Once upon a time, a bunch of people on the internet couldn’t identify satire when they saw it, then tripped over themselves being racist haters about it. Yes, this is the story of when a self-identified Disney-focused satire blog wrote a post claiming that actress Jada Pinkett Smith was cast as Princess Rapunzel in Disney’s upcoming live-action remake of Tangled. Soon after, some TikTokers who are a bit … ignorant picked up the fake news as fact and started to let their mouths and harmful vocabularies run wild, identifying themselves as real a-holes in the process.
Mouse Trap News, the blog that published the article, also posted a video version of the satire piece on their TikTok, where it got picked up as gospel by other accounts, despite the fact that their bio literally says their content is “100% FAKE‼️”
As one TikToker who saw the fake news and ran with it, @yourfavoriteguy, explained to his 2.8 million followers, “… you know the young white girl with incredibly long hair with magical powers? Yeah, that’s right, they casted Jada Pinkett Smith, a Black, 51-year-old woman with no hair … what is Disney doing?” What indeed? It almost seems as if the cultural flashpoint moment at last year’s Academy Awards, involving Pinkett Smith being a woman who has no hair because of alopecia, might suggest that readers should dig deeper into the source of this random news. In his active comments section, the POVs are mixed, with some folks calling him out for it obviously being fake news and others bemoaning their view that Disney is ruining itself with “wokeness.”
He went on to call Disney “out of touch” and say they were casting all the exact opposite and wrong people in their live-action movies, presumably referring to the major public outpouring of racist hate against the decision to cast Halle Bailey in The Little Mermaid. He blamed casting as the reason Disney has lost $900 million recently, saying they “want a person of color for their movie,” and he’s “pretty sure it has something to do with diversity.” Right. What a luminary.
Another TikTok “luminary” posted her self-described “rant” on the matter, complaining that Disney “already messed up The Little Mermaid,” with a Black lead actor, describing how she recently babysat a little girl who wore a Little Mermaid shirt with “the Black one,” instead of the “normal one.” And what was the only difference between these two mermaids? Their race. It’s not about anything but race. These racists are so eager to be racist that they’re leaping to complain that Disney is destroying itself with a movie that they not only haven’t seen, but that doesn’t exist, based purely on the skin color of the imaginary lead.
They only thing they’ve proved is that their opinions aren’t worth listening to.
(featured image: Amy Sussman/WireImage)
