A viral Twitter thread where you play along as the new Assistant to Beyoncé has over 50,000 retweets and thousands of people talking about how great it is to finally find something Nice Online, especially on a platform so renowned for fostering Bad Things Online.
Being Beyoncé’s assistant for the day: DONT GET FIRED THREAD pic.twitter.com/26ix05Hkhp
— landon (@CORNYASSBITCH) June 23, 2019
If you spent any amount of time of Twitter over the last 48 hours, you’ve probably seen it: an exhaustive, impressive, fun, and weirdly positive use of the platform to create a choose-your-own-adventure style Thread where you play the role of Beyoncé’s assistant, desperate to choose the right breakfast and pick the right hotel room, lest you be fired.
It’s the brainchild of a 19-year-old from Los Angeles named Landon,* who says there wasn’t even much planning put into it. “I first started it as a joke for my followers,” he told me via Twitter DM, saying the initial thread took “about five minutes“, was made in the moment, and had answers based off of Beyoncé facts and common logic.
She’s been spotted and you ruin a whole era so she fires you. pic.twitter.com/AbU3JxRt5e
— landon (@CORNYASSBITCH) June 23, 2019
The thread, which has been compared to (and praised as ‘better than’) ‘Black Mirror‘s ‘Baldersnatch’, seems exhaustive. Every question leads to two possible answers, also in the thread, which then branches out into more and more options – an endless tree graph of FaceTiming Blue Ivy and painting and blackmail and even the Kardashian-West family.
It’s filled with cultural references and Beyhive knowledge, adding layers of possibilities and outcomes. It is, honestly, brilliant. The internet can often be bad, but efforts like this remind you of what’s possible and why we all put up with social media’s fake news and propaganda and meme wars in the first place.
https://twitter.com/CharlotteAlter/status/1142769830459781121
My own assistant just got fired on the very first question https://t.co/VrTrv8Y26k
— chrissy teigen (@chrissyteigen) June 23, 2019
“I’m getting many quotes and messages to do another,” says Landon, who has already started thinking about what the next Twitter Thread-turned Choose-Your-Own-Adventure might look like.
“My followers doubled overnight and I’m getting 15-20 quote-tweets a minute.”
While Landon’s thread is no-doubt hugely viral and attracting the attention of people everywhere, he says the inspiration for it comes from a more macabre place: a similar, 2017 thread that allowed Twitter users to play choose-your-own adventure through a school shooting. No points for guessing why that effort didn’t have the same sort of impact as the 19-year-old’s Beyoncé thread.
Other than that, the most shocking aspect of Landon’s Beyoncé thread is how little planning he says went into it. “I just go through each thread as if I was playing it and I’m kind of imagining it as a maze,” he said, adding that since the thread first started blowing up he has spent a good four hours working on adding more answers and endings.
i really got fired from being beyoncé’s assistant for playing sandcastles instead of all night while she was painting
— ur dad’s gf (@laaaureeeenn) June 24, 2019
Me after getting fired from being Beyoncé’s assistant for the third time https://t.co/ZU7Fm1IAbH
— A (@mikiminach69) June 23, 2019
As of now, the teenager is still fifteen tweets away from finishing the thread, and has probably opened the door for countless others to try their own hand at the format.
“Just as long as you’re having fun and it’s not forced it should go great,” says Landon.
