Please, Do Not Let Grimes Talk You Into Creating Animated Fetus Instagrams
The truth is an ephemeral thing on the internet, and also when it comes to boundary-pushing artists. Even knowing that, when we started seeing headlines today about Grimes creating an Instagram and Twitter account for her unborn child, it took a minute for us to curb our initial excitement.
On the surface, it seemed like the singer announced two weeks ago that she and boyfriend Elon Musk are expecting a baby. On January 8, she posted an Instagram photo of herself with a pregnant belly, made to look as if her womb were transparent. The pic showed her nipples, and in comments she said she decided not to censor it because it looked feral that way, and “being knocked up is a very feral & war-like state of being.”
Censors thought differently and apparently took it down, so she replaced the pic with a similar one in which her braids cover her breasts. While fans and the media went wild with speculation about her pregnancy, she posted another pic with her belly looking even bigger and decorated with red lines. She also took to her Instagram stories to share what looked like a sonogram of a dragon in her womb. Though neither she nor Musk confirmed her pregnancy, the congratulations started rolling in.
Hey, we understand wanting to be private about pregnancy. But also, those pictures are so gorgeous that we’d love to know more, too!
Then this week she started posting links on Instagram and Twitter to another account called @warnymph. Though the accounts are private, they feature an eerie illustration of a red-eyed angel-devil baby. All parents of newborns might agree, this is a great symbolic depiction of what babies are actually like.
When one fan tweeted her to ask if this was her baby, she responded, “Technically this one is a de-aged digital clone but prob similar.”
And to a query about why the accounts are private, she explained, “Yes while she’s in beta form she’s private.”
She did approve some followers, and one of them shared this video (though we can’t yet confirm whether it really did come from Grimes’ account):
Wow, we all said. This is a new way for a mother-to-be to discuss her own gestating fetus. Even those of us who aren’t superstitious about such things aren’t usually daring enough to animate illustrations of our unborn children, let alone ascribe mythical imagery to them. Giving them their own social media accounts even seems a step too far, though there is quite the precedence for that — see this Instagram-famous family. A social media account predicting the apocalypse? Well, that’s a very different version of maternal instinct than we’re used to seeing. But that’s great. Every mother gets to celebrate in her own way!
And then Grimes decided to write this in response to an article about @WarNymph: “What the hell are you guys talking about? can you plz reach out to my team before running stories?”
For the record, SheKnows has reached out to Grimes’ label, and we’ve yet to hear back from them.
But that tweet, and the many fan replies to it, make us think that the cynics have been right all along: Grimes isn’t literally pregnant, and this is all an artistic representation of her gestating art, namely, the album she has coming out in February. The fact that the Twitter version of WarNymph was created in 2018 really backs up that theory.
Or it could be both. She may be feeling extra creative with all those pregnancy hormones and feeling her power to grow life inside her. Whatever is going on here, brava, Grimes. We’re digging it.
But please, please, please, let’s not have this start a trend of pregnant moms feeling they need to hire animators to turn their unborn children into social media stars.
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