Brangelina divorce: Life lessons we learned from the social media reaction
News of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie breaking up has predictably blown through social media like a storm of pity and schadenfreude. Here are five early lessons we can take away.
Hey, all you space aliens out there? Tuesday might be a good day to land an army of flying saucers, because no one will pay any attention. Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt are divorcing, and the media is in a feeding frenzy.
Everyone from TMZ, which broke the news, to the staid New York Times ran a story. Not to be outdone, CNN, whose motto is "Go there," actually went there, at one point busting out the "WORLD WAR III BEGINS"-size font to cover the divorce and shoving the New York bombing to the margins.
Social media quickly built Meme Central around Jennifer Aniston, who's been divorced from Pitt for more than a decade and married to actor Justin Theroux for over a year. But in Memeland, she's celebrating, boogying down like she's still Rachel Green on "Friends" spiking the Thanksgiving Day football in Jolie's face.
Yes, a real family is breaking up, and that's never easy, but the people involved here are so rich and beautiful, and so, so famous, it doesn't seem real. Hence the memes, and the GIFs, and the multiple think pieces on what we think about when we're thinking about people we kind of forgot about until now.
Watching the early news explosion is kind of educational. Here are 5 lessons we picked up.
Lesson No. 1: Romantic illusions die hard
What, people projecting their own starry-eyed romantic fantasies onto strangers' relationships? Never!
Lesson No. 2: Team Aniston never forgets
Lesson No. 3: Perspective, people
OK, we may secretly read this stuff, but we also get to be appalled when it bumps real news off the front page.