This month marks the 10-year anniversary of the I Will Fight You podcast. In celebration, my co-hosts and I decided to revisit the first movie we ever covered: The Swan Princess.
I keep track of all the movies I own and watch via a website called Trakt, and when I looked up The Swan Princess, I noticed something unusual about the banner image attached to its Trakt listing:
I’ve seen a lot of official promo images for The Swan Princess over the years, and this didn’t look like any of them. That, plus the signature down in the corner, made me suspect this wasn’t an official image at all.
It’s sure being treated like an official image, though. It shows up in the photos section of the movie’s Rotten Tomatoes listing, its Common Sense Media listing, its TMDB listing, this listicle on Looper, and appears to be somewhere in the movie’s image library on Sky TV:
I posted this picture in the Crooked Russian Cam Discord, and eventually one of our members managed to track down the source (thanks, Zagil!). It’s a piece of fanart, drawn by an artist who goes by madam-marla on DeviantArt.
It seems that, sometime in the early 2010s, a blogger went looking for art to accompany a post about The Swan Princess and found madam-marla’s piece through Google image search. Then another blog picked up the image, and another, until inadvertent SEO pushed it near the top of the image search listings for the movie. From there, tired interns and/or automated image scrapers picked it up as an official promotional image, and now it’s everywhere.
I think madam-marla might be owed some money.
This Week’s Links
“Tinder for Nazis” hit by 100GB data leak, thousands of users exposed
Root said she contacted a hacker who helped to exfiltrate the data. However, no hacks were required – all it took was a simple URL trick of adding “download-all-users/” to the top-level domain.
Mermaids are Seafood
You work at a mermaid-sourcing corporation. Gamble your blood, upgrade your luck with insider deals, and sew fish tails onto human torsos. Use the profits to pay off your debts and bribe others. “Mermaids are Seafood” is a management game with choices and a branching story.
I’m Kenyan. I Don’t Write Like ChatGPT. ChatGPT Writes Like Me.
The machine, in its quest to sound authoritative, ended up sounding like a KCPE graduate who scored an ‘A’ in English Composition. It accidentally replicated the linguistic ghost of the British Empire.
By the way, the new Swan Princess episode is now recorded and will be out later this month. We talked about it for twice as long as the actual runtime of the movie.
-K
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