Kim Kardashian and Michael Cera are TikTok’s Favorite Celebrity Couple

feel like shit just want them back Photo: MEGA/GC Images, Tyler GoldenABC via Getty Images

TikTok user @youreawizardmichael is a stan who just wants their favorite celebrity couple to get back together. They post emotional fancams set to breakup songs, stitching together paparazzi shots and interview clips marking milestones of their relationship. They have millions of views and very active comment sections in which people say things like “right person wrong time … I hope they find their way back to each other” and “You can see it’s breaking her.” They’ve posted 24 painstakingly edited TikToks about their celebrity obsession since March 2022. The exes in question are Kim Kardashian and Michael Cera.

Kim and Michael, or #Kimchael, as the fandom has dubbed them, have never dated. But what these TikToks ask is, “Wouldn’t it have been cute if they did?” The answer to that is “not really,” but there is something strangely alluring about watching an alternate reality play out in which they were a passionate, public item. @youreawizardmichael fills their videos with pretty convincing photoshops of the Skims tycoon and Scott Pilgrim star on red carpets, at parties, and spotted in public. The quality of these edits suggest levels of devotion and care normally reserved for actual fandoms. This sort of wishful shipping isn’t a new practice, but it’s almost always devoted to couplings that sort of make sense: Harry and Louis, Tom and Greg, any and all combinations of Avengers. The appeal of #Kimchael is in what an unlikely pairing the two make …

… Or that would be the appeal, if it weren’t for the fact that this account started posting #Kimchael at the height of Kim and Pete Davidson’s relationship, which was just as much of an odd-couple moment. If that pale, skinny dude could bag one of America’s most famous women, why couldn’t the ultimate pale, skinny dude? In many of these videos, Davidson is presented as the home-wrecker, the competition. When @youreawizardmichael pairs pics of Cera at the height of his indie-boy fame with Kardashian in her Paris Hilton–lackey era, you can almost make yourself nostalgic over them.

This account has gone viral before, and it convinced a fair amount of people that it was presenting real historical facts in the process. Enough people Googled whether #Kimchael was real in June 2022 that multiple online outlets had to publish explainers debunking it. “While we can’t answer with 100 percent certainty,” Distractify wrote, “we’re going to say no.” The lines of plausibility are further blurred when you scroll through the rest of @youreawizardmichael’s output: Most of their non–Michael Cera–related videos are sincere fancams about the actual friendships between members of the Stranger Things cast, their styles functionally identical. And even before they came up with this ship, they were already posting an extremely high amount of Cera fan content.

Whether the #Kimchael fandom has ended up in our timelines through some sort of multiversal rift, or whether it’s just a goofy celeb-culture trolling campaign, it’s a highly committed bit that makes for a pretty fun binge-scroll if you enjoy trashy-fun content. It’s also an oddly convincing illustration of how accessible deepfaking has become, even without AI-voice and -video tech. As user @vanillacokemunch commented on a recent #Kimchael drop, “im just thinking about north seeing this and asking kim who michael cera is.”