Thea Von Engelbrechten, 20, says the videos began last January due to her being bored at the beginning of the pandemic lockdown.
Thea Von Englelbrechten had no intention of her "Sylvanian Drama" TikToks going viral. She originally made the videos using Sylvanian Families animal figurines to joke around with her friends.
Sylvanian Families, created by Epoch, a Japanese gaming company, were first created in 1985. In the U.S., the figurines are known as Calico Critters.
But the internet had other plans where Englelbrechten's stories were concerned, and fans have been devouring each of the novellas, which take them on a wild ride in less than a minute.
She says they began last January due to her being bored to tears at the beginning of the pandemic lockdown.
“I was gone a bit mad,” she said. “And I got reminded of all the Sylvanians that I had as a kid. I just decided to take them all down from the attic and set them up. I thought it would be so funny to make a few TikToks with them and send them to my friends.”
She said she makes the stories up as she goes along.
“I usually know what the opening line is going to be when I start the video, but then I make it up as I go along," she told Inside Edition Digital. "I never really prepare them beforehand because I think it would actually be less funny if I put more effort into them.
“It's just my sense of humor. Well, I was playing with them when I was a kid," she continued. "As I grew older, I think my sense of humor stayed the same. It's really stupid, dark humor. I think I make them up as I go along.”
Now she’s up over a million followers on the platform and counting. But Thea says she never intended on her videos going viral.
“No, the hashtags I was doing were completely a joke," she said. "One of them that went viral, it was #pizza. I was like, how does that even get on the freaking page? You know what I mean?
“But I think the first one went viral, and then people went onto the contents, all the other ones," Englelbrechten continued. "I think that's how it kind of took off from there.”
Because of the video’s subject matter, users are constantly perplexed by who exactly is running this account. Many also want to know her age. Englelbrechten is 20.
Thea is studying multimedia at Dublin City University and says her goal is to work in film. “Yea, It would be great if I could get to doing it with real people, but Sylvanians are good for now," she said.
And as expected, many have been asking for longer bits. And some wonder if maybe a series is in the works. According to Thea, it is a possibility.
“I've had like a few networks and then a few kind of like management companies that manage writers, they've reached out to me,” she noted. “I suppose now I just have to kind of decide what I want to do or like what direction I want to go in, but I'm very new to that whole industry.
“It's kind of difficult to know what the right thing to do is and stuff, but for now, I'll just keep making the TikToks, and hopefully, people will still watch them.”
