The Lesbian Space Princess film, a barely animated 2025 Australian movie that almost nobody outside its home country had heard of, has become the unlikely glue holding fractured online fandoms together, simply by being, in the collective judgment of the internet, spectacularly bad.
Written and directed by Emma Hough Hobbs and Leela Varghese, the film follows Princess Saira from the planet Clitopolis in her battle against the Straight White Maliens. It holds a 98% critical rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The audience, however, has other views, and that gap between critical praise and popular reaction is exactly what set the whole thing off.
How the Lesbian Space Princess Film Became Everyone’s Shared Enemy
The mechanics are simple. Right-wing corners of the internet post clips to mock it as peak “woke” media. Left-leaning viewers post the same clips because, as the argument goes, it is so on-the-nose and terminally online that it stops being funny and becomes something else entirely. Fans of Hazbin Hotel share it to demonstrate how much worse things could be. Marvel fanboys join in for the same reason.
Then a meme phrase emerged: “Just this Once.” Fandoms that would normally spend their energy fighting each other (Naruto versus One Piece, football versus futbol) found themselves briefly aligned, united by a single shared conviction that the Lesbian Space Princess film is uniquely, comprehensively bad. According to some online, this amounts to nothing less than world peace.
It is, obviously, not world peace. But as internet phenomena go, it is a genuinely odd one: a film bringing people together not through love but through unanimous, cross-ideological derision.
From Berlin to a Belated UK Release
What makes the Lesbian Space Princess story stranger still is the film’s actual awards pedigree. It had its world premiere at the 75th Berlin International Film Festival on 16 February 2025, where it won the Teddy Award. That is not nothing. The Teddy is a well-established prize at Berlin, awarded to films with LGBTQ+ themes.
The film was released in the US on 31 October 2025. Its UK and Ireland release followed on 19 June 2026, having been pushed back from an earlier scheduled date of 22 May. So by the time British audiences could see it in the conventional sense, it had already become a meme on a global scale.
That timeline matters. The viral moment did not happen because audiences rushed out to see the Lesbian Space Princess film in cinemas. It happened because clips started circulating online, divorced from any theatrical context, and the reaction snowballed. The film went from obscure Australian festival winner to internet flashpoint without most people ever watching it properly.
Whether the meme cycle translates into actual box office interest now that it has a UK release date is another question. Sometimes notoriety does that. Sometimes it does not.
Aura Battles and the Week’s Other Nonsense
The Lesbian Space Princess phenomenon is the most interesting thread in an otherwise chaotic week of youth culture. Elsewhere: aura battles have arrived in the US, apparently originating in Latin America in early 2026. An aura battle is a public contest of coolness and charisma, judged by crowd reaction, with no particular skill requirement. A self-billed “first-ever American aura championship” took place in New York City. It looks, to the uninitiated, like people doing bad versions of meme dances in public. This is not a criticism. Getting young people outside and interacting with each other is, on balance, a good outcome.
Then there is pheromone maxxing, young men skipping showers on the theory that unwashed human scent functions like animal pheromones and will make them more attractive. The vast majority of online responses to this idea are, straightforwardly, “ew.” The scientific consensus, such as it is, does not support the hypothesis, and the anecdotal evidence from the general population of unwashed, single men is not encouraging.
And Cat in the Hat memes have triggered police involvement and school lockdowns across multiple countries, including an incident in Constantine, Michigan, where a user called “catinthehat” reportedly threatened specific students, prompting state police and the FBI to respond. The broader trend involves AI-generated videos of someone dressed as the cartoon cat, accompanied by cryptic warnings and ominous music. There is no Cat in the Hat serial killer. There is, however, a great deal of institutional panic.
Of the three, only the Lesbian Space Princess film has a Teddy Award, a Berlin premiere, and a UK release date. Make of that what you will.
