Written by Salonee Kulkarni

On 24 November, 2010, Tangled hit cinema theatres. The film tells the story of a young princess locked away in a tower by her mother, Mother Gothel, who is fiercely protective. Meeting Flynn Rider changes how she sees the world: a vibrant place full of life, hope, dance and inclusivity, painted in lilac and yellow.

Gen Z is building its identity in a burning room. Social media is swept with extreme right-wing ideologies, algorithmic outrage and digital tribalism. For a generation raised on the promise of the internet as a “global village”, the hostility feels like a personal betrayal. A sea of the saffron wave has choked the blue bird; what remains is an X mark. The tower today is algorithmic. The echo chamber amplifies hate, rewards outrage and pushes individuals deeper into ideological corners.

While the East battles divisive politics in digital spaces, Gen Z in the West is equally fractured. Political parties in the land of the free trend hashtags like #AmericaFirst. America, once referred to as the melting pot, where individuals from diverse cultures interacted, has witnessed a surge in rhetoric now inclined towards deportation and immigrant hostility.

But who is Mother Gothel? Is it the government, the algorithm, or the emerging digital tribes?

While Gen Z lives in one of the most politically fractured ecosystems in recent memory, they have also found comfort in plush toys, rewatching childhood cartoons, building LEGO monuments, DIY painting and experiencing entertainment through the eyes of a child. This retreat into nostalgia is not always escapism. Sometimes, it is emotional survival. In doing so, they allow innocence and play to begin healing the fractures between them.

Yet that bridge is crowded with competing digital tribes, and the weight of their hostility is causing it to crack.

As you scroll through the internet, it is not uncommon to find jarring snippets of videos or words in the comment section. Even those who do not wish to engage with hostility are eventually forced to confront it. I watched for sixty seconds and felt like a stranger in a country I used to call home. During the 2024 elections, one Twitter account posted an animated character holding a saffron flag and predicting the elections would cross the 400 mark. The hashtag #SaffronTwitter flooded social media, and even the logo of the platform was not spared. Its colour changed for users who leaned right.

The youth seems broken into fragments. Several belief communities now function on tribal hostility alone. Even as the digital world promised to stitch together conflict and reshape ideals of peace, the “ingroup” and “outgroup” divide only deepened.

A reminder that I live in two worlds, and in one of them, the walls are made of screens.

Gen Z needs to climb down the tower and venture into real conversations not clouded by preconceived notions shaped online. It is not only the echo chamber that dents our ability to eliminate barriers, but also the “digital diary” Gen Z is unable to log out of. So I built something quieter inside it.

In 2022, I created a digital story garden where the magic of everyday life intertwined with the urgent whispers of our times. I drafted fictional stories curated from headlines. The visual space was deliberately warm, with pink and blue colours catching the eye. It took effort to curate a page where stories of urgent times could be written fictionally yet remain rooted in reality.

Over time, every story settled into the archive of the account. A moment attached itself to every post.

Today, when I revisit the archive, I don’t just see photos uploaded online, but memories digitally preserved in a grid. The archive feels less like content and more like emotional evidence that I existed in those moments. It brings a range of emotions and a longing for years that have already passed as digital dust collects in binary numbers.

One such archive was a plushie post from 2022, just after the pandemic, when the world was beginning to open again. It was a pink-and-blue octopus that could be reversed to reveal two colours. I received it on Raksha Bandhan. The picture evoked nostalgia and the sweet memory of spending the day with my sibling.

I vividly remember buying it; the retailer gave Toto a gentle push to wake him up. I named him Toto and gave him a birth certificate. I was nineteen. It was enough.

In turbulent times, Toto became my emotional anchor. Every Gen Z individual in an unpredictable economy seems to be gravitating towards ritualised or playful consumption through LEGO blogs, pretend play, escape rooms, murder mystery games, plushies and interactive worlds.

The playful consumption of a dramatic scenario may last only fifteen or twenty minutes, but what that brief window reveals is extraordinary. Gen Z is building a world that needs no passport: a shared language, a set of rules adults willingly agree to play by, an infrastructure curated for an invented world.

Jellycat in London has created its own notebook for shop conversations. Here, plushies live, breathe and are cared for. While the sensory design may appear childlike, Gen Z has become central to the brand through what is called kidulting. The comradeship of pretend play is radical precisely because it is rooted in shared goofiness and vulnerability. The imaginative storylines dissolve rigid adult identities, soften biases and create opportunities for honest connection within a borderless tribe.

It becomes difficult to label someone as “other” when both of you have accepted the name of a stuffed toy.

But here’s the catch: it is not entirely utopian. The rules of the playground have to be reframed. To engage in pretend play, we rely on memory and vulnerability. The memory of childhood has to feel inclusive, and the imagination must be shared.

Kidulting can only become collective when people have equal access to childhood itself. A child cannot be playing on a trampoline while another is left with stones and sticks. The gap within those memories can create hurdles in this emotional revolution. Closing that gap is what creates space for individuals across ethno-cultural and religious identities to exist as global citizens with genuinely diverse and multifaceted identities.

Perhaps Mother Gothel is the algorithm, learning our fears and feeding them back to us, amplified until the tower begins to feel like home.

On 24 November, 2010, Rapunzel finally saw the lanterns.

Fifteen years later, Gen Z is still lighting them. Not because someone rescued them, but because enough people, from enough towers, decided to light one at the same time.

(The author is an intern with The Indian Express)