“Hmph!” It is the sound of a whole corner of TikTok right now. The Tsundere Hmph trend, built around anime’s most famous character type, the tsundere, is the second fastest-growing trend on TikTok today, November 14, according to the daily ViralRemix chart, which ranks trends by how many new videos they gained in the last day. Only the Ba Ba Ba Dance is growing faster.
A tsundere, for the uninitiated, is a character who is cold, prickly and dismissive on the outside and warm and affectionate underneath. The trend’s signature is the performance: creators lip-sync or act out the classic tsundere denial in an exaggerated, stammering style, all blushing and protest. “M-ME?!!!! A TSUNDERE?!! N-N-NO WAY?! THAT’S I-I-IMPOSSIBLE!! HMPH?!!!” runs one popular caption, complete with the flustered blush and the storming off.
From anime edits to a full-blown format
The trend has roots in anime edit culture, where characters like Bakugo from My Hero Academia, Taiga Aisaka from Toradora!, Asuka Langley from Neon Genesis Evangelion and Kaguya Shinomiya from Kaguya-sama: Love Is War have long been held up as textbook tsunderes. Clips of those characters, cut to the “It’s not like I like you!!” sound, have circulated for months, and this week the format has broken out beyond anime fans into a broader role-play trend.
Creators now film themselves as the tsundere, or point the camera at a friend and declare them one, with captions like “She’s literally a tsundere” and “6 stages of being a tsundere”. The humour is in the overacting: the stammer, the blush, the arms crossed, the “Hmph!” delivered like a door slamming.
Why the “hmph” lands
Part of the appeal is how instantly readable it is. You do not need to know anime to get the joke: everyone knows someone who insists they do not care while very obviously caring. The tsundere is that person, turned up to eleven, and TikTok has spent the week turning up the volume with them. As the chart shows, the trend is still rising, which means the “hmph” is not going quiet any time soon.
Read more viral stories on ReportRig: Futile Devices Tops US TikTok Songs as Rechazame Leads World and Ba Ba Ba Dance Tops TikTok’s Fastest-Rising Trends Today.
