Every few weeks, Twitter is taken over by a Main Character — a person who, seemingly independent of planning, becomes all anyone on the app can talk about for approximately 12 to 24 hours.
Sometimes, the Main Character is an easy one to catch, like when Elon Musk says any of those things Elon Musk says, or when Mark Zuckerberg barbecues or goes hydrofoiling. And, of course, there are those characters on Twitter who are controversial by nature and, with their large followings, are seemingly automatic victims of the Main Character farm. Twitter even created a secretive “Project Guardian” to protect the thousands of users who are deemed high risk for harassment.
But typically, Main Characters are people who have such terrible takes that everyone else on Twitter feels overwhelmingly compelled to dunk on them. And the best ones are those who surprise us. Here are four of the most fascinating Main Characters of 2021, from politicians to parents.
Bean dad
It was January 2021 when we were all introduced to our first Main Character of the year. John Roderick, a musician and podcaster, tweeted about how his 9-year-old daughter wanted some baked beans. Instead of just, you know, cooking the beans for her, he saw it as a “teaching moment” and proceeded to let his child try to figure out how to open the can on her own. Of course, she didn’t know how to open it because she is 9 years old and had never been told how a can opener works. According to Roderick, it took her six hours to open the can.
The story infuriated Twitter and led to multiple trending phrases on the app, including “She’s 9,” “Apocalypse Dad,” and “SIX HOURS.” A few days later, Roderick, who had been dubbed “bean dad” by the public, issued a lengthy apology on his website. However, by then the discourse had already moved on.
Shrimp in Cinnamon Toast Crunch
In March, Jensen Karp — writer, comedian, art gallery owner, radio personality, and husband of Topanga from Boy Meets World — tweeted a photo of what appeared to be shrimp tails in his box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. It was a fishy story for many reasons: a comedian named Jensen Karp, married to Danielle Fishel, found shrimp in his cereal?
This might seem harmless at first glance. A gross meal gone wrong, a funny tweet, end of story, right? Wrong.
Cinnamon Toast Crunch responded by saying that object wasn’t a shrimp but was a clump of cinnamon sugar. Karp said that couldn’t be true because he also found string in the box, black marks on the cereal, a resealed bag, and other oddities. There was a new theory: Had rats nested in the box?
So General Mills, the company that manufactures Cinnamon Toast Crunch, tried to get the apparent shrimp tails and cereal tested. We’re still waiting to find out the results.
Meanwhile, Karp was publicly accused of multiple acts of misconduct and has since gone radio silent.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, you’re violating my HIPAA rights
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who is also a far-right conspiracy theorist, trends on Twitter often for her wild and objectively awful takes. But this take created a movement that was more based in humor than devastating misinformation, so we’ll take it.
When the representative was asked if she had been vaccinated, she responded by saying the question was “a violation of my HIPAA rights. You see, with HIPAA rights we don’t have to reveal our medical records, and that also includes our vaccine records.”
This is not how HIPAA works, and it resulted in an onslaught of jokes.
Capitol rioter tasered his testicles to death?
This one goes out to Twitter user @ggooooddddoogg, who tweeted out a joke that Kevin Greeson, one of the four people who died while storming the Capitol in 2021, tasered his testicles to death. Multiple news outlets reported it as fact (it is not). His family confirmed he died of a heart attack, but didn’t comment on the taser situation.
And for a brief moment, Greeson became a Main Character.
