Disaster Girl
Where it came from
A 2005 photo of four-year-old Zoë Roth in front of a controlled house fire in North Carolina. She's looking over her shoulder at the camera with an unmistakably devious smirk. Became a meme in 2008.
A small child stands in front of a burning house. She is smiling. Not a worried smile — a "yeah, I did that" smile. The caption is whatever chaos you secretly enjoyed causing. "When you told your friend a spoiler by accident and they're spiraling."
The whole meme lives in that one expression. She looks so casually pleased with herself, and the fire in the background is doing the rest. It's the visual shorthand for petty delight at someone else's problem.
Still works, used occasionally. And in 2021, the real Zoë sold the original photo as an NFT for about $500,000, which is somehow a perfect ending to any meme story from that era.
Search interest, over time
↳ data courtesy of google trends
