What is Aura?

A brief history of aura, the phrase taking over the basketball internet

V.I. Lenin once remarked that “there are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen.” Last week, someone used the word “aura” in a scouting report of Kentucky prospect Rob Dillingham. If modern basketball fandom is an exercise in symbiosis with the online discourse surrounding the game itself, then seasons can be neatly shorthanded by their discursive markers. 2023 was Ball Don’t Stop’s year; the year of real hoopers, the demise of blog boys, the return of the tween tween hesi pull up. 2024 belongs to aura.

It’s hard to find a precise definition of “aura” as it’s employed on the basketball internet. Search “what is aura?” and you’ll be inundated with riffs on the same meme: “Dad, what is aura?” accompanied by video after video of Anthony Edwards, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Kevin Durant, LeBron James. Crucially, these videos will not depict these superstars, well, playing basketball. At their best, they capture players’ triumphant celebrations; more often, they’re just videos of men walking in slow motion. Aura, as best I can tell, is a basketball player’s presence, vibe, and stature, a diffuse concept which can be difficult to quantify but which maps, more reliably than anything else, onto a player’s conventional attractiveness. But the notion is slippery. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart once opined that you know pornography when you see it; the same could be said for players who lack aura.

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With something of a working definition in my mind, I reached out to @WaveyForever, the man behind the twitter account I have come to view as single-handedly responsible for the aura revolution. Over the course of our conversation, I settled into an understanding of Dre as something like aura’s J. Robert Oppenheimer: a man who brought European innovations to American soil and, in so doing, unleashed an uncontrollably destructive force. Over DMs, Dre sketched a lineage of aura’s etymology. By his account, the most recent FIFA World Cup exposed American Twitter users traditionally focused on basketball and football to the alien world of the soccer internet. “They had a whole different type of lingo,” Dre told me, and the most popular term was aura. “The context I always saw them use it in is basically players they find attractive aesthetically. For example, it would be just a picture of a player with no highlights or nothing and the caption would be ‘nah he’s so cold’ or ‘his aura is insane.’”

Dre described using the word aura ironically, in a move I understood both as a gentle barb at the foreign habits of soccer fans and a mischievous inside joke; still, the word got traction. By his telling, “everybody always blames me for the aura shit.” The American godfather of aura defines the term as how somebody “moves on and off the court.” Using Shai Gilgeous-Alexander as an example, he describes the interplay of off-court fashion with aesthetically pleasing play, on-court demeanor with a certain indefinable motion. The opposite of aura, he added, is someone like Zion Williamson: “he’s a sex addict, sloppy build, and wears anime-inspired outfits.”

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Aura, then, is not so dissimilar from any other meme or linguistic development: it transmogrifies from one context to another, is spread as an ironic in-joke, reaches a critical tipping point, and then becomes so overused that its original adopters come to resent its every mention. What makes aura interesting, then, is the way in which its current ubiquity tells us something about the latent homoeroticism (or, if you don’t care to go that far, the libidinal investment) of online NBA fandom. In Jezebel, Kylie Cheung once wrote about the culture of NBA fanfic, a phrase I’d previously used only to describe the pathologies of Miami Heat fans. By Cheung’s account, there exists an ecosystem of tremendously horny NBA-inspired fanfiction on the level of nearly any cultural product the league’s size. In so describing this ecosystem, Cheung draws parallels between the hidden world of NBA fanfic and the more visible, seemingly inescapable world of NBA Twitter. By her account, insofar as modern NBA fandom entails a mix of gossip obsession, narrative invention, and psychosocial projection, “all devoted sports fans, including straight, male fans, are fanfiction writers, at least on some level, whether they identify as such or not.”

While it’s certainly not the case that every NBA fan wants to have sex with their favorite player, an unavoidably sensuous charge has grasped online fandom in a way that should be taken more, not less, seriously for the dutiful irony in which it’s caked. If you participate in the basketball internet, your “for you” page turns into a mix of people debating players’ aura, grown men pouring honey on themselves in honor of their favorite players, and TikTok edits revolving around the premise that Karl-Anthony Towns’ voice suggests a certain queerness. Each discrete input is presented as a joke, but the net effect is that the dominant mode of contemporary NBA fandom is a sort of loosely ironic homoeroticism.

Aura, in that sense, is the logical endpoint of the basketball internet’s shifting of NBA fandom away from casual consumption and into obsessive projection. Somewhere in the alchemical reaction of the length of the NBA season, the feverish pace of the offseason, the infinite ability to clip, analyze, and statistically interpret every play, the unfettered access to players via social media, and the construction of any number of apparati serving one or more of these discrete developments, NBA fandom has turned into an encompassing identity. Fans, in this new information environment, never run out of information to receive, dopamine receptors to fry, or opinions to share. The act of fandom, if left unchecked, can entail—rather, demand—a hollowing-out, a complete disinvestment in one’s own life as price for a tremendous libidinal investment in one’s team or, better yet, favorite player. Fans can identify fully with multimillionaires who don’t know they exist because fans now have the ability to spend all day attending to that investment.

Fandom, in other words, can serve as a stand-in for more than just one’s personality. The current online fan infrastructure permits the total sublimation of one’s own desires by channeling them into projection onto identifiable stars. In this context, aura makes perfect, unironic sense. If the projecting fan, in a very real sense, wishes to become the embodiment of their obsession, then it’s not enough for that player to simply be good at basketball. The totalizing object of desire needs to look good, move gracefully, dress well, have aura. Sports, as Luca Guadagnino somewhat clumsily explores in Challengers, are often just necessary footholds into this sort of intensely associative desire, an envy, investment, and obsession that starts to resemble lust.

It’s no wonder, then, that functionally the entire basketball internet appears in the process of rallying behind Anthony Edwards, the chosen aura man, in these NBA playoffs. Even for the least-obsessive fan, Edwards has come to be understood as a stand-in for American basketball itself, an association less tethered to consistent on-court greatness than to his demeanor, his charm, his profile; fuck it, his aura. In a coincidence that would be too obvious for fiction, his Minnesota Timberwolves literally wear the word “Aura” on their jersey sponsor patch (Aura, in the non-NBA-Twitter context, is apparently a leading provider of all-in-one digital security for consumers.) It’s hard not to see the function of desire at play: the American media apparatus waits with bated breath for Edwards’ coronation, in the hopes that he can save America from preternaturally skilled European slobs, a generational free-throw grifter, a steroidal running back masquerading as a basketball player, or 7’4” French freak born in a media-training lab. American basketball fans, not just Twitter obsessives, are deeply invested in Edwards’ success, to the point of depicting him as a messianic Jordan redux. Aura has reached the mainstream.