What is Princess Leia?

Princess Leia is a fictional Rebel Alliance leader from the Star Wars films, played by Carrie Fisher, whose side-bun hairstyle and gold bikini made her a long-running subject of fan art, cosplay and reaction memes.

Where did Princess Leia come from?

The character was created by George Lucas and first appeared in Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope in 1977, with subsequent appearances through the sequel trilogy shaping her most-memed looks.

What does Princess Leia mean as a meme?

Online, Leia works as both a nostalgia and tribute meme: bun swaps and bikini cosplay for jokes, and #CarrieOnForever posts as annual memorials for Fisher after her 2016 death.

How do you use Princess Leia?

The common convention is to remix her buns with another round object or caption a Rebel-era still with a modern joke; tribute posts typically pair a Leia image with #CarrieOnForever and a line from Hamill's 2017 remembrance.

Is Princess Leia still popular?

Yes, Leia stays a classic fandom meme: tribute posts recur every December 27 anniversary, and her buns and bikini remain heavily referenced in Star Wars cosplay and fan-art archives.

Princess Leia

1977character / fandom memeclassic

Published September 23, 2026

Princess Leia is the Rebel leader from the Star Wars saga, played by Carrie Fisher, whose cinnamon-bun hair and gold bikini turned her into one of the most parodied characters in fan art, cosplay and internet culture. After Fisher's death in December 2016, tribute posts and the #CarrieOnForever hashtag transformed Leia into a recurring memorial figure that still circulates every anniversary.

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Overview

Princess Leia works as a meme on three loops that fans keep looping back to: the side-bun hairstyle from A New Hope, the gold Jabba's-palace bikini from Return of the Jedi, and Carrie Fisher's sharp real-life voice on Twitter1. Cinnamon-bun jokes, Photoshops swapping her buns for headphones or pastries, and the endlessly reworked bikini shot are the base image formats, while her lines and blaster-toting stills are recycled as reaction images inside Star Wars fan spaces1.

The second layer is tribute content. When Fisher died in 2016, fan art, GIF sets and quote cards took over Tumblr and Twitter, and the character became a stand-in for mourning the actress herself2. That mix of parody and eulogy is what separates the Leia meme from most other legacy Star Wars characters, whose meme output is mostly jokes without a mourning strand attached3.

Gallery

Origin & Background

Platform

Film (Star Wars, 1977) / Tumblr and Twitter (viral fan spread)

Date

1977

The character debuted in Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope in May 1977, written and directed by George Lucas, with Fisher cast as the 19-year-old senator and Rebel leader3. Her two most meme-heavy visual beats came from that film's side buns and from the gold metal bikini worn during the Jabba the Hutt sequence in Return of the Jedi (1983), an outfit later reported on by outlets covering its complicated legacy in fandom4.

Leia's move from film character to internet shorthand happened gradually across the 2000s and 2010s through cosplay circuits, DeviantArt galleries and Tumblr fan communities, where the buns and bikini became instantly readable costume references3. Fisher's own social presence sharpened the meme surface further: her blunt tweets and self-deprecating jokes about the character made Leia feel active online in a way most 1977 film roles are not1.

How It Spread

The cinnamon-bun comparison and gold-bikini cosplay were staples of convention photography and fan art blogs well before the current meme era, and outlets like MentalFloss traced the buns' pop-culture reach in explainer pieces about the hairstyle's origins5. Fanfiction.net, DeviantArt and Tumblr each hosted large tagged archives of Leia work, and Reddit spun off dedicated subreddits like r/SlaveLeia focused specifically on the bikini imagery3.

The biggest single burst of meme activity came after December 27, 2016, when Fisher died at 60 following a heart attack days earlier2. Cinnabon posted an image of Fisher drawn in cinnamon with a roll replacing her bun, and Smash Mouth tweeted an edit with their logo pasted over her; both were pulled after backlash, with CBS News reporting Cinnabon's public apology6. A separate viral thread grew around a Katherine Nesbitt tweet reviving Fisher's own line from her memoir, "drowned in moonlight, strangled by my own bra," written up by Quartz and Daily Dot7.

One year later, on December 27, 2017, Mark Hamill posted a set of photos of Fisher with the caption "No one's ever really gone… #AlwaysWithUs #CarrieOnForever," which pulled more than 47,000 retweets and 141,000 likes in under a day1. The #CarrieOnForever hashtag became the recurring annual anchor for Leia tribute posts across Twitter1.

Timeline

1977-05-25

Princess Leia debuts in Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope, establishing the side-bun hairstyle that later drives cinnamon-roll and headphones edits.

1983-05-25

Return of the Jedi introduces the gold Jabba's-palace bikini, which becomes a cosplay and fan-art staple for decades.

2015-12-18

Fisher returns as General Leia in The Force Awakens, re-energizing meme output around the character.

2016-12-27

Carrie Fisher dies at 60; Cinnabon and Smash Mouth face backlash for tribute images that leaned on the bun and bikini iconography.

2017-12-27

Mark Hamill posts #CarrieOnForever tribute images, seeding an annual Leia memorial meme cycle on Twitter.

How to Use This Meme

The template is usually visual: swap Leia's buns for another round object (cinnamon rolls, headphones, Beats, donuts), or drop her Rebel-briefing stills into a modern political or fandom caption. Tribute posts often pair a still of Fisher-as-Leia with the tag #CarrieOnForever and a line about "no one's ever really gone," borrowed from Mark Hamill's 2017 remembrance post1.