The Creators of the ‘What Are You?’ Name Meme Explain Why You Are the Chicken You Are

From Esquire

Remember that winning feeling of finally finding your uncommon name on a keychain on one of those revolving racks at a gift shop? Well it’s 2020 now, Kyleigh, and instead you can cashapp a teenager in Georgia to put your name on an image of a dog and post it on Instagram instead.

Earlier this week, I was informed by a friend via Instagram that I was a stunning cow with a pink hair bow and really long eyelashes. Or maybe the cow was also named Lauren. I wasn’t sure. But either way, I double-tapped the image to show my appreciation and went about my day. But then they kept coming. A fish with my name in rainbow bubble letters landed in my DMs, too. A dog with a piece of toast as its face. People I know began to make Instagram stories sharing posts of sandwiches, horses, ducks, and vegetables with their own names lettered across them, declaring, acknowledging, or agreeing that yes, that otter/frog/monkey/cat/Simpson’s character is, indeed, them.

This past weekend, Instagram all of a sudden seemed flooded with “what [insert anything] you are” content. Type “what are you” in the Instagram search bar and you’ll be scrolling for quite a while. If you have ever wondered what hedgehog, sandwich, otter, dildo, or Harry Styles you are, now is your chance to find out. If your name isn’t posted yet, DM the account with a request. Their bios all beg followers to be patient, though, as they’re getting more name requests than they can possibly stay on top of. There is even a @what_whatareyou_are_you account. Does that hurt your brain? Good. It’d be weird if it didn’t. But most of these accounts have only, as of July 15, been posting for three or four days.

And most of these “what are you” bandwagon accounts have fairly small followings—between 100 to 300 followers. But a select few original creators have accumulated hundreds of thousands of followers over the past few days. One of those is @whatdogyouare, which Mallory, a 19-year-old college student in Georgia, made on Thursday July 9 whilst bored in an online class. Six days later, she has 124,000 followers and counting. She thinks the overnight fame is mostly hilarious, but she is particularly giddy to tell me that Ross Butler from 13 Reasons Why reposted her photo. And also that Joe Exotic’s official account DMed her to request this one. “They sent me the picture they wanted me to use. I was like, okay.”

She traces the trend’s origin to the @what_cat_you_are account, which was created a week or two before her own, but has since been deactivated. “[The account owner] posted a thing about how he was glad that he started a trend but that he was taking a social media break,” Mallory informs me. Don’t worry, though. More than twenty cat accounts have been created since in its stead, stepping up to, well, let you know what cat you are. However, the oversaturated space is not a competitive one. In fact, they’d welcome you to join in and share their workload.

A few days after the trend begun taking off, Andrew, a 20-year-old social media manager and college student in Atlanta created the @what_chicken_you_are account. Now, four days later, he says he can't keep up with the volume of requests. “I think I do have more followers than the other chicken accounts, but it's not necessarily competition because they can just get to the names that I don't get to. There are thousands of requests that come in a day and it's not really about who can get the most followers or who can post the most pictures,” he told Esquire over the phone. “It's just putting peoples' names on a chicken.” In four days, he has amassed over 4300 followers and more than 774,000 profile views. He explains the irony of doing his day job—social media for a company with a contracted graphic designer and planned content calendar. “And then this account, I can make 10 posts in three minutes in Snapchat, and it's way more viral.”

Mallory and Andrew are both embarrassed to tell me how many hours they’ve spent creating content for their accounts over the past few days. But despite the time commitment, both are adamantly against monetizing their platforms for their own personal gain. “The account's not about me, and I never want to make it about me,” Andrew told me. Instead, both have picked on-brand charities (Mallory a dog shelter; Andrew a sustainable food organization) and a donation receipt in their DMs will bump your name up to the top of their request lists.

“I was getting too many requests, and I saw that the cat account, the original one, had been accepting donations, and so I was like okay, this is a great idea,” Mallory explains. “I've already donated a thousand dollars to [the Royal Animal Refugee dog shelter in Peachtree, GA], and I'm planning on donating more. I'm really excited about it and I've been talking to them and they're very excited about it, too.” Her activism is rubbing off on her contemporary “what are you” accounts, also. “The other accounts have kind of followed suit and also started donating their funds to different charities and organizations, which I think is pretty cool. Makes me happy.”

That’s not the only influence she’s had in the “what are you” arena, either. Mallory started a group Instagram DM for all the main accounts a few days ago. So although there are several “what are you” accounts for every animal by now, you’re only really the official one if you’re in the group. It isn’t meant to be exclusive, though. “I just added the top names that came up for each animal. So I don't know if they're the most popular now, but they were just the ones that existed when I made [the DM],” says Mallory. There are 19 accounts in Mallory's group, and she says they've been discussing funny follower interactions and sending pet pics over the past few days. But like Andrew, she doesn’t see other what-dog-are-you accounts as her competitors. The more money raised for charity as a collective meme movement while the trend is still viral, the better. It isn’t about fame, clout, or monetary gain, nor is it about popularity, recognition, or follower counts. It’s just a few kids trying to keep busy, spread joy, and do some good in this crazy world.

Is there an art to the image/name pairing process? Sort of. “I Google image search and grab pictures of chickens, and then I'll have a list together of name requests and I'll match them. So if there's a name based around a color, like Raven for example is a black bird, I made sure that was a black chicken,” Andrew explains. “Sometimes if they request that it looks like them, I look at their profile picture and see what kind of chicken looks like them. Sometimes people send pictures of their own chickens and ask for that to be their name, so it really just depends.” Mallory says at first she modeled her dog pic selections after people she knows personally. Now she also looks at the profiles of the requestor to see if she can find a lookalike dog.

And why is this trend exploding right now? “I think that it's because there's a lot of stuff going on in the world right now, a lot of uncertainty. Social media has kind of become—I don't want to say a hateful place—but it used to be a place where people could kind of escape from the world and the news and everything,” Mallory says. “And right now, it's filled with political things and it's very divisive. I think these accounts are one source that people can unite around and everyone can agree on. Everybody likes dogs, everybody likes frogs and cows.”

There’s a sense of gift-shop nostalgia baked into the trend, from the bubble letter fonts to the perfect simplicity of the whole phenomenon. It’s a classic “tag yourself” meme format, reminiscent of a bygone, golden era of Facebook. There’s no endgame or complexity, just: look, I am a cute puppy. And similar to the recent viral “Am I cake?” cultural existential crisis/meme, maybe it’s also just easier to imagine, for a brief moment of respite from 2020, that we are something else. You get a DM from a friend and for a second, you aren’t hunched over your desk, bleary-eyed, exhausted. Oh, no. You are a pretty alpaca getting ready for Coachella.

The virality will likely die down within a few weeks, yes. But until then, a bunch of kids across the country are spending their pandemic-ridden summer raising money for good causes out of the kindness of their hearts, and you are a fed-up fish hacking a dart. That’s kind of beautiful. And maybe being an acai bowl might even be fun? What do I know?

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