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Barbie’s mugshot is now a nerdy fan art meme

Everyone good ship has a Barbie and a Ken

A still from the Barbie movie that shows Barbie taking a mugshot. Barbie is played by Margot Robbie and she looks distressed as she holds up a sign that says Barbie LAPD Venice. Image: Warner Bros.
Ana Diaz (she/her) is a culture writer at Polygon, covering internet culture, fandom, and video games. Her work has previously appeared at NPR, Wired, and The Verge.

The Barbie movie might just have produced the last good meme on Twitter.

Last week, director Greta Gerwig and Warner Bros. released a trailer for Barbie. In it, Barbie slugs a man in Venice Beach and gets thrown in jail, with the trailer showing both her booking photo (and Ken’s).

Those images have inspired a wave of memes online, as people now share fan art that swaps Barbie and Ken out for other characters from treasured video game and anime franchises.

One of the early viral posts was shared online by user Mew on Twitter. In the tweet, you can see both Barbie and Ken’s mugshots side by side. Barbie looks concerned and stressed whereas Ken is just beaming with the widest smile. The dichotomy between their reactions clearly endeared more than a few fans, and the tweet garnered over 32 thousand quote tweets at the time of publication.

The quote tweets are now stuffed with fan art referencing seemingly every fandom that’s ever existed. There are anime characters, video game heroes, even the Muppets.

This phenomenon began on Twitter, but inevitably spread to other social platforms like TikTok:

There are too many tweets to stuff into this story; you scroll through the quote tweets for yourself if you want more.

Barbie and all her shenanigans come to theaters July 21.

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