Sure, Buddy: I Have Reviewed Your Story and My Official Verdict Is That Never Happened

Let’s begin with the spontaneous supermodels, my favorite genre of fiction currently being published. Exhibit A: a woman claims she was “secretly photographed” in bed, in a photo featuring studio lighting, a full face of makeup, and framing that took, at minimum, eleven attempts. Secretly. By whom, the tripod? Exhibit B, the beach collage, where a “random” photographer apparently just happened to bring a telephoto lens and direct three specific angles, as strangers famously do. And the “accidental” hand-reaching-for-the-phone pose, number forty-seven in the series, caught mid-reach, perfectly lit, entirely by chance. I’m not saying these photos are staged. I’m saying the photos are saying it, loudly, in every pixel.

Then we have the prodigies and windfalls, where the fiction gets ambitious. There’s a toddler who allegedly drove her mother around while delivering a seasoned motivational monologue, feet nowhere near the pedals, wisdom apparently fully installed. There’s the teenager who, per a story posted over a photograph of a public toilet, which is exactly the credibility setting it deserved, corrected an entire classroom on planetary physics. And there’s the tearful juice bar breakdown that yielded free money AND free açaí, because in these stories, strangers respond to public crying the way ATMs respond to cards. And then, of course, the blender clapped. The blender always claps. The blender has never once not clapped.

But the karma and revenge division is where these authors truly stop pretending. A woman escaped felony charges via rock paper scissors with police officers, which is not how any legal system works but is absolutely how a nine-year-old would design one. An ex allegedly sent unsolicited money as a trauma apology, invoicing heartbreak like a freelancer, and I’ll admit that one made me laugh purely at the accounting. The instant mashed potato lawn revenge at least has the decency to be petty and plausible-adjacent. And the church potluck Satan joke, ending in legendary family-wide scandal, definitely happened, in the sense that it definitely happened in the author’s head, in the shower, three days after the actual event, where all the best comebacks live.

Here’s the thing I’ve realized reviewing all this evidence: I don’t actually want these stories to stop. Yes, they’re fiction. Yes, the applause is invented and the toddler said “goldfish” at best. But somebody sat down and wrote “and then everybody clapped” with complete sincerity, hoping we’d believe them, and there’s something almost sweet about that level of optimism. They’re not lying to us, exactly. They’re lying to themselves, out loud, and we just happen to have front-row seats.

And honestly, the detective work is half the entertainment. The internet has become extraordinarily good at spotting the tripod in the “candid” photo, the physics in the toddler story, the suspicious universality of clapping strangers, and every comment section is now a courtroom full of amateur barristers presenting counter-evidence with glee. That’s a whole participatory sport we invented by accident. The stories are false. The joy of debunking them, however, is completely real, and no jury has ever deliberated happier.

The tripod is visible. The blender clapped. Case dismissed with thanks.