From Pick Me Girl to Medieval Chronicles: Inside Riham Bichri's World of Recurring Characters

You probably know a Pick Me Girl.

Maybe from college, maybe she was part of your friend group and maybe, if you're being honest, you recognize a little bit of her from an earlier version of yourself. That familiarity is part of what makes Riham Bichri's characters work.

Known online as Riri Bichri, Riham has built an audience of more than 3 million followers across platforms by creating recurring characters that feel less like one-off internet jokes and more like people with lives of their own. Her most popular characters have each crossed 20 million views, and many are drawn from the kinds of personalities and experiences people recognize from their own lives. They are wildly different from one another, but they all come from the same instinct: take something familiar, exaggerate it, and give it a personality people want to keep watching.

Riham's comedy centers on recurring characters rather than isolated sketches. A single comedy video has a beginning and an end; a recurring character can keep changing. She can make mistakes, develop new habits, enter new situations, and become part of a much bigger story.

That is what Riham has been doing with her characters.

Her best-known creations span very different worlds. There is the Pick Me Girl, whose personality is rooted in Riham's own experiences. There is the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, the Wife of a 98-Year-Old Billionaire, and a Mom character. Then there is Wyenne, who exists in the much more elaborate setting of The Medieval Chronicles of Wyenne.

Each of these characters has attracted more than 20 million views.

But the numbers only tell part of the story. What makes the characters memorable is that viewers can usually find something recognizable in them. Riham says her comedy resonates because people see themselves at a particular point in their lives through the characters she creates. That relatability has become a defining part of her work.

Of all her characters, Pick Me Girl has become the one most closely associated with Riham's work. She created the character in 2023, and it marked a major shift in her growth. Before that, Riham describes her progress as relatively steady. After Pick Me Girl, things moved much faster.

There is a personal reason the character connected so strongly.

Riham studied Electrical Engineering at McGill University, graduating with Honors, and says she genuinely loved school and engineering. Pick Me Girl draws from that part of her life. That autobiographical connection gives the character a particular kind of familiarity. She is exaggerated for comedy, but she comes from somewhere real. And that is something Riham has been doing throughout her career: taking experiences she knows and turning them into something audiences can recognize in themselves.

The world Riham has built today looks very different from where she started. She joined TikTok in 2020, initially making dance content. At the time, she had recently lost her job in technology during the pandemic and suddenly had more time to experiment. TikTok gave her somewhere to do that without worrying too much about how she was being perceived.

She tried different styles. Her content changed, and her audience changed with it.

Over time, the dance videos gave way to other forms of content, eventually leading to the recurring characters that became the foundation of her work. That evolution is important because Riham has never treated her content as something that had to stay in one place. She has allowed it to change as she has changed. Her audience has stayed through those transitions, and she says maintaining that connection over the years is something she feels genuinely grateful for.

There is another interesting shift happening in Riham's work now. Pick Me Girl is being developed into a cartoon, with her audience helping to build out the world around the character. Other characters are expected to follow a similar path and develop into stories of their own.

For Riham, that is where the larger vision begins. She does not want these characters to exist only inside short-form videos. She wants to keep developing them, building their worlds, and eventually creating something much bigger.

Her ultimate goal is a cinematic universe for her characters, with connected stories that audiences can experience in a deeper way. It is a natural progression from what she has already built. First came the videos. Then came the characters. Now she is thinking about the worlds those characters could inhabit.

For all the growth that has come with her career, Riham is also open about a period when she felt disconnected from the reason she started creating in the first place. At one point, she became too focused on metrics. Views, numbers, and the pressure of the algorithm began influencing how she thought about her content. Eventually, she felt that she had lost her touch. Her solution was not to develop a better strategy for chasing numbers. She stepped back and reconsidered what she actually wanted from the work.

She returned to the art itself.

Since then, Riham says her content has carried more meaning, and she has developed stronger bonds with her audience. She would rather have a core group of people who genuinely connect with what she makes than create solely with the goal of reaching as many people as possible.

It is also the philosophy behind the advice she gives other creators.

"Fear chokes creativity," she says.

For Riham, creating from fear means worrying too much about comparison, failure, numbers or whether something will work before giving yourself permission to make it. Her advice is straightforward: create from the heart first and strategize later.

Riham's work has already taken her well beyond the world of independent social-media videos. She has collaborated with brands including Sephora, L'Oréal, Sirius Radio, Crunch Bar, Peacock, La Roche-Posay, Innisfree, Bumble, Contigo, Tubi, Mio, CamScanner, Pantene, and Cash App, among others. She also appeared in NerdWallet's Super Bowl advertisement.

But the direction of her career increasingly seems to be about what happens beyond individual brand campaigns or viral videos. Riham wants to keep developing characters and give them their own worlds. Pick Me Girl is already taking a step in that direction, and she hopes the other characters will eventually follow.

Riham Bichri has already built something that many creators spend years trying to find: characters that audiences recognize, remember, and return to.

Now she wants to see how far those characters can go.

The girl who once started posting dance videos after losing her technology job is now developing fictional worlds based partly on her own experiences and imagination. Her audience has been there through the changes, from dance videos to sketches to recurring characters, and now into a new phase of storytelling.

For Riham, the goal is not simply to make another viral video; it is to create characters that can stay with people long after the video ends.