twitter account @maplecocaine succinctly noted, ‘Each day on twitter there is one Main Character. The goal is to never be it.’ In 2025, Main Character Syndrome has broken out of the birdhouse and become an expected part of online life. Indeed, it has become a profitable one for those who play the game, willingly or otherwise. In an attention economy where it’s harder and harder to get a sizeable portion of people to click on your content, we’re chasing evermore fleeting trends. The moment something gains even the faintest glimmer of virality, every corporation latches onto it like a lifeforce. We need #content, preferably from non-union sources, and we need it now.
How does one become the Main Character? Often it’s through no choice of our own. Many Main Characters are doofuses who were caught doing something stupid or offensive. Perhaps they came up with a turn of phrase so unique and useful that we just had to make it part of our vernacular (eyebrows on fleek, very demure, 30 to 50 feral hogs.) They had a great clapback. They made us laugh, cringe, cheer, jeer. We mock them for believing themselves to be the Main Character in someone else’s story. They inspire. Mostly, though, they just are. It’s the IT girl trend of days past, our 15 minutes of promised fame that we’re desperately trying to stretch out to a full-time hustle. It could be you, whether you like it or not.
We’ve well moved beyond the concept of shame when it comes to filming others in public without their consent. People barely think twice when they pull out their phones to document anything and everything. It can be a handy public tool, as too many examples of citizen-documented police brutality can attest. Mostly, however, it feels like we just want everything to be content. Moreover, we want it to be our content. In 2018, an influencer asked a stranger on a flight if they could switch seats. The stranger complied, then the influencer spent the entire flight documenting what she claimed was a blossoming romance between this person and their new neighbour. It became #planebae, a grand love story that inspired worldwide devotion and media coverage. The influencer talked about it on multiple TV shows and used it as an opportunity to plug her work as an actor and blogger. One of the people involved embraced the attention. The other, the woman involved in this drummed-up narrative who was nicknamed ‘pretty plane girl,’ was harassed and doxed.
It wasn’t until this woman released a statement calling out the abuse that people sheepishly admitted how wrong they’d been. ‘I did not ask for and do not seek attention,’ she wrote. ‘#Planebae is not a romance – it is a digital-age cautionary tale about privacy, identity, ethics and consent.’ But once the think-pieces had been written, everyone happily refused to learn the lesson at hand. Soon thereafter, man-on-the-street channels and influencers gained clout. Even the most talentless and charm-free losers with a camera and microphone could begin their one-person businesses by barging into people minding their own business to ask inane questions. One of these creeps hung around outside a bar in Nashville to coax drunk women into answering invasive questions about their love lives. One responder made a joke about spitting on a guy’s penis to excite him and, well, you probably know what came next.
In the space of about six months, Haliey Welch, a 22-year-old worker at a bed-spring factory, went from an unknown to the central figure in a cryptocurrency scam. Initially, she responded to the clip going astonishingly viral by staying at home and avoiding the paparazzi who tracked her down. She eventually accepted her status as the Hawk Tuah girl because, as she said on several occasions, too many people were using her name and image to make money. If she didn’t do it herself, somebody else would. Cue the merch, event appearances, podcast under the umbrella of Jake Paul’s business empire, and Hawkcoin, a meme coin that was so blatantly a scam that I’m honestly still surprised anyone bought into it. But they did.
Now, Welch is still hoping to make her podcast into a regular revenue stream, even as views on YouTube plummeted and her name/brand are irrevocably connected to a con. It’s clear that she is neither equipped for fame nor charismatic enough to warrant it. She doesn’t seem particularly penitent regarding all the people who lost their money in her joke of a scam either. But she’s also not wrong about a key fact in this mess: if she didn’t do it, someone else would have. Secure your bag, right?
You can understand what motivates this philosophy. It takes so little for enterprising money-makers and proud grifters to take something like a TikTok clip and turn it into a business. It must be embarrassing and aggravating to see those people using your image, one you may not have consented to being out there in this manner, to make a few bucks. Main Character Syndrome is the worst version of fame: all of the hindrances and none of the privileges, both monetary and social. You don’t have a team in place to navigate you through these treacherous waters, nor do you have the financial security to weather the storm. Maybe they’ll offer their services later, as happened with Welch, but your own interests won’t be prioritized. So hey, go make that money. Be the boot.
Defector summed up my feelings on ‘get your money’ motives perfectly. This nihilistic response to a broken economy, fuelled by increasing right-wing control of online spaces and the monetisation of everything, makes it seem not only enticing to turn yourself into a cog in the machine of exploitation but necessary. The piece cites Welch as the absolute apotheosis of this philosophy and how it encourages these afloat Main Characters to act in callous and manipulative ways in the name of getting what they’re owed. Everyone else is doing it, so you’d better do it quickly or you’ll end up losing out. Just pay no attention to all of the crypto bros, faux-agents, betting company ads, hard-right leeches, and Paul brothers behind the curtain.
Not every Main Character has a cycle as parodic as Welch, but the same tools are always in place. Everything is fair game, from the people on the street to your own children. Take the Amazon affiliates. Dropship the creepy plushies. Do targeted ads for the online casinos. To quote that Defector piece, ‘Young people today live in a country with collapsing public services, a society actively receding away from them […] Sure, the game is rigged, but so is everything, so why not have some fun along the way? Why not at least be on the winning side of something?’
I can’t claim I wouldn’t be tempted myself if I were forced into the limelight and wanted at least some sort of compensation for the emotional agony of it all. You can’t really blame people for engaging in a rigged game when it’s the only one in town. But every time I see this cycle unfolding once more, as a new Main Character steps or is thrust into the limelight, I shudder. It’s the same thing over and over again, from the shady business dealings to the pandering to weird political rhetoric to the inevitable crash-out when people stop paying attention.
So, let’s just leave this story here. Let’s not turn these people into micro-celebrities. Don’t have them on reality TV shows or Cameo. Don’t let them start up crypto scams. Don’t let them make merch or dance for Jimmy Fallon. It’s okay for their shame not to be our entertainment or an avenue to profit for themselves or others. We don’t need to milk every detail of this non-story. Unless something truly unexpected or newsworthy happens, and in these cases, this seldom occurs, it’s okay to move on. Frankly, I think there’s a good chance we may be spared a lot of this because the people involved are wealthy. Why debase yourself for a few quid when you’re already swimming in it?
But what do we move on to? When we’ve reinvented the economy to benefit such a system and ripped away all alternatives, what next? Will our unending circle of teachable moments lead to a true lesson learned? It depends: how many people will click on that?
