Swifties Are Royally Confused By Taylor Swift's Tortured Poets Department Clues Ahead Of Its Release, And Their Memes About It Are A+

You know how when Taylor Swift performs “Anti-Hero” during the Eras Tour fans will sing back at her “Taylor you’ll be fine?” Well, right now, we should all be singing “Taylor, we’re not fine,” because these clues for The Toruted Poets Department are overwhelming. In the days leading up to the “Lavender Haze” singer’s upcoming release, she’s been dropping cryptic clue after clue, and now Swifties are posting about how royally confused they are, and their memes concerning all this are hysterical.

While Swifties are used to Taylor Swift being “cryptic and Machiavellian,” these clues for TTPD are causing way more questions than answers, and many of us have absolutely no idea what they mean. From QR codes popping up all over the world, to a pop-up in LA that’s laden with Easter eggs, to those brutal playlists inspired by the stages of grief, to all the seemingly random 2’s the singer keeps using, we’re floundering in hints over here. I think @staystaystace put it best when they used a hilarious clip from The Good Place to describe how “overstimulated and overwhelmed” they are:

As one fan explained when the first QR code popped up in Chicago, Swift’s hints are Riddler-level cryptic. That code ended up leading to an “Error 321 Backend fetch failed” message, just like what her site said right before TTPD was announced, and it’s throwing Swifties for a loop. It’s been a couple of days since this was revealed, and we still don’t know the meaning. As @singin_swiftie posted, it feels like we’re trying to solve a cold case:

Despite Swifties being experts at decoding Swift’s messages that are put in some of her best music videos and Instagram posts, all this TTPD promo is deeply confusing – like orange door at the end of the Eras Tour confusing…cause we still don’t know what that means. I think @delaniraeann put it best when they used four immaculate memes to break down the collective Swiftie mentality at the moment:

The Charlie Day meme is the one that really hits hard right now. I feel like we all have our string out trying to connect The Tortured Poets Department dots on a giant mystery board, however, many of us are just tangling said string. 

For example, Taylor Swift has been putting mystery words in some of her old songs, and each day a new term is revealed. So far words like "hereby” “conduct” and more have been found. However, we don’t really know what it’s spelling out. I was a big fan of @so_shantastic’s post about this, as they used this hilarious T-Swift meme to illustrate their confusion:

You’d think we’d all be good at decoding by now. We did it for the re-releases of Speak Now and 1989, and we’ve been trying to figure out clues for Reputation (Taylor’s Version) for months. However, every single time, the chairman of the Tortured Poets Department gets us, and now I’m feeling like Pete Davidson in this meme ellie! posted on X:

Overall, the theories are flying, and Swifties are frantically trying to figure out what all these clues mean before The Tortured Poets Department drops on April 19. However, it’s still unclear how all these puzzle pieces fit together, so we’ve resorted to posting these truly hilarious memes about how the “Mastermind” has gotten us again.