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@kky:
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Notes -
It was good fun, but to be honest my main takeaway from it is that I hate culture warriors.
Malfoid is a cute premise and led to lots of adorable creativity, and within approximately five seconds discussion around it was hijacked by 1) right-wing morons who think that it's somehow evidence that the masses yearn for their retarded combination of racism and ethno-nationalism, and 2) left-wing morons who think that the whole thing is evidence of incel misogyny and radicalisation.
It really makes me want to strangle both camps.
Can you not just... let nice things be nice?
Let people have good things. For once. You parasitic idiots.
Sorry, I think it's rather revisionist to act like there was never any culture war element to Malfoid and it was just hijacked by bad faith partisans. It was a right-coded trend from pretty much the beginning, and naturally intersected with many pre-existing culture war fault lines. Many of the Twitter (where the meme first gained popularity) accounts signal boosting Malfoid the hardest in the week it took off were right-wing shitpost or political accounts. Why do you think the meme is called Malfoid to begin with, and not something like Galfoy? Foid is an incel/chud term, and though it's seeing wider adoption recently, that kind of name doesn't fall out of the sky from nowhere.
You're also misrepresenting what exactly the left/right conflict was. Left-wingers that disliked the meme did not talk about radicalization, they didn't like that it was associated with JK Rowling, the final boss of transphobes. Every Malfoid meme is free publicity for her. There were plenty of complaints about the -foid suffix as well. Those of them who enjoyed the meme made sure to caveat that they didn't support Rowling when doing so, or were tongue-in-cheek about it by insisting Malfoid was a trans Malfoy a la Petra Parker.
Right-wingers didn't jump onto the meme for its 'racism and ethno-nationalism' — the majority of the appeal for them was about romance, love, yearning, gender dynamics, and flag planting. Malfoid as a trend led to lots of people discussing what was lacking in modern-day courtship, or in modern western media. There was also a ton of glee in 'reclaiming' Harry Potter, something that has been left-coded for the entirety of the 2010s, and in knowing that left-wingers couldn't embrace the meme due to its association with Rowling. There was a feeling of taking something back, or gaining ground in a media environment that is left-wing by default. Even the name of Malfoid acted as a filter due to its aforementioned associations.
An illustrative incident for this whole thing is with Yunayu, a popular Chinese artist, who posted Malfoid fanart on her Blsky before deleting it and apologizing due to backlash. A few days later, she would delete her Bluesky and go back to Twitter, where she reposted the deleted art and drew many more like. This is not a neutral act that can be taken without cultural context. The migration of many artists and left-wing accounts to Bluesky was a huge deal when Elon took over Twitter in 2022, and someone doing this in the wake of an attempted cancellation is big. In culture war terms, this was a massive L for the progressive heckler crowd that held all the cards only four short years ago. This may seem like inconsequential nonsense, but the culture you swim in is made up of thousands of these little skirmishes.
Adding onto all of this is the use of AI fanart and animations in this trend. While many talented artists contributed, I saw dozens of AI-generated animations cross my feed depicting Harry Potter as a slice of life romance anime. The reception to them was uncharacteristically positive — I am used to seeing 'AI slop' and 'hate that this is AI' in the comments section of AI-generated videos, but people didn't seem to care here. Take a look at the comments of this one — many of them even say something like 'maybe those data centers aren't so bad.' I saw plenty of animations like this where the comments were in near-full support. We seem to be crossing a threshold where many normies do not care if the content they consume is AI or not as long as it is enjoyable. Make what you will of that, but the Malfoid trend seems to have done a lot to push the needle in the direction of 'maybe AI is not so bad.'
I can agree that the DOE Twitter account posting a Malfoid meme is cringe and unserious, but it’s not like they were turning it into a partisan thing out of nowhere. There is a reason the person behind the account thought it would be a good bone to throw their audience.
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Unfortunately, letting people have good things in real life will require some attitude other than this. It turns out that, if you want Malfoid to be real, something has to change; being apolitical will not get you there. As for what, I will agree that neither the mainstream right or left know.
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Looks like from the original viral drawing until the first viral use of "foid" was actually more than half a day? I would not have guessed that, but I'm not finding any similarly popular use of "Malfoid" any earlier, and it doesn't become a hashtag until 5 days later.
The best defense I've heard of the culture-warring here is the idea that "foid" acted as a shibboleth, preemptive offensiveness to keep away the "We have to do this My Way, because Your Way is Too Offensive" crowd and enable more creativity ... but I'm not sure the timeline works for that theory.
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Nothing to add really but I wholeheartedly endorse this commentary.
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I really loved the parts that were another riff on "men only want one thing and it's disgusting". Compared to fifty shades of jacking off minotaurs and whatever Alchemized was, the male fantasy of "love interest is so invested into playing tsundere that she keeps on trying even when married with three children" is disgustingly wholesome.
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I do find the far right versions of this to be cringe, but as usual I find them to be tamer and less harmful than the far left. Note the asymmetry in the parasitism: it's fanfiction and memes. They're not getting access to the Harry Potter License and making canon works with racist Malfoid. They're not infiltrating an ongoing series and then degrading the quality, making a cringe propaganda piece and preventing authentic version of the work from existing. When the left claims something they get into the canon and ruin it. We don't have good Star Wars 7-9 because the left ruined it. They're not making woke fanfictions, they are subverting the canon and the IP, effectively pushing out the original, neutral creators.
Meanwhile, when the right claims something they make fanfiction. All of the wholesome, politically neutral Malfoid content still exists, and then the right wing stuff exists too. It's not parasitism because they're not denying anything, they're not squatting on an IP, they're just making their own versions alongside the others. The threat is that when the right claims something, the left will threaten to cancel people making and enjoying it. If you don't like the right wing culture warriors you can just ignore them and enjoy the wholesome version of the content. If you don't like left wing culture warriors you are screwed because they are unavoidable.
I think Disney corporate could have ruined Star Wars VII-IX without politics. For that matter, George Lucas could have ruined Star Wars VII-IX, and given the way he ruined episodes I and II that would be the way to bet. The problem is the existence of the plot holes (most obviously Rey's backstory) that Disney tried to fill with woke politics, not the woke politics.
I think politics made movies worse by suppressing criticism of movies that were bad anyway, more than by causing people who could have made good movies to make bad ones.
I don't think this is a meaningful distinction, I think the dynamics you point out are one of the primary mechanisms through which wokeism ruin things (media and real political ideas). It substitutes for goodness. Carbon Monoxide, Cyanide, Lead, and other chemicals are toxic because they bind to a receptor as if they were another useful chemical, but then they don't do the thing that chemical is supposed to do. The receptor is filled and it doesn't have a second slot to accept both, so it lacks the thing it was supposed to have.
Wokeism fills the goodness receptor. It's not that Disney thought and thought and thought about Rey's backstory and couldn't think of anything so they reluctantly turned to wokeism to do the job. It's that they thought about the backstory slot, someone suggested wokeism, and everyone thought that was a great idea and stuck it in there, then they stopped looking for something better. If someone thinks woke ideas and characters are 4x as good as they actually are, then when they see a character who is 30% as good as average they perceive them as above average instead of recoiling in disgust and trying really hard to fix them before publishing.
Relatedly, I think this is also largely what's going on in politics. When someone comes up with an idea like "Whole language" and it causes literacy rates to plummet, a normal person should be horrified and see this as a bad policy to be immediately replaced. But if it gets 4x goodness perception for woke reasons, then it is seen as good despite its object level failures.
Even if the wokeness had no first order impact on the results of any specific thing its attached to, it causing massive perception distortions prevents them from choosing properly. It's impossible to fully optimize for multiple variables simultaneously, so any preferences on one axis trade off against preferences on other axes.
(Note also that this dynamic is not unique to wokeism, and can happen with far-right stuff too. Just in practice in the modern day it's the most prominent example.)
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I think Kathleen Kennedy herself is a stronger argument. A lot of the core problems with the sequel trilogy do seem to come down to her personal character flaws, which at least rhyme with woke politics in a chicken-and-egg situation.
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That's probablt a fair point to make, but it is highly contingent on the present terrain, that is to say, the left dominates the culture industries, and the right doesn't. I don't view the right as morally superior to the left when it comes to opportunistically parasitising media like this, because the right's abstinence is not coming from any kind of virtue. It's just coming from a lack of power.
The active ingredients here are not 'left' and 'right'. The active ingredient is power, and nothing else.
I tentatively agree, which is why I identify primarily as a centrist (albeit a right leaning one). Back when the right had more cultural power they went around censoring and cancelling things they didn't like. But... that was decades ago. It is contingent on the terrain, but the terrain shifts slowly, so we should act in accordance with the present terrain. I'm not going to get upset at zoomers getting excited about racist Malfoid or Anakin because that's going to correlate with good immigration policy and maybe in a decade or two the terrain will end up more central and we can get some sanity and balance for a bit. THEN if it starts to go too far right I can start pushing in the opposite direction. But we're so far from that I'm not going to worry about it now, there are bigger priorities in the opposite direction.
I'm a bit ambivalent here. On the one hand, as a fellow moderate, I agree that there is some merit in the idea of siding with whoever's currently out of power in the hopes of dragging the polity back toward the centre...
But on the other, I'm not sure it's as linear as that. I think it's possible for far-left to flip to far-right, and vice versa, without ever passing through the sane middle, and that it's therefore better for the cause of moderation to stand up for moderation regardless, even if that means criticising the extremists who are currently out of power. If Team Open Borders is in power, then I'm not actually convinced that siding with Team Let's Eat Immigrants is a route back to sanity. I suspect it is better to continue to disavow Team Eat Immigrants while still fighting against Team Open Borders.
Prioritisation is important, you're right, and I'm potentially vulnerable to being suckered by whichever lunatics are currently in power, but at the same time, you might be vulnerable to being suckered by whichever lunatics aren't currently in power.
At any rate, in this particular context I am anonymously whining on the internet. I feel more license, on the Motte, to just say what I genuinely feel without consideration for how it might affect the wider political landscape.
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