Why are SUs so irritatingly twee?

Stop trying to be cute


For some reason your Student Union is home to the most twee, cringey marketing this side of Innocent Smoothies.

SU’s have become so sickeningly cutesy you can’t even visit the Union supermarket without wanting to spew up everywhere.

Even if you stay at home, their wince-inducing Facebook and Twitter banter is hard to escape.

I’m not asking for a soulless, depressing chill whenever I’m on campus, but can the Union just try a little less hard to be my BFF?

Their sunshine and rainbows approach to life does not sit well with miserable gits like me.

Part of it is down to the people who run them. They’ve all got perfect teeth for one thing, and they all seem to genuinely care about stuff.

Sure, that’s well and good – well, it’s at the very least tolerable – but their posters look like they’ve been designed by overly-poltical Zoella fans.

Signs in the union supermarket at Leeds say “you’re super-awesome for shopping with us”, and they’ve even started a cereal bar in the union cafe.

It’s on social media where things get even worse. Brands and football teams having banter with each other on Twitter is bad enough, so do we really need SU’s posting memes? Memes for fucks sake.

The nadir of this shower of positivity is of course the videos. It’s a given that the union election campaign videos will be devastatingly awful, but a look at the stuff people already in the union put out is even more spine-chilling.

So much so that this effort from Loughborough has now passed into legend. This should have been a warning to us all that this is what happens if we let the smiley happy people run things.

Do SU’s give off this vibe of false mateyness to distract us from the fact that many of them are actually being dicks behind your back?

While you’ve been distracted by their banterous snapchats, they’ve actually gone and banned newspapers and bottled water without giving a shit what you thought.

A union should be functional first and “entertaining” last. It should give us a pub and a shop and just generally kind of make sure we’re not all trying to kill each other. It shouldn’t be pretending to be my chum and trying to make me laugh with cheap gimmicks and cute slogans.

Can anything be done to stop this vanilla bullshit? Not as long as respected companies and brands are using the word “bae” on twitter it can’t. Not when people do actually find it charming that stuff like this is being put out there:

Deep down I’m hoping everyone’s being ironic and it’s all a big joke. Stop being so damn happy. Let cynicism have its day.

If you’re a faceless organisation like an SU you’re allowed to be boring on Twitter and you’re allowed to try and do things without this extraneous bumfluff.

Yeah, there really are bigger problems in the world than a cringe SU, but if they could tone it down that really would be “super-awesome”.