There comes a moment in every stan’s life where you simply just run out of things to post about. Perhaps you run a No Context Succession Instagram, or you’re an ARTPOP stan, or you’ve dedicated your life to creating memes about Disney’s Encanto. What seemed like such a fruitful source of content at the beginning of your standom is now beginning to run a little dry. In a last ditch attempt at pilfering content from the emaciated corpse, you turn to obsessing over the most minute and inconsequential details. “Doesn’t Kendall just look so sad in this scene?” “Venus is in retrograde guys, stream ARTPOP!” Or, in the case of Encanto, and the definitional example of the term: “I never realised she was holding a plate with corn in this scene.”
If you’re lucky, nobody will notice these embarrassing attempts at content. If you’re not lucky, you’ll accidentally birth a whole new term into the lexicon. This is precisely what happened with Twitter user @hourlydolores who, clearly on a fairly slow day in the Encanto fandom, posted a screenshot from the film which displayed the character Dolores, voiced by reggaeton artist Adessa, looking surprised whilst holding a plate of corn. The caption, “I never realised she was holding a plate with corn in this scene,” was quickly jumped upon as an astoundingly nugatory piece of content, the most popular quote-tweet proclaiming “y’all are running out of shit to say about this movie i’m crying.”
“I never realised she was holding a plate with corn” held a niche place as a mid-tier meme for a little while, usually being used when people would point out other equally peripheral details in films or shows. Then, in late 2022, Twitter user @camscamshafts, cutting the wheat from the chaff, reduced the sentiment of the meme down to a single word — cornplate. Finally, a hyper contemporary name for a not very new concept.
In rough terms, cornplating can be described as that point when a fandom runs out of steam. After ransacking a piece of media for every bit of content it could possibly provide, stans are left to cornplate the remains. They must turn to making memes about the most trifling aspects of the work, trying to weave gold from straw, resulting in Dadaist morsels of anti-content.
A new name for an old habit. Biographies of historical figures, for example, are full of cornplating. In the introduction of the biography Napoleon the Great, Andrew Roberts discusses how, over two-hundred years since the battle of Waterloo, so much of Napoleon’s life has been documented, discussed, picked apart, and probed, that even utterly inconsequential events have led to wholly disproportionate analysis. To the point that there genuinely exists a 15-page treatise about the time Napoleon had a cup of milky coffee at a blacksmith’s house in Picardie on July 19, 1804. I really am excited to see how Ridley Scott handled that pivotal scene in his forthcoming Napoleon film.
Like most terms that originate on Stan Twitter, cornplating has already entered an advanced usage since its coining almost a year ago. Now, when users know they are posting something that could be interpreted as cornplating, they preface the tweet, in a tongue in cheek way, with “not to cornplate but…” in order to curb any backlash. In this way, a cornplate has essentially become a way to refer to any small detail in a piece of media. Different from an easter egg, which is an intentionally veiled detail, a cornplate is usually an unintentional detail, something that the stans have projected a meaning upon.
Thus, users are now cornplating the banners in Yellowjackets, cornplating A League of their Own, cornplating Dan and Phil… in 2023. It’s a phrase that really would get a lot of usage in academia, I feel. Like, “not to cornplate but the crossbow figuration of Jesus in Rogier van der Weyden’s The Descent from the Cross is sooo IYKYK”. Or, perhaps, “not to cornplate but Sondheim’s use of ¾ waltz time for the score of A Little Night Music is just chef’s kiss, like, he was giving Mozart fr.” See, it works!
Though it may not seem obvious at first, cornplating does suggest something interesting about the life cycle of fandoms in the 2020s — that they can die. Cornplating is a terminal diagnosis for a fandom, a sign that resources are sparse and it may be time to move on. Fandom death is an under-researched phenomenon, mostly because fandoms don’t end with a bang but with a whimper. If you weren’t looking, you probably wouldn’t have noticed that the Supernatural fandom died off, as did Teen Wolf and Adventure Time. Once load-bearing fandoms, now they’re whispers in the wind. Someday it’ll happen to Heartstopper and BlackPink and Timothée Chalamet. And when will be the moment that Red Scare cornplates?
The life cycles of these contemporary fandoms and the relative speed at which they reach the cornplating stage could also hint at foul play. Fandoms of yore felt like colossuses, they felt permanent and eternal. When @hourlydolores tweeted about Dolores’ plate of corn on 25 January 2021, Encanto had only seen its worldwide Disney+ release on 24 December 2020. Meaning that the Encanto fandom had reached the cornplating stage within literally a month. The lifeboats were already being lowered and flares were illuminating the sky.
It isn’t breaking news that studios now purposefully insert memeable content into their products in order for them to go viral. They plant the seeds and the stans do the rest. The bottom falls out of this nefarious tactic, however, when the fandom folds spectacularly in mere weeks and the shutters come down like a sweet shop on Oxford Street. Stan pages dedicated to fairly recent pop culture phenomena have already entered receivership, such as No Context Wandavision, Jesy Nelson Updates and Francis Bourgeois Reactions, which brings into question just how solid the foundations of these fandoms were in the first place.
Of course, the opposite of this argument can easily be made. That cornplating, an extreme study of a piece of media, is in fact the very essence of fandom itself. As John Waters once famously said, “without obsession, life is nothing”. Think back to the person who was cornplating The Wizard of Oz and noticed that it looks like a Munchkin is hanging themselves in the background of one scene. It birthed one of the most famous film conspiracy theories of all time (even if it actually just turned out to be a bird stretching its wing.) But the story of the Munchkin hanging is now as much a part of Oz lore as L. Frank Baum’s source novels. And it’s all thanks to cornplating.
The documentary Room 237, which compiles the large number of conspiracy theories around Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, is an exercise in cornplating to the nth degree. Oftentimes, the documentary slows down, taking us through The Shining frame by frame in order to obsess over details that may or may not even be there. It’s tedious work, but the passion on display from those who have legitimately flicked through every frame of the film is unbelievable.
So, who are we to say that Encanto isn’t just @hourlydolores’s The Shining? Perhaps it genuinely is a revelation that Dolores is holding a plate of corn in that scene. Perhaps the stan was also just a stan embroiled in a pervasive bit of marketing. Either way, for better or worse, cornplating, and all its signifiers, is here to stay. Welcome to the lexicon, sweetie.