I've thought about Taylor Swift every day since she released her single "Look What You Made Me Do," the first off her upcoming album, Reputation. This is partly because it's my job—I write about entertainment, after all—but mostly because I'm a huge pop-music nerd. And as a huge pop-music nerd, I spend a lot of my time on Tumblr because the social media platform is a hotbed for fan theories of all kinds, especially ones about Reputation. I've covered several of them for Glamour, but I've never fully explored the Swift fandom on Tumblr—until this week. I spent hours in the trenches of it, and honestly, I'll never be whole again.
My eyes are bloodshot. My ears are hot. I haven't stopped scratching my skin. And it's all because of Taylor Swift Fan Theory Tumblr. Swift has released only two songs and one music video off her new album, and yet there are easily 1,000+ fan theories about it floating around the Internet. That's nuts. The Swifties aren't playing games; they take the tiniest details in her work and turn them into 700-word theories that read like War & Peace book reports. And after reading them all, I may have to enter early retirement. Seriously, my left eye won't stop twitching. Someone call Nils Sjöberg.
And get this: Stewing in this pool of Swift stan jargon caused me to conjure up my own Reputation hypotheses. (Reading 6,000 convoluted sentences about how Swift's blinking in the "Look What You Made Me Do" video obviously means XYZ apparently wasn't enough!) I was particularly proud of one that, in my mind, brilliantly connected the Reputation album cover and the 15 Taylors at the end of the video. I presented said hypothesis to my editor, who quickly pointed out a very obvious hole. I'm not kidding when I say I wanted to swan-dive off the nearest cliff in that moment. This is what stan Tumblr does to you! It makes you lose your goddamn mind!
Me when my editor poked a hole in my fan theory.
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