Social media is hard. There are so many memes, and they just keep coming. How is Disney‘s social media team supposed to understand them all? Well, it appears they really didn’t understand a classic one because they had to quickly delete a controversial post after it went up.
The post contained images of some of Disney’s more popular TV show characters who live together with the caption, “omg they were roommates.” Out of context, that seems totally cool and harmless, but with an understanding of this particular meme, things get pretty gross, pretty quickly.
See, “Omg they were roommates” is an old Vine meme in which a woman walks by a man speaking loudly on her phone being shocked that two people were roommates. It took off, eventually taking on the idea that the roommates were actually more than just roommates and were sexually involved. These days, it’s often used for fan ships as a way to insinuate some characters are more than just friends.
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You can see where the problems lie now. There are a slew of siblings in this photo, including Mabel and Dipper Pines from Gravity Falls, Phineas and Ferb from Phineas and Ferb, the siblings from Big City Green, and Milo and Oscar from Fish Hooks. They’re all pretty bad, but maybe the use of Lilo & Stitch is the toughest pill to swallow, given one of them is a child and the other isn’t of this planet. It’s all just gross and not something that should go up on a social media page that typically traffics in wholesome content directed toward children and adults who love a good theme park.
Clearly, despite it likely being an honest mistake, someone on Disney’s social media team did not understand what this meme was about. Maybe they were just scrolling through Know Your Meme looking for a meme to use and stumbled on this. The first part of the page doesn’t explain the sexual connotation at all, so if they decided to just read the opening paragraph and then go with it, it makes sense how something like this could happen. Whatever the cause of this situation, Disney obviously quickly took the post off its TikTok page due to the almost-immediate controversial reaction, and some social media manager somewhere is surely getting a dressing down. Not a good way to spend a Friday.
