TikTok has so far been a blind spot in the discourse on film, media, and German language didactics: Although the app is very popular among students and has great potential for promoting both film-specific and digital reception and production skills, this potential is barely reflected in current competency models. This desideratum becomes even more apparent when differentiating between fictional and factual TikToks: While the media didactic and pedagogical research discourse on TikTok – often from a media-critical perspective – deals primarily with the phenomenon of non-fictional short videos, fictional narrative TikToks are largely neglected – unjustly so. After all, TikTok unites the principles of ‘The Digital Condition’ as identified by Felix Stalder (2017) like almost no other medium: Referentiality, communality, and underlying algorithms lead to a specific TikTok aesthetic and narrative, characerized by both a genuinely cinematic and a genuinely digital textual dimension. In this paper, a classification model is first developed to distinguish TikToks from conventional (short) films. The media-specific differences identified in this way are then analyzed with regard to their effects on forms of narration and aesthetics in fictional TikToks at both the cinematic and digital levels, in order to derive specific competence dimensions for dealing with TikTok in language classes for learners and teachers.