NCS
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In the Chinese zodiac, 2024 is the yr of the dragon. To the web, it is the yr of the rat.
It started, seemingly, with a couple of innocuous social media posts evaluating Mike Faist, co-star of the titillating tennis throuple movie “Challengers,” to a dormouse. Soon, the complexity of the analogy snowballed to odd ranges of specificity: He’s a subject mouse. No, he’s a cartoon mouse. No, he’s Despereaux (the dumbo-eared mouse from the 2008 animated movie “The Tale of Despereaux”). No, he’s Stuart Little, if Stuart Little was scorching. He was “like if a sleepy cartoon mouse came to life and then got really into cross fit,” wrote journalist Lucy Ford on X.
And it wasn’t lengthy till followers on social media started inspecting the facial options of different male celebrities for comparable indicators of rodent likeness — Faist’s “Challengers” co-star Josh O’Connor, for instance. Barry Keoghan. Timothée Chalamet. Jeremy Allen White. Glen Powell. This checklist goes on. From chinchillas to capybaras, the rodent comparisons sped throughout social media like a runaway wheel of cheese, warping the picture (and maybe the confidence) of many fashionable, younger white male celebrities in its path.
On June 2, a Daily Mail article launched this web in-joke to the plenty. “How ‘hot rodent’ men became Hollywood’s sexiest heartthrobs: Gen Z fans are going wild for actors with unusual features including Barry Keoghan, Kieran Culkin and Jeremy Allen White,” learn the headline. The pattern has since been lined by the New York Times, the Guardian, the London Times, NBC and the Today Show, amongst others.
How do these men — heartthrobs of the second, even — feel about being categorized as “hot rodents”? Powell, who was first likened to a rodent again in 2023, has gamely praised the ingenuity of the chronically on-line. “This is why the internet’s a great place,” he informed Jimmy Fallon final December. “I really kind of own the capybara thing now. I am the capybara.”
Despite outreach, NCS didn’t obtain a response from O’Connor, Chalamet, Keoghan or White. (Faist’s agent, in the meantime, confirmed that the actor doesn’t use social media. A small mercy). But extra broadly, the casual sampling of common Joes — or ought to that be common Jerrys? — NCS reached for remark largely didn’t thoughts being dubbed ratty.
Surveyed in a Whatsapp pal group, one 20-something admitted listening to the time period would “hurt,” whereas one other stated he can be comfortable to embrace “hot rat summer.” A 3rd man polled shared that regardless of an preliminary knee jerk response, he understood that “rodent men are very hot right now” and so would in all probability be “flattered.”
For some, the query goes past the hypothetical. One had already been referred to as a “rat boy” by his present girlfriend. “She’s still with me,” he wrote. “So I’ve taken it well.”
Similarly, Gustav, a 22-year-old X person, has additionally been in comparison with a mouse. (Stuart Little, to be exact — similar to Faist.) “I’d say I mostly found the comment amusing,” he informed NCS by way of X. “It was clearly not meant as an insult and even though some people would take it as an insult, I mostly felt it was a way of saying that I was cute.”
While under no circumstances exhaustive, these responses counsel men feel principally advantageous with the “hot rodent” pattern. But if any male superstar is combating the break-neck transition from conventional dreamboat to furry pin-up, maybe the Chinese zodiac — which believes rats to be amongst the most clever, fashionable and charming animals of the 12-year cycle — will be some consolation, in spite of everything.