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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1042 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 23, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Obviously the whole "Amelia" meme is very culture war-loaded, but this jocular rundown of the whole thing (containing 100+ memes) made me laugh so much that it feels more appropriate for this thread. (It caught my attention because Scott liked it.)

My favourite part of that game is that it penalises the player for having 'ideological thoughts'.

One does wonder if anyone making that game thought 'Are we the baddies?' at any point?

For the real life equivalent, consider Louise Perry (who even dyed her hair purple recently).

So the thing is, Amelia isn't real.

Not only is she not literally real, she isn't even figuratively real. There is no attractive sexually available 18-29 year-old alt girl willing to take direct action to fix the demographic crisis with you. She doesn't exist. This is the most perfidious lie of all.

I still think this matters.

The thing about Amelia that doesn't apply to the previous meme is that Amelia originated from the left. The left made a propaganda piece so out of touch and unpersuasive that it made the right seem more appealing rather than less. The left tried to make a cautionary tale warning people to stay away from the dangers of right wing extremism and accidentally made their fantasy instead. This is not the right saying "come join us, we have cute alt girls", this is the left saying "stay away from those dangerous cute right wingers, they'll seduce you and convince you to rebel against the system" and the right saying "wow, that sounds even better than what I was expecting, sign me up!"

Every Amelia post is a troll against the left wing. The left can't meme so badly that they accidentally spawn right wing memes. (Almost) nobody actually thinks Amelia is real. She is a fantasy. But she's a fantasy that the left considers to be a cautionary tale propaganda piece (at least the subset that made the silly game) and put her in there as an antagonist. It's a dismissal of the left wing's warnings and concerns, saying "your worst case scenario is my fantasy". Her purpose is not to actually convince people to join the right to get cute girls but both to troll the left for warning against cute right wing girls, and also celebrate the idea of right wing girls and hopefully inspire more to step up and stand up for what's right while still being cute and alt at the same time.

There ARE girls on the right wing. There are going to be some who decide to cosplay as Amelia to show their support (Calling it now, next ShoeOnHead video has her purple wig at least cameo in reference to this even if it's not the main topic of the video). They're almost certainly not single: girls like that get snapped up immediately by high status men, but they do exist. Maybe if Amelia memes stick around there will be more of them 5 years from now. Maybe not. It is a fantasy after all.

Yeah, but in 50 years if we fix the culture, maybe there could be. It’s a hell of a lot better than ‘look, dude, IRL women are going to regard you with utter loathing and contempt for trying to fix the country, and society will punish you any way it can, but it’s still gotta be done’. And besides, everyone knows that anyway, which is why this took off. They’re just temporarily enjoying the thought of a world where it’s not so.

Well, yes, obviously it's a fantasy. But fantasies do have a place, and men have been fighting for fictional ladies for thousands of years. A symbol doesn't have to be a real person to be effective.

And as you say, the place of women in political discourse itself changes and evolves. Women went around and gave white feathers to able-bodied young men. Today you would expect young women to be disproportionately progressive, but that's not an eternal truth, and surely any movement towards encouraging young women to be more conservative would contain images as examples.

I don't think Amelia's going to change anything substantial by herself. She's just one more bit of internet froth. But there are worse things in the world that somebody enjoying or feeling encouraged by froth floating on top of the online sea.

Yea, it's the Manic Pixie Dream Girl fantasy with extra racism.

I was a bit obsessive in the weekly thread but I am genuinely enjoying the meme. There are a lot of low-quality versions of it, but where it works, the 'joke' is the simple idea of being proud of one's own country. I criticised the Huff AI slop ones, but there is a part of my soul that is moved by this one, and it's AI-gen slop too. Maybe it's just that Shakespeare's words are doing all the heavy lifting.

Still, regardless of origin, I enjoy the whole thing as a reminder of one important trait of patriotism.

It's fun.

It is genuinely fun and uplifting to feel part of and believe in something larger than yourself, and to identify with a place and a heritage, and it's a type of pleasure that people from middle-class liberal cosmopolitan backgrounds like myself are trained not to feel. So allowing myself the space to read the This England speech and enjoy the feeling of loving something in my own heritage, without a trace of irony, feels somewhat transgressive.

The worse Amelia memes, at least for me, are the ones that are just focused on this or that bad thing. Bad things are bad, and should be opposed, but if hatred is the only emotional tenor of a movement, it won't land with me. There's plenty of media that just serves up outrage or panic or whatever else, and none of that finds fertile soil in my heart. But for something to say, with plain sincerity, "This thing that you and I belong to is good and beautiful", is unavoidably moving.

Gotta say, this one made me laugh.

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