This puzzle is about an aspect of Taylor Swift's oeuvre rarely explored in puzzlehunts - her fun music videos! The title of the puzzle, "Love Stories", is meant to be evocative of both Taylor Swift's works in general as well as one of her better-known songs, "Love Story". The VEVO logo in the bottom right of each clip, in addition to the audiovisual presentation in general, is meant to clue us towards looking at music videos (as opposed to songs or lyrics).
Each clip contains two separate pieces of content: the dialogue and the action.
Each clip begins with the name of an ex-girlfriend. Those exes have feminine names, but if we reverse the gender of the name the same way that the gender of our actor was reversed, we get the first name of one of Taylor Swift's many exes. Each piece of dialogue also references a real-life event that serves as confirmation that we have the correct ex-boyfriend.
The dialogue:
| Given Order | Name | Relationship Order | Ex | Distinguishing Fact | Explanation |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Jean | 4 | John Mayer | called what I do cheap | John Mayer called Taylor Swift's song about him, "Dear John", "cheap songwriting" |
| 2 | Tammy | 9 | Tom Hiddleston | wore shirts with my name on them | Tom Hiddleston rather famously and publicly wore an "I love TS" shirt |
| 3 | Lucy | 2 | Lucas Till | my highschool sweetheart | Lucas Till played Taylor Swift's high school sweetheart in her "You Belong With Me" music video (you may have spotted him while doing this puzzle!) |
| 4 | Taylor | 3 | Taylor Lautner | made me feel like a movie star | Taylor Lautner and Taylor Swift played a couple in the movie Valentine's Day |
| 5 | Calvina | 8 | Calvin Harris | got a taste of my own medicine | Calvin Harris turned the tables on Taylor Swift and wrote a breakup song rumored to be about her - "Ole" |
| 6 | Joanna | 1 | Joe Jonas | happened in less than a minute, it was over the phone | Joe Jonas broke up with Taylor Swift during a twenty-some second phone call |
| 7 | Jackie | 5 | Jake Gyllenhaal | she stole my scarf | Jack Gyllenhaal kept Taylor Swift's scarf after their breakup |
| 8 | Harriet | 7 | Harry Styles | we walked through central park together | Taylor Swift and Harry Styles were photographed walking through Central Park together |
| 9 | Connie | 6 | Conor Kennedy | snuck into her cousin's wedding once | Conor Kennedy and Taylor Swift dropped in on the wedding of Conor Kennedy's cousin uninvited |
These clips can thus be sorted according to Taylor Swift's relationships timeline.
The actions in the clips themselves correspond to clips from Taylor's music videos. The clips are presented in alphabetical order by music videos, to make identification easier. When the original clips are tracked down, it becomes evident that the strange objects - a key, a bun, etc - that our lead actor is holding are different objects from those in the original clips. The enumerations we provide in the videos correspond to the objects in our videos. Once a couple of our new objects have been identified, a pattern emerges - each object rhymes with a number. This is clued by the flavortext having words rhyming with "one" and "two".
The actions
| Given Order | Relationship Order | Video Action | Music Video (linked to appropriate timestamp) | Rhyming Object (Given) | Rhyming # | Original Object (From MV) | Extracted Letters |
| 6 | 1 | holding an apple core in bed | Teardrops on My Guitar | APPLE CORE | 4 | GUITAR | T |
| 3 | 2 | holding a key while hanging out of the driver's seat of a car | Look What You Made Me Do | KEY | 3 | GRAMMY | A |
| 4 | 3 | playing a bun like a piano | Lover | BUN | 1 | PIANO | P |
| 1 | 4 | throwing a knife into a shampoo bottle | Bad Blood | SHAMPOO | 2 | TEDDY BEAR | E |
| 7 | 5 | overenthusiastic celebrations with plate | The Man | PLATE | 8 | TENNIS RACKET | A |
| 9 | 6 | putting a toy gun in a blender | You Need To Calm Down | GUN | 1 | COTTON CANDY | C |
| 8 | 7 | cradling a shoe and pointing out into the distance | You Belong With Me | SHOE | 2 | CLARINET | L |
| 5 | 8 | leaping elegantly while waving bamboo | Shake it Off | BAMBOO | 2 | RIBBON | I |
| 2 | 9 | performing teabag voodoo | Blank Space | TEA | 3 | APPLE | P |
Using these new numbers as indices, we can index into the object that was replaced to get the phrase, TAPE A CLIP. Upon submission of the answer phrase, we are greeted with a message:
Correct! Now, tape a clip of your team reenacting a scene from your favorite Taylor Swift music video, and send it to us at swifties@teammatehunt.com
Submitting your own Taylor Swift music video rendition would yield the final answer, WOMANIZER.
For some reason, Taylor Swift seems to pop up in puzzlehunts far more than any other music artist. We’re pleased to have to contributed a puzzle to this long puzzle lineage! Partly because of the abundance of excellent puzzles exploring her music, we decided to go in a different direction and write a puzzle about her music videos instead. We found her videos to be full of fun and strange little details, and hoped you had as much fun watching all of them as we did!
The original version of the puzzle was focused on just identifying video clips and what changed between them. We wanted to add in more steps, so we brainstormed with an editor and figured out two new steps-- ordering by Taylor Swift's long list of ex-boyfriends and indexing by rhyming number of the replaced object. Since our actor was male, we changed all of the ex-boyfriends into ex-girlfriends to obscure exactly who we were talking about and added backstories to aid in the identification.
Tuning the difficulty on this one was a challenge, since we filmed the first version and it was very hard, but refilming the clips was a huge challenge so we spent a lot of time adding different edits to the videos and flavortext. Adding the VEVO icon and enumerations, slowing down the jumps in the Shake it Off clip, and adding rhyming flavortext were among the various innovations needed to make all of the solve steps smoother. One of the issues we were never able to fix is that Taylor Swift has written a breakup song about almost every ex-boyfriend, and that can cause confusion about which song is important to each clip. Regardless, we hope you had fun identifying the very silly (and painful) clips!