This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).
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Quality Contributions to the Main Motte
Contributions for the week of September 28, 2026
Contributions for the week of October 5, 2026
@kky:
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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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