Everything Is a Stan Account Now

PopeCrave, Club Chalamet, and How Meme Accounts Hijacked the News and Made You Care Again

May 09, 2025

Writer’s Note:

This piece is a little too close to home. As I dive into the chaos of PopeCrave and Club Chalamet, I can’t help but recognize that I’ve already been the cautionary tale, one viral tweet, one obsessive deep dive at a time. While I’m analyzing how meme accounts hijack the news, I’m also looking in the mirror and realizing I’ve been living out that exact story. If you’re wondering if I’m in on the joke… well, I’ve been the punchline for a while now. Take this piece as a warning, or a case study in digital self-destruction. Either way, enjoy the ride.

In 2025, you don’t need a press pass to report the news. You don’t need credentials, access, or objectivity. You need a Twitter account, a deranged niche fixation, and enough irony to pass your delusion off as a bit, even when it’s giving full psychotic break.

This is the era of stan media: a lawless, hyper-online world where parody accounts break international news, fan pages dictate narratives, and the boundary between joke and journalism has dissolved into campy sludge.

Two accounts proved it this month: PopeCrave and Club Chalamet. One turned a papal funeral into a meme sprint. The other launched an anti-Kylie psyop with a blur tool. And both did what traditional media simply cannot: make people give a damn.

Let’s start at the Vatican.

PopeCrave: Holy Slay

PopeCrave started as a shitpost, a PopCrave parody with incense and unresolved Catholic trauma. It launched in 2024 to promote Conclave, a film about Vatican intrigue, and mostly posted unserious headlines, Catholic memes, and edits that screamed, “What if the Vatican had a Finsta?”

And then the pope died.

Suddenly, the gag account got serious. Or… serious-adjacent. PopeCrave began posting rapid-fire updates on the papal transition. Its graphics looked like CNN on acid. Its jokes hit harder than actual obituaries. It was faster than Reuters, holier than BuzzFeed, and campier than the Vatican’s actual Instagram.

They memed Karlie Kloss’s “looking camp right in the eye” with a cardinal in full scarlet drag. They broke the news of the new pope with a vape joke. It was irreverent. It was absurd. It was….incredibly….trusted.

Today, PopeCrave has 60,000+ followers, a Discord server, and a zine that raised $75K for charity which is to say, they have more engagement than most religion desks and a better merch strategy than The New York Times. Their tone? Gregorian feral. One part catechism, two parts Lana Del Rey fanfic, and a light dusting of Tumblr core. CNN gave you bullet points. PopeCrave gave you plot.

When legacy media was still checking its tone, PopeCrave was posting. Not necessarily with precision, but with urgency. With voice. With vibe.

Club Chalamet: Sincerity as Conspiracy

If PopeCrave is satire in a chasuble, Club Chalamet is a full-blown fever dream in a peplum blazer.

Run by a 57-year-old LA woman named Simone, the account operates like a one-woman PR firm run out of a Restoration Hardware showroom and powered exclusively by projection. She’s been documenting Timothée Chalamet’s every move since Call Me By Your Name, posting with the blind devotion of a 2013 Directioner and the tone of a woman who once cornered a barista to explain astrology “as a science.”

This week, she went viral for blurring Kylie Jenner’s face in a red carpet photo with Timmy. Not cropping. Blurring. Like a trauma. Like a glitch. Like Kylie was a casualty in some soft-focus digital exorcism. The caption? “Isn’t Timothée the honoree? Why the attention hogging?”

That’s not shade. That’s an act of spiritual warfare.

The post outperformed the entire event. Vanity Fair picked it up. Rachel Zegler asked if Simone was okay, not as a drag, but as a genuine mental health check.

And while Simone insists she’s just “protecting her boy,” the vibe is less overprotective mother and more aging sorceress whose spellbook is just a Chanel lookbook. She’s reposting Kris Jenner conspiracy threads. She’s treating Kylie like the Yoko of film bros. Her captions read like QAnon newsletters rebranded for a Hollywood Reporter audience.

This isn’t stan behavior. This is Succession meets Tumblr-era delusion. This is propaganda with a crush.

Simone doesn’t want attention, she wants control. She wants the narrative, the lighting, the entire Hollywood machinery to bend toward the Timothée Cinematic Universe she’s directing from her iPad.

And somehow, the media plays along. Because Club Chalamet isn’t just a fan account anymore. She’s a character in the story. A chaos agent. A narrative saboteur.

If PopeCrave is memeing the church, Club Chalamet is running hers.

When Meme Accounts Eclipse the News

PopeCrave and Club Chalamet might seem like opposites, religion vs. red carpet, irony vs. earnestness, but they’re running the same playbook: emotional hijacking via aestheticized information.

They don’t just cover stories. They manufacture them. PopeCrave made the conclave feel like a Game of Thrones finale. Club Chalamet turned a red carpet couple debut into a full-blown stan meltdown. And the kicker? Traditional media followed their lead.

This is the reversal: media doesn’t steer the discourse anymore. It desperately clings to it.

Their secret weapon isn’t access or accuracy, it’s tone. PopeCrave speaks meme. Club Chalamet speaks delusion. Both speak fluent engagement. Neither is neutral. And that’s why people listen.

Objectivity is for losers. Irony is clout.

If It’s Funny, It’s True

The internet doesn’t ask, “Is this factually sound?” It asks, “Does this fucking hit?”

PopeCrave reports on Vatican politics like it’s RuPaul’s Drag Race. Club Chalamet erases Kylie like she’s an unsightly watermark. And somehow, both feel more real than a Reuters alert.

Because in this moment, truth isn’t about accuracy, it’s about affect. It’s about vibe. Meme accounts understand this. The newsroom? Still booting up Internet Explorer.

What matters isn’t what you say, it’s how you say it, when you post it, and whether it slaps. Authority is no longer institutional. It’s aesthetic.

The Collapse of the Fourth (and Fifth) Wall

We used to talk about “breaking the fourth wall.” Baby, the wall is DUST. Everyone’s both the reporter and the source. Accounts like PopeCrave and Club Chalamet don’t just narrate the drama… they are the drama.

This isn’t new. DeuxMoi turned gossip into gospel. PopCrave made stan culture feel like CNN. But this new breed of accounts is self-aware, meta, and fully weaponized.

PopeCrave is a meme account masquerading as a religious institution. Club Chalamet, meanwhile, is a tabloid saga in the making, one meme at a time. Their followers know it’s a bit. And they love it because it’s a bit. The performance is the point. Journalism used to be a window. Now it’s a mirrorball reflecting the chaos, obsession, and sheer spectacle that makes the news.

Fandom Is the New Faith

This isn’t just a media shift. It’s an identity shift.

PopeCrave gave people a way to grieve the pope without sounding like a bootlicker. Club Chalamet gave terminally online girlies a war to fight. These accounts don’t just report. They ritualize. Logging on. Refreshing. Posting like your life depends on it.

This is how people belong now. Not through facts, but through fervor. Through jokes and mess and obsession. Meme accounts became what churches and newspapers once were: emotional infrastructure.

People trust them not because they’re right, but because they get it. Because they speak unhinged fluently. Because they make you feel like part of the bit and the battle.

What Happens When No One Knows It’s a Joke?

Of course, there’s a catch.

When PopeCrave’s memes get mistaken for real Vatican updates, or Club Chalamet’s delusions cross into doctrine, things get… unstable. Satire becomes citation. Blurs become censorship. It’s a short hop from camp to chaos. But that’s the algorithm. Media literacy is out. Vibes are in.

And honestly? It works. Because deep down, we don’t want the truth neat and cited. We want it chaotic. We want it posted by someone chronically online. We want it to feel true.