Viral narratives around the 'Sailor Moon made me gay' controversy on Facebook

Social media viral narratives create stereotyped and simplified representations of situations, events or individuals and can reflect the users’ emotions, feelings, identities or discourses. This article is a case study of the controversy “Sailor Moon made me gay”, which arose from the viralization of a humanities master’s thesis of the same name by a Tecnológico de Monterrey graduate in Mexico. Using a mixed method qualitative and quantitative content analysis of the comments from the four Facebook posts with the most engagement, five main thematic categories that fed the viral narratives were identified: mockery, sexuality, criticism of the research, criticism of institutions, and interest in the thesis. Driven mainly by mockery, the main narrative involved a literal interpretation of the title of the thesis, homophobic discourse, dismissal of the importance of the work’s findings, anger because of the author’s scholarship and the interpretation of the phenomenon as a sign of educational decline and Mexico’s downfall. These findings can aid researchers and institutions in understanding what is the social perception of pop culture and marginalized identities research.