The American Girl Doll Meme Is Peak Shitposting | Glamour

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How did you learn that the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade? From your Twitter feed? A push notification? A text from a friend?

For some followers of Barrett Adair, who coruns the popular American Girl meme account @hellicty_merriman on Instagram, the answer is an ’80s-inspired American Girl Doll named Courtney Moore. The bucktoothed preteen wearing a “Totally Cool” T-shirt broke the news with the following message for the six justices who voted in favor of overturning the precedent: “I hope each of you soulless fucks never knows peace again for the rest of your lives.”

“I’ve had multiple people be like, ‘Why am I getting my news from a meme account?’” Adair jokes when we speak on the phone earlier this summer. “And I’m like, ‘I’m so sorry about that. I didn’t want that to happen to you.’”

The most liked comment on the account’s reactionary Roe post? “We need an American girl doll who dissents.”

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The American Girl Doll meme exploded over social media last month, largely thanks to TikTok, where the #AmericanGirlDoll hashtag has a staggering 315 million views. The original “We need an American Girl who…” meme format has spawned thousands of iterations, from “needing a doll who was a passenger on the Mayflower” to “needing a doll who cried when they found out Nick Jonas released the Type 1 diabetes anthem ‘A Little Bit Longer.’” 

Accounts like @hellicity_merriman (a play on American Girl Felicity Merriman) and @juuliealbright (a nod to another doll, Julie Albright) have found success replicating the format over and over. You take the dead-eyed doll, an obscure cultural phenomenon, and blend the two together. The result is a curated post that sits squarely in the middle of humorous and offensive—or what the internet calls shitposting, the unhinged, stream-of-consciousness-style posts Gen Z popularized.