TR.BIZ: 10.21.2025

From Amazon Prime's Twitter goof to a new Floptropican war, this is your early-mid-week check-in ✨

Welcome to The Trend Report: Business Edition™, a midweek look at top stories, trends, and more of what’s happening online and off by Kyle of The Trend Report™. Today, we’re diving into an Owala bottle that saved a man, new AI policies, and musing about if advent calendars will continue to trend.

Don’t miss the next How To Be Creative™ conversation, a *free* chat this Thursday on music writing with Pitchfork critic and writer of Futurism Restated, Philip Sherburne: RSVP here!!!!!

🤩 Hollyweird Insider: A tale of two social efforts

There’s a big story going around about how Lionsgate hired TikTok fan editors to promote movies, which is interesting if you’ve never been on TikTok, a la: they are five years late, as the ship and stock of that social platform — like all platforms — is about to crash. If we’re looking for lessons of what using social in entertainment (and beyond) looks like now, here are two examples —

• Singer Sophia James made a very clever move on TikTok by jokingly assigning a group assignment, effectively making the entire platform believe that they were all assigned to the same group, Group 7. This has built a culture of people asking about assignments, unsure if there are other groups, and generally figuring out how to proceed, as if the platform were a classroom of students awaiting an assignment. That’s all fun but there’s an underlying motivation: this was a ploy to promote her new song, which has gotten big name TikTokers like Chris Olsen and Latha Jay participating. The song is already pushing almost 20K usages as other artists are copying the idea, all signalling success.

• Last Thursday, a normie named Savannah Monroe posted about her engagement on Twitter, which she admits should have gotten about twenty likes but somehow went viral — and incurred a lot of hate. Why? Amazon Prime quote Tweeted then deleted the post on Saturday, making a joke about her fiancé to promote The Summer I Turned Pretty. This sparked a series of normies defending the person, which had them point out that such amplification led to their harassment. The brand has since apologized.

This is exactly how and how not to use social as an entertainment brand in 2025, which proves the point of something I always instructed social teams to do in navigating such discourse: anything that pokes fun at someone or has a direct target for a joke to work is mean spirited while centering nothing keeps hate at a distance, as people will not have a target to be mad at. Sure, the Group 7 thing may go off the rails but, as of now, it is perfectly benign, something that the platform and community is iterating on and having fun with — versus the very specific, very mind-your-own-business situation of Amazon Prime ruining an engagement.

👀 Trend Watchers, I: The body keeps score

There has been a rise in trends about and or focused on making sure your body is working, or manipulating your body in ways that require little or nothing while having fun in the process. The first is people testing themselves to see how lazy their eyes are, which is the sequel to people looking upward to see what happens to their eyes (which I believe was started by Italian Bach over the summer). This naturally ties into people making jokes and wondering about the eye color change surgeries, which are picking up steam as a conversation and concern. Then there’s the joke trend of people giving themself one tooth, which has caught on to the point that Doja Cat has offered her tooflessness, along with content to aiming to help you prevent Alzheimer’s and dementia. We can pin this to a few things — pseudoscience via MAHA, an extension of Amialivecore, trends based on testing bodily extremes, the “youngest person ever” and “How old are you? Romanian.” trends — which reveal how absurd the body is as an idea and that modification and prevention are as simple as doing little claps or looking up or down. Clearly, this conjures the young people acting old vibe crashing into the impatient gamification market: life is gambling and educated guesses now, all as the rabbit of time watches, keeping score of all these hypotheticals.

👀 Trend Watchers, II: Will the Floptropica wars matter?

Are you familiar with Floptropica? It’s a niche queer realm of TikTok, that is essentially a fake country for “flops” (Queer people and other extremely online people.) that includes meme expressions like Cupcakke, Jiafei, Deborah Ali-Williams, and more: this is where stan twitter, queer culture, and brain rot collides. A “drama” broke out over the weekend as the 24K Labubu lady announced she was the new queen of Floptropica, sending the subculture into a tailspin, calling her the Trump of the fictional digital country, inspiring (AI) videos of a so-called “Poosi” war brewing (which — mind you — is the second war in the country). This is technically all fun and games — but a curious thing happened yesterday: a very real mayor of a very real Italian city, Marco Ballarini, pledged allegiance to the Floptropicans, in a post marking that he is also Floptropican. The post itself is a niche Floptriopic meme, but it’s fascinating as it is neither mainstream nor aligning with Ballarini’s center-right politics despite his gay rights support. This is all ridiculous, as online things are, but such connections beg the question of if political shitposting absurdity matters when there is no target other than fandoms. If Floptropica goes mainstream, does that mean we’ve entered a mass state of brain rot? Or are we already there?

🩹 Branded, I: Weaponized Owala