Fangirls
April 26, 2026
@mileycyrus on Instagram
On March 24th at 8:45 PM, I sat down on my couch, opened Disney+, and pressed play on what my younger self would have manifested into existence if she had known how to. I lasted exactly 5 minutes and 47 seconds before I started crying. For days leading up to it, my phone had been blowing up with texts from friends who were all riding that specific wave of emotion you only experience as a fangirl. Even though we’re all in our twenties now, scattered across different apartments and cities, we had planned to watch together. There we were, doing the same thing at the same moment: sobbing into our (now work or uni) laptops at a Disney Channel reunion none of us realized we were waiting for.
Looking back, being a fangirl meant following a very specific afternoon ritual. You’d get home from school, drop your backpack in the corner, and grab a snack you’d already negotiated on the walk back. Once the TV was on and tuned to Disney Channel, the rest of the world just had to wait. It meant owning the CDs and pulling out the booklets to read the lyrics while the songs played. I spent years with nothing but ‘Rock Star,’ ‘Nobody’s Perfect’, and ‘Let’s Get Crazy’ on repeat.
By early 2025, even before the ‘Hannahversary’ was officially on our radar, girls who grew up with those songs started scoring their adult lives to ‘Ordinary Girl.’ It became a heartfelt TikTok trend where people our age tried to navigate their chaotic, sometimes mundane lives while still radiating main character energy. And if you look at the data, it’s not just nostalgia talking. Spotify reported nearly 10.7 million hours of Hannah Montana streams globally in 2025 alone, which is “more than 1,220 years of listening.” Gen Z even made up 70% of those streams in the month leading up to the anniversary. It’s clear the ‘Hannahversary’ didn’t actually start the trend of girls finding their way back to themselves. It just gave us official permission to stop pretending we had outgrown those parts of our identity.
The special itself plays out as part concert and part archive deep-dive. Miley revisits three tracks from Hannah’s catalog: ‘The Best of Both Worlds,’ ‘This Is The Life,’ and ‘The Climb’ (and let’s be honest, those first notes still hit just as hard as they did in 2009). But the music is only half of the story. There is also the mandatory closet walk-through, and as fangirls, we know better than anyone that both the melodies and the clothes serve as time capsules for our memories. Watching Miley and her mom, Tish, go through Hannah’s wardrobe piece by piece was a total rollercoaster. When Miley held up a bedazzled shoe and joked that “no bedazzler was safe” in their hands, I laughed, but I also had a lump in my throat. Then she pulled out the dress from the opening scene of Hannah Montana: The Movie, and I was genuinely not okay.
It makes total sense that the special focuses on this kind of fandom-first perspective. Miley chose Alex Cooper, the Call Her Daddy host and a self-professed Hannah Montana superfan, to conduct the interview. In Variety, Miley explained: “She understands Hannah in a way that I couldn’t. I never got to experience Hannah being crazy in the pit with other kids.” This special was built for those of us who were in that pit. We’re all grown up now with adult money (but sadly, there wasn’t a tour announcement to spend it on).
Throughout 2025, independent artist Áine Deane began posting her ‘Hannah Montana Diaries,’ showing snippets of her life split between ordinary routines and life on stage. She’s an artist who actively identifies with the template the show created: the ordinary girl by day who becomes a performer by night. For some fans, the Hannah Montana catalog did more than just score their childhood; it provided a model for how a creative life could be structured, and they went on to build exactly that.
The lineage has always been there in the music if you knew where to look. ‘You'll Always Find Your Way Back Home’ from the movie was actually co-written by a 19-year-old Taylor Swift. The girls humming that song in 2009 were being soundtracked by Taylor without even knowing it, and many of them naturally were, or grew up to be, Swifties. Rolling Stone recently called this the “Hannah Montana Generation of Pop Music,” noting that stars like Sabrina Carpenter, Olivia Rodrigo, and Chappell Roan all trace their ambitions back to the show. Seeing Chappell appear in the anniversary special felt like a full-circle moment for an artist who grew up watching the show, and is now standing in the place where it all began.
‘Younger You’ closes the special, and it is the exact moment we were all waiting for to have one final cry. The song is a stripped-back, introspective ballad. Lyrically, it differs from most songwriting perspectives: it’s written from the point of view of young Miley talking to the woman she grew up to be, rather than the other way around. Miley was clearly emotional as old clips played behind her, and for the following week, the rest of us desperately clinged onto this feeling. Social media was flooded with girls digging through their own (still non-rotating!) closets for keepsakes and restarting the series from episode one. We clicked through every related clip the algorithm threw at us, because in the end, the reunion was never just Miley’s. It belonged to us, too.
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