How to Make a Girl Like You Again Reddit
The internet's cast of characters always has room for ane more. The newest is Doomer Girl, a quickly sketched drawing woman with black pilus, black clothes, and sad eyes ringed with red makeup. Visually, there's not much to Doomer Girl beyond that. She has a lightly sad expression and a permanent blush that give the impression she is bummed, but not dysfunctionally so. She's aspirational-gloomy, like Billie Eilish with a bob and no hands.
Doomer Girl is likewise well-nigh unaccountably popular. People started sharing the original sketch of her on social media less than a calendar month ago, clearing and refilling the thought bubble above her head each time. Fans have since flooded Twitter with art depicting the graphic symbol's imagined friendships or romantic relationships with other internet-famous cartoon women. Some people post pictures of themselves dressed up equally her. Already, Doomer Girl's image has become flexible. Her eyes are canonically dark, but new drawings of her sometimes make them greenish; her black sweater has been replaced with a muscle tank. "Her aesthetic looks similar to mine and, well, I'm a depressed 21-year-old but trying to survive HAHAHA," Luna, a cosplayer from the Philippines, wrote to me on Twitter.
To Doomer Daughter's fans, who are mostly young women, her appeal is simple enough: If Doomer Girl were real, she'd be a cool girl, nighttime and sad in a fashionable fashion. Who hasn't cosplayed every bit one of those? But Doomer Girl'south past is as twisted equally her unsaid outlook on life. She came out of 4chan, the infamous hotbed of oft racist and misogynistic internet culture. She was created equally the female counterpart to another cartoon character chosen Doomer, a ragged-looking guy with three-day scruff, a black beanie, and a cigarette perpetually dangling from his mouth. In Doomer comics, the joke is that Doomer Girl should realize she is Doomer's perfect lucifer, but she rejects him instead because she's a woman, and women alive only to withhold. (A archetype!)
Doomer Girl could take waxed and waned and died in that location, but she was plucked from 4chan and moved to Reddit, then onto Tumblr and Twitter and Instagram in a affair of days. The viral spread was driven largely by women who were removing her from a context in which she was a mechanism of male cocky-mythologizing and remaking her into something joyful.
In the history of memes, the familiar story is one of harmless images accruing sinister meanings that turn them into weapons—the about famous case existence Pepe the Frog, an innocuous web-comic character that was co-opted by various extremist groups leading up to the 2016 election. But Doomer Girl shows how the reverse can happen too: A cruel idea gets whittled downwards and recirculated without context, because its origin is less interesting than the artistic possibilities.
For the past year and a half, crudely drawn net characters named with the -oomer suffix accept been getting odder and more than specific. The original was a "30-year-sometime Boomer," created on 4chan to make fun of Millennials who espouse ideas associated with Babe Boomers. "Zoomers" are teenagers whose entire personalities were molded by the algorithms of SoundCloud and YouTube. Doomers, meanwhile, are the nihilistic cousins of "Bloomers" and "Gloomers," all 3 gradients of the same twenty-something. Whereas Bloomers are well adjusted and Gloomers are depressed considering they are non, Doomers take just stopped trying. They are no longer pursuing friendships or relationships, and become no joy from anything considering they know that the globe is coming to an end. As one of the many iterations of the meme goes, a Doomer "pays for his phone but merely apply [sic] it to know what time it is."
The -oomer family extends even further, into dozens of oddly specific and niche types—an entire visual vocabulary for young people who desire to make fun of happy idiots and stereotype themselves equally particular shades of down-and-out. The Doomer character was beginning posted in September 2018, on 4chan's business concern-and-finance board, and reposted the next day on the /r9k/ lath, which is one of the more repugnant places on the cyberspace. To an outsider, the average postal service will read either as garbled nonsense or almost parodically misogynistic and racist vitriol. The lath is probably best known for its frequent calls for a "beta uprising," in which neglected cognitive men take revenge against women and "alphas"—including a September 2015 mail service that the FBI investigated for its possible connectedness to a mass shooting.
[Read: It'south Not Easy Being Meme]
Many Doomer memes, every bit Mel mag's Miles Klee reported final leap, nod at anti-Semitism and other alt-right extremist views. Amidst all the usual lamentable stuff, several incarnations of the original 4chan Doomer template include phrases similar "Redpilled on Jews, simply bored of discussing it," and "The Due west is gone and genuinely I fearfulness for the future generations." When the question of whether a girl could identify as a Doomer first came up—several months before Doomer Daughter herself was born—Doomer fans bickered. Maybe, only she'd have to be exceptionally messed up or "unusually intelligent." More likely, she would be vapid and amoral: "No clue who the Smiths are," "Non actually depressed," "Cheats on bf all the time," and and then forth. Another batch of early Doomer Girl memes were vaguely transphobic, positing that Doomer Girl was only Doomer after he'd eaten a meatless Impossible Burger.
Shortly after she appeared, all the same, Doomer Girl was reposted into r/transitiongoals and r/traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns—two large communities organized effectually memes and in-jokes near transitioning. Members commented on 1 postal service that Doomer Girl had a "prissy confront shape" and a "cute haircut." The commenters were fully enlightened of her origins: Reddit'southward thriving network of trans-specific spaces tend to be securely versed in meme culture and the linguistic communication of 4chan. I commenter summed up r/Doomer, the subreddit dedicated to Doomer memes, equally "extreme nihilistic low with a dollop of toxic masculinity." But the original poster of Doomer Girl in r/traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns, a 16-year-old from Frg named Siobhan, told me information technology was "kinda fun" to accept the Doomer idea out of its original context—where she saw it being used to express anti-Semitism—and make it into something positive. Doomer Daughter "presents herself as a goth, which I too want to be," Siobhan added. (She asked to be identified simply by her outset name for privacy reasons.)
As Doomer Girl became more popular, her connection to her origins became far less clear. According to Tumblr, searches for Doomer Girl increased past 558 percent from Jan 7 to Jan fifteen. Most of what they turned upwardly weren't memes, but people dressed up as Doomer Girl or images of her redrawn in more than detail. Within a few days, versions of Doomer Girl that were actually human faces or borderline-unrecognizable overhauls were more visible on the platform than the original.
Doomer Daughter is, a month into her young life, a generalized prompt. She'due south the basic thought of a melancholy daughter with an elegant bob—neutral to some, inspirational to others. The term context plummet is often used to refer to the potential danger of pulling an idea out of a specific social network and placing it in forepart of a much larger and diffuse one. Just context collapse isn't always unsafe; it'south simply inherently chaotic. As Forrest Wilkins, a 26-year-old U.South.-based programmer who posted a meta remix of the Doomer Girl meme to Tumblr, sees it, then much online culture starts out harmless and spirals into something toxic. "It's nice to see information technology go in the other direction," he told me.
The people who claim ownership of Doomer, meanwhile, are pissed. Two weeks later the first Doomer Girl drawing hit 4chan, the moderators of the r/Doomer subreddit banned her. "Anyone posting doomerette memes will get his post removed and his business relationship will exist banned for 3 days," the proclamation read. Once Doomer Girl was added to the mix, the moderators told me, the subreddit had blown up, adding vi,000 new members in a thing of 2 weeks.
The moderators criticized the new members as a agglomeration of "normies" who didn't understand the Doomer lifestyle, or every bit self-obsessed women eager to get attention by playing dress up. "We don't want our forum to be invaded and taken over past a agglomeration of snapchat addicted zoomers, e-girl worshipping simps, and histrionic e-thots looking to expand their collection of orbiters," ane moderator posted. On 4chan, an anonymous user shared a copypasta—a punchy paragraph meant to exist copied and pasted wherever relevant—that began, "The doomer girl meme is destroying the whole indicate of doomerism," and ended with a reference to Fight Lodge.
This is the type of net disharmonize that reflexively admits its own silliness. While some members of r/Doomer are freaking out, others are mocking them for their disability to relax. Just many members do appear to consider this a thing of gravity: The memes that define social identities and shape the borders of a subculture are also the memes that can trigger the nigh severe defensiveness. "A skilful part of meme-ing, especially at this level, is gatekeeping and keeping people out," Matt Schimkowitz, an editor of the internet encyclopedia Know Your Meme told me. "The more spread they encounter, the more they want to tighten up the transport."
In the past week or so, there has been some pushback against the moderators' gatekeeping. The annotate section on a recent post making fun of a "cute" and "wholesome" Doomer Girl meme is mixed. Some Doomers share in the original affiche'south ire, while others respond flatly: "You cannot copyright a meme." The question of whether you can copyright a meme, though, has been haunting the internet for years. Matt Furie, the illustrator behind Pepe the Frog, issued dozens of takedown requests under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and successfully sued Alex Jones, the founder of Infowars, for using it in promotional materials. It was an understandable move that fair-use proponents still found "troubling" because it set up a precedent for stifling the cyberspace'southward cardinal remix culture.
The openness that allows art to exist remixed toward detestable political ends is also what allows something hateful to be redeemed. (In a world with strict copyright for images that broadcast online, Doomer Girl would have stayed what she was: a mechanism for a bad joke.) The argument going on in r/Doomers is mostly about whether young women have any right to remix things in the first place. As one Reddit user wrote, "Women and normies [are] taking something original and meaningful to a specific group of men and making it about themselves." But the truest tradition of memes has e'er been pilfering things from boring places with rigid rules, redoing them, and creating chaos.
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Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/02/doomer-girl-meme-4chan-tumblr-wojak-history/605764/
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