This week in TikTok: Everybody wants to be “Heather”

Hello from The Goods’ twice-weekly newsletter! On Tuesdays, internet culture reporter Rebecca Jennings uses this space to update you all on what’s been going on in the world of TikTok. Is there something you want to see more of? Less of? Different of? Email rebecca.jennings@vox.com, and subscribe to The Goods’ newsletter here.

Someday, when historians write about the year 2020, there will be an entire chapter devoted to the TikToks students are making while at Zoom School. I think it was a video of dozens of kids doing jumping jacks over the internet for PE class that finally caused me to lose it (the account that posted it seems slightly dubious so I can’t confirm whether it’s from a real school, but the image will remain lodged in my brain forever).

But that’s just one of the many videos on TikTok over the past two weeks depicting the unbearable awkwardness of remote learning. There’s one depicting the bored silence of a breakout room with your fellow classmates, one about how teachers basically always know when you’re messing around, and one where a kid is fake-kidnapped in his dorm room. Each one shows how strange and uncanny the phenomenon of internet school is, and how much all of our efforts to make it better have failed.

Beyond making me grateful I’m no longer in school, these videos are fascinating. Nobody knows what the effect of a year or more of social distancing will be on young people — students in 2020 are literally guinea pigs in an experiment none of them signed up for — or how many kids will end up sick or worse due to the financially driven insistence on forcing them to live on campus. What we do know is that Zoom School has bred a new type of gallows humor, and it’ll likely only get bleaker.

There is, as is often the case on the internet, yet another new word to describe a specific kind of beautiful woman. That word is “Heather,” as in, “you’re Heather,” or “she’s such a Heather.” The name comes from the Conan Gray song “Heather,” in which Gray croons about an unrequited love for someone who is in love with someone else, named Heather (“But you like her better/I wish I were Heather”). The song is extremely sad, obviously, with Gray both yearning to be Heather but also sort of hating her, a very relatable feeling for anyone who has been to high school.

When the song blew up on TikTok earlier this year, so too did the shorthand of what a “Heather” is; many girls started making videos of the Heather in their lives and lamenting what they don’t have, often starring happy-looking girls lying in a field of sunflowers on Instagram. Others have made videos like “my mom was the original Heather” with family photographs from the ’70s and ’80s. Sometimes, the Heather is their past self.

Over the past few weeks, “Heather” has become less about the inherent sadness of the meme and more of a TikTok trope, like VSCO girls or e-boys. And while many of these types of labels have historically been used to categorize thin, attractive white people, “Heather” is now a favorite term for any woman; comments sections on videos of body-positive TikTokers and users who don’t fit the stereotypical “happy-go-lucky Brandy Melville model” are full of encouragements that they are, in fact, Heathers.

It’s all very cute and melancholy, just like the song itself, and just like this summer in general. But mainly, I personally love that a name that peaked in 1975 is suddenly shorthand for a hot girl in 2020.

Presenting: the Kidz Bop version of “WAP.” Spoiler: It’s short for “waffles and pancakes.”