If there’s a single social network built for fandom, it’s Tumblr, the weird, indie(-ish) collaborative social network built upon obsession and iteration. Doctor Who, the Marvel movies, One Direction, K-pop, Steven Universe, anime, dank memes, you name it: If there’s a particular bit of pop culture you care about beyond the point of normalcy, Tumblr is where you go to uncork that pent-up urge.
And of all of Tumblr’s thousands of obsessive fan blogs, there is none more infamous than the blog Constable-Frozen. As you might gather from the title, the blog focuses on the Disney animated hit Frozen. It consists entirely of context-free collections of Photoshopped images, presented without any caption, description, clarification, or explanation. The blog is, in a word, baffling, and has gotten stranger over time. Take this anime-inspired photoset in which Anna kills Hans with a katana.
Or this one, where Elsa is rendered small, kept in a Pringles can, and fed an enormous Pringles potato chip.
It is thanks to inexplicable and fascinatingly weird edits like these — and others incorporating other Disney properties, like the film Moana or the Marvel Cinematic Universe — that Constable-Frozen has developed a sizable cult following on Tumblr. It was exactly the sort of confusing, gonzo, excessive expression of fandom that Tumblr traffics in and excels at, and its anonymous creator’s mysteriousness only added to its allure. In a fractal expansion of obsession not uncommon to Tumblr, the fan blog gained its own fandom, and the legend of Constable-Frozen grew, even as the mind behind it stayed in the shadows.
As the wiki entry on TV Tropes states:
Constable Frozen’s debut onto Tumblr was met with concern and bemusement, as Constable Frozen’s art varies from the perplexing, to the insane, to the disturbing, to the very funny. This, combined with the poster’s total anonymity, has made Constable Frozen into a enigma. Despite this, a dedicated fanbase has built up around Constable Frozen, with adherents praising them as a comedic genius, some going so far as to state that their work has redeemed the Frozen Franchise.
Others agree:
And then, last week, something odd happened. Constable-Frozen posted this edit, featuring characters from the Disney film Tangled.
Over the years, the blog has broadened its focus to include other Disney animated film besides Frozen, but immediately, you can see that something is off. Namely, three characters are depicted in explicit bondage situations, and one character is wearing a ball gag. Not exactly Disney fare!
Tumblr users became, well, concerned. As user Portaltwo explained, “I am genuinely so fucking afraid of this post. There’s no context to it at all, as per the usual of constable frozen, but I desperately need context for this post in particular.”
“Is this a fetish? Is this constable frozen’s fetish? Are we unlocking constable frozen lore? I’m going to cry,” they continued.
The post has spurred users to revisit the entire corpus of Constable-Frozen posts, which is now, in retrospect, incredibly and very weirdly horny. There is the post where Olaf the snowman drinks milk, makes ice cream inside himself, and then feeds it to Anna and Elsa like a baby bird.
As BuzzFeed reporter Ryan Broderick elaborated on Twitter, other posts have involved odd ice-cream food-play, and one post involves the Frozen duo eating another character’s ramenlike hair.
What this whole ordeal has led to is the realization that for years, what seemed like a curious remixing of children’s entertainment might have actually been a Tumblr user being “horny on main” — the term for someone transparently expressing sexual desire in their primary online presence, rather than using an anonymized side account. (If you need an example of being horny on main, think Anthony Weiner accidentally tweeting a dick pic.)
The news has sent Constable-Frozen’s many followers into a tizzy. Is Constable-Frozen, in fact, a vore blog? (Vore, short for “vorarephilia,” is a fetish defined by Wikipedia as “characterized by the erotic desire to be consumed by, or sometimes to personally consume, another person or creature, or an erotic attraction to the process of eating in general.”)
I have been trying to find Constable-Frozen for at least a couple of years, but the account holder didn’t respond to direct messages on Tumblr. So a few months ago, I decided to do some digging. The earliest posts on the Tumblr linked to a South Korean forum, which I couldn’t parse at all. Thanks to the magic of Google Translate, however, I found bread crumbs leading to a YouTube channel (featuring an Elsa/Iron Man mash-up, also present on the Tumblr blog, with 500,000 views) and a dormant Instagram account featuring Disney paper craft. Through associated WHOIS records, I was able to find an email address for the mysterious poster, who confirmed this morning that his name was Shin Chul and that he ran Constable-Frozen.
We spoke briefly through Google Translate on both ends. Shin told me, “I was impressed with Frozen, so I started making pictures,” and that he gets his ideas from “Japanese comics, Hollywood movies, and my brain.” He likes Disney a lot, and “Frozen, Tangled, Big Hero 6, Zootopia, and Moana” are some of his favorites (they have all appeared on the blog at some point). He also seemed to express surprise when I referred to the Tumblr as popular.
But what I really wanted to ask about was the fetish aspect, which is difficult to approach when there’s a language barrier and it involves Disney characters projecting ice cream from their mouths like soft serve and eating each others’ hair. I asked what was happening in the Tangled ball-gag post, and he answered, “Hmm … well,” and did not elaborate.
I told him, “Some Tumblr users assume that your blog is a fetish blog. Is that true? (Also, are you familiar with vore?)”
He replied definitively: “My blog is not a fetish blog. I hate vore.”
Still, the gulf between artist and audience is wide. One person’s hobby is another’s fetish. Vore is in the eye of the beholder.
