2025 was about finding solace in the human-made slop

In 2025, the slop got worse. 

Nonsense imagery and words generated by artificial intelligence migrated from the back pages of your grandparents’ Facebook to pretty much every corner of society. It’s all over Google Search. McDonald’s and Coca-Cola have dropped horrific AI-generated Christmas advertisements. The official social media accounts of U.S. officials are mashing up Franklin the Turtle with war crimes. I can’t even open my work email without being prompted to “create professional images for work with Nano Banana.” (The Minions never asked for this slander.)

And while this surge in slop is demoralizing for a host of reasons (see: the collapse of truth, the environment impacts, the impact on workers, the sheer shittiness of it all), it also sucks because it distracts from the fine art of human-made—or could I even say human-crafted—slop. 

To go out on a limb and be so brave, I think slop’s been given a bad name by the rise of AI. “Slop” has become widely used to describe the low-quality, mass-produced AI content currently flooding the internet. But for the sake of culture—and queer culture specifically—we must reclaim it. 

Because in 2025, nothing topped the pure quality human-made garbage that rotted all of our brains. 

As queer and trans people, we have long looked to “low-brow” culture as both a salve and a vehicle for representation. From drag performances to the Real Housewives, there’s something distinctly queer about what the rest of society casts aside as being trash or slop. And 2025 was a year that saw horrors abound for queer and trans people like me—silly little nonsense can also be a lifeline. 

I spent much of this year making social media videos about the abuses of the second Trump administration on TikTok, a platform that every administration was looking to buy. I watched and reported closely as my home province of Alberta banned gay books in the summer and legislated away the rights of trans kids in the fall. I wrote about how mainstream media weaponized trans people in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s death and irreparably shifted the narrative before they had any of the facts. Needless to say, it’s been a rough year for a lot of us. 

And while I’ve appreciated the excellent high-quality art and culture that 2025 has produced—shout-out to Sinners, Rosalía’s Lux, etc.—what I will remember from this year is the pure volume of slop I’ve consumed to keep myself sane through it. The gone-too-soon The Ultimatum: Queer Love. JoJo Siwa’s pivot from trash lesbian to a gravelly voiced trad-wife-esque Big Brother star who sings about loving a man. Everything having to do with Labubu. The feverish obsession we all have with the horny gay Canadian hockey TV show. 

This summer I wrote for The Tyee about how slop had come to define the first part of 2025, using the example of the Lafufu—a knock-off Labubu—as a noble case of good slop amidst a wave of AI nonsense. As we come to the end of the year, this feels even more prescient for queer and trans people in particular. 

My personal favourite queer-flavoured trash of the year that really encapsulates all of this came at the end: the many compilations I’ve spent hours watching on TikTok of Michelle Yeoh saying, “Madame Morrible, M. M. Flip it around? Wicked Witch!!”

In these waning weeks of the year filled with seasonal depression and a continuingly horrific news cycle, the recurring bit of Michelle Yeoh saying “Flip it around!” really has the special sauce built to infiltrate gay brains. At first I wondered if it was just my algorithm—if you watch one video on something, platforms like TikTok and Instagram will serve you up 18 more—but I can confirm that it has breached containment. 

Earlier this week, at a Christmas-themed drag bingo event, the hosting queens (shout-out to Vancouver locals Weebee and Addi Pose) led the crowd in a rousing call and response of “Madame Morrible?” “M. M!” “Flip it around?” “Wicked Witch!” that inspired such collective joy that throughout the night the crowd would proactively respond to every number read out with some version of the phrase. 

There’s only so much capacity we as individuals have for Big Serious Culture. And don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the cultural contributions of Paul Thomas Anderson, Severance, FKA Twigs and the like this year.

But 2025 showed there is value to slop. The flavour of slop may vary—the entirety of the Real Housewives of Vancouver back catalogue, that guy on TikTok who does a pitch-perfect impression of Gal Gadot’s bad acting—but we all have something that has helped us through a very tough 2025. 

And in every case, that something was made by honest-to-goodness people. We used to be a real culture, where slop referred to the dregs of late-night Bravo or the latest Kim Petras album. In 2026, as rich and powerful people continue their bizarre obsession with these AI platforms and tools actively making the world worse, let’s not forget that.