Why Are We So Obsessed With Disney Princess Memes?

There's a meme I've seen on Tumblr which I find oddly haunting. It's a girl from a Disney film, wide-eyed and smiling, watching as white sparkling rain falls from the sky. The effect is magical and seedy. The tags include "fairy tale" and "Disney princess" but also "grunge" and "hipster." Across the picture, capital letters spell "COCAINE."

This is the online afterlife of the Disney Princess, an uneasy nostalgia which glances back toward an era even the scrolling Facebook timeline cannot reach. Why do we keep coming back to her, and what does this princess obsession say about us?

Disney princesses consume the web: They're never far from Reddit, Buzzfeed, and clickbait sites like 9gag. These memes celebrate the princesses but are undercut with bitterness, as if to say the kind of magic we experienced in childhood is not achievable now (without drugs). Are we paying homage to the princesses, parodying them, or both?

A blend of adoration, self-loathing, and neurosis, the millennial princess complex plays out in fanfic, cosplay, and endless Tumblr GIFs. Cosplayers and makeup artists both male and female transform themselves into the princesses. Redditors ask "which princess would win in a fight?" "what makeup would they wear?" and "which princess would you bring with you on a bank heist?"

And listicles; everyone has seen the listicles, "reimagining" Disney princesses with their mothers, as dead, as realistic photo composites, as Fallout characters, and, um, as cement mixers. Each one represents a "what if?", questioning the traditional happy ending. The pictures are often technically and creatively brilliant, an example of the DeviantArt tendency welcomed into the mainstream.

Clearly there is comfort in nostalgia: The internet is a scary place, one where the princesses can offer some respite in sweetness and purity. But they also represent childhood as clickbait, a formula designed to feed the erroneous, Buzz-fed notion that 90s children are the OGs of the internet. The past is rewritten to accommodate social media as our new reality, capitalist realism applied to childhood kitsch. Many of us experienced Disney on homemade VHS tapes and Sunday afternoon TV, watched with parents and babysitters. Now we carry them into our online lives.

Though many of the films referenced in these memes are decades old, the Disney Princess as a cultural phenomenon is relatively recent, running in direct parallel with the childhood of viewers now referred to as millennials. The studio itself did not realise its own Princess revenue stream until 1989's The Little Mermaid, the first princess-themed film they had released since 1959's Sleeping Beauty. Its wildly popular heroine, Ariel, triggered a run of further princess titles—and their associated merchandise—including Beauty and the Beast, Pocahontas, and Mulan.

It's worth noting that this Disney Princess Generation was also the last to lack an online childhood. By retroactively fashioning one through shared memes, we are grafting technology onto the past.

It's easy to argue that princess fans demonstrate some kind of arrested development, a longing for childhood and escapism. Some social networks lend themselves to this more than others: Aside from (or perhaps, because of) its rampant porn content, Tumblr serves as an internet Wendy house, a place of sunrise skies and mirror selfies, gleeful materialism (it's little coincidence that sugar babies flourish there), cut with a fierce sense of social justice.

But there is also a gothic undercurrent to the princesses, fitting to Tumblr. Most of them are loners, befriending woodland birds and talking candelabras rather than their human peers. They are at odds with their parents (who, to be fair, are occasionally sociopathic or hell-bent on marrying them off to dodgy suitors), their society, or their own bodies. Often they live in exile, in a tower or a woodland or a castle. Is this so different to the lonely selfie-taker in her room? The disenchanted teenager, the pastel goth, the solitary vaporwave music maker?

This social media afterlife might also be how a generation works out its anxieties around what the princesses represent. Perhaps secretly, or on a subconscious level, millennials feel embarrassed and guilty about how much of their childhoods they invested in them: We might ourselves be the product of these "damaging stereotypes" the Daily Mail warns about. It is an uncomfortable truth that before we learn about feminism we learn femininity, and for many of us our first role models were skinny figures cast in plastic.

A study published in the journal Child Development last month found "princess culture" to be a negative, and occasionally dangerous thing. Titled "Pretty as a Princess: Longitudinal Effects of Engagement With Disney Princesses on Gender Stereotypes, Body Esteem and Prosocial Behaviour in Children," the study tracked 198 preschoolers and their engagement with "princess culture" through films and toys over a year. Researchers found that princess fans were more likely to show "stereotypically feminine behaviour," and that girls, especially, tended to have "worse body esteem."

The implication is that Disney films help limit girls to feminine archetypes, damaging their self esteem and limiting their options later in life (boys, too, were affected, but were found to be less vulnerable to the "thin ideal").

"We know that girls who strongly adhere to female gender stereotypes feel like they can't do some things," said researcher and BYU family life professor Sarah M. Coyne in a statement to the press. "They're not as confident that they can do well in math and science."

Strangest of all is when we try to atone for this by recasting the princesses as woke, a hollow endeavour in that they will still be princesses, and their stories have already been written. The princesses as feminist role models are especially flawed: Let's not forget that for a majority of Disney princesses, their goal in life is to marry into royalty. They have blonde hair and blue eyes, and they wear skirts rather than trousers.

Let's not forget that other meme, the rejection letter from Walt Disney Productions, written to a woman applying for work as an artist in 1938: "Dear Miss Ford, Your letter of recent date has been received in the Inking and Painting Department for reply. Women do not do any of the creative work in connection with preparing the cartoons for the screen, as that work is performed entirely by young men…."

2013's Frozen was the first Disney feature to be directed by a woman, Jennifer Lee.

And for every "empowered" princess meme, there are several which sexualise their passivity. Type "Disney after dark" into Tumblr or search "Disney Rule 34" or "Disney Princess bondage" on Reddit if you have any doubts. There's something very creepy about porn themed around the more wide-eyed, baby-faced princesses, though artists take measures, usually breast-related, to depict them as "grown up." For many, this is the ultimate "what if?": In the words of one Reddit user, "Childhood boners, unite!"

One way to level the playing field is by objectifying the princes in turn. A cottage industry has sprung up "reimagining"/creeping on Disney's men as much as the women for an audience of both gay men and straight women: They are given Tinder and Grindr profiles, given kitschy moustaches or grey hair. Sometimes they're a canvas for gender bending—fans who pose as both prince and princess, or reworkings of both princesses and princes cross-dressed as their counterparts. This is significant in that, for many, Disney characters were a sexual awakening. The studio has a hidden-in-plain-sight LGBT heritage, though it has yet to openly embrace it.

To me, the urge to reinterpret Disney's princesses has always been baffling: They're not enigmatic, only blank. The internet's obsession with them feels lazy, indicating a creative exhaustion and an inability to move on.

But the princess complex runs deep; she's in our DNA now, an "illusion of life" woven with reality. One meme presents not the princesses themselves but the colour schemes of their clothing, asking viewers to guess the character. It's disconcerting how easy it is to identify each one by her pastel ghost.

Regardless how we change, a princess remains a princess. She keeps coming back, from banishment and poisoned apples and even eternal sleep. In another Tumblr meme, Cinderella is dancing. The original film was made in 1950: Now she is distorted, pixelated and strange. Still she twirls on, on a blog with the title "I'm so fucked up."