The world has officially been Pinkydoll-pilled.
After going viral last week for her strangely bewitching TikTok Live streams, content creator Pinkydoll — real name Fedha Sinon — has ushered in a new social media trend that’s done what Kim Kardashian couldn’t: it’s broken the damn internet. Let us explain.
Sinon, known to her 463K followers on TikTok as Pinkydoll, specializes in NPC streams. In the gaming community, an NPC is a non-playable character, i.e. a character with a set of preprogrammed reactions that can’t be changed or controlled by the user. What this means to a gamer is fairly simple: anytime you interact with an NPC, you already know what they’re going to say and do. Their movements and phrases are repetitive, often meant to serve as background noise or move the game’s story forward in some way. But, what this means for those who what NPC streamers like Pinkydoll on TikTok is a bit more confusing.
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Most of Pinkydoll’s live streams boast hundreds of thousands of viewers who send her “gifts,” digital tokens like roses, ice cream cones, cowboy hats, and other miscellaneous emojis. Pinkydoll reacts to these tokens with preprogrammed, repetitive responses, much like a real NPC would. For example, anytime she’s sent an ice cream cone, Pinkydoll mimics a slurping sound before saying, “mmmm, ice cream so good,” in a voice The NY Times describes as “sexy baby.” That catchphrase has become a meme in its own right, and Pinkydoll’s success — she’s making thousands of dollars per stream thanks to users sending her these cartoonish tokens — has spawned a legion of imitators. Most of her fellow NPC streamers now follow Pinkydoll’s patented formula — staring directly into the camera, speaking in soft tones, uttering phrases and sound effects specific to the emojis they’re sent, and even popping popcorn kernels with a hair straightener. It’s the kind of mind-numbing, kink-adjacent content you’d expect to see streaming in the background of a David Cronenberg dystopian drama and it’s left everyone questioning our viewing habits — and broken psyches.
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“It’s very stimulating, because it’s fast and very repetitive, so people sit and watch it to see the next reaction or if I will break character or mess up somehow from too many gifts,” another NPC streamer named Cherry Crush told the NY Times.
What Pinkydoll and other NPC streamers do is basically brain-smoothing viral content at its finest but it’s netted them massive followings, celebrity fans — both Keke Palmer and Timbaland have given Pinkydoll shoutouts recently — and big paydays. So maybe the joke’s on us?