The Reign of TikToker Salina Johns, The Eboy King
The sensation talks about how she went from self-proclaimed to beginning her Eboy kingdom.
Since joining the platform on a lark last summer, Salina Johns aka @SalinaKilla has amassed over a million followers as of TikTok’s self-professed “Eboy king.”
“Eboy” refers to a mostly male, goth-adjacent subculture that Johns’s videos originally sought to satirize. “I was getting tired of watching creators, specifically men, do absolutely nothing but be shirtless and wear chains, and get hundreds and thousands of likes,” she says.
Instead of merely mocking young male mediocrity, Johns recast the archetype in a referential style all her own. “I was doing these more masculine types of videos, but putting a lot of thought into them. And I’m, like, a 5’4” Asian girl.” she says. “People had [equated] Eboys with f[uck] boys, and I guess I changed that.” Her status as an unofficial figurehead has morphed into something more concrete. “At [TikTok] conventions, I’ll see the original Eboys who know me now as ‘Salinakilla,’” she says. “They’re like, ‘It’s cool, [you] can be our king.’”