Clout Alchemy

How Online Fame is Made (and Re-Made)

During the summer of 2019, an English teenager named Mary-Belle Kirschner—better known as Belle Delphine—burst into the mainstream by selling small jars of “GamerGirl Bath Water” for $30 apiece. The stunt spread rapidly across social media and the press, generating a predictable churn of headlines and think pieces. Was she a troll? A “performance artist”? Our era’s Andy Warhol? (A title inevitably conferred on every ambitious attention-seeker online.) If someone drank her bath water, would they get herpes? Inevitably: Had the Internet “gone too far”?

To much of the Internet, Delphine seemed to appear out of nowhere. Her 4.1 million fans were proof of some strange alchemy conjured in the borderlands of YouTube, Twitch, and OnlyFans. Her persona blended cosplay, J-fashion, gamer culture, and practically every negative stereotype associated with women online. It was playful, erotic, absurd—and, at times, even a bit gross.

Shortly after the bathwater stunt, Delphine launched a PornHub account featuring videos like “Belle Delphine gets huge dripping cream pie,” which turned out, to her fans’ great disappointment, to be a baking joke, rather than pornography. As her career matured, in both senses of the term, she became increasingly provocative. One infamous photoshoot showed Delphine in the backseat of a car, tied up with rope, with duct tape covering her mouth. Another photoshoot, even more alarmingly, had her in a child’s “My Little Pony” bathing suit, surrounded by children’s toys, holding an oversized lollipop. These stunts, of course, only inflamed the controversy about her work—and in turn, her popularity.

Her rise didn’t just prompt, as Rolling Stone’s EJ Dickson put it, “a cottage industry of reaction videos.” It also inspired something known as the “Belle Delphine Effect.”

According to the meme encyclopedia, Know Your Meme, one Reddit user remarked:

We can all agree that belle Delphine is kinda a genius, she found a niche market and has finessed us all,.

However it’s a sad reality that people are buying these very strange fetish items, it kinda makes me ashamed to be Male.

My problem is this will clearly have an effect on e thots and Influencers, I’m literally waiting for a new girl to dress up like Nami from one piece and cover her nipples on tape and start selling toe nails and salvia.

The future doesn’t look to bright, this will clearly inspire others to copy and sell more gross items, lemme cop some of that Tana mongeau fanny fart in a bottle £50

For this user—and for a surprising number of “Terminally Online” spectators—Belle Delphine was radically new. Like Zooey Deschanel’s Summer in 500 Days of Summer, Natalie Portman’s Sam in Garden State, and Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s Ramona Flowers in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World—all characters blamed at some point for “ruining a generation of women,” as the famous Negative XP song put it—Delphine became a scapegoat. Delphine, YouTube video essayists and professional opinion-havers began to argue, was emboldening a new wave of e-girls with turbo-charged marketing tactics. In 2019, it seemed as though we’d met the “Mr. Beast of Sex” in the shape of a British teenager sporting braces and a My Little Pony bathing suit.

Yet the apparent novelty of her persona said more about her audience’s short cultural memory than her own originality. Her pastel wigs, ahegao faces (the exaggerated orgasmic expressions borrowed from hentai), cosplay, and nods to gamer culture only seemed pioneering.

These tropes were not new—in fact, by 2019, when Delphine’s popularity exploded, they were well-worn. By the 1990s, early camgirls and “lifecasters” had already mastered the art of forging intimate, parasocial relationships with their audiences, including behind a paywall and with extreme marketing tactics. Jennifer Ringley, widely credited as being the first creator of this type, was so popular that she eventually landed on late-night television. And she herself emerged among a sea of women who were selling their lives—or if not their lives, some aspect of their sexuality—online: Anna Voog and Danni Ashe being just two popular examples of content of a similar template of an ultra-confessional, ultra-intimate, and importantly, erotic style of posting.

Delphine’s trademark style, too, emerged as a crystallization of trends, as opposed to something purely original. What came to be called “e-girls” would draw from a mix of influences. J-fashion infused their looks with pastel colors, exaggerated eye make-up, and over-the-top girliness. Meanwhile, the “Living Dolls” of the mid-2000s and early 2010s—a group of young women, like Venus Palermo and Valeria Lukyanova, who meticulously curated doll-like appearances through makeup, clothing, and their YouTube personas—helped popularize the heavily-stylized, anime-inspired femininity that would become associated with Belle Delphine.

She was hardly the first to tap into the “horny lonely guy”—specifically, the horny lonely gamer—demographic, either. In the mid-2000s, a pattern was emerging on image boards like 4chan and, later on, 8chan.

Sometimes, women, and even more disturbingly, young girls, posted images or videos of themselves deliberately (“self-posters”)—performing, flirting, or simply seeking attention—while others were posted by anonymous users, sometimes without their knowledge. Young women like Boxxy and Cracky-chan became fan objects for boys and men on imageboards who circulated their images, transforming their presence into a kind of cult phenomenon. Both cases, and many before and after them, revealed that among “Very Online” men, there was a powerful audience ready to mythologize young women who fit the archetype of the quirky, cute, and accessible. These young women were also, often, mysteriously, quite neotenous (charitably, “anime-like”).

Meanwhile, women who played or commented on video games—especially if they were conventionally attractive—were often accused of weaponizing male loneliness for personal gain. Sometimes these accusations were baseless, fueled by misogyny; other times, they weren’t entirely wrong. While gaming communities always included female players, the “gamer girl” stereotype emerged as a shorthand for a woman perceived to be feigning genuine interest in geek culture to “simp farm” for attention, fame, money, or all the above. This tension, arguably, lay at the core of #GamerGate, where underlying fears suggested that women were infiltrating male-dominated spaces, reshaping cultural norms, and exploiting male vulnerability. As Delphine would demonstrate, these men were not devoid of agency, yet the presence of a fertile market for flirtation, parasocial relationships, and porn remained undeniable. Just as Boxxy, Cracky-chan, and countless others found fans eager to put them on a pedestal, Delphine proved that the historical template of the “cute girl on the Internet” was profitable.

Delphine simply refined these existing motifs and amplified them to attention-grabbing extremes. Her genius came not from inventing something from scratch, but from exploiting the “gamer girl” or “e-girl” archetype to its maximum effect. The “Belle Delphine Effect” is not because she “invented” anything. Rather, it describes a process anyone involved in a subculture has seen before: a savvy person taps into existing currents, intensifies them, achieves fame, and thereby prompts a wave of imitators.

This pattern—where novelty emerges by rearranging and amplifying older traditions rather than conjuring something entirely new—lies at the heart of René Girard’s essay “Innovation and Repetition.” Girard challenges the assumption that true innovation can and should unfold without any link to the past. He details how, historically, “innovation” was once condemned as a type of heresy, while “good” cultural forms were expected to remain stable and consistent with longstanding traditions. Over time, as societies shifted and modernity took hold, the meaning of innovation changed.

By the modern era, “innovation” became synonymous with progress, originality, and genius, with people now craving dramatic breaks from tradition.

According to Girard, our contemporary culture praises creators who seem to break entirely from what came before, yet true innovation is never rootless. It’s our language that’s changed, not the underlying processes of cultural development. Even in Internet culture—often described as obsessed with endless, escalating, even spiritually deleterious novelty—the most viral successes belong to those who recognize, recombine, and re-energize established trends. In fact, online, being too different often works against you. The social media platforms and subcultures that Belle Delphine drew upon already had established aesthetics and audiences. She succeeded by tapping into these reservoirs and selling them back to the public as a fresh spectacle. Using Girard’s metaphor, expecting novelty without imitation is like expecting a plant to grow with its roots dangling in the air.

The roots of Belle Delphine’s success were already there. The genius was in the way she remixed them and exploited them—not in the invention itself.

Girard’s essay also helps explain why certain other online phenomena that appeared shockingly new turn out to be skillful remixes. Mukbang, for instance, is a video format where creators eat large quantities of food on camera. In the early 2010s, Western viewers who first encountered mukbang considered it strange, unprecedented, and borderline-pornographic.

Yet the building blocks were already present: vloggers had already accustomed audiences to personal, intimate camera addresses; haul videos had normalized consumerist spectacles; and eating challenges introduced the idea that watching people eat could be entertaining. More explicitly, there was also the subterranean “feeder” fetish that lurked in the corners of almost every major content platform, from DeviantArt to Instagram to Reddit to YouTube. Feeders were essentially performing mukbangs with a clearly stated sexual bent. For ordinary viewers, as opposed to those who had this fetish, they were the online equivalent of tabloid content or rubbernecking—“can you believe people are actually into this stuff?”

The fetishists, on the other hand, view mukbang differently. In the feeder fetish, food symbolizes unrestrained sexuality, with both the messy, explosive displays of binge-eating and the subsequent body growth acting as metaphors for sexual arousal. What unsettles mainstream viewers excites fetishists: the raw display of appetite becomes a stage for lust and voyeurism. Power dynamics also play a role, with some aroused by control (the ability to make others eat large quantities and thus grow) and others by submission (the act of eating beyond their physical comfort).

The mukbang did not arise spontaneously in the West and it was not “merely” an import from South Korea. It combined familiar elements into a pattern that felt surprising to those who had never noticed the common threads, demonstrating once again that new trends often emerge from tradition. Much like Belle Delphine’s persona, mukbang succeeded not by creating something from nothing, but by remixing old elements into a format that appeared new. This happens again and again online.

Indeed, the most reliable path to Internet fame is imitation and then iteration.

Andrew Tate offers another example of how cultural patterns evolve online through recombination rather than pure invention. At first glance, Tate—a “masculinity influencer” and “male supremacist” who rose to prominence long after the original pickup artist and manosphere communities peaked—might seem like an entirely new type of internet personality. Indeed, he’s been described as one; a sign of both the “end times” and the “startling” misogyny of Zoomer young men. Tate preaches almost parodic ideas about masculinity.

He, too, is often spoken about as if he emerged in a vacuum.

Yet his tactics also have deep roots. On Substack, Peter Limberg writes that long before Tate, “pick-up artists like Ross Jeffries, David DeAngelo, Mystery, and RSD Tyler taught ‘average frustrated chumps’ how to manipulate social dynamics and ‘improve their game’ with women.”

Limberg goes on to say that these methods eventually morphed into the manosphere, personified by figures like Roosh, Rollo, and Roissy (Heartiste), the “three Rs,” who added political and pseudo-scientific theories to explain men’s perceived failures in sexual marketplace. Limberg also describes how this happened alongside other “memetic tribes”: Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs), MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way), and incels, who were a direct response to perceived “failures” or oversights in PUA culture. Tate, then, is the latest iteration of this lineage. He did not emerge without precedent; rather, he exploited long-standing resentments that earlier generations had already refined. Just as Belle Delphine did not invent the e-girl or gamer girl persona and mukbang hosts did not conjure food spectacles from nothing, Tate did not pioneer a new ideology. He only updated it, once again exemplifying Girard’s principle that supposed breaks with tradition are almost always recombinations of what came before.

Earlier PUA or meninist figures also relied heavily on self-promotion, cultivating mainstream celebrity status as much as they focused on seducing women. Ross Jeffries, who considers himself the first pick-up artist, once made a notable appearance on the Faith Daniels Show, a popular talk show in the early ’90s. Erik von Markovik, better known by his stage name, Mystery, didn’t just show up on talk shows—he eventually hosted a VH1 series called “The Pick-Up Artist.” But only Andrew Tate managed to move beyond notoriety to become a global menace. Where Jeffries and Markovik were relatively harmless sideshows, obnoxious, even straightforwardly misogynist, Tate took things to a far darker level. He wasn’t just promoting sexist ideas. He took these ideas to their worst conclusions. It wasn’t about seducing women anymore: In Tate’s worldview, women weren’t people to be manipulated for sex; but rather, objects to be bought and sold.

Once we trace the lineages and repetitions, we may feel disappointed that we aren’t witnessing “pure” originality. Girard would argue that such purity never existed. Every seemingly new phenomenon online—be it Belle Delphine’s porn, mukbang, or Andrew Tate’s inflammatory rhetoric—has historical precedents.

Recognizing that these figures, formats, and trends are not rootless can make it feel like “culture is stuck,” that nothing new is happening. But every cultural development stands on the shoulders of what came before. All great innovators must be great curators. It’s not “cheating”—it’s a different, though under-appreciated, skillset. This also explains why some talented creators find that they’re not particularly successful in online ecosystems. Girard’s argument suggests that straying too far from established patterns is risky.

Innovation as we contemporarily perceive it is a type of heresy online as well: you must tap into existing currents to grow.

There is perhaps no better example of this dynamic than what we see in the “hot take” media market. In this ecosystem, “take-sellers” present themselves as public intellectuals, each vying for attention in what they claim to be a true “marketplace of ideas.” Yet there are still established boundaries. You can’t move against the prevailing currents. As one particularly ornery, anonymous political commentator once put it: “There are two shows in town, dissident, and leftist. You’re one or the other. Pick one or pack it up.”

While it’s fair to say there’s more diversity in opinion than this writer suggests, his observation still captures something important: within the “take market,” not all ideas can find traction. The rules of this game may be implicit, but they ensure that only certain narratives gain an audience, limiting the range of what’s considered a “viable” hot take. In this environment, Girard’s logic applies once again. The supposedly free marketplace of ideas is not free at all but structured by inherited traditions and recognizable categories. You see this with the way centrists are treated within these Internet discourse bubbles: they’re viewed with suspicion, at worst, even hatred. And the few centrists who succeed are ultimately not veering too far from left-wing or right-wing camps—it is implicit which side they “truly” belong to. In fact, the purpose they serve is to provide a liberal gloss on an ultimately conservative idea or vice versa. But the ones that go too far off the beaten path—who promote nuance—are bullied and excluded. There is no place for them in the conversation.

It’s tempting to view this constrained “marketplace of ideas” as a pathology peculiar to the Internet’s echo chambers. But this tension between old and new, between the constraints of tradition and the lure of innovation, has always shaped cultural evolution. Even the “take-sellers,” who pride themselves on their “heterodox thinking,” ultimately rely on ideas that were well established before their arrival. Just as Belle Delphine relied on preexisting expressions of online sexuality, and mukbang hosts drew on older spectacles of consumption, the “marketplace” take-sellers inhabit is less a frontier and more a curated bazaar, stocked with familiar wares that have simply been re-labeled and rearranged for the present cultural moment.

Accepting this can feel disappointing, but it should be liberating. There is something strangely comforting in the fact that even someone like Belle Delphine is in a continuous dialogue with tradition, not a random burst of spontaneity who materialized from thin air. She is the pinnacle—the ultimate expression—of the camgirl, the gamer girl, the e-girl.

*The above is an essay from Be Not Conformed: Rene Girard at the Nexus of Athens, Jerusalem, and Silicon Valley, edited by Luke Burgis and forthcoming from Catholic University Press later this year.