The Fangirl Edit Issue
A weekly series of trends, moments, fan edits & campaigns I couldn’t stop fangirling over.
Pudding mit der Gabel
This is my favourite trend of the year, no question. Pudding mit der Gabel, which translates to “eating pudding with forks”, has taken over cities across Europe: Vienna, Munich, Hannover, and beyond. It started in August in Karlsruhe, Germany, with a mysterious flyer inviting people to a “let’s-eat-pudding-with-a-fork meetup.” The creator remains unknown and has cropped up elsewhere in the world with students at Northwestern taking up the pudding ritual.
Pudding mit der Gabel is simple: crowds gather in parks, pudding cups and forks in hand. Someone leads a countdown from ten. At zero, everyone tears open their lids in unison and cheers before digging in. I’ve heard sometimes people will tap their forks on cups like a form of glass clinking.
I love the absurdity of it all and how young people have turned something this ridiculous into a vehicle for connection. You can’t eat pudding with a fork efficiently. It requires time, patience, presence.
In a world obsessed with optimisation, where AI streamlines everything and loneliness is epidemic, young Europeans chose the most impractical way to eat dessert as their act of resistance. As much as we collectively love a sweet treat as a generation, it is less about that and more about showing up together for no reason other than to connect. I think we can place it within the realm of the Timothee Chalamet and Paul Mescal lookalike contests, and it makes me have faith in humanity again.
‘The Fate of Ophelia’ Track and Music Video
I’ll say this again in The Fangirl Edit, but The Life of a Showgirl didn’t do much for me as an album. However, “The Fate of Ophelia” music video delivered some of Taylor Swift’s best visuals and storytelling to date. Released Monday, October 6th at midnight, it’s a stunning piece of work. The details are characteristically Swift: her Eras tour team in the dance numbers, her own sourdough bread making a cameo, a pop star catching and throwing an American football—a sweet nod to her NFL fiancé, Travis Kelce. The video takes us through the different lives of showgirls across time, from Ophelia to a present-day pop star.
Swift references the famous tragedy Hamlet in track, crediting Kelce with saving her from Ophelia’s own terrible downfall, the character’s descent into madness and subsequent drowning after being gaslit and manipulated by the men around her. In her Official Release Party of a Showgirl film, Swift explained her thought process: “Ophelia drowned because Hamlet just messed with her head so much that she went crazy, and she couldn’t take it anymore, and all these men were just gaslighting her until she drowned. So it’s like, what if the hook is that you saved my heart from the fate of Ophelia? Basically, like, you are the reason why I didn’t end up like this tragic, poetic heroine.”
Visually, the video is breathtaking: Renaissance paintings come to life, brilliant period costumes, flawless cinematography, gorgeous production. It’s our girl Taylor in her element.
‘I Told You Things’ Edit by Lyrichq
Gracie Abrams’ ‘I Told You Things’ has been living rent-free in my head since its release in 2024, particularly that devastating bridge, “you built this cage / lost color in my face”. It’s all over TikTok. The edits are mostly set to characters who understand what it means to lose yourself: Meredith Grey in Grey’s Anatomy, Maxine Baker in Ginny and Georgia. Each of them makes me tear up so I have to be cautious about how many I watch unless I’m really in the mood to ugly cry.
In my doomscrolling pre-bed ritual, I came across an edit by lyrichq which did something very different with Gracie’s bridge. Instead of fictional heartbreak or trauma, the account used ‘I Told You Things’ to show the effects of global warming. Melting glaciers, rubbish at the bottom of oceans, burning cities. That same emotional architecture, but this time it was building up a picture of what we were doing to the planet.
It’s what I love about trends and why I am so fascinated by them. You can work within them to say something that matters to you. I love Grey’s Anatomy and Ginny and Georgia and so welcome edits, among any others, to Gracie’s track, but trends go viral for a reason, and sometimes the most effective activism is meeting people where they already are: in their feelings, in their feeds, and redirecting that emotional energy toward something as important as the fandoms we care about.
Ultimately, it’s evidence that we don’t have to choose between being chronically online and being environmentally or socially conscious. We can do both.
“Art is talent” versus “Art is practice”
The talent versus practice trend has taken over my feed, and honestly, it’s hitting differently. Users share carousels of their craft over the years, oil paintings, photography, showing the messy, unglamorous progression from amateur to skilled. It sends a clear message that their craft is all hard work.
I love this trend because it pushes back against a particular kind of dismissiveness that artists and creatives face constantly. The assumption that creativity is biological, effortless, and notably fun, so therefore it can’t possibly be difficult. It flattens years of failing to master shading, practicing how to draw noses, showing up to something you love even when you don’t feel like it, into a casual “oh, you’re just talented.”
What frustrates me is that this trend even needs to exist as a defence. We should’ve moved past undermining creative pursuits by now. But it doesn’t surprise me. As AI tools claim to replicate human artistry instantly, without the years of learning and failure, the fight to validate creative work has intensified :(
The Life of a Showgirl Official Release Party
I’ll be honest, The Life of a Showgirl wasn’t the album I needed it to be. But here’s the thing about disappointment: sometimes it leads you exactly where you’re supposed to go. The Official Release Party became something else entirely: a room full of people who understood the specific language of loving something this much, the way only Swifties can.
There’s this aching rarity in finding your people outside the stadium lights and the screaming crowds. A shared frequency that says: I know what this means to you, too. I’m grateful she gave us that space, that permission to gather. I wish more artists understood that we want community as well as the art.
The choice to host it in small independent cinemas alongside the major theatres was intentional. I was in Richmond that night, Station Cinema in the city centre, one of those pocket-sized theatres that holds you close. It had a gallery, open spaced cafe, and gift shop from what I can recall. My best friend beside me in the dark, eating our co-op bought ice creams with wooden spoons. There’s something about watching someone else’s creative process unfold on screen, seeing what haunted her into writing ‘The Fate of Ophelia,’ my favourite track despite everything. Understanding the mythology she built in her mind before it became the mythology in mine.
Even when the album wasn’t what I wanted, the moment shared with other swifties and my best friend made it.