The Nursery Nurse

Web Series Fandom
Name:	The Nursery Nurse
Abbreviation(s):	TNN
Creator:	Charlotte
Premiere date:	5 July 2021
Website:	The Nursery Nurse TikTok
Genre:	drama, comedy, found family
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

The Nursery Nurse is a TikTok webseries by Charlotte – who also plays all the characters – set in a UK nursery and following the team based there as they deal with the daily challenges of running the nursery, dealing with parents and upper management, and the chaos caused by their coworkers.

With over 1,300 episodes as of April 2024, the series is extremely popular, with many recent episodes far exceeding 1 millions views, sometimes getting 3 million views or more. As the series grew in popularity, a fandom grew around it, first in the TikTok comments section; then in other TikTok videos via stitches, duets or edits; and then out into other fannish spaces such as Twitter, Wattpad, Tumblr, and Archive of Our Own.

Canon

Set at a UK nursery, the series started out focused on the character of Charlotte, whose characterisation and experiences were heavily influenced by the creator's career. Initially, many of the videos were one-to-one interactions between Charlotte and a parent or Charlotte and a member of staff, but over time a cast of main characters has developed alongside a revolving door of parents and students. With the growing popularity of the TikTok account, Charlotte has moved from creating the episodes alone to working with the media company, We Create Popular.

As of 2024, the main cast consists of nursery staff Charlotte, Marjorie, Autumn, Carly, Jody, Winter, Reece, and Sorscha; with other key supporting characters such as current Siobhan, Summer, and the clueless owner, Roger, potentially ex-antagonistic Mia; and occasional substitute, apprentice, and other professional characters. While various parents, carers, and other family members appear; no children are shown, though babies are sometimes portrayed through the use of a doll.

Alongside one-off episodes – which make up a large proportion of the episodes in the series, especially early on – there are longer multi-episode arcs focused on the same story line. One-off episodes tend to focus on interactions with parents about their children or interactions with ignorant staff members about students. In addition to day-to-day happenings, these episodes will include things like disability inclusion for staff and children, pushing back against bigotry from parents or staff, handling issues of domestic abuse or neglect within families, or other topics which may occur within nurseries. Longer story-arcs tend to be focused on the core characters and how relationships – platonic, familial, and romantic – develop amongst different staff members throughout the series.

Redemption arcs play a key aspect amongst the core characters, with fans of the series often commenting in surprise that characters they once hated have now become beloved and redeemed characters while still retaining their core original personalities to a believable extent.

Fandom

The comments sections of The Nursery Nurse videos frequently contain thousands of comments, with people responding to the events of the episode, discussing and predicting future story-arcs, shipping characters, or talking about their experiences of topics relating to the episode. Charlotte also creates one-shot episodes based on submissions by people who watch her TikToks.

Edits of the series are becoming increasingly popular on TikTok, including some introducing new watchers to the characters and stories, and other focusing on specific characters, or using scenes from the series to participate in a current trend on TikTok. Episode dissections and discussions, headcanons, and theorising about future story-lines have become popular fan activities of their own as well. Incorrect character quotes are becoming popular on Tumblr and Twitter, while themed series' of videos such as 'The Nursery Nurse Characters Once Said...' and 'Alphabet with the Nursery Nurse' where clips from episodes are used are also popping up with greater regularity.

Initially fanworks for the series were primarily posted to Wattpad, but the tag on Archive of Our Own has started to see some works posted there, too. Some fan art for the series can be found on Tumblr and TikTok.

Charlotte, the creator, encourages the fan interactions and shipping of the characters, including joining in joking about her basically being shipped with herself. She has created playlists such as Marjoreece and Mialotte to help fans of certain ships find videos relating to the pairing in question.

Pairings

• Marjorie/Reece (Marjoreece)
• Autumn/Winter (Wintumn)
• Charlotte/Mia (Mialotte)

Fan Commentary

As with many TikTok series, fans often find themselves surprised by how engaged they become in story-lines, to the point of forgetting that all the characters are a single person in different outfits and wigs:

the way im so invested in this storyline on tiktok when it’s literally just the same person with different wigs on and accents

falcqns 

i'm this close to writing a fic based a tiktok series where a woman puts on different wigs and does different accents

Yes, it's the nursery nurse. The mialotte brainrot is real

If there's a fandom for that on here please let me know

ebdaydreamer 

Controversies

Spoiler Warning: This article or section may contain spoilers. If this bothers you, proceed with caution.

Theft and Plagiarism

As Charlotte's account popularity has grown, she has increasingly seen her material targeted by re-post accounts which are widespread on TikTok. More recently this became a significant issue because those re-posting accounts take the videos from her Facebook account, where she posts episodes about a week earlier than on TikTok, and upload them to TikTok. TikTok then recognises the re-posting account as the "original content owner" and demonetises Charlotte's videos and considers them plagiarised.

Charlotte has asked fans to report these re-posting accounts. Most fans have voiced a willingness or enthusiasm for doing so, but others are less supportive, arguing Charlotte should post to both platforms simultaneously if she wants to stop it happening as they don't want to wait a week to watch new episodes on TikTok. As of May 2024, watching the episodes on Facebook does not require an account to access.

Confusion and misunderstandings over universe "rules" and internal consistency

Up until some time early 2024, there was a lot more flexibility about the internal consistency of the Nursery Nurse universe. However, as the series has moved from being predominantly one-shot episodes or shot story-arcs into longer and more complex story-lines, the flexibility of characterisation and universe rules has decreased, leading to confusion amongst some fans.

For example, previously with notable antagonists — whether they are characters who go through redemption arcs like Marjorie and Autumn, or who remain antagonists to date, like Siobhan and Summer — characters often got away with actions long-term that would likely be dealt with swiftly by many real-world settings. Additionally, characters such as Autumn enact comedic violence against abusive parents with no repercussions and Jodie would carry out ridiculous behaviours to fulfill the role of 'hopeless staff member'. Charlotte has previously stated that the reality of consequences is dependent on the story-line at the time, so as to develop good quality "villains" or simply for entertainment purposes. When users sent in requests that involved staff at their own settings, existing characters like Siobhan or Jodie would be used to exemplify those staff on multiple occasions.

With the transition to long story-lines, and the need to redeem Mia, which caused minor controversy on its own, some of those characterisations and inconsistencies have been retconned. For example, Jodie's incompetency became a significant plot-point during one story-line in April/May 2024. This fluidity in realism has caused confusion for some fans of the series. This is in part due the large number of episodes and the rapid-moving pace of TikTok (in addition to the difficulty locating comments and replies) which results in Charlotte's explanations being difficult to find. As there is no central source for "canon lore" of the series, why some events in some story lines are now treated with serious responses while others seem to have been left unexamined can lead to fans getting confused over why one character is experiencing repercussions while another is not.

Mia's Arc and Mialotte

An antagonist introduced to the series in early 2024, Mia, has caused a division of opinion amongst fans of the series. Having regularly made Reece's life miserable, driven a wedge between Reece and Autumn, and enacted various cruel acts against children and staff members, Mia was revealed in April 2024 to have acted against Reece and Autumn under their father's instructions. In return, he promised her information about her own father.

Some fans, particularly those who were hopeful for a romance between Mia and Charlotte, felt that the sad backstory was akin to either an explanation for her behaviour or a redemption arc, while others felt that while it meant they felt some sympathy for the character it far from redeemed her. Some expressed concern for how various fans were responding to Mia's story-line and how quickly some fans were to consider her exonerated for her previous actions.

[Suzy Murray]

Amazing how much my opinion of Mia has chanced from the first introduction to the last 2 episodes. I went from disliking her to actually feeling bad for her after understanding why she is the way she is ❤️

[Heather Horzs Stevens]

Suzy Murray I don’t know how anybody could think she’s redeemable. Like she purposely hurt a child just to pick a fight with a mother. She’s done horrendous things above and beyond what Roger even asked her to do. She is far too toxic. And the thought of her and Charlotte getting tangled up together is not a good.

I am so glad you are having the same thoughts as me. All those young teenage girls in the comments obsessing over Mia and crying because she was so "misunderstood"

I really hope Mia is just trying to manipulate and is lying. I don't want Char to get hurt, but if this ends in a sappy love story where Mia is suddenly nice, I'm going to be so disappointed.

I worry they're not seeing narcissism for what it is. And think that love can cure it.

** Grace ** 

The fallout of Mia's arc, including her impact on Charlotte, led into a new arc centered on conflict between Charlotte and Marjorie, with fans of the series encouraging one another to side with "Team Marjorie" or "Team Char", leading to arguments between fans.

Perceiving series Charlotte as creator Charlotte

The creator has made it clear in some comments and videos that while the Charlotte character from the early episodes was something of a self-insert, as the series has gone on she has moved the character further away from herself and her experiences. However, due to the aforementioned difficulties finding the videos and comments, some fans continue to believe that the character of Charlotte reflects the creator's life.

During the Mia/Charlotte arc, this resulted in some fans asking or just assuming that Charlotte was having marital issues, or that she was also divorcing her husband. A few fans even located her most recent social media images and commented on how infrequently Charlotte's husband featured in them. Despite other fans of the series discouraging the theorising, comments about Charlotte's relationship continue to appear occasionally on her videos, particularly those featuring Mia and Charlotte.

Example Fanworks

Examples Wanted: Editors are encouraged to add more examples or a wider variety of examples.

Fanfiction

• autumn 🍁 by GeminiJenna, an Autumn focused work, starting from before her joining the nursery.
• Adventures and Dramas in the Nursery by Hummelberry07, a fanwork developing and expanding on storylines seen in the series.
• black rose by fork_07 - A Mia/Charlotte fanwork set after the events of episodes released in April 2024.

Fan Art

• Marjorie fan art by marjorie-88, ^{Archived version}

Fan Vids

• Meet the Nursery Nurse Characters by marjoriesglassesxoxo
• The Queer TNN Characters by charlotte_vsp
• Charlotte edit by autumnst4n
• Autumn edit by tnn_editsx

Resources, Archives and Fannish Links

• Thenurserynurse stories at Wattpad (other tags also used)
• The Nursery Nurse tag at AO3 (uncategorised in April 2024)
• The Nursery Nurse search at Twitter
• The Nursery Nurse tag at Tumblr