Children of the Waning Star

Mark Honeychurch - 21 July 2025

TikTok is an interesting social media platform. As a host of short videos that anyone can make these days pretty easily with just a mobile phone, an interface that makes it easy to scroll through hundreds of videos, and an algorithm that attempts to feed you content that will keep you engaged, many kids use Tik Tok as their main social media platform. The platform allows viewers to easily engage through not just their likes, but also through posting their own opinions in response videos.

As part of my effort to use my three kids to find me TikTok trends that are in need of a skeptical viewpoint, last week I found out about a brand new “cult” - less than two weeks old - that has formed on TikTok, called the “Children of the Waning Star”, or CWS for short. The idea of a cult being created on social media intrigued me, although in the back of my mind I was also mindful of some of the other recent dark social media topics that have turned out to be mostly imaginary, such as the Momo and Blue Whale challenges.

So I went looking for the source of this supposed cult, and very quickly found its founder, Gigi Jarvis. Gigi is a 24 year old wannabe star who lives in Atlanta, Georgia. She has a few credits to her name as an extra in music videos, an actress in some TV commercials, and a model for a handful of photo shoots. There’s an interview with Gigi from last December in an Atlanta-based magazine called “Shoutout Atlanta” that showcases local talent, that will tell you as much as you need to know about her, and more - it’s all pretty generic stuff, talking about how “each day is an opportunity to grow in kindness, gratitude, or discipline”, and how she’s “living more meaningfully by embracing a gentle and mindful approach”.

The info on her Backstage profile page gives you an idea of where her career’s at. As well as this recent moderate success, Gigi appears to have made several attempts in the last few years to monetise social media, along with some of her flatmates in the shared house she lives in with her boyfriend. This includes a YouTube channel where she and flatmate Jarvis play horror video games, called Chicken + Rice, although none of the videos appears to have racked up more than a few hundred views at most.

Gigi’s TikTok account, where she started her Children of the Waning Star cult idea, is a mixture of a few different types of videos, many of them repeats of exactly the same thing - there are those where she lip syncs to music lyrics or some tv/movie dialog (sometimes five or more videos lip syncing to exactly the same audio), videos where she’s talking to the camera about whatever’s in her head in the time, a period (of one day) where she tries to follow a TikTok trend of posting 20 videos in a day, and so on.

The TikTok account Gigi’s been using (@notgigijarvis) is fairly new, having been started in early June this year, but it follows on from another account she posted to until late 2024, called @polarchicken, where the same kinds of attention-seeking videos have been posted.

The cult idea appears to have started with a 12 second video on the 10th of July, in which Gigi, in a stairwell, sings along to the Counting Crows song “Accidentally in Love”. The text accompanying the video simply said “plotting to start a cult soon…. #altootd” (the hashtag is unrelated to this cult idea of Gigi’s, and is short for “alternative outfit of the day” - as she’s showing off her outfit to her followers). Here’s a frame from the video:

After this initial floating of the cult idea, just a day later and after a few unrelated videos, on the 11th of July Gigi posted another video where she talks to the camera and says that:

“I’m starting a cult and you guys are all going to be a part of it. The first thing I want to start doing is “victim of the week”, where whoever drops the funniest video in my comments section I’m going to steal your profile picture and become you for a whole week. Also, anyone who follows me feel free to chime in on the rules to our little society. Like, I feel like holidays could be really fun for us, or maybe like we have a certain emoji so you know that you’re in the in, if that makes sense.”

This cult-themed video looks to be just another of Gigi’s attempts to get people to watch and like her content - part of the wider pattern of her posts, included pretending to crash a U-Haul van, testing TikTok’s filters, showing off a new haircut, etc. Many of her videos are posted from her bathroom, presumably as that’s the only place she can make them in a shared house alone without interruption. The new account only had a few followers until she started these “cult” posts, at which point she jumped from around a hundred to over a hundred thousand followers, with video views going from a few hundred to several million - a pretty big jump for a new account.

This looking for, and responding to, feedback was a recurring theme of Gigi’s subsequent videos, as the “cult” became the only topic she was posting about. I presume that her willingness to engage with her budding new audience, which seems to have been mainly young teen girls, was probably a large factor in the near-instant popularity of her idea. Over the next few days she posted two to three videos a day, with a variety of ideas she pulled from her viewers’ comments.

She read out a suggestion from a follower that people could post pictures of their pets - “maybe each month we could comment photos of our animals as a sacrifice”. In one video, Gigi asked members for ideas on what cult symbol they should use. She told her viewers “don’t think of the emoji as a texting thing, think of it as me literally coming to you and branding it onto your skin”. In a follow-up video, where two emojis were chosen to represent the cult (a star and a fingerprint), Gigi said “congratulations, once you fall asleep I’m going to sneak into your home and carve it into your skin”. Later videos also included spooky background sounds in an attempt to further cultivate a creepy vibe. By day four, Gigi had chosen the name for the cult from her comments, and also started talking about “the entity”, a spirit that would visit members.

After day four (the 14th of July), Gigi posted a couple of videos the following day about how this new group she’d created wasn’t actually a cult, it was just a “community that uses dark aesthetic”. In an admission that this was all about gaining likes and followers, she mentioned in a video that “I know I say a lot of out of pocket things to get the attention of people”. She even started talking about how she was prepared to educate people about the dangers of cults, despite the fact that she’s obviously far from an expert in the topic. But all of her attempts to back-pedal were too late, as her creation started to take on a life of its own.

There have been many attempts online in the last week or so to benefit from this new emerging trend. For example, here are just a few of the new accounts that have popped up on TikTok trying to capitalise on the CWS idea:

TikTok is also currently flooded with videos from teen kids either claiming to be members of the cult, or talking from a place of ignorance about cults and how cool, or how dangerous, they are. Much of the conversation on TikTok is way off base, and I’ve watched 14 year olds talking about how cults sacrifice animals and people, people mentioning brainwashing, supposed cult survivors weighing in about how in their expert opinion this is definitely a well-organised cult with ill intentions (despite it having existed for a grand total of under two weeks so far), and a whole host of video creators feeding off each others’ ill-informed video content about cults in general, and the Children of the Waning Star specifically - seemingly without ever bothering to go and watch Gigi’s videos first.

Worse than the cult misinformation is the fact that rumours have started being shared online that cult members have been sacrificing their pets, as well as carving/tattooing the CWS symbols on their bodies. So far there’s no evidence that this has actually been happening, and it seems likely that this is nothing more than a mix of some people faking content to shock people and others reporting on second and third-hand rumours, but I can imagine it wouldn’t have been nice for Gigi to suddenly start reading thousands of comments that make it sound like it’s a real thing.

The overwhelming feeling I had from looking through Gigi’s social media output a week ago, while she was still promoting the idea of her “cult”, was that - more than anything - she’s desperate to become famous. I had a suspicion that, once this idea of a cult took off and people started doing things that were out of her control, she would quickly figure out that she was way out of her depth. She even joked in one of her videos (apologies if you watch it, this one’s a particularly cringy video of hers) about how if you search for her name online, the search results included references to her being a “cult leader”, and that her casting agency may not take too kindly to that - to me it came across as more of a humble brag than anything else, an opportunity to let her new fanbase know that she’s an aspiring actress. However, whatever her intentions were for saying this, it turns out that she was right, as the Miles Models page for her profile now returns a 404:

Confirming my hunch that Gigi had bitten off more than she could chew, a few days after the posts trying to clarify that she wasn’t actually starting a cult, on the 18th of July, she posted the following text to TikTok:

I started what was meant to be a fun, creative community by kickstarting a voting style choose-your-own-adventure game. I genuinely didn’t realize how hurtful the word “cult” could be to some, and although I wish I knew sooner, the last thing I wanted was to cause pain. I am very sorry for my insensitivity.

Once I learned, I immediately ended the series.

I never supported any harmful behavior. I’m sorry if anyone was hurt or impacted, that was never my intention. Moving forward, I will be using my platform to raise awareness by sharing resources for cult survivors and mental health.

This whole experience happened very fast and was difficult to figure out while receiving harassment and having my personal info leaked. I appreciate those who’ve been kind and patient while I navigate through this.

I’m committed to learning and doing better.

She’d also posted a 5 minute TikTok video the day before this message that followed a pattern that’s all too familiar to me by now, where she attempted to say sorry for the entire debacle. In reality, she spent much more time blaming anyone and everyone else for the events than accepting any personal culpability. In the video she: says she didn’t realise cults are bad, accuses her followers of being culpable for having clicked the Follow button, claims (rightly) that there’s no evidence that any of the claims of pet sacrifice are real, talks about how awful her life has been (for the previous 24 hours), apologises to cult survivors (pretty much the only actual apology in the video), offers to help investigate and bust cults if any of her followers are current members, says that people are messaging her employers to tell them she’s grooming children, claims that her talk of “the entity” was just a drawing prompt for artists to draw something for her, and finishes off saying “I wouldn’t wish what has happened to me to anyone else”. The whole video’s a mess - she’s a 24 year old who’s suddenly having to deal with some very grown-up topics, and she’s so far out of her depth she’s not dealing with it very well.

As an aside I described this video as “all too familiar” because, along with some other recent internet fiascos, this nonpology reminded me of an hour long video I watched recently from a YouTuber who plays computer games for a living, called Dr Lupo. Dr Lupo had recently been invited to play in an online charity chess championship called PogChamps recently, and after a few lacklustre games where he barely won (his ELO is very low, around 600, as he doesn’t even play chess recreationally and just practiced a little for the competition) viewers noticed that in the middle of a match he suddenly started playing like a professional. In fact, his game instantly became far better than any professional player - he started playing like he was a computer, specifically making the same almost flawless moves that the Stockfish software would make. This sudden and dramatic improvement resulted in Dr Lupo obliterating his 1300+ ELO opponent, something that those in the know about chess were confident just wasn’t possible for someone with an ELO of only 600. And Dr Lupo was clueless enough about chess that he didn’t realise that using Stockfish in this way would make his game stick out like a sore thumb. In the wake of many, many online accusations that Dr Lupo had cheated there first came denial, followed by a partial admission, and then reluctant acceptance that he had been caught. In a follow-up hour-long live stream, Dr Lupo (real name Benjamin), by way of “apology”, managed to blame his parents, his audience and pretty much everyone else he could think of for why he chose to cheat in a charity chess game, all while paying lip service to his own actions and guilt. If you want to know more, here’s an overview video from YouTuber Karl Jobst (who regularly documents gaming cheaters), and the hour plus video from Dr Lupo that I cringed through:

In conclusion, it appears that Gigi had played along with her shameless attempt to gain new followers for a few days, until she started reading about some of the things her followers were supposedly doing, at which point she freaked out and tried to fix it all with the pivot to the idea of being nothing more than a “community” group. When this didn’t work, she ended up having to come clean and admit that the whole thing was just made-up nonsense, while also attempting to blame everyone else for her mess.

Meanwhile the internet is now freaking out about this new “cult”, with angsty teens in video comments talking about the messed up things they’re doing, and Christians denouncing it all as evil, and blessing everyone to save their souls. Just head to Gigi’s TikTok account (quick, before it’s deleted!) and read the comments on any of her videos to see the mess that’s ensued. To be clear, this whole thing is not a cult, and it never was a cult - it bears none of the hallmarks of cultic control, any kind of power structure, or money being funneled to its leader. It’s more a case of someone pretending to be occult than it is anything to do with a cult.

What this looks like to me is a perfect storm of edginess and outrage, with a bunch of people online winding up another bunch of people - it’s impressive that so much content has been posted about this online in such a short time. However, given that there’s no real evidence of harm, so far it appears to be nothing more than a storm in a teacup. I guess I just hope that it blows over as quickly as it blew up, so that Gigi can get on with her life and focus on her acting/modelling career. With any luck she’ll move on from this carrying with her the wisdom that gaining followers at any cost is not a good idea, and that it’s not worth trying so hard to earn internet likes, because most of the time they won’t pay your bills.