There are few certainties in this world: death, taxes, and a Taylor Swift fan’s compulsion to look for clues in everything. A recent addition to the list is TikTok’s unyielding love for Normal People‘s Connell (Paul Mescal) and Marianne (Daisy Edgar Jones). It’s officially been three years since I first laid eyes on the beautiful, tortured couple, and they’ve haunted me and my For You Page ever since.
Normal People, an adaptation of Sally Rooney’s second novel, follows Connell and Marianne’s fluctuating relationship from its intense beginning in high school to their tumultuous reunion at university. Over the course of 12 episodes viewers watched the Irish teens mature into anguished young adults, while confronting challenges with mental health, family, and feelings of belonging.
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If not beautifully edited to a poignant song by the likes of Taylor Swift or Phoebe Bridgers (who is, notably, Mescal’s ex), stirring scenes — and there are many — are posted to TikTok raw, not even properly formatted just a phone recording a greasy laptop screen. And yet, thousands of likes and views pour in.
The fanfare doesn’t end with the television adaptation, Rooney’s novel gets nearly equal airtime. I’ve seen the quote, “I’m not a religious person, but I do sometimes think God made you for me,” more than my own reflection.
On TikTok, the tag “Normal People” currently sits at 7 billion views. It’s not a series that will ever have a second season, and the recent adaptation of Rooney’s first novel, Conversations with Friends, lacked Normal People‘s cultural impact. So why can’t TikTok let Connell and Marianne go?
“It’s a show I still think about quite a lot. The show and the book really influenced the way I look at modern relationships,” Pete Rouse, a 22-year-old publishing assistant in the UK, tells Mashable. Rouse started making Normal People edits after he graduated from college in 2022, two years after he originally watched the show, to learn editing software.
For young people like Rouse, Normal People is a mirror through which to see themselves more clearly. Eliot D’Silva, an English PhD candidate at UC Berkeley, explored the popularity of Normal People in a course he taught, titled, “Sally Rooney: Popularity and the Popular.” He says, “Relatability is the thing that gets people hooked on Sally Rooney. [Her] characters feel like they could be any young person today who is negotiating the same kind of challenges and changes as we all are.”
It helps that the actors who played those characters have become stars in their own right. Mescal’s performance in 2022’s Aftersun earned him a nomination for Best Actor at the Oscars, and his public relationship with singer-songwriter Bridgers led to much internet speculation. Edgar Jones has since starred in Fresh and Where the Crawdads Sing and while she hasn’t found the same level of onscreen success as Mescal, she’s still adored among Normal People fans. The pair regularly hangs out, feeding fans with more content that they can then use to make speculative Connell and Marianne edits.
With edits, fans regularly remix the show. By now, the 12 episodes are creased by a return to favorite moments and re-contextualized based on the songs the scenes are paired with. New music that’s come out in the three years since make the scenes feel new again. By connecting the new lyrics to the characters, fans re-immerse themselves in the emotions of the show. For example, Taylor Swift released the 10-minute version of her iconic break-up song “All Too Well” a year and a half after the release of Normal People. An edit(opens in a new tab) spanning the entire length of the song now has over 1.9 million views on YouTube.
“With edits you get to relive the best scenes of the show, but with the most heartbreaking music and sickest transitions. I could watch Normal People edits to Taylor Swift songs for actual hours, connecting the lyrics to the scenes,” Konstantina, a 24-year-old medical lab assistant in Greece and self-described Normal People edits “addict,” tells Mashable.
“Songs will immediately remind me of Connell and Marianne, and then I plan an edit that matches up with the lyrics,” Julie, a 20-year-old student tells Mashable. She didn’t watch the show until last year and now creates and posts Normal People edits on TikTok. A video that pairs clips of Connell and Marianne with Bridgers’ “Waiting Room” garnered over 803,000 views and 145,000 likes. Another set to “Those Eyes” by New West received over 80,000 likes.
Normal People edits exist as part of “sad girl culture,” a niche corner of the internet where disaffected young people worship at the altar of Sally Rooney, Fleabag, Bridgers, Swift, and anyone whose art could effectively get you through a depressive episode. An entire universe called The Multiverse of Sadness(opens in a new tab) was created by fans connecting sad girl faves, and both Mescal and Edgar Jones are central figures – the pair even dressed up as Fleabag and the hot priest for Halloween. “The connections with Paul Mescal, Phoebe Bridgers, Fleabag and Taylor Swift kept Normal People popular,” explains Konstantina.
“A lot of Phoebe Bridgers’ music really lends itself to Normal People because a lot of those songs are about growing up, and Normal People is about growing up or falling in love and trying to figure out where you are in the world,” says Rouse. “It helps that it’s a gorgeous-looking show. The visuals really lend themselves to edits.”
Normal People ends ambiguously with Connell and Marianne continuing their cycle of miscommunication. It’s a conclusion that might leave viewers unsatisfied and begging for a happy ending for the couple. “Normal People wasn’t that many episodes, and you never really understand what happens to them after, so edits that continue Connell and Marianne’s story have a large fan base,” explained Julie. “Edits are a way to keep their love of the show going.”
Fans may also be particularly fixated on Normal People because of when it came out: a month into lockdown. In 2021, The Atlantic(opens in a new tab) reported on a subculture of young people devoted to stirring nostalgia for the early days of COVID-19. I wrote about how the viral TikTok songs from spring 2020 elicited strong emotional responses from users, and perhaps the same can be said for the TV shows we binged during that time. Normal People is a touchstone for people to return to in order to evaluate how they’ve changed over the past three years.
Launching just a month into the pandemic, it became a building block for a new algorithmically generated personality, the online sad girl. There’s a strange comfort in watching it now — an ambiguous ending for a an ambiguous point in time, our FYPs forever dragging us back to Connell and Marianne.
