Fan edits have a lot of power in the internet economy. The practice of making these videos—brief supercuts of TV or film clips, typically set to thematic music—has increasingly revealed the power to move the needle, prompting viewers to tune into the source material. Studios have come to value this organic engagement so highly that Lionsgate even hired TikTok fan editors to make marketing materials. But the fan edit world is not always so corporatized; if you take a peek down the rabbit hole, the community is often a lot stranger and more imaginative than any marketing department could spin. Take, for instance, the latest ship that’s sweeping the web: Mean Girls‘ Regina George (Rachel McAdams) and Diary Of A Wimpy Kid‘s Rodrick Heffley (Devon Bostick), a.k.a. “Rodgina.”
It’s unclear where or why the “Rodgina” ship set sail, only that it exploded in popularity over the last week. There are hundreds of videos on TikTok splicing together the characters’ scenes into a new hybrid teen rom-com. The appeal of the pairing is based on the archetypes prevalent to the genre in the early- to mid-2000s. Regina’s the popular homecoming queen, Rodrick’s the outcast musician—in the words of Avril Lavigne, “Can I make it any more obvious?” (One of the edits is set to Wheatus’ “Teenage Dirtbag,” just to paint an even clearer picture.) Both characters are depicted as mean and antagonistic in their respective movies, but the imagined relationship with each other serves to soften and humanize them both.
Of course, TikTok fan editors did not invent weird crossover relationships. “Crack pairings” (as they’re somewhat unfortunately called in the world of fandom) have existed probably as long as “shipping” has. Sometimes the weird pairing itself is a joke (like Harry Styles and Barack Obama), but sometimes the pairing comes from a place of sincerity. In this case, “Rodgina” taps into a particular nostalgia for a golden era of teen rom-coms. Neither Mean Girls nor Diary Of A Wimpy Kid is a romantic comedy in the traditional sense, but by combining the two the fan editors have created a sort of “lost media” from a time when Hollywood was still catering to a high school audience. The last teen rom-com to genuinely break through was Netflix’s To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before. More often these days, teen romances are balanced with something for adults, too (see this week’s Regretting You, which features parallel storylines for Mckenna Grace and Allison Williams).
Whatever the reason, “Rodgina” has spread like wildfire. In addition to the robust fan edits on TikTok, there’s fan art of the couple being shared on Twitter/X, conversation about them on Reddit, plus a lot of fanfiction. In the last 12 days, the new fandom has generated nearly 200 works on the fanfiction site Archive Of Our Own. The comments on Devon Bostick’s most recent Instagram post are full of Regina George gifs and people asking, “Does he know about Rodrick x Regina George?” If he didn’t before, surely he does now.
