The fervor around Fiona makes sense, given the polarized, tense, mass anxiety swirling around the country this year. When times get rough, we tend to project our hopes and fears onto animals. It happened during the global economic meltdown, when the baby polar bear Knut became the undeniable star of the Berlin Zoo, raised by hand by his trainer after his mother, Tosca, rejected him in 2006. (Knut’s entire short life was blanketed by controversy — are polar bears meant to be raised by humans? — and ended in tragedy, as he slipped into the water and drowned in front of horrified zoogoers in 2011.)

As the animal philosopher Steven Cave wrote in an essay about Knut’s death, the bear’s story serves as a poignant cautionary tale about celebrity animals: “We might search for nature in zoos, but what we find are our conflicting ideas of nature reflected back at us. Those who believe we can live in harmony with the beasts and so redeem ourselves will try to catch the eye of the next animal superstar.” Of the bronze statue of Knut that now stands in the Berlin Zoo, he writes, “It is not Knut the Dreamer, but Knut as we dream him who is realized in bronze for future generations to chirp and coo over.”

In other words, it can be dangerous to overhype and anthropomorphize wild animals, as we project our fantasies and desires onto them and turn the narrative into a heartwarming tale that serves to reaffirm our own sense of goodness. The animal becomes a meme, a product, a unit of sale. As the late critic John Berger wrote of celebrity creatures living in zoos: “This reduction of the animal, which has a theoretical as well as economic history, is part of the same process as that by which men have been reduced to isolated productive and consuming units.”

And yet, many of Fiona’s keepers insist that she courts and adores the attention. “She absolutely knows she is a star,” Ms. Gorsuch said. “I’ve been in this industry over 20 years and I’ve never seen or experienced or heard anything like this. She loves the camera. She has the biggest personality. And yet she is clearly a hippo. When we reintroduced her to her parents, she knew how to be a hippo immediately. She has an incredible ability to balance her little worlds; being an animal, and being in public.”

The day I visited Fiona, Cincinnati was chilly and overcast and only a few fans were lingering around Hippo Cove, the $7.5 million enclosure that opened in 2016 and offers visitors the rare opportunity to view hippos as they frolic underwater. Fiona was out and spinning, like “Fantasia” brought to life. But where the vintage Disney version of hippos in tutus now feels more like a cruel, shaming joke, the experience of watching Fiona pirouetting felt joyful and buoyant. A roly-poly imp, she swam underneath the 3,300-pound body of Bibi, her mother. Fiona’s father, Henry, was inside, having suffered for months with infection and weight loss, an old man in hippo years at 36.