We Need An American Girl Doll Who X

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About

We Need an American Girl Doll Who X is a phrasal template popularized on Twitter and Instagram in which people sarcastically advocate for an American Girl Doll who has taken part in a certain activity, subculture or event, generally from the 2010s. The snowclone is sometimes seen as a parody of calls for certain types of representation in American Girl dolls and other kinds of media, but also as a way of invoking nostalgia for the 2000s and 2010s. The image macro memes began appearing in late 2019, spreading over the following years.

Origin

On October 15th, 2019, Twitter user @BARBIEBRUISE posted a tweet calling for an "egirl American Girl doll," using the phrasing from 2017's We Need A Disney Princess snowclone meme. The tweet received 37 likes in roughly two and a half years.^[1]

Calls for new kinds of American Girl Dolls were sparse until February 4th, 2022, when Twitter user @juuliealbright advocated for a "psych ward" American Girl Doll in a tweet that received over 830 likes in four months, the first variant of the meme trend to receive significant engagement.^[2]

The trend gained more momentum in spring 2022 as the Instagram account @hellicity_merriman, which specializes in American Girl Doll memes of all kinds, starting posting memes of imagined American Girl Dolls with the descriptions of the experiences that the dolls went through overlaid on top of them. The account's first meme of this kind, from May 16th, 2022, received over 5,550 likes in one month.^[3]

Spread

The meme spread both in text-only and image-centered forms throughout the following months. For example, the Instagram account @hellicity_merriman posted more memes in the format and started soliciting suggestions from followers. In a June 2nd, 2022, meme (seen below) that received over 6,400 likes in 20 days, @hellicity_merriman shared that they have received "over 1,000 submissions" for types of American Girl Doll to be memed.^[4] On Instagram, the memes typically drifted towards obscure historical events and personalities.

On Twitter, We Need An American Girl Doll memes were heavily influenced by 2010s pop culture, with tweets about American Girl Dolls embodying particular social types seen in American society at that time. Twitter user @juuliealbright posted some of the highest engagement examples, including a meme posted on June 12, 2022, which earned over 720 likes in one week.^[5]

Media coverage of the meme trend cropped up on June 16th, 2022, with an article by Buzzfeed listing a series of memes in the format.^[6] Cheeseburger also published an article on the memes.^[7]