TikTok Invaded This Cruise for Content. Maybe Someday It’ll Come for You.

17.01.2024 - 11:15 / nytimes.com / Royal Caribbean

“The people on this cruise ship continue to give me dirty looks everywhere I go,” Marc Sebastian announces to his 1.5 million followers on TikTok. He is filming in a cabin onboard the ship, addressing the camera in classic reality-TV confessional style. Text floats above his head. It reads: “day one on the 9 month cruise.”

The ship in question is Royal Caribbean’s Serenade of the Seas, now on a 274-night “ultimate world cruise” set to visit 65 countries and every continent, including Antarctica. It took to the seas on Dec. 10, carrying its presumably well heeled passengers — the full cruise costs almost as much as a year’s tuition at an Ivy League institution. Sebastian is not, precisely, one of them; his “day one” came later. He is there because the cruise has become a strange online obsession. It began with passengers posting snippets of their experience on TikTok and spiraled rapidly from there. The Serenade of the Seas morphed into a spontaneous mash-up of HBO’s “The White Lotus” and Bravo’s “Below Deck”; viewers back on land started gobbling up every morsel of cruise-related content they could find, producing their own commentary, concocting their own wild story lines, turning passengers into “characters.” Many observers are now openly rooting for this opulent vacation to devolve into some kind of entertaining chaos, seizing on any sign of trouble, real or imagined, as a potential first act. Flooded rooms. A shortage of preferred wines. Rumors of sexual libertines. Illness. Exclusive perks for so-called Pinnacle Club members maybe, somehow, sparking class conflict. And of course, microaggressions. This is the “drama” — in TikTok parlance, the “tea” — supposedly captured onboard.

Sebastian was, initially, one of those gawking nonpassengers. But he used his own online following to TikTok his way onboard for one leg of the trip, paid for by Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. “There’s going to be mutiny, there’s going to be blood, someone is going overboard, I wanna watch,” he told his followers. “Put me on the cruise. I’ll go ... I will cause chaos, I will wreak havoc and I will record everything.”

These are the obvious reasons fellow cruisers might be giving him dirty looks. In his cabin confessional, he inserts a shot of himself walking around the ship, smacking gum, as a perturbed fellow guest can be overheard saying, “He’s videotaping everything.” It sounds like a warning: Stay away from the camera.

The audience on land clearly has a fantasy of what cameras may catch. Something juicy, like a disgruntled crew member struggling to serve an impossibly demanding guest. If you stare long enough, connect the right dots, perhaps you’ll glimpse some tense dynamic, the sort of thing Bravo might