Image of slime by @craftyslimecreator on Instagram
Down with the slime
By Katie Czenczek, Staff Writer
For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, you are the lucky souls who have been saved by the viral video gods.
Slime videos are a subgenre of the overarching “oddly-satisfying videos” posted on Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, and so on… Only I don’t find them “oddly satisfying” at all. It involves a wad of goo getting tossed onto a board only for a hand to swoop in and mix the gunk all around. The worst part? People are actually making bank uploading these videos. According to an article published by Money magazine, a girl named Theresa Nguyen has been earning up to $3,000 per month selling slime. She’s gotten millions of followers by posting these three-second videos on Instagram, and later selling slime to other people who want to stick their fingers into goop.
You might be asking yourself, “Why would anyone possibly care this much about a three-second video?” Well, I do and here’s why.
First of all, they have swallowed my entire Instagram feed whole. If I could escape it, I would, but I made the mistake of clicking on a slime video once when they first started out. Now, every suggested video for me has something to do with glittery gunk being mixed. I can no longer look for memes or find different accounts on the explore page without encountering them. Is this a ridiculous problem to have? Yes. Am I still pissed about it? Absolutely.
Another problem I have with these viral videos is that they’re not even edited nicely. If the sensation they’re going for is confusion, people who make slime videos have succeeded. It would be one thing for them to have smooth transitions and nice music in the background, but that is simply not the case for the standard slime video. They begin and end abruptly—with little room for the viewer to even register what’s going on—and you can often hear strange background noises. The choppy editing combined with unfitting background sounds make for an unappealing experience, in my opinion.
However, my biggest gripe with all things slime-related is how they’re all basically the same video. Once you’ve seen one slime video, you’ve seen them all. Sure, there are different colors and textures of slime, but overall, they all involve the same technique. A slime-er first pokes the goop, making the same aggravating clacking sound Donkey makes in Shrek 2. Then, they fold it in half a couple of times, and repeat the process. This goes on for a little while, with the possible alternative of stretching the slime or mixing colour into clear goo on camera. There’s only so many ways that slime can be mixed, poked, and stroked, and they have all been done before.
My final point on the matter is this: There are already enough slime videos on the internet to last a lifetime. Why bother making anymore? The people who love slime can watch it all they want, and probably won’t even notice that they’re re-watching videos. After all, they’re all the same thing, anyway.
