Hipster Mermaid / Hipster Ariel

About

Hipster Ariel (a.k.a Hipster Mermaid) is an Advice Animal image macro series featuring a screenshot of Ariel from Disney’s 1989 animated film The Little Mermaid and a superimposed caption poking fun at hipsterisms, in similar vein to Hipster Kitty.

Origin

The original image comes from the 1989 Disney animated film The Little Mermaid^[10], which was based on the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale of the same name. Blogger Braden Graeber^[1] is credited as the creator of Hipster Mermaid on the F Yeah Hipster Ariel Tumblr^[2], where the earliest known instance was posted on February 2nd, 2011.

Hi, my name’s Braden. A little over a week ago. I photoshopped raybans on ariel and posted it as my facebook profile picture (I have red hair and wear raybans) and onto my tumblr. I posted a few more versions with all-caps helvetica captions. The rest is meme history…

Graeber also operates related social media accounts like Twitter^[3] and Facebook^[4] pages for “Hipster Mermaid” macros.

Spread

From Tumblr, the image macro series quickly spread elsewhere in February 2011, getting picked up by social media aggregators like Reddit^[5], BuzzFeed^[6] and MemeBase^[7] as well as image generator sites like MemeGenerator^[8] and Quickmeme^[9]. The series was also highlighted by a number of news sites and daily blogs such as Time Magazine^[11] and New York Magazine^[12] and Urlesque^[13].

Although the captions shared some overlap with previous Hipster Kitty image macros, Ariel’s iconic image struck a chord with the Internet’s childhood nostalgia. Its popularity soon surpassed that of the former series and went on to inspire a number of other hipster Disney character spin-offs.

Notable Instances

Cosplayers

Template

Search Interest

External References