Kim Kardashian's Tribute: Grandma MJ Deserved Better

The internet has had a full day to process Kim Kardashian's Instagram tribute to her late grandmother Mary Jo "MJ" Campbell, and the consensus is not kind. MJ passed away this week, and Kim — who built an empire on knowing exactly how to play a moment — somehow played this one spectacularly wrong.

The post that broke the internet's patience wasn't a heartfelt memory or a throwback photo from a family Christmas. It was, by most accounts, a tribute to MJ's *feet*. Accompanied, reportedly, by MJ's expressed hope that her private-jet-collecting family would one day help solve climate change. The combination of the two — the vapid with the aspirational, the bizarre with the sincere — is the kind of thing you have to see to believe, which is precisely why everyone is talking about it.

Social media called it "vapid and superficial." That's probably fair. But here's what I find more interesting than the outrage: Kim Kardashian has survived every other public moment that should have ended her. The tape. The robbery. The marriage. The divorce that became a legal thriller. She has more than nine lives and she knows how to use all of them. A grief post gone wrong is not going to be her undoing — and the people screaming about it by sundown will have moved on to the next thing by Monday morning.

What the moment does reveal, if you're paying attention, is the fundamental tension inside the Kardashian content engine. MJ was real in a way the family rarely is on camera — grandmothers usually are. She wasn't a brand. She didn't have a PR team or a ring light. She was someone's actual grandmother who happened to end up on the most watched reality show in television history. Turning her death into content was always going to be a tightrope, and Kim, for once, didn't stick the landing.

Kris Jenner will manage the fallout. She always does. But someone in that house should have looked at that post before it went up and said the thing nobody says in that family: *not everything needs to be shared.*

MJ deserved better than a caption. She probably knew it too.

*— Dua Mifsud*