#year in swiftdom

[dreamaboutwhathappens]

2024 in swiftdom: share your fave moments from the past year!

as many of you have expressed interest, i will be creating a 2024 in swiftdom video like i did for 2023! submissions will be open until monday, december 9. i'm looking forward to remembering all the insane things that have happened this year and commemorating all our memories together. if you have any questions, let me know!

submit your favorite swiftie posts, images, memes, tweets, whatever from the past year here!

[bisluthq]

Andrea and Scott are such an interesting case study to me especially after the last few years where it feels like Scott’s really taken a driving seat with being around Taylor comparatively to how front and center Andrea was pre-pandemic. Obviously I’m sure her health comes into that and part of the reason she’s stepped back but idk Taylor has actively expressed issue with her dad in her music whereas she’s never even really entertained that idea or train of thought about Andrea. Maybe the issues she has with her are just too personal or she wouldn’t want to put that out there while Andrea’s still participating as one of the heads of her team. The shroud over 13 Management is something fans really don’t talk about. It makes sense for the narrative of Taylor’s career and generally speaking with the nature of fame reducing someone’s close circle dramatically to have parents like them, but idk, there’s something very codependent sometimes about them. I really don’t know what Taylor would do if/when they pass. Austin’s stepped up but definitely not at the level Scott and Andrea are. And he’ll always be playing second fiddle.

their family is SUPER interesting in a SUPER fucked up way. There are just so many things to analyze that are super deeply messed up lol? And Swiftdom categorically refuses to do that because tbf Taylor refuses to do that PUBLICLY lol. I don’t actually think she doesn’t know it’s all fucked. I think she doesn’t want to try process that in front of millions of people. Fair. I wouldn’t wanna. That’s SO personal. And she obviously adores them both and they’ve helped her SO MUCH and they both sacrificed a lot for her (and gained a lot in the process) so idk it’s just really fucked? And Austin is sorta just there being fairly useless but obviously also lovable and kind and trying to help and I think weirdly hardworking because since he took over Taylor’s music licensing rights, her music has been licensed SO much more. He’s obviously legit busy with this. But also what a fucking depressing life in a way? Not saying I’m dissimilar to Austin but like if my pinnacle of achievement was getting my sister’s music, when my sister pays me a salary, into a few tv shows like… I’d be sad. Extra sad because I convinced her to let me be on the Vanity Fair cover with her. Extra extra sad because our parents are fuckeddddd in their heads.

[hope-ur-ok]

—•🧡•🅓🅐🅜🅝•🔸•🅓🅞🅡🅞🅣🅗🅔🅐•🧡—

Rachel my dearest! The audio genius of the swiftdom and swiftierinas. We are so lucky to have you. Thank you for sharing the most high quality audios you can find. This has been such a fun journey with you during the eras. I love love love seeing you on the dash and miss you when you're not.

Happy love letters weekend! And happy last week of eras tour. In all levels except physical, we attended the eras tour together and I gave you a friendship bracelet 🥹 I adore you and your blog and wishing you a happy holidays ahead 🫶

Kree I literally love you so much!!! Someday I really hope we can meet and actually hang out because you are one of my favorite people on this website!! I hope you have such a good holiday season and a great year next year, cause you deserve the world <3

[lcndonboysstuff]

it's been almost like 2 years, will they ever let him go? it's just concerning, i think their obsession with him needs to be studied. it's like they still think he's part of swiftdom, but he has a life of his own, he's not tied to taylor anymore. he doesn't do this or that for them or her. he doesn't think about her when he talk to kendall jenner or talks about palestine. it's annoying that in their eyes he can't be his own person.

sadly people that were/are in her life will always be in the “taylor swift cinematic universe” to them.

a phrase that i’ve genuinely seen used a few times.

[theoldtaylors]

what better way to celebrate the end of the year than a ranking of all the memorable moments in the tumblr swiftdom. including highlights such as the many platypus milk nights, the rise of swiftie banners, the great eras opening night meetup, and a kangaroo fooling us all when you're losing me came out. enjoy!!

[iwanderthroughthesenights]

Ok imma need aspiring prince consort Travis Kelce to maybe chill a little cos I'm scared that the intensity will scare our Queen away lol. He seems objectively good all around but at the end of the day Miss Swift has the last word (as she should of course).

And since we're on the topic: Tay is who i'm here for of course so I will always root for Taylor x happiness. One could say I view all of her flings/boyfriends as suitors and/or aspiring prince consorts for our Crown Princess/Queen of Swiftdom. Joe is the only one who actually earned the title of Prince Consort cos he was around for more than six years (yes I know CH was around for over a year but nope he didn't earn it, we all know that).

All jokes aside though, I'm just really happy that she seems to be at a very balanced and healthy place in both her professional and her personal life, and I hope things keep getting even better for her and she finds everything she wishes for.

[isitovernowfromthevault]

ur tags.....if u ever want to share these thots abt the sw*ftie fandom, I promise I will reblog and scream your post on the rooftops. it’s the best tea there is

My thoughts are kind of a mess and they change as we see more and more internet creators speak out about the fucked up nature of parasocial relationships.

It basically goes like this: ever since her MySpace days, but particularly around the Secret Sessions and tumblr interactions, Taylor herself has basically functioned as a BNF (big name fan) within the fandom. For the longest time, BNF’s have been kind of a replacement creator inside the fandom. For example, you could never have an actual conversation with JKR (ew) and actually change her mind about what she was going to do with Harry Potter, but maybe you could get Cassandra Claire to become your friend and listen to you for suggestions on fanfiction. Or at least laugh at your jokes. And so fandom became an insular activity somewhat separated form the creator.

This barrier did not exist in swiftdom, because back when she was a teenager, Taylor realized that she was basically sharing her diary with her fans and she wanted to actually meet these people. And then swifties realized that, if they got lucky, they could get the actual creator to laugh at their jokes and even invite them to her house. So swiftdom never really developed outside the ever present Taylor, and, likewise, Taylor never really stopped trying to meet as many fans as possible. Neither side took the traditional role.

So of course this leads to a unique kind of insanity. On one hand, swiftdom has a very unique hierarchy defined by Taylor herself: secret sessioneers. Its undeniable that she approves of these fans AND they have access to special content, so they’re at the top. At the same time, these people suddenly have a huge amount of responsibility, they have to not spill the beans for starters, but they also end up with a huge audience, and now “policing” the fandom is kind of up to them as well. If you think its inappropriate to speculate on her romantic relationships, you may just yell at people and log off, or ignore the drama. But if you think its inappropriate AND Taylor follows you AND invited you to her house, then the least you can do is make sure tumblr is a safe place for her, so now you have to be very careful about how you talk about it. Fandom becomes a spectacle. Its all very fucked up, because of course she doesnt actually see everything thats going on, and its not really her duty to police everything everyone says in her name, but the fandom acts like it is.

Her solution as of this year seems to be to distance herself from fandom, which, while on the surface is the most sensible solution, does leave an entire fandom without the leader it used to have. (who also never functioned as a traditional leader but thats besides the point). Now you have the same homophobia and bigotry except without the classic “Taylor liked” that would put a stop to it, so thats a mess. I think its also important to remember that whatever Taylor liked or reblogged was interpreted by the fans. She was kind of an oracle that came in to say “oh I like that” and then everyone would be left scrambling to figure out what exactly she liked. Im still not sure how I feel about her leaving, or what exactly I think her responsibility to and inside the fandom is.

The whole ask blogs thing is a separate but somewhat related discussion: there are always going to be BNF’s thats just... human nature to create leaders I guess. It also leads to a lot of trouble. You have people trusting other people with their problems and life stories, because they want to be seen. But now you have blogs that receive dozens or hundreds of asks a day that are also forming parasocial relationships with their followers. Once again you have someone who cannot possibly be expected to deal with so many people on a personal level (and cant even if they wanted to-these are anons we’re talking about). And then you get, yet again, a hierarchy.

I think to condemn any sort of structure besides purely horizontal is to say you cannot have a fandom bigger than a dozen people and I dont think thats the solution. I think its ok to have gif makers, people that interpret lyrics, make masterposts, gossip, or even blogs that give advice. Its fine to have some BNF’s, and fandom really isnt fandom without them, but its also important to acknowledge that they can sour the entire experience because they have too much on them. Anyone can have a bad day and get snappy, and I think everyone needs to realize that you cannot depend on one big blog (or several) for your entire fandom experience. If a big blog, or even Taylor, has a bad day and yells at people (or calls them freaks) its not their fault if the entire fandom then goes down the gutter.

I dont really know, and my thoughts on the matter change every day. For example, I love Taylors Easter Eggs, and i dont think she should stop doing them, I think they can be a very healthy way of interacting with hardcore fans: its saying “this one is just for you guys”. But spend five minutes on Kaylor, or Haylor tumblr and you can see how these are spun wildly out of control to people looking for clues to a truth only they know. (not unlike QAnon).

I dont know, and if you have any thoughts on this please share them. Ive spent most of my life in one fandom or another and I do think Swiftdom has a uniqueness to it that comes from Taylors close interaction with it. Also, shes a mega popstar of truly gigantic proportions so maybe the fandom is just bigger than usual and gives more space for wild things.

[lazybirdxd]

Entertainment Wars (SB & BMR vs. Taylor Swift)

-Long Version-

If you're new here, SB stands for Scooter Braun and BMR for Big Machine Recordings, the former label of Taylor

---------------------

tumblr & chaos

As we said before, in the short version of this post, SB has an influence on Karlie whether she and Taylor like it or not, those are the rules of the entertainment industry’s game, however, what happens in tumblr when conversations about Kaylor stunts happen is something to observe carefully and patiently.

 Now, I’m going to delve into the highly theorical and subjective here proposing that it could be the case that because SB is a merciless player that will cross whatever line there is whether it exists or not, he could have sent mixed signals on purpose to the Kaylors through Karlie’s accounts or ordered Karlie herself to do it (see tweet about football fantasy and 7 years waiting) under the excuse of “protecting his client’s image”, because the Kaylor fandom is the only one on both Taylor and Karlie’s side preaching their gay gospel to the world. So, it would make sense for SB to destroy the tiny (in relation to the Swiftdom) niche community that supports the coming out agenda the most, an agenda so important not just for Taylor and her ultimate freedom, but for the many LGBTQ+ youngsters like me who found solace and support in the idea of the possibility, however remote, of a mainstream personality representing them in that aspect of themselves that sometimes makes them feel like misfit toys. 

Thus, from the Swiftdom perspective, it wouldn’t make sense that Taylor paid that much attention to a community so small that would barely have an impact on her sales and charts to the extent of creating complex easter eggs (I’m looking at you, “Look What You Made Me Do”) to tear them down a minute later with her toes. To me, at least, sounds like a lot of work and money put into an empty bucket from the business perspective. However, if we enlarge the view a little lot more, we start to appreciate the easter eggs and the stunts as being the result of an internal struggle for “gaining status” or gaining significance within the high-tier players of the top, each player trying all the tricks in the book to enhance their own status. Some of the tricks are dirty, others are brilliant, some just don’t work for you, and some will just sink you without warning.

SB is not a dirty player, he’s a nasty one. We (well, most of us) as Kaylors suspect that he announced the purchase right before the day we thought Taylor was going to come out, to avoid precisely that, and to have a sort of control over Taylor (someone with a higher status than him) by owning her most precious and invaluable property, her music.

 Why would he want to avoid her coming out? You may ask. Well, in this war that we call entertainment, the completion of the plan or the gaygenda means that Taylor will have mastered her own weaknesses when it comes to her public persona. In the long run, coming out will be the shield that will protect her so that players like SB don’t hit her in such a way, to stop people like him from under-the-table moves that could destabilize the Swiftdom and eventually end it.

All these problems derive from the Victorian influence on our views about sexuality and its repression. As time has passed, we have softened the metrics by which public figures are measured, which in our context means that Taylor has now a higher chance for things to go good than before, but it will not necessarily be an easy road.

If Taylor decides to come out right now (In the lover era), then she will be faced with a situation similar to the 2016 crisis, but worse. On one hand she’d have Jerk & Scooter manipulating the love of her life on social media (for as long as the contract lasts), on another hand she’d have to take care of the next album cycle, which involves planning lyrically, musically, aesthetically, entertaining-oriented strategies (complex easter eggs to get you hooked to improve charts and win more Grammys), several meetings with her different teams (booking agents to gauge which continents could be profitable -ROI-, meetings with the head of her label to guarantee she’ll have their support, meetings with PR team for album promotion, meetings with her manager for technical assistance as to the commercialization or not of certain songs, meetings with her financial advisors, meetings with her lawyers to prevent copyright issues, etc…). On a third hand she’d have to craft the strategy(alongside her team) to be on the good graces of her listeners again, which means that the problem would be so complex that she’d have to divide her PR team into two PR teams, one specialized in the next era promotion and another only on perceiving and manipulating guiding the response of the people to the new album and creative direction after coming out process, which is being eased into people’s minds step by step. In addition to everything above, she’d have to have a personal life, because, where are the songs going to come from? If she’s doing this to be ultimately happy and free with whoever she loves, then neglecting the love of her life for the sake of long-term happiness will lead her to ultimately be forever unhappy. All these things would be happening at once. 

So, if you ever feel confused about her messages on social media and what they mean, what’s happening with Taylor right now, what I just told you is what is probably happening to her in this era, and if she doesn’t come out this era, be understanding, there’s a lot on her plate right now, put yourself in her shoes and try to figure it out yourself this scenario to see if you come up with a solution. No, you won’t, so be patient.

[sparklessswift]

In honour of Taylor Swift turning thirTAY today, I made a video to show her how much impact her existence has made in my life. I learned calligraphy because I was inspired by one person in the fandom, and that will never happen if I didn't idolize her. If I didn't know her. If I didn't fall in love with her music. That mere fact changed me as a human being. And I can proudly say that stanning her was the greatest thing that was ever happened in my life. This girl has been in the music industry for 13 years, and in 5 years of stanning her, I witnessed how genuine of a woman she is. If you're reading this @taylorswift , I just wanna say thank you for everything and I hope you feel all the love that you deserve, today and forever. May you continue blessing our lives with your words of swiftdom and keep being our resident loud person😹 I LOVE YOU 30 TIMES 13! Happy birthTAY!!! 🎈🎂💗💗💗 @taylornation

[dreamaboutwhathappens]

what a year the past seven months have been

[taylorcometoindia]

Just made a decision

Wherever I might have to go this era, I will see @taylorswift LIVE. After 11 years of swiftdom, I DESERVE THIS.

[bisluthq]

https://www.tumblr.com/bisluthq/752916769005568000/and-then-she-wrote-peter-and-tied-cardigan-to-him?source=share

Well again, she is not beating the allegations that Cardigan was always about him then

You know what bothers me about takes like this? The implication that Taylor gets songs fucked into her or can only take inspiration from boys she’s into/no longer into/whatever. That’s why I push back so hard at this kind of stuff. Let her be a fucking artist I BEG.

It’s not just Swiftdom, like I told y’all I played Champagne Problems for my friends at sushi night and THE FIRST THING the one girl, who had professed not to know much/like Taylor, said was “so who is this about???” And I was like “she wrote it with her boyfriend at the time” and she was like “oh so he proposed” and I mean this is a supposedly intelligent woman who professes that Bob Dylan (who also wrote confessionally but, like Taylor, very much not exclusively) is her favorite artist. SHE COULD NOT WRAP HER HEAD AROUND THE IDEA THAT TAYLOR SWIFT IS CAPABLE OF WRITING SONGS THAT WERE NOT FUCKED INTO HER and I really fucking resent that stance.

if you want to believe Taylor in 2020 at an awards show saw the future because she is a deity pop off but I prefer to think she wrote a dope song that serendipitously wound up summing up a relationship years later and she dedicated it to him and she used Peter Pan imagery because that’s the idea of a boy never growing up and she feels like Matty’s not grown up so it fit him… come onnnn.

[thatskepticalbitchcara]

side note but I’m just now realizing that new swifties will look back on posts like that years later as an example of how insane pandemic era swiftdom was, much like we look back on larry lol. that faction is the very bottom of the fandom’s iceberg.

i surely hope so 😭 i mean i don’t have a ton of room to talk considering before the vaccine came out i spent an embarrassing amount of time discussing taylor swifts relationships but then i touched grass before i started analyzing the contours of joe alwyn’s dick and how it hits taylor’s g spot

[bisluthq]

I think this bit: “Add in the harassment anyone who so much as said a lyric sounded gay or relatable in a gay context used to get death threats in our inboxes from the broader TS fandom and it’s like pouring gasoline on a fire.... do you stay in the section of the fandom that maybe feels like it’s getting a bit out of hand, or do you join the part of the fandom that told you and your friends to kill yourselves multiple times? Or do you leave the fandom (when you’re microobsession is this world TS created) entirely?” is extremely important and neatly sums up a lot of the stuff we were discussing on here with regards to homophobia in Swiftdom.

Like it’s very easy to go “well these are dumb things to believe, Karlie spent six years fighting to be with Josh and seven to play fantasy football with him and she makes him breakfast and writes him cute notes about his day and like generally dotes on him in a grossly heterosexual way” from the vantage point of people who didn’t find comfort and community from Magical Everlasting Kaylor. But if people are getting death threats for gay lyrical interpretations in one corner and being told Taylor is a Great Big Gold Star Lesbian in another it’s pretty obvious they’ll flock to the latter community.

And in the end that’s damaging too but the original issue is, again, broader homophobia.

Kaylors riding hard to defend Karlie but she chose this!! She married into that family and associates with them that's on her.

kaylors gonna kay 🤷‍♀️

[copaceticneoteric]

Taylor Swift killed us in 2006 what are all of you talking about with her making us dead now?? Like, we have been dead for eleven years, just reaching deeper into the pits of Swiftdom

[jennyboom21]

Taylor Swift is the kind of lyricist that can crack your heart open like a geode, to reveal the sparkling crystals of emotion you never knew were inside of you. There’s a scene in her Netflix documentary Miss Americana, released way back in January 2020, where she’s in the studio with Jack Antonoff and writing “Getaway Car” for Reputation. The words “put the money in the bag and I stole the key, that was the last time you ever saw me” tumble out of Swift’s mouth so fast, I’m not convinced they were not divinely delivered into her brain. What I’m saying is: This is a person who knows how to write a song, who is intentional in her word choice; a person who Jake Gyllenhaal kept like a secret, while Swift kept him like an oath. “You can’t spell ‘awesome’ without ‘me’” is a line we probably all could have done without ever hearing, but even in the candy-coated schlock of a song that is Lover lead single “ME!,” Swift understood the assignment. She is a songwriter that knows exactly what she is doing when she puts pen to paper.

To doubt that, at this point, is simply to hold onto an era from years past where hating Taylor Swift was a personality trait. Say what you will about her—though not to me, I don’t want to hear it—but the woman knows how to write exactly what she means in her songs. Which is why I can’t stop thinking about several lines from her new album, a re-recording of 2012’s Red. One of the songs”from the vault”—new tracks, for those who don’t speak Swift—on Red (Taylor’s Version) is a catchy number called “The Very First Night.” It’s about a secret love from the past and longing to go back in time, and at first listen, it’s a song that’s very fun to dance around to in your living room while jumping up and down as quietly as you can, because it’s 12:45 a.m. and you have neighbors.

The pre-chorus goes like this: “They don’t know about the night in the hotel/ They weren’t ridin’ in the car when we both fell/ Didn’t read the note on the Polaroid picture/ They don’t know how much I miss you.” The way the lyrics scan, my brain immediately wanted them to be a simple AABB rhyme scheme. Even without knowing the words to the song, I wanted that final word to rhyme with “picture.” What pronoun rhymes with “picture” you might ask? “Her.”

Didn’t read the note on the Polaroid pictures. They don’t know how much I miss her. Listening to it with that in mind feels like a fakeout, our ears led right up to an expected convection, only to have it ripped away at the last second. Swift does it a second time later in the song, rhyming “whispered” with “you.”

If you know anything about Swiftdom, it may not surprise you that there are two camps that are having it out over this particular song currently. These are the Hetlors (“het” as in heterosexual), who are fans that affirm Taylor Swift’s straightness and frown upon queer interpretations of her lyrics, and the Gaylors, who are, well, the opposite. (That’s “gay” as in … duh.) The first group is insistent in its belief that these lyrics don’t rhyme because that’s exactly how Taylor wanted them to be; some even think the song might specifically be about Harry Styles. The second group also agrees that the words don’t rhyme, but it’s because Taylor is hiding the song’s true message. (Swift self-identifies as straight, but for years rumors, fueled by clues seemingly left by Swift herself, have swirled about her sexuality.) On TikTok, queer fans have already edited the track to have what they deem the correct word in the lyrics, while questioning its current state.

What Swift is doing is employing a classic songwriting trope, sometimes called a teasing rhyme, which is a name that feels apt for what’s happening here. In Frozen, for example—another work that’s constantly pored over for its queer undertones—there’s a song sung by a talking snowman obsessed with summer and who has no idea he’ll melt in above freezing temperatures. “Winter’s a good time to stay in and cuddle,” he sings. “But put me in summer and I’ll be a … happy snowman.” “Mr. Brightside” by The Killers, as pointed out on TikTok, offers a less G-rated version of a tease: “Now they’re going to bed and my stomach is sick/ And it’s all in my head, but she’s touching his … chest.” It’s a neat little trick to mess with a listener’s head to make us pay attention. We all know these words were supposed to be “puddle” and “dick;” doing it this way creates a little inside joke between artist and fan.

Swift knows the words“picture” and “you” don’t rhyme. She knows that you could fudge it and make them “pict-cha” and “ya,” to scan a little more cleanly. But she chose not to do that—which is, in itself, saying something. Parts of the fandom think it’s unfair to Swift to speculate about her sexuality, but Swift is an artist known for baking in codes and Easter eggs into her word and her brand. She’s known for everything from capitalizing certain letters in her liner notes spelling out secret messages, to wearing particular outfits to send signals about album releases. (A purple velvet suit worn at the premiere of her short film for “All Too Well [Taylor’s Version] [10 Minute Version]” has certain Swifties thinking the next album she’ll re-release will be Speak Now, because the original album art for that one was purple, while the 1989 model car used in the film itself has other fans thinking 1989 will be next up.)

During the Lover era, Swift debuted her single “ME!” on Good Morning America, following an interview with the one and only gay icon Robin Roberts. In the video for “You Need to Calm Down,” the album’s next single, Swift’s hair is dyed the colors of the bisexual flag, and the cast is chockfull of various queer celebs. (These were also the same colors of her short manicured fingernails, seen in a teaser for Lover she posted to Instagram.) As an artist who does, by her own admission, nothing unintentionally, it’s hard not to, as a queer fan, want to read those things as clues, too.

Maybe they are. In the deepest, gayest chamber of my heart … I want those clues to be real. But we just don’t know who or what Taylor truly is deep down, no matter the signs we think we see. But what we do know is that Taylor Swift wrote the lyrics to “The Very First Night” with lyrics that could be easily interpreted as teasing. I get a kick thinking about her sitting down and writing a verse she knew would drive a not-insignificant portion of her fanbase absolutely mad over its implications. (Yes, I know these “From the Vault” songs were ostensibly written pre-2012, but I am willing to believe they got a little zhuzh in 2021.) How nice to have a little joke just between me, Taylor, and a million of her other biggest fans. Even if the lyrics to this song left queer fans in dismay, one can’t deny Taylor Swift is … talented.