‘Why is trending so weird’ because of tag spam. Because people (and bots) are tagging like it’s Instagram.
This is spam. It’s against TOS and it throws trending completely out of whack, along with being wildly annoying.
Please, please, PLEASE report posts like this as spam, because otherwise it’s just gonna get fucking worse
‘Cottagecore’ is trending right now and the tag is literally 80% spam from real humans who don’t fucking know how tumblr tags work
Honestly while this is good information to know I think about 99% of tag spam is from bots
I might have overestimated how much of it was real people, but no, this specific kind of spam is at least significantly from humans (either that or bizarrely sophisticated AI I guess?) If you go to their blogs they have varied setups, a combination of original posts and reblogs, and usually content that is either obviously or verifiably original. A lot of them link back to very normal instagram accounts too
That and, aside from the recent cottagepocalypse, there has DEFINITELY been a general increase in weird, barely-relevant tagging activity across the site that is characteristic of instagram :/