Stirring Up Pop Narratives: The Multimodal Discourse of "FanFood Videos" on TikTok.

Since its global spreading in 2018, TikTok has emerged as a central platform for creative expression, identity performance and engagement in trend-driven forms of participation (e.g., Bhandari and Bimo 2020; Abidin 2021; Darvin 2022). While much attention has been paid to its viral dance trends, comedic sketches and activism, another striking phenomenon has gained wide attraction at a global level: the circulation of food-related content. According to Emily Contois, even if food culture’s saturation and enthusiasm has reached “a particular boiling point on food Instagram”, TikTok’s “virality seems more potent” combined with the surge of the platform taking off in the context of lockdowns and the pandemic. Moreover, TikTok’s mimetic emphasis has led users to consume but also to act, thus helping people to try experimenting with food and recipes (Heil 2025). The chapter will investigate a sub-genre of food-related content on TikTok, that is the content that remediates elements of popular culture. Indeed, from Disney-style dishes and Hogwarts-themed pastries to recipes inspired by video game aesthetics and iconic film scenes, TikTok users have been turning cooking into a space of intertextual meaning making. Such videos do not merely demonstrate how to prepare food, they narrate, reference and recontextualize cultural texts through a layered combination of visual, verbal, gestural and aural modes. In this sense, they align with the evolution of the recipe genre described by Cesiri (2024), who identifies the emergence of the narrative social recipe as a hybrid form in which procedural discourse merges with personal storytelling and social interaction. This conceptualization provides a useful backdrop for 120 Chapter Six understanding how TikTok’s FanFood videos extend the genre into a fully multimodal and participatory space, where food preparation becomes both narrative performance and social connection. The term that I have adopted here to label these fiction-inspired cooking videos is ‘FanFood videos’ , from the hashtag #FandomFood which is already in circulation on TikTok, albeit primarily within a specialized community of users38 . Specifically, the aim of the chapter is to explore how “FanFood videos” function as a form of culinary intertextuality, that is, a discourse practice where users transform pop cultural references into performative food-based texts. Indeed, these videos are linguistically and semiotically multilayered artefacts shaped by the platform’s affordances and constraints that combine intersemiotic translation and discursive framing to construct shared meanings, enabling users to align with fandoms, signal cultural competence and position themselves as authors within niche digital communities. From a theoretical and methodological point of view, the adopted approach combines Multimodal Discourse Analysis (Kress and van Leeuwen 2001) with studies in TikTok discourse (Zappavigna 2012, 2018; Abidin 2021) and digital fandoms (Booth 2010; Leppänen et al. 2014) in order to examine how TikTok users mobilize semiotic resources to construct meaning, participation and identity in their pop-culture-inspired cooking content following and/or adapting their productions to the “platform vernacular” (Gibbs et al. 2015), that is the combination of styles, grammars and logics that is unique for each platform. A key premise of this study is that TikTok, as a platform, does not simply host content, it actively shapes discourse through its affordances (e.g., looping videos, superimposed text, aural perspective, algorithmic curation) and vernacular norms (e.g., mimetic logic). These parameters influence how content is created, interpreted and mimicked – what Zappavigna (2018) terms the platform’s “metadiscursive grammar”. Within this platform- specific discourse ecology, pop culture cooking videos constitute a productive site for the recontextualization and “entextualization” of familiar media artifacts (Leppänen et al. 2014), enabling their “resemiotization” (Iedema 2003) through food-based, multimodal discourse practices. The dataset underpinning the analysis has been qualitatively selected and consists of TikTok recipe videos that explicitly reference cultural texts from across media domains, including film, literature and gaming. These materials encompass both direct recreations of iconic dishes and more ambient or aesthetic homages, thereby illustrating the range of strategies through which food becomes a vehicle for intertextual meaning making. The dataset has been selected to illustrate how ‘FanFood videos’ are 38 https://www.tiktok.com/tag/fandomfood?lang=en (retrieved in April 2025). Stirring Up Pop Narratives 121 discursively and multimodally constructed. Three case studies have been chosen for this purpose, with detailed references provided in the following sections. The first is Andrew Rea’s (a.k.a. Binging with Babish) recreation of the ratatouille-dish from Disney Pixar’s Ratatouille (Bird 2007), which represents one of the earliest prototypical “FanFood vids” and offers a clear example of how content is remediated from YouTube’s long-form, instructional style into TikTok’s condensed, platform-specific vernacular. The second case focuses on a series of videos by TikTok creator Gabrielle Williams (a.k.a. gabby.jaye), who translates dishes from popular culture universes such as Disney and Laika into multimodal culinary performances and whose productions were explicitly acknowledged by one of the referenced studios. The third example is drawn from the viral Lava Chicken Challenge, inspired by Minecraft: The Movie (Hess 2025), which demonstrates how fictional motifs are translated into participatory rituals of cooking and performance within the TikTok community. In terms of structure, the chapter begins with the transition from YouTube to TikTok through Babish’s Ratatouille video, proceeds with an in-depth analysis of Williams’ multimodal strategies and concludes with the Lava Chicken Challenge as a paradigmatic case of fandom-infused food discourse.