Introducing Fairy Comments: Gen Z’s Instrument of Online Kudos Trolling

Social media platforms have come a long way from being spaces for just informal interactions between friends and family. Today, these platforms provide numerous ways for people to express their ideas, views and opinions. In this article, we look at one such medium of expression that gained widespread popularity on Instagram during the 2020 pandemic. Popularly known as ‘fairy comments’, these are comments with a very typical syntactic structure used on social media platforms. The syntactic structure involves several emoticons in the middle of a sentence rather than the end. The aim is to define what a fairy comment is and understand the characteristics responsible for its popularity among the youth. We conducted in-depth interviews with 17 Gen Z participants who are active users of Instagram and fairy comment makers tractioning high engagement on their comments. Besides, a rhetorical criticism of high engagement comments on posts of an Indian political leader helped develop an anatomy of a fairy comment. Based on the findings, we propose that Gen Z’s inclination for using fairy comments in the online public sphere is contingent on two characteristics intrinsic to the nature of a fairy comment. First, the potential for creative expression that fairy comments provide, and second, the potential of fairy comments to tread on borders of offense but not harm as they steer clear of abuse or suggested violence in the online space. A collateral outcome of making fairy comments is a coalition between the youth on matters of public interest. These characteristics indicate that fairy comments constitute a medium of trolling under the ‘kudos trolling’ category used by the youth as an instrument of expression in the online space.