Comment on Anon browses ancient memes
DillyDaily@lemmy.world 1 month agoSomehow the bigotry of the old not-for-profit internet felt less harmful than the current model where corporatations fund bots to fuck everyone in the mental health for a grab at our empty wallets.
Flax_vert@feddit.uk 1 month ago
Back then the bigotry were mostly jokes than actual serious unironic targeting which you see festering nowadays.
HawlSera@lemm.ee 1 month ago
A lot of it was ironic “It’s funny because we know it’s fucked up and wrong, if we legitimately agreed we wouldn’t think it was funny.”
Flax_vert@feddit.uk 1 month ago
Yeah, like a lot of racist humour in old british comedy shows is generally at the expense of the racist themselves, rather than who they’re mocking
HawlSera@lemm.ee 1 month ago
Back in the YTMND days I was among the “Moon Crew”, people who made fads (what we called memes back then) about Moon Man. (The overtly racist version of the Mac Tonight character)
If I had known Moon Man would go on to be a symbol of the Alt Right, I’d have never had anything to do with the character.
Back then the joke was “Lol, Moon Man is completely insane and wacky.”, but in more recent Moon Man material the joke changed to “Moon Man is based cause he hates women and minorities.”
No one actually had any support for the KKK, the chant just sounded funny on the old version of AT&T’s text to speech
And when Moon Man was involved in storylines the villains were usually folks like Charles Moonington (An undercover terrorists pretending to be a member of high society) or Goofy Clown Face (an unapologetic pedophile) who were demonstratably worse than Moon Man.
Now when I see the character he’s unironically supporting Trump, and actively battling against Sun Man (who in the original canon we made for the character was a self-hating black man who the “Three K Mafia” had to have around due to anti-discrimination laws requiring at least one black guy in the klan)
Moon Man was also shown as being clueless and out of touch with reality, because again, a major part of the character was that he was insane and not meant to be imitated.
It just pisses me off that he became a recruitment tool for Bigoted Movements, when again, he was largely satirical and meant to mock such backwards views. I mean shit, Moon Man’s “songs” were largely specifically parodies of and homages to famous rap musicians, that should have been a big clue right there that no one involved with the character’s inception actually hated black people. (That’s actually how I discovered Tupac, look this was like 15 years ago, I was an edgy teenager back then)
It makes me fully understand the pain Anthony Starr feels when he gets those fan letters about “What a good American Homelander is”, or how that guy who wrote that one comic felt when he had to kill off Pepe…