miscellaneous
[Sad Specific IRL Trope] A character made by someone ends up being used by the worst people ever as a meme, thus making you feel bad for the original creator
Chill Guy (My New Character) - Phillip Banks
Chill Guy was used as a meme coin in 2024, resulting in Banks having to copyright the character, but this resulting in him getting doxxed by Crypto-Bros
Silly Cat (Later known as Boykisser) - Mauzymice
Silly Cat was only used for silly gifs, but later on someone else made a caption that would later be known as the Boykisser, what made it worse is that the boykisser gif was later used for predatory purposes. Resulting in Mauzymice to get harrassed off the internet. (wait what do you mean it got worse recently?)
TBH, I don't really know how the Pissing Calvin came to be, or why it didn't get stomped out.
It was just a bootleg edit that went viral before the internet. The first documented use was at a college football game, with Calvin urinating on the opposing team's logo.
Watterson did talk to his comics syndicate about shutting the bootleg stickers down, and their answer was that the problem was so widespread, they'd need more money to take all the bootleggers to court. And they'd need to merchandise Calvin & Hobbes to get that kind of money. Watterson then decided the pissing Calvin stickers were the lesser of two evils.
And what’s worse, as a lifelong C&H fan old enough to have all the original books and saved the very last newspaper comic ever printed, is that image is the antithesis of the character.
Calvin is just an imaginative, impulsive child that gets into trouble because he doesn’t take school seriously and likes to try new things. He was never, ever malicious like that, even when he’s messing with Suzie.
Like Bart Simpson is right there, and had plenty of official media and merch where he was a little shit causing trouble. It sucks that they roped Calvin into being something he was not.
It reminds me of the Xbox Live game pic from the 360 era that's a kid wearing a beanie and blowing a bubble. It let you know someone was an asshole without even having to talk with them.
Public demonstration that they like to imagine being the kind of person who sneakily pees on things. Why? Because they know they are not going to have the excuse to do it really but they want others to THINK they are the kind of person who does it.
TIL, when asked about his resistance to merchandising Calvin and Hobbes, cartoonist Bill Watterson replied "I clearly miscalculated how popular it would be to show Calvin urinating on a Ford logo."
He is an ASCII character first popularized on the japanese board 2ch - which 4chan is an homage to or ripoff of, depending on who you speak to.
His original name is a pun on the japanese word for bear - Kuma - which translates to 'Safety Bear." It was an ASCII art image that was used to flag trolls
Mac Tonight had a crazy history, he went from a nighttime mcdonald's mascot, to being used as a hate symbol, to being used in fnaf fangames that took place in mcdonald's
IIRC it started with him being associated with a specific subgenre of vaporwave that leaned towards hyperconsumerism, 1980s Wall Street/corporate/yuppies toxic nostalgia and then just naturally snowballed from there.
I had thought about buying a t-shirt of this guy just because I had fond memories of the commercial, but when I was trying to find the store that had it all my top search results were about it being a version of that frog meme now. Very disheartening.
Catholics were like the #2 target of the original KKK behind black people.
Quite famously, the KKK tried to do a rally near the school Notre Dame which is an Irish (and very Catholic) institution, so all the students went out and beat the shit out of them and ran them out of town.
Hooked crosses were found all over the world in rather old civilisations despite being so far apart, almost all having a similair meaning as well i believe. What could have been a beautiful symbol to unite under, all together as humanity and our commonality, became a symbol of absolute evil and hate.
They always know how to take something good and turn it into the most heinous shit.
There is actually a version without the capirote. The giveaway is that the KKK uses basically a white sheet while the whole costume for a nazareno has more than one colour, can be made of velvet, and it's very detailed with embroidered stuff and symbols that only that cofradia uses.
I remember being on r/teenagers at the time and seeing that get posted for the first time. It was really surreal watching it turn into this massive meme after that point.
Oh shit, Alex Maestro. I remembered seeing some art of his on the The Owl House back in the day (As in 6 years ago). I knew he created this but I didn't know he deleted his social media presence.
I like the one where he gives up talking to her cause of her dry replies but in her end she's happy and thinks they had a good conversation, been there quite a few times.
I was so surprised to find out Pepe was originally from a webcomic. He just seems like the sort of thing that the internet would spontaneously generate.
lies.
ink is just a fake thing invented by big paper to sell more things. don't get fooled.
they even tried to make machines that used it automatically, to sell it at a premium ( i think they called them printers, but everyone know those are just ink-wasters.)
to be fair, most things that the internet "spontaneously generates" are often pre-existing things that were extremely niche and then one small/random element of them spreads like wildfire.
I hate the asshole who memed up the depressed pepe as that shit is a big reason why it left its niche as the "Feels Good Man" version of the meme and became associated with all that other crap later on.
Pepe lore meme was cool tho since it actually made the character cool again. Plus the story behind it with the creator wanting Pepe to be cool and no longer something offensive just an embodiment of creativity.
Spoilers for the most recent season on DareDevil: Born Again but there was a whole arc where Mayor Fisk started an “Anti-Vigilante Task Force” that ended up being assembled by a bunch of POS cops who were essentially in a gang “inspired” by The Punisher. Fisk gives them absolute authority above any regulations or procedures to stop all vigilantes, which I’m sure you can assume leads all sorts of heinous shit like imprisoning people in black sites without charges and torturing them for information.
They end up getting Frank into their custody and try to get him to join them. He tells them to get fucked, so obviously they torture and imprison him. Then eventually he breaks out and kills a bunch of them. Like so many. I kept thinking “How are there still more of them?”
Spoilers for the new version of ultimate Marvel, Punisher being a vigilante in the 70s, with the Red Skull and John Walker appropriating his imagery for their own purposes in the present as a rallying icon for a modern day right wing militia, and then Cap punching their teeth down their throats while Torch burns it all , was also a wonderful middle finger to these assholes by Marvel.
Seeing Punisher skulls with a blue line flag is peak media illiteracy. Gerry Conway explicitly said that the Punisher is emblematic of a broken system.
Context: This happened during the original Marvel Civil War arc, Castle just murdered two minor supervillains (Goldbug and Plunderer) who tried to join up with Steve's anti-registration side because "they were thieves and killers". Steve was naturally rather unhappy with this and proceeds to beat the shit out of Castle until Steve realises he won't fight back at all because it's against Steve and simply yells at Castle to leave and never come back.
Spider Man also draws a bit of Steve's ire when he suggests Castle worships Cap, joined Vietnam to be like him, and that Cap and Punisher are "same guy, different war".
This confused me so much when I heard it happened. I was a fan of the Punisher since I was a kid, how can a group that would likely be a target of the Punisher appropriate his famous skull logo? (serious question)
For what it's worth mentioning I'm not American so I haven't followed US news besides whatever gets international headlines.
They've deluded themselves into thinking they're "raging against the machine" by voting for the man who has always been the epitome of the "machine"
Yet they can't understand why those same rock bands make statements against their fearless leader or pull the rights to their songs from the right wing rallies lol
Because fascists are all about aesthetics and are devoid of deeper meaning beyond ingroup/outgroup and might makes right. Hence why they also like American History X, Fight Club, etc. while failing to grasp the message.
When they got mad in like season 3 of the Boys about how the show was actually making fun of them.
As if it wasn't abundantly clear from the first episode when a man in an american flag costume callously lets people die and is quickly revealed to be a massive piece of shit
Magats love telling everyone else they have "TDS" but then they do objectively weird shit like photoshopping his head onto ripped bodies or putting his shitty hairpiece onto things.
https://giphy.com/gifs/Shd3VsKd6MkzBVahsc
Sirenhead by Trevor Henderson. It was a genuinely neat concept that got co opted by brainrot channels and bootleg merch sections. This ultimately ended up leading to some random ass company buying the trademark to Sirenhead so now he can’t profit off of his own work after it gained that much notoriety.
I'm struggling to find any articles about the company you're referring to, but Trevor's an executive producer on the Zach Cregger film adaptation that's being made, so clearly something got resolved and he'll definitely have already made money off those rights.
IIRC some copywrite troll company claimed they owned Sirenhead, but AFAIK it still belongs to Trevor Henderson and the only thing he's ever wanted is accrediation when you talk about Sirehead or expand on the lore. (literally, all he was is an acknowledgement that he's the OG)
It is supposed to represent strength, protection, and even agriculture due to its connection to thunder and rain. It also has ties to marriage and law.
However, it has also been used as a hate symbol by certain extremist groups, alongside other symbols, like Tyr's rune or Othala rune.
Thanks to that, it is significantly harder to show your love for Norse Mythology without people thinking you're racist.
That and the fact that he made a government agency called DOGE because he is a singularity of cringe and is proof that you can have literally all the money in the world and still be a catastrophic loser.
Probably, which he'd prove right when he tweeted to a billion Twitter followers that Donald Trump was all over the Epstein Files during their little breakup.
Mac Tonight was a 90’s McDonald’s mascot for advertising McDonald’s late night hours https://giphy.com/gifs/jOAdzSSLyGEsE
Recently, he was co-opted by white supremacist groups
That's a loaded sentence for someone who is neither aware of the character nor his current status of "white supremacy icon". I have two questions: How and why?
I believe it originated on 4chan. Someone made a YTP syncing some of the original commercial to a racist song sung by a text-to-speech program. It kinda just took off from there
White supremacists are too stupid to create, and "white" doesn't really have a singular culture, so they just steal symbols and ideology from other groups.
Originally (and still) a penitential tradition appropriated by a group that is not only racist but also anti-Catholic.
And I know that some will criticize the Catholic Church—rightfully so, I might add—but as a non-white Latin American, I view the *nazarenos* as part of my culture; it is unsettling when someone from the United States expects us to abandon our tradition simply because their compatriots appropriated something of ours.
Pedobear - originally he was the mascot on some website to let people know they’ve been banned or are being warned or whatever; but since a lot of those folks were posting creepy shit, naturally a lot of folks thought he was representative of those types, and you can prolly connect the dots from there.
Pepe the Frog - I don’t recall him having white supremacist connotations when he first cropped up, but I wish I could say the same for his current reputation.
Pedobear - originally he was the mascot on some website to let people know they’ve been banned or are being warned or whatever
2ch, the japanese board Moot ripped off to make 4chan. Kuma-chan was an ascii art intended to warn users that an individual was a troll and not to engage.
I’ve wondered to what extent Ongezellig falls into this. I’ve watched the shorts and it’s fairly typical as web animations go. Even the girl 4chan Nazis have glommed onto is mostly just “Dutch Cartman”
But I can’t really say, because when I tried to sus out what the creator actually thinks about anything, it was just an inscrutable mix of smash cuts and obscure references to Dutch things, and I’m not sorting out that bullshit.
A quick reminder that in Belgium, ongezellig isn't really that big and the creator is more well known for making YTP's, with the most well known one being The Suffering of the Flemish Forest Dwarf. I'm guessing that this is where the humor came from.
There's a letter somewhere where he just dismantles any claim Nazism has to his work. I couldn't find it in a quick search, but I really recommend taking the time to dig it up. It's so satisfying to read
Everyone has to just stop letting this happen. White supremacist rallies could start handing out free strawberry icecream at their rallies and then everyone will just throw their hands up and say. "Cant use strawberry icecream anymore. White supremacist own that" and theyll call you a white supremacist if they see you even positively mention strawberry icecream
It's due to the duplicitous nature of both white supremacy and dog whistles in general (plausible deniability to out-group members is the entire point of these symbols)
I feel so bad for the creator of Sprunki. I saw Sprunki plushies at a mall once and it almost made me feel sick to my stomach thinking that people are making a profit off of his game and he’s not getting ANY money off of it. It’s inevitable for off brand/bootlegs to be made for any popular franchise,but it hits differently when it’s an indie creation created by one person and not a team of developers.
Wait what?... My kid was into this, I thought it was kinda like... Slop Vocaloid/kid's first synthesizer, and saw no big harm on it, what happened? If this is the fan version, what is the OG?
If I remember correctly, Sprunki was a fan game of the game Incredibox. The twist being that it was a horror game. After the fangames boost in popularity, it fell victim to large content farms using the game as a way of making slop videos for kids. People grew tired of it, but instead of directing anger towards the content farms, they blamed the creator of the fangame, who was a minor. That led to the creator being doxxed.
The creator of the game Sprunki was a teenager at the time of making the game (I think he was either 15 or 16 but I could be wrong). The characters from his game were then used in nasty content farm slop containing NSFW content made without his permission, and people have been making a profit off of his IP and NONE of the profits have gone to him. He got harassed, doxxed, and I heard he was even swatted because people hated the NSFW content farm videos and ads. He also got hacked on the site he posted the game to originally (Scratch, a children’s coding website) and he got banned as a result.
He was going to make a sequel but after the harassment he couldn’t do it anymore. There’s also lots of reuploads of Sprunki on other websites, many of which may be viruses. I don’t know what the official website to play the game on is since there’s so many unauthorized reuploads, and people are making a profit off of his game. There’s also companies making plushies and other merch of his characters without his permission and they’re making money off of them, and not a cent has gone to the creator.
I feel horrible for the creator. He did NOT deserve any of this. I hope he’s doing okay. Sprunki is a really cool game and it’s clear he put a lot of effort into it, but people only know it because of the content farm and other NSFW content people made without his permission. Him being a minor at the time makes the NSFW content of his IP even worse. He has every right to seek legal action over the disgusting content people made with his characters, but it probably will never happen.
Even marvel made fun of those losers by having the corrupt task force in Daredevil wearing the punisher logo while actively beating the shit out of Frank Castle.
I mean sure there's worse things you could be depicted as than "gigachad" but at the same time having your life reduced to a meme that people just use to establish who's correct, no matter the side, can't feel good
It's like the "Hide the pain Harold" guy. He was angry at first, then realized how much joy it was bringing people everywhere and he embraced the meme.
At least, everytime I've seen this used is on a positive light. Like saying "You dropped the crown, king" and stuff like that.
This is different tho. The guy was severely altered by his gf, who's a photo editor iirc. He looks nowhere like that and if ppl saw him irl they wouldn't even know he's gigachad
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u/BrightGreenLED 9d ago
Every single person I've encountered with this sticker on their vehicle is the worst.