#TawawaChallenge

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About

#TawawaChallenge (Korean: #타와와_챌린지 / Japanese: #たわわチャレンジ) is a hashtag for images featuring people attempting to put a smartphone device on their chest, which was inspired by an episode in the Japanese webcomic Tawawa on Monday / Getsuyōbi no Tawawa (月曜日のたわわ).^[1] In October 2016, this fad began among Korean Twitter users and was subsequently reached the Japanese and the Western web.

Origin

Tawawa on Monday ^[1] is a 1-page manga written by Japanese mangaka Kiseki Himura, who is best known for his work on the manga adaptations of Sword Art Online. On October 10th, 2019 (JST), Kiseki Himura posted the 86th chapter of the Tawawa on Monday manga. In the chapter, high school girl named Ai-chan is shown balancing a phone playing the YouTube video on her chest. The artist's tweet of the chapter gained over 36,000 retweets and 47,000 likes within its first 4 days.^[2]

Spread

The photo fad of reproducing or parodying Ai-chan's impressive pose started among Korean Twitter users on the night of October 10th, after the video made headlines for having been taken down for violating YouTube's Community Guidelines.^[3] The first instances using the hashtag were posted by Korean user @Pleasure54 at 11:24 PM (KST) (shown below).^[4] After a few hours, Japanese Twitter users came to notice this fad by the help of other Korean users, @akatuki11 and @Biddunggi, who introduced this fad in Japan and put up the Japanese translated hashtag.^[5]^[6]

Transcript:

#Tawawa_Challenge
Looking forward to your participation

Many Japanese Twitter and Instagram^[7] users, including Japanese idols and models, were participating in the trend. Parody illustrations tagged under this hashtag were also posted to the Japanese illustrators community Pixiv.^[8] Alongside, this online fad was reported by Japanese online news media^[9] as well as Kotaku in English.^[10] Then, works of participants from other regions became to be uploaded to Twitter, Facebook^[11], Instagram^[12] and DeviantArt^[13], under the hashtag #TawawaChallenge.