The Shrek kissing TikTok filter is a blight upon society

I need to preface this by saying I don’t believe in yucking anyone’s yums. That being said, please dear lord, I do not want to see you make out with Shrek. This seems like a simple wish, and yet it’s one that has been unfulfilled for the past 24 hours.

On Thursday, TikTok user Igor Ryleev blursed the world with a new filter: Kissing Shrek. Since then, videos of people pretending to kiss everyone’s favorite swamp dweller have haunted my For You Page. And with nearly 463,000 posts already, it’s not like TikTok is going to run out of videos to serve me anytime soon.

I know, I know, it’s my fault that TikTok keeps feeding me these videos, because clearly I am watching them enough to signal interest. But what is getting lost in the algorithm is that I do not enjoy watching people kiss Shrek. It’s only that one glance at someone making out with the big green lad and I freeze. Like Cthulhu, Kissing Shrek is simply too much for the human brain to comprehend.

This is not the first sexualized Shrek filter, unfortunately. The popular SHREK IN THE SKY effect, which has over 527,000 views, features a supersized, latex-clad visage of Shrek towering over you, gyrating and thrusting in a way Dreamworks never could have imagined or desired. But there is an intimacy to the kissing Shrek videos that is particularly unsettling — and that won’t be leaving my memory anytime soon.

My one hope of ending this curse is that maybe — just maybe! — Kissing Shrek works like The Ring or those superstitious chain e-mails that I definitely, maybe, never thought were real growing up. Perhaps, if I share Kissing Shrek with you all here, I’ll free myself of this burden. If that freedom comes at your expense, I apologize, but we all must do what we need to to survive.

And with that, I hope I’m finally, finally free.