As 2025 and another academic term roll in, TikTok is sure to flood our ‘For You Pages’ (FYP) with content on everything from the ‘Clean Girl’ aesthetic, morning routines, ‘Rory Gilmore’ inspired outfits, and the romanticisation of studying: the so-called ‘thought daughter’ trend.
But first, for those of you not chronically online and unacquainted with the world of Gilmore Girls and TikTok trends, (enough with the smirking and bragging rights of a low screen time) here’s your crash course.
Gilmore Girls is a much beloved noughties series centred around the lives of Lorelai and Rory Gilmore. The series follows the mother-daughter duo: Lorelai, single mother to Rory and manager of the local inn, and Rory an academic overachiever at Chilton High School, and their small town American life in Stars Hollow.
While the series has been available on Netflix since 2014, it has gained renewed attention in the last few years, with COVID and, undeniably, the TikTok edits of Jess and Rory to ‘the one’ by Taylor Swift as the prime suspects.
The series appears in an eternal autumnal season which has certainly helped to continue the infatuation for autumn (or the Americanism, ‘fall’, as it’s most commonly referred to on TikTok) that Zoella also began to cultivate back in 2015. Since its Gen Z revival, the series has stimulated a fair few trends. TikToks, commonly paired with songs from Taylor Swift’s album Folklore, see the romanticisation of ‘fall’ weather and chunky knits, as well as an appreciation for small-town living. But perhaps the biggest takeaway from Gen Z’s (re)watching of Gilmore Girls is Rory’s attitude to her academics. Forever shown with her nose in a book, or completing her homework at Luke’s (Stars Hollow’s coffee shop), the show’s romanticisation of previously dull school or uni work is definitely palpable.
So, take Rory Gilmore, with her scents of cosy weather and reading that I’ve just described, add into the mixing bowl a far from healthy dose of Lana Del Ray playlists, leave till sizzled from the pressure of academic overachievement, and out comes the ‘thought daughter’.
Okay, so what is the ‘thought daughter’? Ask TikTok and out comes everything from Spotify playlists, book recommendations, video essays, and most popularly (so it seems) ‘POV’ (point of view) videos of girls wistfully looking out of a car window – an experience apparently very different for the ‘thought daughters’ who spend the journey overthinking (aesthetically, of course). But, this has prompted me and some TikTok creators to question who the ‘thought daughters’ are, and who they insist on differentiating themselves from; as one TikTok creator suggested, the ‘thoughtless daughters’. Although this trend may give space to those girls with a love for books and a tendency for overthinking, I can’t help but feel that it perpetuates a sexist rhetoric: a desperate attempt to differentiate oneself from other women, the ‘thoughtless daughters’.
And as much as I love Gracie Abrams, cosy vibes, and reading in a Waterstones coffee shop, I must question the vehement attempt to distance oneself from other women, and to turn these activities into an exclusive brand and aesthetic. TikTok loves nothing more than to monopolise on women’s traits and characteristics. After ‘brat girl summer’, is the ‘thought daughter’ just the next iteration of this?
I think the trend has become so popular on TikTok because it turns the fairly normal experiences of introspection, thinking, and reading into a self-congratulatory and exclusive club. And that’s not to ‘bash’ on those who identify with the ‘thought daughter’ trend. I must admit it’s nice to see the things you enjoy romanticised on TikTok, but I think we need to be weary when it comes to the internal (and most often subconscious) misogynistic rhetoric among women; namely an attempt to put other women down as ‘thoughtless daughters’ in order to identify as a ‘thought daughter’.
Let’s take a look at Rory Gilmore, who I (and certainly others on TikTok would be sure to agree with me) is the archetype for this ‘thought daughter’ trend. Whilst Rory’s academic rigour and prowess is certainly something to envy (and perhaps to emulate) her treatment of other female characters in the show speaks to the underlying misogyny of the ‘thought daughter’ trend. Her toxic academic rivalry with classmate Paris Geller, and dislike of ‘thoughtless’ daughters in the series, Dean’s wife Lindsay for example, demonstrates how our archetype of the ‘thought daughter’ trend has perhaps supplied more detailed blueprints for it than just reading recommendations.
And this is not to say that I will stop watching Gilmore Girls, or avoid patting myself on the back for plugging a new read into ‘Storygraphs’, but that I’ll watch this trend with greater caution: recognising how women’s trends and aesthetics can often put other women down.
