Social media platforms have come a long way from being spaces for just informal interactions between friends and family. Today, these platforms provide numerous ways for people to express their ideas, views and opinions. In this article, we look at one such medium of expression that gained widespread popularity on Instagram during the 2020 pandemic. Popularly known as ‘fairy comments’, these are comments with a very typical syntactic structure used on social media platforms. The syntactic structure involves several emoticons in the middle of a sentence rather than the end. The aim is to define what a fairy comment is and understand the characteristics responsible for its popularity among the youth. We conducted in-depth interviews with 17 Gen Z participants who are active users of Instagram and fairy comment makers tractioning high engagement on their comments. Besides, a rhetorical criticism of high engagement comments on posts of an Indian political leader helped develop an anatomy of a fairy comment. Based on the findings, we propose that Gen Z’s inclination for using fairy comments in the online public sphere is contingent on two characteristics intrinsic to the nature of a fairy comment. First, the potential for creative expression that fairy comments provide, and second, the potential of fairy comments to tread on borders of offense but not harm as they steer clear of abuse or suggested violence in the online space. A collateral outcome of making fairy comments is a coalition between the youth on matters of public interest. These characteristics indicate that fairy comments constitute a medium of trolling under the ‘kudos trolling’ category used by the youth as an instrument of expression in the online space.

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引入仙女评论：Z 世代的在线荣誉拖钓工具

社交媒体平台已经从只是朋友和家人之间非正式互动的空间走了很长一段路。今天，这些平台为人们提供了多种表达想法、观点和意见的方式。在本文中，我们将探讨一种在 2020 年大流行期间在 Instagram 上广受欢迎的表达媒介。俗称“童话评论”，这些评论具有社交媒体平台上使用的非常典型的句法结构。句法结构涉及句子中间而不是结尾的几个表情符号。目的是定义什么是仙女评论，并了解其在年轻人中受欢迎的特征。我们对 17 位 Z 世代参与者进行了深入访谈，他们是 Instagram 的活跃用户和仙女评论制作者，他们的评论吸引了很高的参与度。此外，对印度政治领导人帖子的高参与度评论的修辞批评有助于对童话评论进行剖析。基于这些发现，我们提出 Z 世代在网络公共领域使用童话评论的倾向取决于童话评论本质的两个固有特征。首先，童话评论提供了创造性表达的潜力，其次，童话评论有可能跨越攻击边界，但不会造成伤害，因为它们避免了在线空间中的虐待或暗示暴力。发表童话般的评论的附带结果是青年之间在公共利益问题上的联盟。