TikTok Has Found A Suprising Bond Between Femme And Frog

The internet has always been in love with sharing content that involves animals. From cat videos to LOLcats to the new wave of Le Monke memes. Animals will always have a strong presence on social media platforms through memes.

One of the more recent animals to dominate memes are frogs, and the beloved amphibians come in many different types: Kermit The Frog, Pepe The Frog, It is Wednesday My Dudes and Dat Boi — to name a few. Of course, these amphibians also exist on one of the year's most popular social media platforms, TikTok, and they have a surprising connection to something you might never have guessed.

Often associated with the term "rabbit holes," video algorithms tend to take users to some unexpected places. It is a known fact that the YouTube algorithm can be manipulated to string tangentially related concepts together, so it's no wonder that TikTok has a similar phenomenon.

The main feed of content TikTok users delve through is their FYP, shorthand for "For You Page." On the FYP the content offered next will be related to user interactions, such as liking or sharing, video information, such as the sounds or hashtags, and even users' device and TikTok account settings. So as a user continues to use the app, the recommendation system becomes more and more refined until one finds what is essentially a TikTok snowclone. At its core, this is what eventually led users to uncover that it had some humorous, hidden corners, much like YouTube.

These "snowclones" explain what users call "Straight Tiktok," "Gay Tiktok" and ultimately the goal of many Frog Tiktok examples. Of course, the various snowclones can be searched on the app, but many like to get their FYP to take them to the various sides of the app with less effort. This is where user swoov’s TikTok, captioned with "My Map of TikTok," and the now-iconic sound effect breaks down the app’s FYP algorithm. The video goes into detail about how the app seemingly relates various snowclones until one reaches the strange world of "Frog TikTok." At the time of this article, the sound has been used in over 173 videos, and as such, users have responded positively to swoov’s breakdown of the site. This, then, begs the question, "Why does the app have an association between the LGBTQ+ community and frogs?"

@swoov

My map of Tiktok ##lgbtq ##lgbt ##nb ##enby ##frogtiktok

♬ original sound – swoov

The answer lies within a fairly new concept that has taken in many young millennials and zoomer women referred to as cottagecore. The idea originally spawned from Tumblr user mothsfuzz's mood board, associating the rural aesthetic of books like Little Women and merging them with a more modern style. The appeal comes from a need to dissociate from city centers, as well as their convenience-based knowledge loss. Within the American experience, there was a pioneering attitude that has been slowly eroded from modern convenience. As a result, the quiet, more natural aesthetic of cottagecore, alongside a healthy contemporary love of fantasy, coincides with nostalgia for this attitude. As cottagecore has become more commonplace on Instagram and TikTok alike, it's been rapidly adopted by Femme parts of the LBGTQ+ community.

Thus, the connection is made, and the TikTok algorithm begins to pick up on this phenomenon. Unfortunately, the conclusion that cottagecore is the true bridge between these worlds is merely speculative, yet there remains a healthy amount of circumstantial evidence. Very few would think a zoomer sipping tea and Tom Sawyer catching frogs would have so much in common, but cottagecore users embraced this unlikely pairing and have created an inescapable concept: To find Frog TikTok naturally, one must engage with the LGBTQ+ community.

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