TikTok thirst traps seem like a perfect fit for Akon’s “Bananza (Belly Dancer),” a steamy mid-aughts hit that beckons you to “shake ya body like a belly dancer.” Over the past few months, the song has been uploaded to the app many times, generating several million videos across its various remixes and iterations. In one of the most popular uploads, shared by the Serbian creator @koleedits, a blue-haired girl dips down and slowly lifts back up, as Akon urges her on in the background. The lighting strobes as if you’re watching her, mesmerized, through the fog of the club. The catch? The girl is not a real person, but a character from the anime-style role-playing game Genshin Impact.
This is what is commonly known as a fan edit, in which fans of a particular celebrity or media franchise take existing source material—excerpts from films, TV shows, video games, concert performances, paparazzi reels—and modify it to create something new. (The term originated within the film world to refer to the alternate movie versions created by dissatisfied viewers, who would rearrange the sequencing or remove dialogue; the first fan edit to popularize the form was a revision of Star Wars: Episode 1 — The Phantom Menace.) On TikTok, fan edits often take the form of montages or simple videos layered with effects, their movements synced to a popular song. Other edits set to “Bananza” include slowed-down footage of BLACKPINK’s Rose and Lisa twerking on each other (8.5 million likes), a flash-filled tribute to Vampire Cookie from the video game Cookie Run (303 thousand likes), and a quick-cut sequence of Tom Holland looking hot (5.4 million likes).
Whether they’re devoted to anime series like Attack on Titan, K-Pop groups like BTS, or games like Fortnite, fan editors are power-players on TikTok. Their edits are like bat signals to other members of their community, whose eager engagement encourages the TikTok algorithm to continue promoting these videos. This is especially true for anime communities, which have a long history of creating and consuming fan-made content, including music videos. “Anime fans tend to cluster together, and that’s a big reason why the edits are more successful,” says Alyssa, an 18-year-old anime edit TikTokker who posts as @kyoswrldd.
Sometimes an edit captivates because it’s telling a story, exploring a character’s inner monologue, or underscoring the dynamics of a relationship. “When you think about it, the fact that drawings or pixels can make you feel so many emotions is just magic,” says John, 21, a student in Greece who is paid to do freelance anime editing via Fiverr and specializes in “sad, emotional edits, especially Naruto edits.” Like a well-timed sync during a wrenching TV scene, the music adds an additional emotional resonance: Watching a montage of the recent Norwegian dramedy The Worst Person In the World set to Phoebe Bridgers’ “Moon Song,” I felt a pang of sadness for a bygone relationship, even though I hadn’t yet seen the film itself.
Sometimes the appeal of a video is less complex. “People like to look at their favorite characters with a badass song in the background,” shrugs a 17-year-old anime editor from New Delhi, India, who uses the moniker Night St4r.
Even for those who haven’t pledged allegiance to a specific fandom, edits have a certain appeal. They are often visually engaging and easy to grasp, especially ones made to flaunt the sexual appeal of a celebrity or character. (These are sometimes referred to as “hard stan” edits.) And because content gets pushed to such a wide audience on TikTok, fandoms can see edits as powerful evangelization and recruitment tools. “There are so many viral K-pop edits, and people in the comments are like, ‘Oh, I’m not a K-pop fan, but suddenly I’m interested’—that’s kind of the goal,” says Zozee, a 19-year-old K-pop editor in Canada. “K-pop fans have always been known for being like free promoters—we want to see our faves succeed and be more appreciated worldwide.”
Zozee estimates that making a basic edit takes them 45 minutes to an hour, but more complicated ones require days to complete. This process includes gathering the clips, which may involve screen-recording performance footage, figuring out how to sync the footage with the music, and then adding text and visual effects. TikTok already offers a suite of editing tools, but to achieve their desired look, many editors will use other programs like CapCut or Adobe After Effects. “I wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t fun,” Zozee emphasizes. “The edit helps me calm down a bit, it’s very different from what I do in school.”
Because fan edits create a captivating interplay between visuals and music, they can drive songs to new viral heights. Sometimes fan edits spawn their own trends, like in 2020, when a hypnotic slo-mo edit of Timothée Chalamet body-rolling in Call Me By Your Name led Melanie Martinez’s twinkly 2015 song “Play Date” to trend on TikTok and generated an onslaught of similarly sultry celebrity clips. Sometimes editors will pile onto an existing audio, like Starboi3 and Doja Cat’s “Dick” (Doja sounds like she’s saying the names of BTS members in her verse) or CupcaKke’s “CPR” (choreography from the K-pop boy band Stray Kids make them look like they’re giving CPR). Last year, the pop duo Magdalena Bay discovered that their song “Killshot” had become a popular sound for suggestive anime edits, and now it’s their most streamed song. More recently, the musician and former Pitchfork staffer Noah Yoo noticed a spike in his streams: Thanks to anime editors, his band Cafune’s song “Tek It” is now No. 1 on the Spotify Viral 50. Labels are catching on. Earlier this year, Rolling Stone reported that small rap labels were paying editors to use their songs in Fortnite montages.
Often, when investigating popular audio on TikTok, I’ll notice that the initial uploader was a fan editor. Examples include El Alfa’s “Suave,” Nelly Furtado’s “Maneater,” and most recently Demi Lovato’s “Cool for the Summer,” originally featured in a quick-cut montage with Andrew Garfield seductively biting his thumb. “If a bigger account makes a new audio, you know that that audio is going to most likely do well, so you’re going to hop onto it,” says Zozee. “It’s both to help others but also to help yourself.”
Much of the music that performs well on TikTok has been modified slightly, either sped-up or slowed-down—a trick that seemed to originate on YouTube, where creators would try to circumvent the platform’s copyright censors. If they’re not uploaded by fan editors, they are often uploaded by designated accounts that share sped-up versions of popular songs, who in turn consider editors a large portion of their audience base. “Editors really enjoy sped-up music because edits with sped-up audios are much more energetic and interesting to watch,” says Wiktoria, a Polish teenager who runs the nightcore account @ex7stence.
The impact of a viral edit can extend far beyond the TikTok ecosystem. In 2020, a Russian-speaking user named eba_lysyy_poletel made an edit zooming in on a detail in the anime series Haikyu!!, decorating the screengrab with stars and hearts and setting it to ElyOtto’s “SugarCrash!” The song was hardly known at the time—ElyOtto, a 17-year-old hyperpop singer from Calgary, Canada, had started uploading music to SoundCloud after being laid off from a pet store—but after “SugarCrash!” edits traveled to YouTube and beyond, it ended up being TikTok’s fourth most popular song of 2021.
While interviewing sources for this piece, I noticed that many major fan editors are not primarily English speakers, and they tend to live in Eastern Europe or Latin America. (“En que le puedo ayudar (How can I help you)?” a K-pop editor with 600,000 followers asked, when I requested to interview them.) This further underscores that edits are their own kind of language—a “moment of audiovisual eloquence,” as the New Yorker’s Kyle Chayka wrote in an essay about the rise of “vibes” on TikTok. What are edits if not the ultimate source of vibe, attuned to the alignment and pacing of visuals and sound for your viewing satisfaction?
