2025 TikTok has the same problems as 2020 TikTok. Who would've thought?
Musings on stealing from Black creators and other TikTok problems
Over the past 48 hours, I’ve seen videos about Flawed Villain on my For You page. Flawed Villain is a TikToker and former sex worker who makes several videos a day about men, romance, dating, and marriage. I could barely go through all her videos because she posts soooo much, but the critiques I’ve seen discuss her stealing ideas from Black content creators, her severe heteropessimism, or her controversial opinions on social justice issues.
Sadly, stealing content has been a problem with popular TikTok creators since the app absorbed Musical.ly. Charli D’Amelio, Addison Rae, and other Hype House members went viral in 2019-2020 after dancing the renegade without crediting the creator, Jalaiah Harmon. She was only 14 years old, and she witnessed white teenagers accumulating wealth from her dance before profiting off of it herself. A year later, Black creators held a strike by refusing to post new dances to demonstrate how Black labor makes TikTok the dancing app.
Creators pointed out that Cecilia Regina and the controversial SheraSeven are the source for Flawed Villain’s takes. Cecilia Regina is a Black creator known for analyzing romantic relationships and family dynamics in media and real life. She criticizes men’s harmful behavior towards women they date and warns her female audience about red flags. However, Cecilia Regina shares examples of healthy love—e.g., her parents’ relationship—to empower her audience and honor their curiosity about whether or not good men exist.
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SheraSeven, AKA: the “sprinkle, sprinkle lady,” is a dating coach whose tactics are not accepted by many. She focuses on the strategic, material aspect of dating and marriage and encourages women 25 and older to pursue older or “ugly” men with money. Some of her quotes about men’s dishonesty and having self-respect as a woman are more well-received. In response to a fan asking for advice on their partner cheating, she asked, “Why are you sleeping with a man that you think is cheating on you? Do you not love yourself?” Overall, SheraSeven views marriage as a business and gives women tips on putting up with a man to get the bills paid.
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Flawed Villain preaches about romantic love as a form of delusion, marriage as a form of sex work, and having kids as a humiliation ritual without crediting Cecilia Regina and SheraSeven. Also, the lack of positive relationship dynamics is arguably a rip-off of Cecilia Regina’s work.
A white woman stealing the ideas of Black women while claiming to be a feminist is unaligned with the movement’s goal of equality. She also referred to the Civil Rights Movement as a race war, liked derogatory comments about Black women, and called undocumented migrants “illegals”. Ironically, Flawed Villain’s actions embody how the early women’s rights movement took inspiration from Native American matriarchy while Native women didn’t have the same rights in the U.S.
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TikTok has always struggled with identifying and removing hateful content. However, allowing a white woman who hates Black women and undocumented immigrants to go viral seems eerily connected to the man who extended the app’s deadline in America. 2025 is the perfect time for Flawed Villain to gain popularity because she has a lot of fans for someone who engages in hateful conduct.
Her supporters make fun of non-white women and bash people who don’t believe that all men are evil and romance is fake. (Seriously, the comments on a woman named Rebecca’s video laying out her nuanced opinions are brutal.) The fact that Flawed Villain became the face of decentering men, as Cecilia Regina said, delegitimizes the work of other creators before her. It waters down the movement to the female version of incel culture, instead of amplifying the idea that women shouldn’t get into relationships that don’t enhance their lives.