From ‘good for her’ to ‘you in danger, girl’: text–image relationships in GIF reply posts

This article aims to explore the relatively under-researched text–image relationships within reply GIFs, with and without embedded text and/or user-added text. Drawing on existing frameworks for analysing text–image relationships, the article qualitatively examines a set of 41 response GIFs replying to the @AITA_Online Twitter account between May 2019 and August 2020. Each text (the stimulus, the user-added text and the embedded text) is related separately to the visual content to tease out the relationships therein, to ultimately answer what role, if any, the GIFs’ visual element plays in the interpretation of a reply as a whole.