U.S. Army E-Girl / Lunchbaglujan

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Part of a series on Military Thirst Traps / Thirst Trap Propaganda. [View Related Entries]

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About

Lunchbaglujan, real name Hailey Lujan and commonly referred to as the U.S. Army E-girl, is an e-girl and a US army specialist who gained popularity on TikTok, 4chan and Twitter in late September 2022. Lunchbaglujan has described herself as a "psychological operations specialist" for the U.S. Army, which led to memes about Lujan herself possibly being a post-ironic psyop meant to recruit more people into the army.

Online History

Haylee Lujan, known as @haylujan on Instagram^[1] and as @lunchbaglujan on TikTok,^[2] made her first Instagram^[3] post on May 19th, 2013, and her first TikTok^[4] post on January 3rd, 2020. However, Lujan did not share posts about her serving in the United States Army until May 2022, when she started sharing videos of herself wearing the U.S. Army uniform to TikTok^[5]^[6] (shown below, left and right).

Starting in September 2022, @lunchbaglujan posted multiple comedy and vlog TikToks about her service in the U.S. Army, also posting similar content to Instagram. For example, on September 6th, 2022, @lunchbaglujan posted^[7] a video that gained over 1.7 million views and 376,300 likes in one month (shown below, left). On September 13th, 2022, @lunchbaglujan shared^[8] a video that received over 558,700 views and 90,600 likes (shown below, right).

In Memes

On September 22nd, 2022, an anonymous 4chan user posted a still image from one of @lunchbaglujan's videos to 4chan's /k/^[9] board, sparking a wave of interest towards the influencer among 4chan users (post shown below, left). On October 2nd, an anonymous user made another /k/^[10] thread using a still image from another TikTok by @lunchbaglujan (shown below, right).

In October 2022, the first viral posts about @lunchbaglujan were made on Twitter. On October 10th, 2022, Twitter^[11] user @kommandostore made a humorous video featuring @lunchbaglujan that gained over 209,000 views, 1,100 retweets and 8,800 likes in two days (shown below).

@lunchbaglujan has been compared to Israeli influencer @nataliafadeev, known as the IDF E-girl.^[12]

Military Thirst Traps / Thirst Trap Propaganda

Military Thirst Traps / Thirst Trap Propaganda refers to social media posts made by a military or people serving in that military which seem to use physically attractive soldiers for propaganda purposes. These posts, sometimes called a "psy op" serve as positive publicity and possibly as a recruitment tool. Prominent examples have included posting associated with the American, Israeli, and Spanish militaries, among others. In the early 2020s, so-called "thirst trap propaganda" proliferated on TikTok, leading to discourse.