2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year

HELLO TUMBLR.

Wow, we made it. 2025. One of the years of all time.

And, speaking of time, it's that time of year again when we reflect on the Times™ we've had: Welcome to Year in Review.

This year, we’re doing something new: Instead of the usual fandom data list drop, we took a closer look at the culture bubbling up through tag data and across your dashboards in 2025—the communities, aesthetics, and micro-moments that shaped the year.

We’ve broken it down into five chapters, each one illustrated by the posts that best capture the moment, because Tumblr is you, and the posts you make along the way. 

You can jump into any chapter using the links below, or head here for the full experience.

Like the look? You can grab the theme for your blog here.

Alright. Let’s get into it:

This Isn’t Nostalgia, It’s Tumblr Dive into popular nostalgia tags and the conversations around them that have become part of our today on Tumblr in 2025. Call it nostalgia if you want. We’ll call it Tumblr in 2025.

Your Life as a Moodboard Jump into moodboard aesthetics and the astronomic rise of girlblogging in this year of our Lana, 2025. 

Cozy Dystopia Re-discover all the elements that, along with r e a l i t y, co-created the cozy dystopia we’ve all been basking in on Tumblr in 2025. 

Age of the Creator Hear from some of our favorite creators on Tumblr and how they’re using their blogs to create exciting projects and build community around their craft.

Fandom: The New Mainstream A look back at some of the biggest fandoms of 2025 through the lens of fan art, fanfic, and fandom discourse.

This isn't Nostalgia. It's Tumblr

The internet is obsessed with its past…2014 aesthetics, indie sleaze, lo-fi photo dumps. But for us, it’s less a ‘comeback’ and more a continuum. What once lived on dashboards as fandom edits, DIY fits, and chaotic memes never really disappeared; it just seeped into everything else online. From trends born out of old tags to fashion moodboards and beauty looks that feel oddly familiar, the internet’s basically running on Tumblr déjà vu. Call it nostalgia if you want. We’ll call it Tumblr.

This year, we saw search volume for #2010s tumblr and #2015 nostalgia grow by 364% and 203% compared to 2024. And we’re not the only ones noticing that Tumblr has been at the forefront of new nostalgia trends as we sift through the past to parse the aesthetics present in 2025:

All of Gen Z's Favorite Beauty Looks Were Invented by Millennials on Tumblr (Allure)

Welcome back to weird. I’m back in my Tumblr era—and I’ve never felt more at home (Vogue Singapore)

Gen Z’s Internet Sanctuary Isn’t TikTok—It’s Tumblr (Vice)

Here are a few more tags for you to explore if you want to revel in new nostalgia aesthetics, right here at the source:

#2014 tumblr, #tumblr grunge, #tumblr 2014, #tumblr aesthetic, #2015 tumblr, #old tumblr, #2014 tumblr grunge, #2000s nostalgia, #nostalgiacore, #y2k nostalgia, #2014 nostalgia, #2010s nostalgia, #00s nostalgia, #2000s nostalgia

@shaawwwttyy:

@eff-ston3m:

@luxielibson:

@abbydabby27:

@afaodail:

@rottenpixiegrl:

Your Life As A Moodboard

Treating your life as a moodboard means reblogging art, music, fashion, and fandom posts until your taste becomes your personality. It’s less about chasing trends and more about aesthetics as a language of identity—and it’s how many curate, perform, and communicate who they are online. The girlbloggers on Tumblr excel at this form of aesthetic journaling, and girlblogger-core has been on the rise in 2025. We saw 52.4% more original posts created using top girlblog tags like #girlblogging, #coquette, and #hell is a teenage girl, while search volume for the latter was 80% higher than last year. Engagements on these tags ran to over 105 million—that’s a lot of likes, replies, and reblogs!

Girlblogging Aesthetics

The Girlbloggers Have Their Sh*t Together (Sometimes)

Girlblogging examines the spectrum of girlhood in all its vast scope, from the hyperfeminine coquette to the disaster grunge queens still going strong. It’s all about embodying a certain existential angst while crafting a personal aesthetic, whether or not you actually look like your blog IRL: Playing with different aspects of girlhood and maintaining an air of mystery is a big part of the whole deal.

Style, design, and fashion trends from Y2K and the early 2010s have come full circle in girlblogger-core: Posts celebrate timestamped, soft-focus images of low-rise jeans, and borrowed leather jackets, pastel flip phones, and shimmer eyeshadow palettes are all going strong on Tumblr dot com.

Other girlbloggers lean into the grainy suburban vignettes of Americas past with Girl, Interrupted filmstills or an imagined old Americana of lace-draped altars, rosaries, and faded fantasies of long-gone streets, charting an aesthetic lineage from The Virgin Suicides through Ethel Cain and Lana del Ray to Gossip Girl, Priscilla, Black Swan, and Cruel Intentions, via MARINA, Mitski, and Sky Ferreira. Related aesthetics include #angelcore, #coquette, #2014 tumblr, and #fairycore.

@loosergirlilyou:

@whereswansdream:

@pascaldiaries:

@angelicdewdrop:

@tealtrailerpark:

@silverdaggerr:

@bluelightview:

Girlblogger-core seeps into academia aesthetics in building community around soft productivity and self-reinvention for the new school year—after a #girlrot summer, of course. 

The girls are studying hard, romanticizing school, and late-night lurking with Lana on wired headphones. But they're also taking care of each other’s mental health: Those pretty, downloadable organizers and planners are posted alongside oh-so relatable lowercase text posts lifting each other up, commiserating over how hard it is to be a girl, how great it can be to be a girl, how awful it is to be perceived, and how good it can feel to be seen.

@bambibabe222:

@s0ph1eemma:

@yayobabydollll:

Musicians and creatives alike are using Tumblr and leaning into moodboard aesthetics to build community around vibes rather than using more conventional, polished image and brand promotion. Sharing creative processes as well as polished work places that work in a broader cultural context and gives fans a sense of where they’re coming from.

Halsey (@tiredandlonelymuse) has been journaling about touring and chronic illness this year, alongside chatting to fans about their music and reblogging smudgy vintage dance GIFs, old film stills, and badlands-era moodboards. Destroy Lonely (@topfloorboss) posted raw text posts and dark impressionistic imagery around the launch of his mixtape </3³ in the fall. For the release of The Life of A Showgirl, Taylor Swift (@taylorswift) shared BTS images, production stills, and diaristic thoughts on her music video concepts, giving shout-outs to all the creative minds that helped bring her cinematic visions to life. And up-and-coming creator Sade Olutola (@sadeolutola) has been here since her teens, vibing, blogging and reblogging, moving through aesthetics and eras, eventually reaching a point where the music is ready to go out into the world, one blog post at a time.

Aidan Zamiri—trusted photographer, music video director, and vibe-creator to such wide-ranging artists as Timothée Chalamet, Billie Eilish, Yung Lean, and Charli XCX—captured the spirit of moodboarding in a recent New York Times feature:

“I’m chewing it all up constantly and just leaving the floodgates open so that high art and lowbrow culture and internet brainrot and academia can all flow in at the same time.”

No wonder, then, that Chlamet describes him as “someone who went to the university of Tumblr.” 

It’s all about celebrating worldbuilding, the process of re-invention, and the beauty in the small, seemingly insignificant moments that build into something new.

Cozy Dystopia

Comfort posting is Tumblr’s response to chaos, from “screaming is self care” to turning despair into memes. This year, you’ve filtered the chaotic IRL through your love for dystopian TV and film: Severance’s office-era dread, Yellowjackets’ feral girlhood, and The Last of Us’ apocalypse catharsis. We also saw homegrown memes like Destiel and Mamaposting find new life through reblogs:

The News According to Destiel

Mamaposting

Juggling Lab

2025 has been a year with no shortage of good and bad, dystopian, bizarre, and outright outrageous occurrences. Whether the death of the Pope, Taylor Swift’s ownership of all her masters, or the decade-long search for a 2m long worm in an aquarium—the Destiel meme was there for us throughout, with Supernatural trending on Tumblr in February, March, April, May, August, and September, and over 188k original posts created to overwhelming approval, evident in almost 19 million engagements.

@deeplywornletters:

@plaidparadise77:

@official-lauchzwiebel:

@pangirl-fangirl:

@destiel-news-channel:

@strangestarlightmusics:

@silly-little-pal:

2025 has also been a year of wholesome memes spreading comfort and humor. On January 2, an image of the solar system with the caption “let’s orbit around mama” launched our year of memes with the Mamaposting meme trend, which quickly spread across Tumblr and, well, everywhere else. Blogs were created, and posts were made, garnering over 4 million notes. Folks found “whimsy in the innumerable qualities of mama” and solace in the warm, fuzzy feeling of being under the care of a maternal being, be that the sun, a luminous lion, or a traffic cone.

My luminous mama (@cognitohazardous):

let's overthrow mama (@mutt-boy):

Being nefarious with mama (@moonshineshrew):

curled up with mama.... protected by mama.... let's be warm with mama... (@fatalisticme):

let’s lay flat on our ovoidal mama (@riqthegoofygoober):

My ancient mama (@im-out-of-the-blues):

Sometimes, a weird meme just...happens, and no one quite knows why. In September, you discovered Juggling Lab, an app for devising and animating juggling patterns to help people learn them. Suddenly, our dashboards were filled with stick figures and red balls. #Juggling lab spiked and became a silly little source of joy on Tumblr for a moment there—with folks using the software to create GIFs and memes, and sending little red balls into each other’s ask boxes. The tag made it into the top trending topics on Tumblr in September and generated over 2 million notes in its short period of infamy, prompting Juggling Lab’s main developer to take to Reddit: “for some reason known only to the internet gods, Juggling Lab has been trending lately on Tumblr. The creativity of people astounds me.”

@lolmatdi1: "You are on this council, but we do not grant you the rank of master."

@foone: "Tumblr right now"

@lun4cat: please, please help, they’re going everywhere

@fireball-me: Boxing

Some of Tumblr’s favorite TV shows of 2025 really leaned into the chaos of the world, and fan artists, GIF editors, meme creators, and text posters were so here for it. Apocalyptic The Last of Us—a longtime Tumblr favorite due to the popularity of the games, its queer love story, and the show’s leading man—had you making 78k original posts with 9 million notes. Severance’s stylish, surreal workplace unease struck a chord, making you question the very nature of work, across over 93k original posts that garnered over 8.5 million notes.

And the feral survivor thriller Yellowjackets had the sapphics living out their girlrage fantasies in over 114k original posts with over 8 million notes. An honorable mention goes to #conclave and #the pope, which together garnered almost 3.5 million notes across 27k original posts as the death of Pope Francis this year brought about a resurgence of GIFs, art, and fanfic from the 2024 film Conclave.

Wow. When the world is in disarray, sometimes all you can do is watch fictional chaos on the screen (which sometimes bleeds into IRL chaos anyway, sigh), and then stick a GIF on your blog like you’re collecting them for later. 

Age of the Creator

Creators aren’t just “influencers” on Tumblr. They’re artists, writers, musicians, and animators sharing both finished works and works in progress, involving their audience at the source, and shaping culture in their own communities. They’re so integral to Tumblr’s ecosystem that they have their own tag—#artists on tumblr—which trended at #1 233 times across 76 days in 2025. In fact, the top 5 tags on Tumblr in 2025 were #my art, #art, #fanart, #artists on tumblr, and #digital art, with over 10.5 million new posts garnering over 958 million notes. But, enough from us, tap below to hear from some Tumblr artists in their own words:

Kiana Khansmith, creator of Pretty Pretty Please I don’t Want to be a Magical Girl.

Sade Olutola, singer-songwriter and Tumblr nostalgia expert.

Creator Spotlight: Kiana Khansmith (@kianamaiart)

Q: What is Pretty Pretty Please I Don’t Want to Be a Magical Girl? 

Pretty Pretty Please I Don’t Want to Be a Magical Girl is a project that I started in August of 2024. Luckily the title kinda explains the premise! It’s a story that follows 15 year old Aika, a magical girl, who doesn’t want to be a magical girl. It started off as a one-off drawing of Aika but, over the course of 6 months, evolved into an 11 minute pilot animatic that was posted to YouTube.

Q: You’ve built a distinct creative world with IDWTBAMG from scratch on Tumblr. What made Tumblr the right place to develop that?

It was a great place to post and cultivate an audience for a specific thing (AKA a fandom). It made it really easy for me to archive and tag my work relating to the project, made it easy for other users to follow, and from there, it just kinda grew legs and ran away from me. I also really love the ask feature! It’s pretty unique to Tumblr and it’s a fun way to engage with my followers and for them to engage with me. It’s nice that I’m able to answer a question for everyone to see versus replying to a comment that would otherwise get buried.

Q: How has Tumblr’s creator community at-large supported or influenced your work over the years leading up to this current project?

It’s definitely helped shape how I share my work and shown me how important it is to have an artist community. There’s a really fun aspect of collaboration that comes from posting on a site like this. Prior to this, I was doing Pokémon comics on my sideblog (@yamujiburo) about Jessie and Ash’s mom dating. It started off as just a silly ship that I and a few other people thought was cute, but after I started doing the comics, it REALLY spread and it was so surreal to see people get on board. It’s lovely seeing people come together and share their ideas. I’ve so rarely had artist block since I really started posting on Tumblr. There’s endless inspiration and this feeling of creating something with a community.

Q: Is there a specific moment or fan interaction that made you realize your work had really resonated?

It’s hard to pinpoint an exact moment but generally getting asks or seeing tags from other queer, Black women saying how much Aika and Zira mean to them, means a lot to me! There’s so many fun anime tropes out there that Black characters (especially Black girls) seemingly don’t get to be. Although we are capable of relating to characters that don’t look like us, it’s nice to have the option! And on a sillier note, the first comic I made had Aika talking about wanting to do normal things, like trying every cheese. It was a throwaway line intended to just fill out the list but my followers took that and ran. And now it’s a canon character quirk that Aika’s obsessed with cheese haha. It’s fun to see the characters develop in real-time through community!

Q: How do you see your creative work evolving in the next year?

Through this project, I’ve been thrown into a sort of showrunner role. While it’s something I was really scared to take on, I’ve learned SO much by having to dip into different parts of animation production that I haven’t had experience in prior. I’ve professionally worked as a storyboard artist, character designer and episodic director, so a lot of my experience is mostly in writing and preproduction. This past year, I’ve had to learn more about production, voice directing, color design, layout, animation, music, sound designing, etc. So, this coming year, I hope to continue this trend and become a better leader and more well-rounded artist.

Thanks Kiana! Here’s an exclusive look behind the scenes of Pretty Pretty Please I Don’t Want To Be A Magical Girl!

Sade Olutola is a 21-year-old singer-songwriter from South London whose visual identity is deeply rooted in nostalgia. We recently caught up with her to talk about her sound, her early Ed Sheeran obsession, and the inspo behind her upcoming project. Check out the new Tumblr-exclusive video for Sade's new single "Ready 4 it," and scroll to the end to download the song.

Q: How would you describe your music/art?

I would say my art is a reflection of my personal experience, my lyrics are pretty much a conscious stream.

I rap as well as sing, which I think brings out colour to the songs I write, it’s like featuring yourself on ur own track.

I write with my friend Luca (producer), so our songs tend to have a fun and carefree vibe to them, I think they reflect the sort of relationship we have.

Q: How did you get started?

This story is crazy. One day, my year 2 school teacher overheard me singing and told me I sounded really good. I got so excited, I remember telling my dad about it in the car on the way home. 

Later on that afternoon, Willow Smith made an appearance on MTV. 

This was her whip my hair era (absolute banger), and I could obviously SEE that she was a kid like me, I thought ‘huh?! if she can do that then I can do it too!’ And then proceeded to write my first ever song called ‘friends.’ It’s been history ever since….

Q: Who inspires you?

At 11 years old I developed an obsession with Ed Sheeran. He’s the reason I picked up guitar and began songwriting consistently. I’d never seen anyone RAP on guitar, and I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. I fell in love with his lyrics, the way he used his loop pedal to build tracks live, everything about that man was so fresh and new, even down to his accent. I didn’t hear that much British music growing up. It was inspiring hearing someone who sounded like me.

Q: What are you working on/excited about right now?

I'm working on an EP. The name of the EP links back to me at 11 in my Ed Sheeran phase. He would always draw the album artwork icon he was touring on his guitars. Cause I wanted to be like him sooooo bad, I made this album concept called Arrow heart, with a whole tracklist. I wrote some pretty awful songs for it and drew an arrow heart on my guitar just like Ed would have done. 

Arrow heart will be the first project I’m ever putting out, I’ve decided to honour my childhood dream by making it a reality, except this time the songs are much better.

Creator Spotlight: Chris Torres (@prguitarman)

Describe your work in your own words—what is Nyan Cat?

Nyan Cat is a little cat with a pastry body and rainbow trail that's been flying across the internet since 2011. It began as a fun little pixel animation I made back in 2011 of my Russian Blue cat, Marty. I drew it on a 70x70 canvas using Macromedia Fireworks, an old program I've been using since 2001. I've always been fascinated by classic video games from the OG Nintendo era, and a lot of my ideas come from trying to recreate that feeling.

How did Nyan Cat come about, for those who don’t know? Give us your origin story!

I created Nyan Cat (and its best pal, Fiesta Dog, who is a corgi with a taco body and blue gradient trails that complement Nyan Cat's rainbow trail) during a donation event to help with disaster relief after Japan's Tohoku earthquake. Once posted online, someone paired Nyan Cat with Daniwell's "Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya!" song, and it instantly took off. Nyan Cat was always meant to be lighthearted and fun, and it's grown into something much bigger than I'd ever imagined. Since 2011, it's circled the globe billions of times and has spawned countless remixes in different styles and flavors.

What’s one Tumblr-specific fan interaction, reblog, or moment that surprised you or made you feel seen as a creator?

Tumblr has always been one of the genuine spaces for Nyan Cat, and it's actually where it all first took off. The original was posted on my blog late at night on April 2nd, and that's where it first blasted off online. I've seen so many creative renditions and uses for Nyan Cat in different styles, it's still amazing to see it pop up in new ways. My favorite Tumblr thing right now has been when it's used on those Blingee/GeoCities style navbar buttons. I think it captures that early internet charm perfectly and reminds me why I fell in love with internet art culture in the first place.

What project or direction are you excited about next?

Right now, I'm happy watching Nyan Cat live a life of its own—it's the internet that's keeping the legend alive and I'm always grateful to see all the ways people use it. I am still drawing different Nyan Cat characters in the original format and style, and plan to continue making fun art as it inspires me. It's been a lot of fun keeping that energy going and watching how art and memes keep evolving together as the internet grows.

Thanks @/prguitarman! Here are some new creations, a timelapse, and an image of Marty who was the original inspiration for Nyan Cat—exclusively for you, Tumblr <3

Fandom: The New Mainstream

What’s next for “Gen Z’s internet sanctuary?” Tumblr’s resurgence proves what we’ve always known: fandom culture is pop culture. In 2026, we’ll keep pushing it forward, sustaining Tumblr as a deeply loved space for fandom, where the next wave of creativity takes shape.

Fanart in 2025

Fanfic in 2025