#this was for a silly redraw challenge on twitter | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

haysprite · 1 year

Text

Hi sillies, just wanted to give a quick update on some things >:3 This is gonna be long, you don't have to read it ofc, but there's some important stuff!

I'm gonna finally set up the lil Legion Q&A sometime next week on one of my days off! Doodling has been v nice and I think this'll be a lot of fun to do, cause it allows me to both doodle and answer some silly questions about my Legion interpretation ! I'm just gonna have it stay on this blog just for my sake (having a separate blog would stress me out a bit lmao, and I don't like having my work in separate spaces aside from Insta), so you'll have to clarify stuff in your Asks, but I think it'll be a lot of fun!

Also I've really enjoyed reading all your Asks n whatnot! Due to work, answering em is gonna be a lot slower than usual unfortunately, since I prefer to type on my laptop which I v much cannot have at work, which you've probably already noticed. I'm slowly but surely catchin up tho, and would still love for you guys to talk about your silly things! I also hope you guys know that even if I don't agree with your headcanons/theories n whatnot, I still enjoy reading em and they always get me thinkin as well, allowing me to give my own personal take on em, so please don't ever hesitate to talk about whatever! This is a safe space to share your ideas and I love that you even wanna bring em up to me in the first place <3

Something that I'm gonna clarify now that even when the comic comes out, my *personal* interpretation will stay the same except for whatever I pick and chose from the comic's canon! I'm v excited for it, esp after reading the quick blurbs and seeing a page from it, and can't wait to see what they do with these funky lil guys, BUT I still really enjoy my version of em, so I'm gonna stick to what I'm doing now :3 I doubt anyone really cares about this, but yknow dslkfjlfkdsj its something I'm a wee bit insecure about so I just wanted to point that out now. Also I dunno if I'll ever draw the comic designs? They've grown on me the more I've seen em, but I've grown too attached to my own lmfao, maybe in a lil drawing challenge I will tho idk :3

Speaking of the comic, I will most definitely be reviewing it !!! I'm gonna post live reactions on Twitter (spoiled, ofc), and then save my final thoughts for Tumblr since I can go more in depth here ! I also would love to redraw some of the panels with my designs as well since I think that'd be funny! I'm also gonna review the Legion Mystery Box that dropped yesterday, cause I bought that thing IMMEDIETLY so I wouldn't miss out on it !!!

I also really wanna start writing some fanfics! I've been talking about this for a while, but I'm hopefully gonna start sometime over the weekend inbetween my shifts! Dunno if they'll be good, but at this point I just gotta stop worrying about that and remember that my work is for me first, and then for some reason a few of you dorks like it as well! They'll probs just be oneshots to start out since I'm v out of practice and wanna figure out how I wanna write these guys, but maybe I could start a fic in the future idk!

Art is gonna become a lot slower unfortunately, I'm workin 40-50 hour weeks now, but I'm still gonna try and get somethin out for y'all at least once a week, since I really do love drawing! I have so many ideas that I'm just itching to draw and share with you folk! I'm still always up for art or doodle ideas/requests as well, though they might take a hot while to finally get to!

Just wanna mention that I'm a lot more active on Twitter, where I just talk about whatever, share game clips, and interact with folks the most! Feel free to check it out if you'd like :3

Just wanted to thank you guys for all your support on my work, I really appreciate it! It helps motivate me a lot to keep at it on top of my desire to show my love to my favorite characters and franchises, and I love that I can share my ideas and artwork with you all! <3

1 note · View note

kakairu-rocks · 3 years

Text

We are excited to introduce our next shining star for the Creator Spotlight… @rocketpunchhh!

This is a member’s only activity where we reach out to one of the talented people in our community each month to find out all about them and their kakairu creations, and then show them off to the world!

We hope you enjoy learning about Ciça & her creations as much as we did. Please give her some love ❤️

Pronouns: She/ Her

Type of Creator: Artist

Where to find her:

Tumblr

Twitter

AO3

Read the exciting interview below the cut, or on the forum!

If you would like a chance to be in the spotlight too, the only thing you have to do is be a member of the kakairu rocks forum, and be a creator; and we will contact you, ourselves!

1. How long have you been creating KakaIru fanworks?

For around 9 months now. Which makes no sense, because I’ve been shipping them for SO LONG, but I used to be a fandom lurker only. Then the pandemic came around, I started binge watching Naruto again and my otp called to me, like a siren call or something. Not sure why it took me this long to actually draw them, but I don’t see myself stopping anytime soon.

2. What are you working on right now?

I’m working on a small comic for halloween and also on some collabs with friends.

3. What is your favourite trope to create for?

I’m an absolute sucker for found family, and also a firm believer that Kakashi and Iruka are both disaster idiots (as artsies once said, I believe they are a dumpster fire and a dumpster fire that is marginally better disguised), so I guess those two mixed are my favourite tropes to draw for.

4. Which of your creations is your favourite, and why?

The drawings I did for Bring Dog Treats, my Kakairu Big Bang 2021 piece with my partner in crime kageillusionz. They’re my favourite because not only did I have so much fun working on them with Kage, but they were my first “big art project” after I was forced to quit art for some years for health related reasons. So they are very special to me!

5. Do you have any WIPs you’re excited about?

Excited for the collabs I’m doing with friends, I hope you enjoy those when they come around!

6. Do you have any original characters? If so, tell us about them!

I have some original characters with friends from the good old tegaki-e days. It was this online drawing board where there were several different roleplay groups people could join in with an original character, and it was very fun to draw out all our ideas together. The end result was like a comic made by several people. As per my usual stuff, it was all more to the silly side.

7. What was your hardest piece to create, and why?

Probably this drawing I did for Laz for the Umino Hours server 90 minutes to gift event. I guess all of my 90 minutes to gift were the trickiest to create because I had to rush to finish but I still wanted it to be something that would be nice enough to gift to someone. I usually play around a lot with colours and ideas before I decide on something, so not having as much time for that made it very challenging for me.

8. Do you have any favourite scenes from something you’ve created?

I love the dumbass daydreaming duo I did for kageillusionz. (here and here).They both look so stupid, I remember having a lot of fun as I tried to make it as over the top shoujo as I could.

9. Where does your inspiration come from?

Mainly from random conversations and jokes with friends. We’re always making up new scenarios and that always inspires me to draw. Also memes, I’ve done so many meme redraws, especially the brazilian ones. Twitter is usually where I’ll post these. If I see a stupid idea, you can be sure I’ll draw it, even if I’m the only one who will enjoy it. I’m a very self-indulgent artist.

10. Which of your creations is the most meaningful to you, and why?

Oh I accidentally answered this already, didn’t I? As I mentioned before, all the Kakairu Big Bang 2021 drawings mean a lot to me, but also this fanart of Iruka I made for Callaina’s fic So Golden. This was the first time in years that I got to sit down to draw and make a finished, more polished drawing that wasn’t a quick sketch. I always look fondly at it, it was a big milestone for me.

#creator spotlight #kakairu.rocks #creator interview #talented creator #kakairu fanart #kakairu #kkir #kakashi x iruka #hatake kakashi #umino iruka

13 notes · View notes

zyuna-arts · 2 years

Photo

LYOKOTOBER 2021: Day 31 (Free Choice)

Day 01 - 10 | Day 11 - 20 | Day 21 - 30

For the month of October in 2021, I came up with my own prompt list by sketching a character from Code Lyoko every day in conjunction with Artgerm’s Arttrober challenge.

I decided to draw these characters in a semi-realistic style as a challenge and to apply what I’ve learned in school to use as well. Since I had to juggle assignments at the same time during the challenge, I kept each prompt as a monochrome bust-up portrait. I had ups and downs, but overall it was a fun challenge I genuinely enjoyed that I’m likely to resume in 2022!

You can view the prompt list and all 31 prompts I did in my Twitter thread here! Individual character posts are also available on my Instagram with longer descriptions & plain sketches.

Day 31 was also Halloween!

I wasn't happy with day 29′s result so I redrew Odd for day 31, but in his Season 1-3 Lyoko avatar + bonus colours! Tweaked his face a bit in the final version as I felt something was off when colours were added. I'm a lot more satisfied with this version than the original on day 29 🤗💕 Originally wanted to draw my idea of Odd's 5 sisters at the start of creating the list, but just didn't have the time for that. Then I thought of redrawing Jeremie since I did a side view for him but I plan to draw him again in the future anyway and I was happy with what I did for his prompt (: This was actually my first time drawing Odd's S1-3 avatar! I made Day 31 special with some colours to wrap up the challenge.

If you like my Odd sketches, I did some silly doodles of him as cat memes a while back (:

SOCIALS: Linktree

Art © zyuna Code Lyoko © MoonScoop/Dargaud

(DON’T REPOST/USE)

#Code Lyoko #Lyokotober #Lyokotober21 #Odd Della Robbia #code lyoko odd #digital art #semi realism #zyuna arts #reblogs are appreciated

5 notes · View notes

forte7 · 4 years

Photo

Another thing we worked on during my Sunday Art Stream! Really, you should check it out c: I do have a Discord for my Twitch channel and stream, where you can submit other anime screenshots for me to redraw on stream. We also work on other art challenges and memes there, as well as commissions. Anyway, this was super fun to do, cause I like doing anime screenshot redraws. Granted, I did more on this than I normally do, like colored lines for the hair and a few other details, but I still think it came out super nice. Wanna hang out, chat, and provide input for silly drawings and memes? Check out my art stream over on Twitch! It's on Sundays, usually around 5PM EST. I also play games during the week there, too. For announcements for art streams and the like, check out my Gaming Twitter. For information on commission pricing, please see here: https://www.deviantart.com/forte-girl7/journal/Commissions-OPEN-227645712 And please check out my Patreon

#forte's art #art #fanart #sailor moon #sailor moon redraw #art stream #stream

16 notes · View notes

sleepymarmot · 6 years

Text

A couple of months ago, after finishing COUNTER/Weight, I spent about a week in a total hangover, relistening to scenes and having feelings. I took some notes, but procrastinated posting them, and then finally got distracted. But, a) I hate leaving things I intended for tumblr unposted, even if they have value only for me, and b) I also hate posting things out of order, and there's a big TM liveblog incoming. So, here's a bunch of really random thoughts about C/w from past me.

The gnosis virus did go nowhere huh. I was hopeful for a minute when one of the finale intros mentioned it, but that was it. What was the purpose of that arc even. [Note from present me: Lol. At least I feel better about this one!]

Oh, and the patch AuDy left never reappeared either. And the idea from the faction game that Aria's images owned by EarthHome/Petrichor transmit Rigour code… That's the flip side of the coin. On the one hand, it's really cool to see the creative process – on the other, it sometimes feels like you're listening to people write a script for the tv show, but only get to see a half of the finished product. It's fascinating to see the universe grow organically and the players to come up with new ideas and get excited about them – but that means numerous retcons, some of them not even presented as such, because the creators forgot what the previous revision was or didn't thought it was important. It's a unique feature of the medium that player choice directs the narrative and it's not bound by railroading – but that means some roads lead nowhere, and some branches dry and fall off.

It's a bit harder to make peace with something that could have easily been developed more within the existing plot of the show. How come there's a player character whose consciousness consists of three different people in various combinations, but nobody seems to be curious how that works? No PC or NPC ever asked “Which one of you is speaking right now?” or something. The final episodes made a lot of things clearer, but it still felt too little, too late. Hard not to be reminded of that gripe about certain two characters sharing one character sheet one of whom was left underdeveloped and half-forgotten… Both are very ambitious concepts that require a double amount of work from the player, so I feel bad complaining they weren't realized to full potential, but…

Speaking of L&D… I still want to know how the hell did that one engineer all by herself design 4 gods, one of which became a basis for technology that was advanced even for the civilizations 80,000 years later? This woman singlehandedly surpassed any technological achievement of humanity before and after. Who Is She

I saw a “Wake me up: before you go go / when september ends / wake me up inside” meme and thought “heh, this sounds relevant, which member of the Chime is which?” and it already made me sad, but then I realized that I'd never actually heard the september song and looked it up and. The lyrics fit so well. What the fuck. It's an old song everyone keeps joking about. Why is it appropriate for a legitimate fanmix. What. I guess the word “September” will never be the same again for me.

I looked up the rules for Firebrands, the game used for the finale. Oh my, challenges for the dance minigame are so overtly romantic when you see them in a list together! Imagine this cast of characters having to answer to “do you place your hand upon my elbow, shoulder, waist, or hip?” lmao. Also I didn't realize “May I?” was part of the rules for “stealing time together”. (And I found out there's a party version of that minigame with bug-themed challenges. I might have dug too deep…) "Tactical skirmish" is a really fascinating concept, I've never seen such a masochistic combat system! Really faces the player with the violence they're inflicting: sure, you can always fight on, but are you ready to live with what you'll have to do? But for it to work fully, you need a lot of non-expendable NPCs on both sides. The one with the most likeable team wins! (Like Mako did.)

I'm relistening to Three Conversations and it's pretty interesting that Ibex has a bunch perfectly lifelike android bodies, right? There is no such technology seen anywhere else. Did Righteousness develop and privatize that? Are they so complex that only a Divine would have enough computing power to successfully mimic organic life? Can Aria convince Righteousness to help her perform on stage without leaving her duties? Also, like with AuDy, I wonder how Ibex & Righteousness' consciousness works. Is it a single mind, spread across every body he has, or even anything Righteousness is running on, having a bunch of different conversations at once if he needs to? Or is the original Ibex just gone, and what's left is a personality imprint hanging on to the connection to his still living body, imitating his former self like the automated recording Cass saw wore his face? In other words, has Ibex completely fused with Righteousness, or assimilated and destroyed by it? Does he not exist anymore as an independent singular being, or does he not exist at all? Most info indicates the former, but there was also “You’re not in there anymore” “No”.

If Orth and Jace are anime fans with their Kingdom Come and Panther, then Ibex is the guy who's way too into dinosaurs or paleontology. It's as if the heads of various confessions were called Triceratops, Stegosaurus etc. and only one of them knows wtf that means, and also he compares his Divine to… Were there scavenging dinosaurs? I'm looking at an article that suggests T. Rex might have been a scavenger, so yeah he would compare Righteousness to a goddamn T. Rex.

Hey what do you think is the most thematically aproppriate part of the Hieron anime for Orth to watch alone at night during the Kingdom game. What's the best thematic parallel for when he turns off the episode and thinks he made a mistake. Do you think that he once, after a long day and a long month and maybe a long year of feeling helpless and doomed, sits down for a distraction but ends up sobbing “How could they let this happen to Mother Glory”

On Joypark, there are definitely statues of Eidolons, ancient and holy, that were repainted and repurposed as Hieron deities. Imagine a giant Greek or Roman style marble statue of Apote – and it’s painted over as Samot, with an anime face and in really bright plain colors like these “reconstructions of original coloring” that actually only use base colors so they look like cheap action figures.

I was reading Austin's top ten games of 2016 list on Waypoint and he gave first place to The Sprawl! Aww!

The Downloads folder in my phone gallery is funny bc it mostly consists of every freely available f@tt map and also that one photo of Tristan Walker (because I tried to redraw it, very unsuccessfully). I go check a map and every time am met by Ibex just. staring at me. It's unsettling

Some of the many options for how Apostolosian gender could have been presented:

Apostolosians prefer to be addressed by the most neutral available human pronoun, represented as "they" in English, because the human languages don't have anything close enough

Apostolosian pronouns are represented in English by a set of real-life common pronouns and neopronouns

There's a list of Apostolosian pronouns and they're just used in English verbatim (Really impractical because the players need a cheat sheet, but the most fair)

Humans apply human genders to Apostolosians. Apostolosians may be offended, may find it convenient, or something else

As Austin said in the post-mortem, the Eidolon system is not gender. It's represented in English by titles/honorifics/etc

Any of the above, and the creators are aware of the difference between personal pronouns, grammatical gender, and social gender

And that’s not even touching the core problem of what the concept of gender in a futuristic, techonologically advanced society would look like. Yes, I'm complaining about this for the third time but I'm just. So tired of native English speakers' takes on gendered language. They could have made Apostolosian gender look like anything and they made it look like that fucking mess... God, I really hope TM is good enough to make me forget and forgive the experience of listening to “he... sorry, they” for 100 hours. [Note from present me: Well… mostly]

Here’s my take on this: eidolons in Apostolosian language are absurdly broad noun classes with associated classifiers (which fits both the idea that they’re gender but not actually, and that each of them is a patron to several unrelated aspects of life) Apostolosian: the word “(Apo)thesa” is used to refer to people who follow the corresponding eidolon, as well as for counting buildings, heavy machinery, military units, specific strategies and tactics, log entries, historical documents and chronicles, history textbooks and monographs, and eras :) Human: what the fuck

Very critical, imaginative worldbuilding in which 80,000+ years into the future humanity somehow has 21st century gender and 21st century capitalism! TBH, I find any sci-fi set in the far future inherently silly – we can’t really imagine the future technogy and its effect on society. But it feels like C/w barely even tried, and to hear it boast about “critical worldbuilding” is kinda strange. I assumed that meant they build the world critically, not that they recreate modern society or some aspect of it and criticize that! It’s just another Star Trek then! And it was already clear right during the setup when they said “We don’t want Star Trek aliens” and immediately created Apostolosians.

I haven't seen a single piece of fanart with Taako and Mako. Come on, does nobody want to see these two next to each other! Especially considering the outfits artists like to put Taako in!

I really don't understand how and why people do fandom activities on Twitter and Discord where the creators also have accounts. It gives me so much secondhand embarrassment. I can barely peek at Twitter posts before running away. Old-fashioned opinion apparently but I strongly believe the main fandom space and the interaction-with-original-creators space should be separate. I need a space where I can voice my opinions, especially negative ones, with complete freedom. I need to be able to say exactly what's on my mind. But I wouldn't want any of the people on the podcast to read something unfiltered like my complaints above. Being in the same space as the source content creators obliges any decent person to be diplomatic and constructive. And the creators, in turn, need a space where they don't come across complete randos yelling at them about something they said in a podcast three years ago. I'm already feeling uncomfortable because hearing to strangers pour their hearts out for hundreds of hours gives me way too much insight on who they are as people. Of course, nothing’s stopping them from lurking on Tumblr or AO3 and even reading this very post, but a platform where they have official accounts is still a different thing! I even feel uncomfortable talking about the podcast creators using their first names so much. To my ear, referring to a total stranger by first name, especially if it's a shortened form, sounds so rude! I'm not their friend, I don't have that right! But, of course, writing something like “Mr Walker” in my liveblogs would have been even weirder, nobody does that...

Is it a common experience to not even think about fanfiction after listening to Hieron, but going straight to AO3 after C/w? I feel like since Hieron is still a work in progress, writing/reading about it is stepping on the GM&players' toes, and C/w is finished so it's like they gave us the keys to the playground, it's the fandom's turn now. This story has so much blanks and they must be filled! In one of the early episodes they joked that something cute they said would encourage people to ship Mako/Cass and I was like "Bold of you to assume they aren't already" and, indeed, I was right and it's the most popular C/w ship on AO3. Too bad I’m so indifferent to it…

It’s a shame we never had a full scene with Ariadne or even learned what they were up to during the finale.

I still don't understand how Ibex went from “evil CEO” to “leader of a proletarian revolution”, these sound like completely opposite concepts to me

I probably have talked about this too much and have pretty much given up on ever getting a clear picture due to all of these reimaginings but… Righteousness and Voice… Ibex takes Righteousness out of Mako but he still has Voice, that was pretty much openly stated, correct? So how does that work? I’m guessing Righteousness is hidden somewhere in Voice’s code. But if so:

Did Maryland know? On the one hand, she’s too competent not to. On the other, why would she ever allow or accept that?

How did Righteousness not get corrupted by Rigour too? Maybe it did, but broke off the connection with the rest of itself to contain the damage? Or maybe, on the contrary, it kept in contact and was sending intel to Ibex the whole time? But in that case he would have provided more help in the finale.

#friends at the table #blah blah blah

4 notes · View notes

ivankahasbeentreatedsounfairly · 7 years

Photo

Over the course of Donald Trump’s staggering political rise, observers tried to make sense of him by borrowing a metaphor from the internet: Trump, they said, was a troll. He was described as turning presidential aspirants into “Twitter trolls” (by a primary challenger, Marco Rubio), as “the world’s greatest troll” (by the data whiz Nate Silver) and, after his inauguration, as “our Troll-in-Chief” (by the liberal pundit Touré). Each was meant as a dig: The troll is the bottom-feeder of internet culture, not a hero. But Trump himself gladly owned the slur. When a Twitter user called him “the most superior troll” on the platform back in 2013, Trump replied, “A great compliment!”

Trolling isn’t just about manning an unhinged Twitter account. It describes an ethos. The troll is a figure who skips across the web, saying whatever it takes to rile up unsuspecting targets, relishing the chaos in his wake and feasting on attention, good or bad. For Trump, that means inciting political panic with glib news conferences, all-caps tweets and made-up terrorist attacks, shifting his beliefs to suit his whims. During the campaign, the ambiguity of this spectacle worked to his advantage, freeing his supporters from their own responsibilities: When he called for a 2,000-mile-long wall or suggested banning an entire religion from entering the country, the sheer extremity of these ideas let voters view them as goading performances instead of real plans. And with every political shrug, the web’s most antisocial sensibility rose further into the heights of American public life.

Now that the trolling ethos has infiltrated the actual core of government, whole systems are being forced to improvise around Trump’s inscrutable center. He is a frequently insincere and unserious person, placed in the most serious of positions. Politicians on the right find themselves staking claims on Trump’s throwaway accusations, pretending that massive vote fraud exists or that angry constituents at town halls are paid protesters. Journalists wrestle with late-night tweets that carry the weight of the presidency but also seem designed only to enrage and confuse. What does it mean for the American presidency itself to become a fake out?

Troll culture was forged in the primordial ooze of the internet, in a time when online social interaction took place in rolling walls of text. In 1993, LambdaMOO, a popular virtual community, was besieged by a user called Mr. Bungle, a character dressed as a clown in a semen-stained costume. One evening, Mr. Bungle used a programming trick to make it appear as if other users were performing violent sex acts on one another. Later, when his targets demanded an explanation, Mr. Bungle typed: “It was purely a sequence of events with no consequence on my RL” — real life — “existence.” He was just messing with people, delighting in the power to provoke reactions from a remove. And because everyone involved could just log off, those left shaken by words on a computer screen were made to feel silly. As one commentator said during the ensuing controversy, “I think that freedom would be well served by simple toughening up.”

Mr. Bungle was a lone wolf, but trolling could also be a communal activity. On 1990s Usenet groups, users would post in-jokes and provocations in a bid to flush out naïve newcomers. And with 4chan, an anonymous, anime-obsessed message board started by a teenager in 2003, trolling charged beyond its online vicinity and into the offline lives of distant strangers. In the most notorious incident, 4chan trolls latched onto a Myspace page memorializing a seventh-grader who had killed himself, ridiculing the child’s recent disappointments and seizing on grammatical errors in posts from mourners. (One had called him “an hero.”) Soon they were placing harassing phone calls to the boy’s parents and snapping prank photos at his grave.

Trolling was always about the distance between people who care and people who don’t. The people who cared always lost.

Internet trolls work by exploiting the gap between the virtual and the real. They float, weightless and anonymous, across the web, then reach out and rattle people who are pinned down by fixed ideologies, moral codes and human emotions. Any attachment to principles — even really basic ones like “don’t torture grieving parents” — gives the troll an opening. Stretching back to Mr. Bungle, trolling was always about the distance between people who care and people who don’t. The people who cared always lost. Often, they were counseled to detach as much as the trolls had: to withhold their outrage, to not “feed the trolls,” to pretend there was a real distinction between doing horrible things and meaning them. So the trolls scampered on to their next targets, amassing more followers along the way.

It was during the summer of 2014 that internet trolling boiled over into a mainstream crisis. It began with a seething, accusatory blog post about a video-game developer named Zoe Quinn, written by an ex-boyfriend. What seemed like a small, personal conflict managed to explode into a culture war, complete with bomb threats and harassment campaigns. First came the nihilistic trolls, some even hoping to compel Quinn to “an hero” herself — tittering 4chan code for committing suicide. But as #GamerGate, as it came to be called, grew, it coalesced into a movement that looked awfully political. Despite their self-presentation as ciphers, trolls have always had a point of view, and #GamerGate offered a platform for a whole coalition to express its distrust of media, resentment toward women and anger at progressive critiques of racism and misogyny. They had demands, too: They worked to get journalists fired, to pressure advertisers, to silence feminist critics.

To outsiders, #GamerGate looked like a cesspool of angry, entitled young men nobody else wanted to talk to. But some right-wing figures spied an opportunity. Mike Cernovich, author of a hypermasculine self-help blog called “Danger and Play,” joined the cause. (“I use trolling tactics to build my brand,” he later told The New Yorker.) So did Milo Yiannopoulos, then writing for the website Breitbart News, which helped midwife the controversy from a fringe freakout to a right-wing political perspective. (“I hurt people for a reason,” he said recently. “I like to think of myself as a virtuous troll.”) Donald Trump saw political promise in this world, too: As his White House bid seemed on the brink of collapse last summer, he found a new campaign manager in the Breitbart executive chairman Stephen K. Bannon, a sincere nationalist with trolling tendencies of his own.

‘Performance art can be so hard for normal people to understand.’

Now, Bannon sits on the National Security Council, and many Trump supporters are fusing the trolling ethos with old culture-war tropes, amusing themselves by calling liberals delicate “snowflakes” and delighting at being “in” on Trump’s “joke.” As the right-wing columnist John Feehery put it after Trump’s Feb. 16 news conference: “Performance art can be so hard for normal people to understand.” People like Cernovich — who jumped easily from #GamerGate to the Trump train — have taken to calling their political posture “antifragile,” Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s word for systems that thrive on volatility and stress. Trump, Taleb has said, is “heavily vaccinated because of his checkered history” — nothing new can shame him. Nothing matters.

The troll figure feels as new as the smartphones in our hands, but his trail of destruction stretches deep into history. Toward the end of World War II, Jean-Paul Sartre looked at the anti-Semites of Europe and saw something that still sounds familiar. “Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies,” he wrote in the 1944 essay “Anti-Semite and Jew.” They “are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words.” Anti-Semites “delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert.”

Recently we’ve witnessed a resurgence of this winking Nazi type. PewDiePie, a wildly popular YouTube video-game star, filmed a “prank” in which he hired two men to hold up a sign that said “Death to All Jews.” Pepe the Frog, an online cartoon that morphed into a 4chan meme, has been co-opted by plugged-in fascists who redraw him with swastikas for eyes. And after the white nationalist Richard Spencer, a man who has voiced support for “peaceful ethnic cleansing,” yelled “Hail Trump” at a Washington conference and received Nazi salutes from crowd members, he claimed it was all “ironic.” These days even David Duke, a sincere and straightforward white supremacist, is sharing racist memes and getting called a “troll.” But when Spencer showed up in Washington for the inauguration, explaining his Pepe lapel pin to the press, a masked protester ran up and collapsed all that ironic distance by punching him in the face.

Trolls work through abstraction, leveraging the internet and irony to carve out a space between actions and consequences. Becoming president has blown Trump’s cover: There’s nothing more consequential than this. Trolls are typically outsiders, and sad ones: They don’t fit into the dominant group, so they terrorize it from the sidelines. Part of what makes Trump’s administration so alarming is that the troll sensibility now dominates. And when that happens, it’s reminiscent of what Sartre described: No reason, no principle, just the pure exercise of power.

0 notes