'Crying on the internet for valid reasons': Emotional Engagements with 'Sad Girl Music' on TikTok

A TikTok posted in reaction to indie rock band boygenius’ song ‘Letter to an Old Poet shows a young person looking melancholically at the camera, with the caption stating, ‘crying on the internet for valid reasons.” Recently, TikTok has been flooded with similar videos of mostly young queer women showing themselves crying in reaction to so-called ‘sad girl music’: a contested term referring to music that explores ‘ordinary’ sad feelings. Utilizing familiar fandom practices like reaction videos, these TikToks connect the music to queer youths’ own emotional states, their identities, and broader societal issues. Based in fandom, queer, and affect theory, this paper explores how emotions, and especially sadness, are mobilized in sad girl music fandom on TikTok. Conducting a visual and critical discourse analysis of TikToks collected using the platform’s sound feature, I examine how TikTok’s affordances of templatability and circumscribed creativity encourage emotional engagements with music and how these become part of fandom-specific platform vernacular practices. Building on Cvetkovich’s conception of depression (2012) and Ahmed’s sociality of sadness (2014), I further analyze how these music fandom practices facilitate collective identity constructions and experiences of sadness, function as coping mechanisms, and what they reveal about queer youths’ expectations for the future in the context of ongoing socio-political crises. Overarchingly, this presentation contributes to understandings of the role of emotions and affects in platformed music fandoms.