The True Story Behind This Scary Meme
Amanda Green
July 15, 2016, 12:05 PM
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Photo: Courtesy of Dave Roth.
Zoe Roth, 16, is not a pyromaniac. But it's true that, a few weeks ago, she and a friend spent two hours trying to light a campfire in Lake Tahoe, where Zoe's working a summer restaurant job. "Everything was wet, and it was so frustrating," she laughs. "I was, like, 'C'mon, this is my meme!'" That meme, known as Disaster Girl, shows 4-year-old Zoe smiling slyly at the camera while a house burns in the background. She looks adorable... and creepy as hell. For the record, Zoe didn't start that fire in the photograph. She was watching TV with her brother Tristan one Saturday morning in January 2004, when her mom said a house down the street was burning. Dave Roth, Zoe’s dad, quickly gathered the kids and his new digital camera. News travels fast in Mebane, North Carolina, just 20 miles outside Chapel Hill. By the time the Roths arrived at the blaze, it was a community event. Any sense of danger quickly dissipated as onlookers learned the house had been donated to the fire department for training. Families watched the controlled inferno like they would a high school football game. Firefighters invited neighborhood children to spray the flames with the hose. Meanwhile, the Roths studied the scene from across the street.
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“There was no danger or stress in the situation at all,” Dave recalls. “The kids and I walked around to see the fire from different angles. It was cool — something you don’t see every day.” Dave, an amateur photographer, snapped 20 or 30 photos before heading home, capturing Zoe and Tristan as they watched the blaze. When he reviewed his pictures, Dave thought the fire was the most interesting part. Three years later, he uploaded one of the images of Zoe on the photo sharing community Zooomr and titled it “Firestarter.” Comments started pouring in, forcing Dave to see his work in a new light. “I guess because I knew the whole backstory, I’d overlooked the expression on Zoe’s face until then,” he says. “But someone with a blank slate has to make sense of the fire in the background and then the little girl with a creepy half-smile. It’s like something out of a horror movie.” In November 2007, Dave entered “Firestarter” in a JPG Magazine “Emotion Capture” photo contest. Months later, he learned he’d won $100, a subscription to the magazine, and publication in the February/March 2008 issue. Instead of telling 8-year-old Zoe the good news, Dave decided to surprise her. “My dad handed me a magazine, and I started flipping through it,” Zoe says. “Then I saw the picture of me — and I flipped out! I took it to school the next day and showed everyone.” She felt famous, but it was only the beginning. JPG Magazine shared “Firestarter” on its website, and the image spread like, well, you know. Internet users began photoshopping Zoe into historic catastrophes, from the sinking of the Titanic to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima to 9/11, and sharing their work on viral sites like Fark, Reddit, and eBaum’s World. Buzzfeed aggregated the doctored photos to make a timeline going all the way back to the extinction of the dinosaurs. Somewhere along the way, Zoe became "Disaster Girl." Dave didn’t know about the meme until Zooomr user Ben Dan Hawks sent him a link.
More:
https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2016/07/116732/who-is-disaster-girl-meme
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