Disaster Girl

Some people just want to watch the world burn. She was four.

In January 2005, Dave Roth took his family to watch a controlled fire drill in Mebane, North Carolina. The fire department was burning down a house for practice. Dave snapped a photo of his daughter Zoe standing in the foreground.

Zoe was smiling. Not a normal smile. A knowing smile. A smile that said she had done this. A smile that implied arson.

Dave titled the photo "Firestarter" and uploaded it to Zooomr on January 2, 2007. In November 2008, he submitted it to JPG Magazine's "Emotion Capture" competition. The internet discovered it, and a legend was born.

Disaster Girl became the avatar of gleeful destruction. She was photoshopped into every catastrophe imaginable—the Hindenburg, the Titanic, nuclear explosions, your ex's wedding. That knowing smirk fit everywhere chaos reigned.

The meme peaked between 2008-2011, becoming one of the most recognizable images of the era. Zoe Roth grew up as the most famous arsonist who never committed arson. She handled it with remarkable grace, eventually selling the original image as an NFT for approximately $500,000 in 2021.

The format faded as newer chaos emerged, but Disaster Girl's smile endures in our collective memory—a reminder that sometimes the scariest thing isn't the fire, but the four-year-old who seems suspiciously pleased about it.

She didn't start the fire. Probably. We'll never know for sure.

That smile will haunt us forever.