Vote Now For Digg's Ultimate Main Character Of 2021
Now that 2021 is entirely behind us (and good riddance to it), it's time to take one last retrospective tour. Our One Main Character series is both a staff- and fan-favorite here at Digg, so it warrants a year-in-review roundup much like those ubiquitous Best-Of lists — except in this case, almost every character is tacky and we hate them. And because the Internet is a warped democracy, we've made this little Tournament of Terribles open to public voting. Let's get on with it.
Honorable Mentions
In compiling the pool for this twisted tournament, I looked back at every single Main Character of 2021. It may not surprise you that quite a few candidates showed up multiple times on our weekly roundups. Shoutout to internet commentators and arbiters of consistently hot takes: Senator Ted Cruz, Chrissy Teigen, Greg Kelly, Piers Morgan, @SideHustleKing, Joyce Carol Oates, Charlie Kirk, Molson Hart, Candace Owens, Brett Scher, Elon Musk, Matthew Ygelsias, Rep. Lauren Boebert and Keith Olbermann. Thank you for your contributions to The Discourse in 2021.
Play-In Candidates
Tom Cruz — No, not that one. Tom Cruz is a rich TikTokker who shared a video of a spreadsheet he and his group of friends use to plan group trips that tracks their individual incomes, relationship statuses, bonus potential and overall willingness to pay for vacation expenses. The "Forbes Friend List" is "broken down here from Shawn, my top-earning friend who makes over $5 million, to who we call 'Broke Bobby,' who makes $125,000," said Cruz. Cruz's TikTok made the rounds on Twitter, where "Broke Bobby" immediately became a trending topic and people gawked at the salary ranges that this group deemed inadequate.
Gene Weingarten — The Washington Post columnist let out a spicy hot take when he published a piece calling Indian food "the only ethnic cuisine in the world insanely based entirely on one spice" — referring to Indian curries. It felt like every South Asian and food lover on earth reared their heads to quickly correct him — "curry" is not, in fact, a singular spice — but Weingarten only doubled down on his dislike of the cuisine. Professional chefs, curry lovers and even the Washington Post's own Food editors disavowed the take. As Padma Lakshmi so eloquently put it: "kindly f**k off."
Kimberly Klacik — The conservative pundit thought she could pull a fast one to make a point with her Twitter followers in October when she tweeted a photo of empty grocery store shelves with the caption, "A look at #BuildBackBetter." Tying a food shortage to the Biden administration's policies might have worked if she hadn't used a photo that clearly was taken in the UK, as evidenced by the pound signs on the price tags. The photo was identified as being taken at a Tesco in the UK in March 2020. As the Internet piled on, she later deleted the photo.
Jayne Rivera — This young woman from Florida stepped into the Internet spotlight when she posted glamorous photos, taken at her father's funeral, to Instagram. Look, I don't know what your relationship with your dad is like, but I'm pretty sure "doing it for the 'gram" is not appropriate in this setting.
16. Jaclyn Lee
News reporter Jaclyn Lee, who works for Philadelphia's ABC affiliate station, was the 2021 face of an age-old myth that makes the rounds every October. Lee teased an upcoming segment warning parents to be cautious about their child's Halloween candy, lest it be laced with THC. This report was apparently based on information from the local police department, but a version of the same story bubbles up almost every year. Wake up, people: nobody wants to give your kids edibles. They're keeping that sh*t for themselves.
15. Milk Family
Knowing what we know now about the Stotler family from Kennedale, Texas, we feel kind of bad about the Internet pile-on they experienced back in early November. CNN tried to garner some sympathy for a family experiencing the very real effects of inflation in its interview with the Stotlers. But the way that CNN tweeted out a clip of Krista Stotler's lament — "A gallon of milk was $1.99. Now it's $2.79. When you buy 12 gallons a week times four weeks, that's a lot of money" — had people losing it. Without context, netizens seized upon the math equation-like absurdity of anyone needing a dozen gallons of milk, and questioned the average price per gallon in their own towns.
14. Rod Ponton
I'm reasonably certain that the words "Zoom cat filter fail" do not appear in the Bible. What we have here is a problem so uniquely specific to 2021 that it ought to serve as the only Google Year In Review segment we need. Poor Rod Ponton, a lawyer from Presidio Country, Texas, showed up for a virtual hearing in Texas's 394th Circuit Judicial Court to talk about a civil forfeiture case. It was all fairly mundane until Ponton realized he could not remove the cat filter from his Zoom screen. "I'm here live, I'm not a cat" is a quote that remains hilarious to this day, and briefly united the Internet in tickled glee over the #catlawyer.
13. Mark Zuckerberg
Everyone's least-favorite Harvard dropout made the list so many times this year, it's hard to decide which version of his character was our favorite. Is it for his iconic sunscreen-smothered face while "hanging loose" on a "swell"? Is it for being the only scapegoat we could blame for a historic outage of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram for a full six to seven hours one day in October? Or perhaps for renaming Facebook to Meta, a moniker we truly had a field day with and yet will never adopt? One thing's for sure: Zuck's gonna Zuck.
12. Jay Baker
Captain Jay Baker put his foot in his mouth back in March when he seemingly made excuses for a man accused of murdering eight people. The Cherokee County Sheriff's Office spokesperson (AKA, a job where you really should know better) held a news conference following the arrest of Robert Aaron Long, the man suspected of a shooting rampage in the Atlanta metropolitan area which targeted Asian women. "Yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did," said Baker. Yiiiiiikes yikesyikesyikesyikes.
11. Amazon
"You don't really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you?" Yes, yes we absolutely do.
10. Robinhood
The investing app seemed to forget its namesake back in January when it halted trading on $GME following the Reddit-fueled GameStop stock surge (AKA meme stock). When you've got both AOC and Ted Cruz yelling at you, you know you've done something wrong.
9. Senator Ted Cruz
Speaking of our fair senator from Texas, Cruz made the list more than twice this year for his hot takes and actions alike. Our personal favorite (rather, least favorite) was his ill-conceived plan to escape to warm and sunny Cancun while his home state was in a winter storm emergency that left millions without heat or power. Internet sleuths tracked down the senator in the airport in Mexico and confirmed the trip, which enraged his constituents and basically everyone else — especially when they found out he left his poodle Snowflake behind as well.
8. Burger King
We at Digg love to play a game called "Who approved this?!" It's simple to play — just pick a piece of truly bad content distributed by a massive corporation and try to guess how many levels of approval the creative went through without anyone raising concerns. For Burger King, that piece of questionable content was posted by its UK Twitter account in March when it decided to, uh, "celebrate" International Women's Day by tweeting, "Women belong in the kitchen." There was more to the thread, explaining how only 20 percent of chefs in the restaurant industry are female, and how the brand was working to close that gender gap — but nobody bothered to read on, nor should they have had to. All the Internet saw was an age-old sexist trope being perpetuated by one of the world's worst largest fast food brands. Woof.
7. Liz Mair
Twitter loves to dunk on bad parents (see our number 1 seed as further proof). Mair, a communications strategist, used a questionable communications strategy when she revealed her methods of persuasion when it comes to her son. "I have resorted to burning Pokémon cards as a punishment when my kid doesn't do basic stuff he has to do," she said. The basic stuff is eating, she added. The judgement of the internet came down hard on Mair as everyone criticized her for traumatizing her child (and for some reason openly sharing it?). Mair later said she was trolling us. All I know is that Charizard doesn't deserve to actually be lit aflame over a school lunch.
6. Jensen Karp
There's only one good non-cereal thing that can be found in a cereal box, and that's a (potentially choking-hazardous) toy. Anything else is fishy. So we were surprised to see that Topanga's IRL husband found shrimp tails in his box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch in March. It was A Very Bad Day for General Mills's PR team as the Twittersphere took delight in the mystery. But the fun and games came to an end as quickly as they started when Karp was Milkshake Ducked: several former girlfriends came out accusing him of emotional abuse.
5. Gorilla Glue Girl
A word to the wise: if you use super glue when you're supposed to use hair gel, you're gonna have a bad time. Tessica Brown learned her lesson the hard way when she ran out of got2be Glued Spray and used Gorilla Glue instead. We were, uh, glued to her TikTok as the saga of the stiff hair unfolded. Her ponytail was stuck for more than a month. The comments section raged with alternating laughs at her misfortune and genuinely helpful advice, though it took a trip to a plastic surgeon with a background in chemistry to finally strip the adhesive from her hair.
4. Nicki Minaj's Cousin's Friend
The "Super Bass" rapper made waves when she declined an invitation to the 2021 Met Gala due to its COVID-19 vaccine requirement, tweeting, "My cousin in Trinidad won't get the vaccine cuz his friend got it & became impotent. His testicles became swollen. His friend was weeks away from getting married, now the girl called off the wedding." Nicki, sweetie, your cousin's friend is a liar and a cheater. His fiancé should dump him and get the vaccine.
Ed note: The Health Minister of Trinidad and Tobago issuing an exasperated statement rebuking her claim made for the funniest press conference ever held.
3. The Ever Given
If Boaty McBoatface taught us anything, it's that you should never let the public name things, and it turns out people love naming boats. We especially loved it when one very big boat got itself stuck in the Suez Canal, effectively blocking one of the world's most vital shipping routes. The shipping container Ever Given gave us a year's worth of "supply chain issue" excuses and spawned many a meme and an Urban Dictionary-worthy new definition of schadenfreude.
2. Bad Art Friend
The kidney donor/bad art friend saga engulfed Writer Twitter for a week in October. For a full explanation, you're going to have to read a 10,000-word piece covering the alleged wrongdoings, which, frankly, is exhausting and I'm still worn out from the reaction. The moral of the discourse is this: never beef with writers. They're petty and have the power to complain about you in the New York Times.
1. Bean Dad
Without a doubt, our number-one seed goes to John Roderick, a man who, one year ago this week, became enshrined in our collective internet brain as "Bean Dad." In a 23-tweet thread, Roderick shared a story about how he had prevented his nine-year-old daughter from eating until she learned how to open a can of beans with an unfamiliar tool that she had never used before. It was an absurd parenting tactic that rightfully earned him derision — especially since he chose to share it as a parenting win. What we didn't expect was for him to receive the full Milkshake Duck treatment, with several layers of backlash and consequences. Nevertheless, we remember his original sin fondly.
Vote Now
We'll crown the winner on Friday, January 14 on Twitter. Make sure you're following @Digg for round-by-round full results.
