Basically, looking at .gifs from shows as a way of understanding in-group and out-groups, from the perspective of a group participant.
Stemming from the Supernatural Tumblr culture of the 2010's, specifically the Cas/Dean OTP.
Test of shared context
By sharing some gifs, there can be an in-group, out-group aspect to inform which gif to share.
It's one of the things that I'm wary of when I use a gif or image where I don't have enough context of that image's story. If it's from a film—what did the film say? What was in that scene? What was the emotion expecting to be shown?
In the Supernatural fandom, .gifs provided a foundation for depth of conversation.
It would be fun to dive deep into this thought and figure out if this is the case across multiple fandoms and how pepople use gifs in the real world.
Outside of the fandom, Ethan Marcotte used to have is own gif bucket where he'd share response gifs he collected over time. I did the same with a website back in the day of gifiitto.us, pronounced "gif it to us."
I know I have a backup on my external harddrive I need to back up and get the information off of.
Leveling
Trying to aid some sort of structure-giving to the thought, these are some high-level leveling that my gut's assigning:
- Level 1: the words and image of what's being said
- Level 2: subtext, either community or canon
- Level 3: the context of the moment, and how that may relate to the situation
- Level 4: deeper.
It's a way of understanding and determining depth of shared-depth inside a fandom, just as much as inside a culture itself.
Cultural Use
As always, if this is focused on framing gifs as cultural communicative phenomena, things always come back to racism (and many other -isms).
There's the use of communicating for clarity, as well as making fun of others or simply using the gifs of peoplee aas a prop.