Update 26th April 2024: As has been pointed out to me overnight by a thousand helpful, furious strangers, describing a Sega fangame (one with Saturn button prompts, no less) as “SNES-style” is a crime deserving of imprisonment in the deepest depths of the Labyrinth Zone. Speaking as a former Genesis/Mega Drive diehard, I can only hang my head.
Like I feel they should want right wing nuts to be mad about the game. They won’t stop talking about media that are mad about and so many conservatives will still buy the thing even just to destroy it and virtue signal to the other idiots.
The left? Some may still buy it, but most don’t talk about it at all. The idea of “go woke go broke” has always been a message of intent, not reality, at least in the modern era.
Nothing makes me want to try a game or watch a show more than legitimate, non surface level representation that incels whine about.
Swastikas, okay. Happy merchant, sure. But how is Pepe an alt right symbol now? I read half of an article about it which seems to conclude that it depends on the context the meme is being used in. If it’s by a nazi in their username, it’s a nazi symbol, wow. To me this feels like “serial killers often ate bread for breakfast, so all of Germany is now a dogwhistle for serial killers.”
Edit: Alright, I’m super late in this edit but I see that I’m (partly) wrong here. Not sure if people who reply to a comment are notified when that comment has been edited (if not, it should do that!), but thank you a lot for the input. My understanding now is tht it’s a quite complicated issue and, depending on the audience, it’s certainly being used and understood as Nazi symbol.
Pepe has been sensationalized for a while now in the media as being a hate symbol. I think it’s because you see it largely on 4chan which traditional media demonizes.
I’m not on 4chan, but it seems like it has similar problems to Steam: a large userbase and poor content moderation gives insufferable people a platform to spread hate from. These problems aren’t unique to either platform, but the news likes to latch on to them.
I hate that some people consider Pepe to be a hate symbol. He’s just an expressive frog, dang it
I guess I’ve been out of the loop for pre-hate Pepe (pre-2016), but the only reason I know of him at all is because of all the Nazi/Quon/KKK folks blasting him all over Twitter and everywhere else. I’ve always assumed everyone knew since it’s been almost a decade, and anyone using him these days is doing so in bad faith.
The sad reality is that he is a politicized figuredhead for fascism. You can try and use him, but you need to be aware of how others use him, and it will end up reflecting more poorly on you than it will help reclaiming him.
I suggest looking the links on my comment linked, but at the very least on your own look up, “Pepe meme Putin”, and “was Pepe at January 6th”. People are using him to storm the capitol and dressing him up in an iron cross to assassinate political figures. That’s not just casual memes :(
I say this as someone who grew up with his era of memes (my first memes were icanhazcheezeburger which was the precursor to RageFu). I remember his good days too man.
But Pepe got Alex Jonesed. He got assaulted by the MAGA cult and they put him on a cross like Jesus and now he’s dying for their sins. I don’t think we can save him.
It was pretty heavily associated with the alt right a decade ago as it was getting more popular. Some alt right meme communities like frenworld and clown world were centered around it, with overtly fascist pepe variants. It’s gotten more popular in a lot of other circles, but if someone identifies enough with it to use as a profile picture I’d at least check their posting history.
Pepe was previously coopted by far-right groups. The usage has died down since the creator of the original comic began suing people, but there are still people who put Pepe in Trump hats and shit.
Pepe has been a dogwhistle/symbol of hate for years already. Richard Spencer’s comical punch in 2017 happened just moments after he was explaining why he wears a Pepe pin. The ADL has it officially registered as a hate symbol.
Maybe it has died down in recent years, but you not being aware of these - frankly, very clear cut - definitions doesn’t make it ridiculous or inappropriate. Nazis take over symbols, that has been their modus operandi since their inception. None of this is new.
You may be willing to cede the cartoon frog to the Nazis for their exclusive use, but many people aren't. If you assume that everyone you see using it is one you'll be vastly overestimating the number of Nazis in the world.
I’m not “willing” to do anything, it is a fact. You may as well argue about the origins of the Swastika or the Iron Cross. Pepe is a hate symbol, and while not everyone using it might be a nazi, they are using nazi imagery. The fact that “many people” aren’t willing to drop it, despite its extensive, well documented use by extremists is a well made point, but not the one you think.
And there’s no “overestimating” of nazis in the world. We live in a culture of white supremacy. There’s no point in splitting hairs about how offensive or not a cartoon frog is. The easiest solution is to simply not use it.
The Swastika interestingly is four right angles, so the symbol occurs all over human society hundreds and even thousands of years before Nazism found it.
People thought any symbol so common throughout history had to be a quasi-good thing. They used it as a general sign of good luck. About the only thing that even comes close to the swastikas ubiquity and thrust of sentiment post-war is the “smiley face” symbol.
The Nazis saw all this and sent scam archeologists around the world to unearth and then piece together a narrative that their Aryan supermen ancestors had been the rightful masters of the earth. From the moment they made that decision, it’s had the stink of human ashes wafting off it ever since. Fire, wind, fortune, ‘North’, Kali’s creative destruction, and dozens more meanings all wiped away. So many cultures and groups robbed of a symbol or perhaps a phoneme even with their own contexts.
Draw the right angles. It is the wheel that crushes now. It means hate. We have a conditioned response as a society to it and each one of us personally has our own gutteral secret feelings about it. But the old meanings are all dead.
One of fascism’s best features is simply bald faced stealing. They stole that symbol from thousands or millions of people who used it every day. Pepe at least carries his own eternal chagrinn with him in protest of being used as a dogwhistle, but thats about it. His expressions are your expressions.
Pepe is damaged goods though. He endures well past his relevance and utility as an internet comic character when very similar concepts (rage faces, Polandball) have had their time and slowly lost ubiquity. But Pepe endures not JUST as a Nazi dogwhistle but as a symbol that even if someone is not right wing they still would like to convey a certain unsociable edginess, like a colorful threat display on a jungle animal. The disposessed middle class, the failure to launch kids, the kissless sensitive souls, all find commonality with the frowning frog. And these are the people they target. People use Pepe as a flare to suggest they’re in pain and only feel safe talking about it to other anonynous people on the same boat. Aka the most vulnerable to radicalization. Clinging to Pepe is advertising that you are looking for something that you don’t even know what it is, but normies can’t or won’t give it to you. Pepe is a green light to radicalization.
And like the various versions of the swastikas before they became THE Swastika, Pepe did nothing to deserve this. Just like everyone else under Nazi occupation.
I’m sorry, but this is completely false. The swastika is still used all across the world for its original meanings. If you’d said this about e.g. Norse symbols like the Valknut or Sonnenrad, I’d be 1000% on board with you, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say you’ve not been to anywhere that Buddhism is common if you think everyone associates the swastika with Nazism.
There are specific versions of the swastika that Nazi Germany created that are only associated with Nazism, such as the 45-degree rotated swastika, or obviously any swastika embedded within another German military symbol, but to assert that the basic symbol itself has been co-opted is very Euro-centric.
Its a complicated thing for sure. I think its worth considering that the Native Americans whose version of the symbol was most directly copied elected to give it up, and that was in 1920. How could we ask Buddhists to give up their symbol of peace? If it isn’t fair to Buddhists, why did the Navajo, Hopi, Apache, and Tohono O’odham feel like they HAD to?
And that was a decade before the mass killings of the Holocaust. A decade before America intervened.
I fear the answer is there is no right answer. Sometimes groups make incredible leaps of empathy like that, but like hell was it fair to them.
I think its worth considering that the Native Americans whose version of the symbol was most directly copied elected to give it up, and that was in 1920. How could we ask Buddhists to give up their symbol of piece? If it isn’t fair to Buddhists, why did the Navajo, Hopi, Apache, and Tohono O’odham feel like they HAD to?
Are you asking me to speak to this? I can’t speak to the personal motivations or viewpoints of either Native American tribes, nor of a myriad of Asian cultures. But I can say that I don’t personally believe it is either fair, appropriate, or necessary for Buddhists to stop using a symbol they’ve used for thousands of years in order to distance themselves from a group they are not in fact associated with.
groups make incredible leaps of empathy like that
I think you may have fallen prey to a false narrative around this. From what I’m seeing, the “whirling log” (the native american symbol that resembles the swastika) was mostly dropped due to pressure from white people over their own white guilt and the politics around Nazism, not out of some collective spontaneous show of empathy, and never actually fell out of use completely, and is now being actively reclaimed by various native americans.
During World War II, Eskeets said the U.S. government asked the Navajo to “hold off” on using the symbol. So for an unknown amount of time, Eskeets said metalsmiths, weavers and other artists stopped incorporating it into their work. That helped create the misconception that items with a whirling log are no longer being made at all.
It’s apparently still being actively used by the Navajo, as well, but they tend not to talk to white people about it since people can’t have a normal one.
The sacredness of the “whirling log” makes it challenging to get some Native Americans to speak to non-Natives about the subject. That’s according to Edison Eskeets, a trader at The Hubbell Trading Post, a national historic site and the oldest operating trading post on the Navajo Nation and in the United States. Several Navajo artists were contacted and either didn’t respond to requests or hung up the phone when asked to speak about the symbol’s significance.
Eskeets said the whirling log represents humanity and life and is still used for healing in hundreds of Navajo ceremonies.
“It kind of has everything on it,” he said. “It represents the constellation, the moon, the sun, the equinox. It’s down to the earth, the four directions, the rotation of mother earth, all of that … it’s the rotation of life.”
Thank you for educating me, I absolutely did get the sappy propaganda version of that story. I do WISH we could convince people not to use the symbol but I admit that’s something I only wish was possible because it would give us a prescriptive answer to emerging hate symbols.
On a long enough timescale maybe people can recoup the symbol back to its/their original forms; but we live now, and I find it unlikely. And the danger we face now from symbols with plausibly deniable hate built into them is considerable.
Did you notice we were talking about an emergant cartoon frog hate symbol and now we’re having a one hundred year old debate about the last great hate symbol? If we don’t draw lines, what is the protocol of protecting ourselves from fully unironic uses of would be hate symbols? I am not saying CENSOR PICTOGRAMS I DON’T LIKE. I am saying there isn’t a way to stop people from abusing our reticence towards censorship and tolerance of the gray without intense scrutiny and educating people about the symbols. That does kinda mean telling Buddhists that their sign of peace is our sign of death. First the culture shock, then the bitter arguments and singed pride. What should come next then?
I think you are looking for a unified solution to deal with very different and very nuanced problems.
The swastika was chosen by Hitler as a means to legitimize his movement. It’s important to remember that the average 1920s German had little formal schooling in world history. Even compared to our shitty and revisionist US curriculum, they had next to nothing. He could co-opt it and people were legitimately like, “wow, that’s crazy, I absolutely have never heard of Buddhism or Hinduism or anything. Maybe we really did used to rule all of them”. The Nazi swastika was at no point a dogwhistle, it’s a very explicit and bold statement of their false identity. It was an assertion of power and authority. If you cede the symbol to them, you are intrinsically acknowledging them as the “legitimate” owners of that symbol, which they are not. You can very easily distinguish between a swastika that is being flown as a white supremacist symbol, and one that is not. No Nazis are building Buddhist temples or weaving faux-Native American textiles just so they can have a “plausibly deniable” swastika, nor using pictures of those items to masquerade as non-Nazis with a nudge and a wink (because that would hurt their ‘pride’). They just use Nazi imagery directly.
To attack this, you need to very actively de-legitimize its improper usage, and boost its proper usage. The message cannot be “yes, this thousands of years old symbol really is about the Nazis”, because that is the stance of the Nazis themselves. It has to be, “fuck off Nazis, that’s not your’s, and we’re going to actively weed out your bullshit”.
On the other side are symbols like Pepe, where the purpose was never about legitimizing their ideology, but in fact to hide it and dogwhistle. The creator of Pepe is attempting valiantly to do exactly what I said above, but I think that while getting Nazis to stop using it (and everything else, air included) is great, there is no wider history or adoption that makes Pepe worth using elsewhere. It was just a cartoon frog. In this case, drawing a direct line between people who choose to represent themselves with Pepe, and with the shitty ideologies they’re using it to dogwhistle about, is actually the best counter to them, because a dogwhistle isn’t a dogwhistle if the relationship is explicit and universally understood.
Banning Pepe outright in Steam profiles makes complete sense to me, because it sends the message that “we know what you’re using this to mean, and you’re not fooling anyone, dumbass”.
Whereas IMO Valve should make it very clear that swastikas will be reviewed, and any Nazi swastikas will result in an immediate ban, whereas use in the legitimate meanings will not be (and that they will take context into consideration, i.e. user location, other profile info, past handles, discussion comments, etc etc).
Whereas IMO Valve should make it very clear that swastikas will be reviewed, and any Nazi swastikas will result in an immediate ban, whereas use in the legitimate meanings will not be (and that they will take context into consideration, i.e. user location, other profile info, past handles, discussion comments, etc etc).
The only thing I worry about this is then the de-legitimization of the cultural ones. All this would do would get fascists to start putting their profiles from the country’s where it’s deemed acceptable. I have no numbers for this but I feel like the number of people who have a cultural swastika are vastly, vastly outnumbered by the number of people who use it as a symbol of hate.
The difference here being that the swastika was used as the official symbol of a fascist government that conquered a substantial portion of Europe and perpetrated the holocaust. Outside of contexts where its religious significance overshadows this, it’s pretty universally associated with Nazis, and even in the places where its other uses are overshadowed it’s presented differently than the black, tilted swastika in the middle of a white circle on a red field. There are swastikas on the sign of a local Indian restaurant down the street from me, but nobody confuses them with the very clear nazi version. Pretty unambiguous.
Meanwhile Pepe, a relatively recent creation, was coopted by a handful of fascists who don’t use it as their primary symbol and haven’t done anything nearly as drastic or impactful with it, and has since become a widely used emoji character with a huge number of variations that’s used by all sorts of people. Have fascists made use of it? Yeah. But most of the people using these emojis in their discord posts have nothing to do with alt-right fascists and aren’t even especially likely to be right-wingers in any sense at all.
It simply doesn’t have the same connotation that the symbols it’s being compared to here do. It’s easy for people who aren’t versed in spaces where it’s used regularly and innocuously to assert that it is, but that doesn’t make it any more true.
What it does do is make those people seem incredibly out of touch to people who are accustomed to seeing cringespin and sleepypeepo and grabbyhands in their discord chats posted by literal queer leftists.
I feel like you had to be there. Frankly, the pepe symbol was co-opted so whether you like it or not, you should be cognizant of its history and how people choose to use it.
Every point the other user is making - the iron cross, the swastika, the SS, people know even if they weren’t there because of how apparent the symbols were and why they were used.
Then there are dog whistles when it became wrong to hold hateful beliefs and people started using combinations of the numbers 1488 or two H’s simultaneously. Pepe was co-opted and used as 4chans alt right mascot and spread out beyond it, into internet campaigns for fascism (not just pro-Trump). That’s the thing about co-opting symbols, fascism doesn’t care what they stand for, if they like it, it’s very difficult to keep it safe. A prime example of this is the fictional, known cop-killer Frank Castle, The Punisher, being co-opted by cops and white supremacists. His logo should instill fear into the fascists heart, instead his logo has been the conservatives wet dream since the 1980’s, and was seen in 2017 during Charlottesville.
Pepe’s usage dying down because people were getting sued doesn’t mean that it suddenly stopped being used by shitty people, it just means it’s swept under the rug with all their other dog whistles. Post 2016 Pepe was abducted and reused just like every other hate symbol. Fascists are never creative enough to make something of their own so almost every single symbol that’s currently tied to the ideology has been stolen.
I would say that you are right that post 2016 Sad Pepe isn’t 100% alt-right, but to be honest these style of memes do not last very long. Each generation of meme lasts about 3 to 5 years and they only really last in that generation of people who enjoyed them. That is to say, kids on the Internet now don’t know Pepe’s history. Would they use him? Maybe, except definitely not because they don’t use memes like that, Gen Z and Gen A do not use TopText BottomText memes, character memes, old RageFu memes.
Memes of today have variations of GigaChad and the anti-NPC (they don’t know I’m ____, or crying behind the mask) which are developed RageFu characters. Pretty much only Sad Pepe exists in this sphere and isn’t entirely co-opted, but even then, Sad Pepe is also commonly used on boomer Facebook for posts when men hate their wives.
I agree that it sucks to lose something to fascism. Pepe didn’t deserve it. But like all memes, his history ran its course and he won’t be used in many new ways anymore. The people who are still using him are using him for specific reasons beyond just nostalgic meme. But who knows, memes cycle. Maybe he will be brought back with a new vigor for anti-Nazi memes created by leftists. Until then though, all you need to do is just look up various events and “Pepe” and you’ll see a whole new side of Pepe that maybe you hadn’t realized. Pepe and Elon, Pepe and Trump, Pepe and Putin… Okay I went to Google that last one myself out of curiosity and literally an Iron Cross Pepe sniping Hillary Clinton. I WISH I WAS MAKING THIS UP.
I suggest, “was Pepe meme at Charlottesville 2017” and going to images. Another good choice would be “was Pepe meme at January 6th”.
You can defend Pepe all you like, I know that in his heart he is not a hate symbol. But Pepe is being used as one, so you need to be critical of when you see him and why. It might be completely innocent, but you must know that the chances of that are low. At least now hopefully you aware of his history and why others are skeptical and critical of his usage. Other meme characters don’t get dressed up to play political hitman. Other meme characters aren’t as heavily used by conservatives
I have to ask, do you use Discord? Because I see Pepes and Peepos all over the place there and they aren’t especially likely to be associated with right-wingers at this point as far as I can tell.
I think because of the time that has passed, there’s a demographic that uses him without knowing and I think the stickers definitely are part of that. However I don’t think that removes culpability, it’s just how different generations interact with different words, or in this case meme.
And really I think what it comes down to is when meme becomes tied to identity. Sad Pepe is relatable, feel a connection to the character, see what other memes he can do, before you know it your discord emoji Pepe is a pipeline to normalizing political extremism.
Like how some subcultures create a pipeline to fascism, like cottagecore and tradlife. It’s not necessarily that all Pepe, all tradlife, brings you into the path towards fascist ideology, but that many of those with fascist ideology are drawn towards Pepe and tradlife, which then make engaging with content surrounding those subjects suspicious.
Pepe in abundance is just something to be wary of. I don’t think it’s wrong to use him on discord or twitch chat, but I am more suspicious of people who identify with him heavily and I keep an eye out for the type of memes and rhetoric that they use. Chances are high that it’s innocuous, but given his history I’d say it’s better to be aware than to think nothing of it.
Last thing, for me it’s mostly just odd because when I look up Pepe memes, so many of them are terrible. Not just bad memes I mean, like hateful and awful. Sad Pepe is pretty much the exception here, as in normal meme I still see him and it’s used pretty in-line with what you would expect from normal memes.
Tl;Dr - sad Pepe or Pepe emojis on twitch/discord = probably okay. Identifying with Pepe or making Pepe memes = maybe I’ll be keeping a closer eye on what exactly you’re trying to say
You can say that again, going faith allowed you to do so much anime shit... Blasting down from the sky with thunder, growing dragon heads with a million different powers, sacrificing your sanity to become Cyclops from X Men on steroids...
And meanwhile, INT is just "blue arrow", "blue arrow, but stronger", "blue sword", "blue sword, but stronger" and "OP Kamehameha that ruins the game", lol.
i wouldn’t say “ruins.” I’m doing another int/fth playthrough and forgot how fucking wicked the Sword of Night and Flame was. It’s way easier to get than Comet Azur
Eh, Comet Azur might have been nerfed but it’s still pretty OP with the infinite magic tear. The only difficulty is actually hitting the boss with it, but if you can, it’s usually a one continuous hit kill.
I’m kind of excited to go for a strength build again once the DLC releases. Greatswords and Ultragreatswords were kind of rough on release (they’ve been straight-up buffed like 4 times now, I think?) and I’m in the mood for some good ol’ fashioned bonking.
I tried going strength on my first run and ended up going with a katana dex build. Months later I picked up STR again and yeah, they’re a LOT better now. You’re in for a treat. I think they made ultra greatswords swing faster by like 30%+ since release.
That’s good to hear. I remember not really enjoying the end game much, because a lot of bosses were so fast that they kind of required you to trade hits because yours were so slow with Greatswords and Ultragreatswords. Malenia especially felt more annoying than challenging (especially coming off of DS3 where most of the fast-paced bosses could still be fought hitless with big weapons).
From what I’ve been able to gather, it’s basically a sandbox. Imagine if F:NV had no main quest but allowed you to create your own faction. You’re just unleashed onto the wasteland to do whatever and let everyone else respond to it.
That is to say, much of the fun comes from building drug running bandit empires.
There is just something about coq that feels bad. I play CDDA, i play elona, i dabble in DF, and i play the heck out of kenshi, but coq just doesn’t click. Maybe it’s the UI, maybe the game just doesn’t feel as deep or as rewarding to explore.
Remember kids, don’t buy into hype anymore. Hype is a marketing tool. They don’t have to make any promises that a game will be good or even come out just because they hyped you up for it. Don’t allow yourself to be excited for anything until it actually releases.
the Israeli military’s usage of Microsoft’s Azure cloud technology and artificial intelligence products
Genuine question, but doesn’t this just mean that Israel paid for a Microsoft Azure subscription and used it to host web services? Like, anyone can do that. What am I missing here, exactly?
They say Microsoft have “deepened” their relationship, but how did they do that, exactly?
If you knew someone is doing terrible stuff with the goods/services you are offering to them, would you happily continue to have that commercial relationship?
Israel crimes are known. Microsoft has deleted accounts for muuuuuuuuuuch less.
I don’t mind the save system… In open world games like this, I tend to save scum without even realizing it. I don’t mind having some restrictions there.
Hollis-Leick and narrative director Craig Sherman pushed back on some of the “do’s and don’ts” they received from Games Workshop about Space Marine vocabulary. They deviated from the suggested phraseology to make Titus and his comrades sound less “strange and antiquated”, less like the Spanish Inquisition, and more like soldiers from real-world present-day militaries. “Space Marines don’t necessarily say things like ‘dismissed’,” Hollis-Leick observed. “There’s a line in the game where Acheran says ‘company dismissed’ and they really wanted me to change that to ‘brothers, attend your duties’, or something. But it’s three words instead of one, and if that model was applied to all of the language in the game, I really strongly felt that people wouldn’t get it.”
Gonna be a whole lotta really peeved 40k ultra fans…
I mean, I’m not an ultra fan, only a casual one and I dislike that. The whole over the top style of WH40k is exactly what was fascinating about it. If I want to play something with modern soldiers, I have Battlefield or Call Of Duty. I play 40k games for the absurdity of it. That’s exactly the kind of “I know better what the fans want” that most bad adaptations are born out of. Luckily it seems they didn’t feel the need to change too much.
But admittedly, I can understand that you don’t want to create something where you are pretty sure enough media illiterate idiots will not get that the fascists are NOT supposed to be the good guys.
But admittedly, I can understand that you don’t want to create something where you are pretty sure enough media illiterate idiots will not get that the fascists are NOT supposed to be the good guys.
Just look at Helldiver 1/2, couldn’t be more in your face about it, and yet there’s still people not getting it.
I formed a barometer for measuring comedy and it’s perceived ripple effect on society. Look at the comedy piece, the joke, the theme as a whole, whichever element, and then ask - does it highlight the issue, or does it perpetuate it? It may be the case that the intention of the piece to be a commentary denigrating fascism, but if it does a poor job conveying that message it might just look like an over-the-top approval of it.
An example of this that hit me close to was for It’s Always Sunny during 2016, the insane “I can do whatever I want” antics that some Americans were replicating was seemingly getting higher and the crossover between people quoting the show in the wrong ways just made me realize that maybe the show hadn’t done a good enough job presenting itself to less observant viewers. Well they also felt the same way because they really ramped up the highlighting of the issues after season 12, in a way that is presented in a different fashion.
This of course, was disliked by that specific crowd - there’s a few people who aren’t hateful who just don’t like the new presentation and that’s fine (they’re wrong of course! lol). It wasn’t uncommon for a few years to see people rage about how the show went woke, and still happens but less often now because they all got angry and dropped the show (Newsflash asshole, they were talking about you the whole goddamn time!).
Anyway, as mentioned with Starship Troopers, this happens with a lot of popular media in the conservative sphere, as can be seen with Idiocracy. There’s a ton of other examples too, but we’re all aware of how often this occurs.
The Boys comes to mind, even though this show is hardly subtle. One has to wonder if at least some far-right demagogues are fully aware of this and are actually doing it as a form of cultural appropriation.
The Boys is a good one, and an interesting one specifically because it plays to the StarWars-Imperialist / DC-Marvel-Authoritarian types. Garth Ennis, who wrote for The Punisher comics and of course, The Boys, is vehemently anti-everything that these types of authoritarians stand for.
Yet despite his hatred of them, he writes them exceptionally well in a way that is lost on the less observant viewers (man I just love that phrase lol). The people who love the Punisher for the wrong reasons are the very same people who love The Boys for the wrong reasons, it’s actually crazy how much crossover there is between the two pieces.
I think The Boys (show) also played up this aspect as a way to vilify power seeking behavior to the Conservative crowd by mocking Homelander outright, and subtly by showing the effects on The Boys (the group themselves and their struggles with power and how they use it). Very similarly to Sunny, there is a shift in the way The Boys is perceived by the conservative crowd around Season 3, as the writers were amping up their highlighting of the issues specifically because idiots were perpetuating Storm-lander’s sexualization of weaponized dehumanization (i.e. getting off on Nazi romance) - in the show so much so that even Homelander was like dude that’s fucked up.
The issue of course is that Homelander is justified to these idiots, so making him look silly and dumb comes to be one of the only ways that a specific demographic will understand that his actions are bad – which of course, they get offended by and do not like, because they’ve wanted to emulate Homelander the whole time. Characters like the right-wing Stepdad and the Podcaster Listener at the convenience store show how an individual can fall into the cycle of hatred perpetuated by the media and the entire point is completely lost on them because Homelander lasering those liberals was exactly what he should have done.
Part of it is scary, because I don’t believe it’s Marvel and cartoons that are breeding this mindset. These people are conservative christians who listen to talk radio and watch the news, and they are not being inspired by characters like Homelander, they were already like this. Characters like Homelander or the Punisher are just placeholders, scapegoats, a way for these hateful individuals to self-insert themselves into media. This does not mean that the answer is culling these characters existence, but rather continuing to highlight their faults and flaws in order to re-engage people to show them what it is like to actually be a good person.
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