Mad at Disney
Song Meaning

“Mad at Disney” by salem ilese is about feeling betrayed by the fairy tale ideals Disney sold her as a child, particularly the idea that a prince’s kiss or “happily ever after” defines love. Ilese wrote it after moving to LA and dropping out of college, a period when she was confronting how different real life and real love felt from the Disney fantasy she’d been raised on 1. The song specifically targets the damsel-in-distress trope and the “true love’s kiss” myth from stories like Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella, arguing that women don’t need saving and that love isn’t one clean feeling but a messy combination of many 1.

The meaning

At its core, “Mad at Disney” is salem ilese processing the gap between the fairy tales she grew up on and the reality of adulthood and relationships. She’s written that the song was one of the first she wrote after moving to LA and dropping out of college in her second year, a time she describes as learning “more about you know actual reality as opposed to the disney fantasy that everyone wishes they lived in” 1. The line “I’m mad at Disney, Disney, they tricked me, tricked me” isn’t really about the studio itself; it’s about the stories she absorbed as a kid setting her up for confusion and disappointment as an adult.

A specific target of ilese’s frustration is the “archaic princess stereotype” present in the movies she grew up with, particularly the reliance on a prince to “break the spell or get them out of the tower or slay the dragons” 1. She’s said directly that “in reality we don’t need to be saved” and that women can “slay their own metaphorical dragons” 1. That theme shows up in verse two, where Cinderella’s story “only ended in a bad divorce” and the prince takes his “sleeping beauty to the motel on his snow white horse,” a cynical rewrite of what happens after the fairy tale ending, which ilese has confirmed was a deliberate choice to imagine “what if cinderella got divorced” and the prince cheated with Sleeping Beauty 1.

The song’s central question, repeated in the chorus, “what the hell is love supposed to feel like?,” reflects ilese’s own admitted pessimism about romance. She’s described herself as “pretty anti-romantic just in general” 1, and the lyric “finding a true love’s kiss is bullshit” pushes back specifically on the Sleeping Beauty trope of being “woken up by true love’s kiss,” a shorthand she says gets used for everything from “love at first sight” onward 1. Rather than treating love as a single, recognizable feeling, ilese has said her working definition is that “love is actually not a feeling, it’s all of the feelings combined,” since it’s felt different every time she’s experienced it 1. That ambivalence, feeling “sad love,” “bad love,” “hurt love” all wrapped into one word, is the emotional core the chorus is built around.

Underneath the fairy tale critique is a more personal thread about fear of vulnerability. Ilese has said she was “so so scared” of telling someone she loved them, worried that the moment she did, they’d break her heart 1. That fear connects the song’s skepticism about Disney’s romantic promises to a real, lived hesitation about opening up. She’s also noted that this anti-fairy-tale, self-reliant streak isn’t new. She recalled lyrics she wrote at age nine that said fairy tales “don’t have happy endings” and that she’d “break the spell by myself” instead of waiting to be rescued 1, suggesting “Mad at Disney” is less a sudden revelation and more a fully grown-up version of something she’d felt since childhood.

Last updated 2026-08-28