I have this persistent notion that future historians, centuries from now, are going to try to make sense of what happened to us in the modern day, and they simply will not be able to.
For one thing, my guess is the Internet will function as a technological event horizon. Things are happening that are -impossible- to explain to anyone from a culture that doesn't have the Internet. (And I'm assuming our future historians will not have anything like it.)
But more, as you say, everything in our society is breaking down. The vaccines, fentanyl, rampant despair, phone addiction, the schools turned into torture factories, military and economic policy crafted in defiance of all known reality. And so on, and so on.
"So you guys didn't think it was a bad idea to give cancer drugs to prepubescent kids?" I can hear the historians ask. "Did no one think it was a warning sign when elementary school children started taking antidepressants? What made you think you could fight Russia when you lost to the Taliban? Why were you just ignoring all of it?"
I tend to agree that there will be no internet in the future, at least, not as we understand it, whether that be because it's evolved into something more advanced, regressed and curtailed, or (and this is the best case scenario in my opinion), there's an IRL Butlerian Jihad. And, on that note, I think regardless of whether or not the internet exists, or what state it is in, or if its been replaced by an alternative network system, future historians will look back at the internet as it is now as one of the major contributing factor to our ultimate undoing and, again, like Dune (can you tell I love the way the Dune series approaches technology?), I can't imagine it will be viewed with anything but superstitious fear at best. As it rightly should. I have no answers for any future historians, either, but I would tell them that the people of our time really had no way of knowing just how things would turn out.
A Butlerian Jihad, you say? Hang on, let me get my crysknife.
I had an idea for some sort of answer, a starting point at least, to my questions:
By the 2020s, the American population had been subjected to multiple decades of psychological warfare, the scope and pace of which was wildly accelerated by the advent of the Internet. Some of the more notable results were rampant insanity, complete demoralization, and a profound blindness to looming realities.
I'm serious when I say that, when I was a kid, I was like, "I can't wait until the future is like Star Trek and computers are everywhere", and, now, even though I'd hate the lose the internet for... reasons, I'm more like, "Wow, I can't wait until the future is like Dune and we destroy computers forever."
The absolute relentless mass media psy-op will probably be what most people point to, yes. There's simply no other way to explain how everyone, as it often feels like, simply went batshit insane overnight.
I do sometimes, depending on how much effort I want to put in, but I also use so much that if I was going to mince it all it would take quite a while. Though I've also taken to just crushing it and roasting it in the oven a bit. Not quite the same but good in a different way.
Your ability to use pop culture fads as a lens to examine the underlying pathologies of our society remains strong as ever. As does your propensity for wandering off the reservation mid-essay - although the look at reactions to the great medieval plagues was a nice touch (If I might nerd slightly about it, both the Plague of Justinian and the Black Death coincided with usually poor conditions. The former occurred around the time of a massive volcanic eruption and generally worsening weather, which led to several years of poor harvests, as well as Justinian's reconquests of Carthage and Italy. The latter appeared in the wake of the Mongol Conquests, in the midst of a Europe which had been experiencing intermittent famines for over thirty years as the burgeoning population of the continent bumped up against the productive limits of medieval agriculture).
We moderns have a bit of a habit of corrupting cutesy things and subjecting them to nightmarish worlds, but ponies certainly seem to attract a lot of it. Fluffy ponies and the like have dogged the fandom since its infancy (I prefer Rainbow Factory to Cupcakes, myself). This new wave of grimdark cartoon horses does seem to be mostly a pressure relief for the insanity of the Plague Year - one that, like everything else mainstream in the current year, is painted up in Brands, corporate or otherwise. It definitely is a little unnerving; perhaps it's the half-exposed horse skulls. This particular trend, however, has passed mostly under my radar. The divide between the older, adult fans and the newer, childhood fans that you mentioned is mostly likely to blame.
I am mad as FUCK I didn't think of "Behold a Pale Pony" to be the title of the article now. I don't think most people got that the title is a play on one of Cormac McCarthy's lesser known novels. Taking into account factors that exacerbated these plagues, though, it makes me wonder how long it takes them to start playing the "climate change" card to drum up fear of a new black death (or even just COVID-20). I mean, climactic shifts can obviously worsen conditions dramatically, but I feel like if they tried to lay the blame of some new plague solely at the feet of climate change, it would be extremely reductionist.
I totally forgot about fluffy ponies. I remember seeing those on 4chan. It's funny that even that was a mutation and extension of an older meme from the Touhou community, which I've always said was almost a prototype for the Brony community in a lot of ways. Namely, an obsessive adult fanbase with an immense output of high quality, multi-media fan content, proprietary fan conventions, a veritable myriad of esoteric memes that can be difficult for outsiders to understand, and the content itself features a cutesy all-female cast that would not conventionally appeal to male audiences. Oh, and their similar penchant for producing excessive quantities of lewd material. Can't forget that.
I'm also curious to get your opinion on something, since you have experience with the community; do you see trends like this opening the door to new fans? Do you think it's likely that someone who's, say, fourteen or fifteen and wasn't really old enough to engage with the brony community during its heyday can get drawn into the larger FiM fandom from this, of all things? I'd be hard pressed to say that there won't be at least one, but I genuinely have to wonder if this major uptick in interest and popularity won't have greater effects on the fandom. Or even the franchise. I've been doing research into G5 and it's kind of shocking how it appears that Hasbro squandered a huge opportunity to parlay the success of G4 into a new series.
Climate change can cause anything now, don't you know? Although, barring a major volcanic eruption, the reaching of Malthusian limits that fundamentally drove the increased mortality of the most famous plagues - thankfully - don't really apply to the developed world; we have other, more civilised comorbidities now. Not that the powers that be would ever care about that
Touhou is definitely a prototype for the brony menace. The musical output in particular is the most salient similarity to me, since I can't really think of any other fandom that approaches these two in that regard. I recall you mentioning that (though in which article, I cannot recall) Japanese neet and consumer culture in many ways prefigured the same in the West, as certain parts of their own crushing social realignment to electronic modernity began one or two decades earlier than our own. This similarity I think is a point in your favour. QRD on the fluffy ponies-2hu connection?
As for new fans, I do think that there's been a slow trickle of new blood into the fandom (like me, for instance), but I don't think it's yet outpaced the rate of attrition to HRT, furries, and general loss of interest. But I can't really speak with any authority on that, since I habitually avoid the sites like twitter where new fans tend to congregate. My personal pet theory on the Hasbro front is that they've been trying to get rid of the adult fanbase for years out of embarrassment and have only belatedly, if at all, come around to just how profitable adult fans can be.
That was the article about Digimon Tamers and the prelude to the consoomer wave, predated by the early otaku community, yeah. As for the fluffy pony-Touhou link, the Touhou community had this... meme, I guess you could call it, called "yukkuri", where the touhou characters were depicted as - and, yes, this is weird as fuck, but bear with me - semi-sentient anpan (red bean sweet rolls). Basically, just very simple heads with the easily identifiable parts of a touhou character (headware, hair, wings, etc.) slapped on. Each character was a different species of yukkuri, but the uniting factor is that they were basically dumb animals that could be kept as pets that spoke in baby talk. And, much like fluffy ponies, someone decided that it would be really, really funny if they killed these things in extraordinarily gruesome, graphic ways. Yukkuri torture was a huge thing in the community and those guys ate it up. I mean it was grotesque. A lot of piss, shit, and gore. I'm not usually someone who equates liking fictional media with personality traits, but it was graphic and excessive to the point that I suspect some of them actually were predisposed to animal abuse, because a lot of it seemed like stuff that a normal person just... wouldn't think about, you know? Sounds hyperbolic, but if you ever saw it, you'd probably agree. Of course, there was plenty of less violent, more wholesome content produced with Yukkuris, but obviously the more depraved content is what stuck with me. I never did much digging into the fluffy pony meme but from what I have seen it seems like pretty much the exact same thing with the exact same conceit of excessive and gratuitous abuse against dumb animals. Obviously fans of this stuff are in the minority of both fandoms, but you didn't have to look that hard to find it in the Touhou community (which, at the time, I was pretty engaged with). It's just weird that the two have such a similar phenomenon and I'm positive that there's a direct correlation between fluffy ponies and the yukkuri.
Interesting idea that Hasbro was trying to shed the adult fans. It makes sense - they probably didn't want the bad publicity, but at the same time, in the world of marketing, there's no such thing as bad attention. Especially when it comes to consoomer types that will unquestionably and reliably buy your stuff. I was revisiting the third part of my brony articles (which will hopefully come out in the next month or so) and was kind of struck revisiting the conversation with my friend about the quality of the merchandise, and how he said he never bought any of it (outside of the Mane 6 figures, which, I think were mandatory purchases for most bronies) because it was all so inaccurate to the show and clearly made for children. The official Hasbro licensed pony plush toys were so shoddy compared to the fan-made ones that I can only think they would have made a mint off plush sales alone if they had looked somewhat decent. I mean, judging from the pictures of bronies and their merch collection, they still bought them, but I think they would have bought even more if they'd been putting out products like many of the custom pony plushes I've seen.
There are great many lessons to be learned from our recent history, lessons that can be further bolstered by looking at ancient history, much like you did here. Unfortunately, as you also say here, there are a great many people simply are not willing to do this. Is it any wonder that history rhymes as it does when this is the case?
A fascinating meditation on disease, death, and culture. There's so much more from Medieval culture that the modern world has forgotten. I hope to write more about it.
As a friend of mine told me recently - "The more I read about the old world, the more I realize they were right about a lot of things." There's something to be said for a more medieval mindset, as he calls it.
Brilliant work, well worth the read time. And woe betide any who dare skip the italics! Fluff for the fluff god! Style for the style throne!
Once again, a million thoughts about this piece, but due to time constraints, I'll try and bullet point a few:
1) I totally agree about this kind of cultural, Lamarkian inheritance of trauma, and both marvel and tremble at the sight of the psy-op shattered American psyche's combination of willingness and desire for repression, suppression, and avoidance regarding the extraordinary trauma being foisted continuously upon it.
2) The "This is fine." Tiger King binging of this era reminded me of a similar point I made in an article about those dark times, in this case regarding the juxtaposition of the Woke Race Crusader/Plague Doctor/Government Enforcer's ability to simultaneously waste countless hours obliviously watching Tiger King and playing Animal Crossing, then somehow spring into action the instant they receive the new firmware download and act with frenzied, fanatical zeal in attacking anyone who doesn't follow suit in addressing The Current Thing. You may get a kick out of it: https://honestlyre.substack.com/p/happy-black-history-month
3) I can't express in words how happy I am to see someone else talk about Marble Hornets.
4) "We are a profoundly sick people." I agree. That's why I find myself quoting Krishnamurti pretty much daily at this point haha when he said: "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” And yet that is where we are, near-complete inversion. No bueno.
Hey, I won't lie - I watched Tiger King and played a LOT of Animal Crossing during the early days of the Lockdown. It was actually a good time. Working remote. Sleeping in. Spending more time with my family than I had in a long time. Despite the world falling apart outside, my life improved dramatically. For a while. Everything gets old after a while (except for the remote work part, I'd actually, sincerely kill someone to do that again). But, still. I'll be sure to give it a read.
I hear ya; it is such a complex, multifarious phenomenon! I totally agree about all of the positives you listed (e.g,. most jobs should have the option for remote work, quality of life & work/life balance, saving on commuting costs and pollution, more time to collect trash to wow Blathers the Owl over at the museum...). But, of course, that's how they getcha! The downsides being that it was all part of a dystopian, Machiavellian powerplay to orchestrate the single largest wealth transfer in history (As far as I know. People say that, but maybe Mansa Musa going on a spending spree in Cairo was greater, what do I know!?) and a brain-melting psy-op that murdered millions and fundamentally, perhaps irrevocably, fractured society and the minds of the masses. Sigh. Globalists: this is why we can't have nice things.
But, I digress... as always haha. I will definitely check out the Marble Hornets article. I was obsessed with that series back in the day haha. Can't wait!
To be fair to Mansa Musa, I'm not sure he knew the effects his shopping spree would have. The guy was fabulously wealthy, not an economist. But that also might be giving him too much credit.
I was obsessed with Marble Hornets, too. I'm pretty convinced it's one of the greatest pieces of amateur art ever produced by the internet.
Were it not for you, I would know nothing of the Bronies, or of these latter-day developments. I guess that I don't find it surprising, exactly; no oddity, or depravity, is surprising anymore. As far back as goatse.cx, one could see where the internet would be going. But I think that linking COVID to past plagues, and the fear of plague throughout history, explains only the first three months or so, at best. Here is what I mean.
In early 2020, I was living in a rented townhouse in a "nicer" suburb in a very "blue" area. This was never planned to be permanent, but these events caught me before I was able to escape to what passes for a rural area in this region. Between my so-called "community" and my place of employment, I observed the full effect at close range. And around here, it wasn't really over until... what? late 2022, early 2023? It's hard to recall when it started getting memory-holed.
Personally, I was vaguely apprehensive at first. Given the number of people in Wuhan, and the reported death tolls at the time, it didn't seem like that big of a deal. And yet all these drastic actions were being taken by the people who should have been best-informed. So I thought, perhaps, something was known that wasn't being publicized, not even in the unusual circles in which I move, professionally. Something very bad? I knew the history of past plagues, and had been inoculated with smallpox in 2002 along with the rest of my squadron; it didn't seem impossible to me. And so, in March and April 2020, I can attribute what happened to the fear of plague, and the exaggerated reports coming from distant locales.
By the end of April, though, it was plain to me that the whole thing was a ridiculous overreaction. By the end of May or June, I found it hard to believe that this wasn't plain to *everyone*. And yet it didn't stop -- if anything, it intensified -- and it continued for *years* after that.
Now personally, as I've written elsewhere, I had long seen that the sun was setting. What I learned from covidism was that the hour was far later than I had thought, that the spread of smartphones, used in the way that our culture would use such a thing, was somehow even more horribly pernicious than I had imagined. I understand that hoping for a general realization of these things is futile. But for "society" at large, how can they just *not talk* about it? It was all that was talked about, for *years*.
I don't believe that they're avoiding the topic to repress trauma, not exactly. Yes, some people, mostly old or sickly, fell ill and died. But if somone claims that this was like the plagues of the past, even the Spanish flu, I will be forced to laugh in bitter mockery. Instead, I think that "we" refuse to discuss the pandemic out of shame. Not shame at the initial panic -- I suppose that the masses can be excused, although the leaders cannot. Instead, shame at the two years that followed the initial panic, at all of the small individual actions and statements, repeated day after day, week after week, that deformed everything everywhere for a very long time. Remember the scorn that met calls for "pandemic amnesty," maybe sometime last year? The bulk of the population -- at least around here -- which either fervently advocated, or more or less agreed, with all of this, wants desperately to avoid considering, much less answering, the questions: how could we have *done* all this? how could we have thought and said all that? for *so long*? what is *wrong* with us?
I think that shame is definitely a part of the equation as to why the lockdowns have been so swiftly and brutally memory-holed, for sure. I meant to imply as much with the passage about "lockdown amnesia", as that, in my opinion, is almost certainly not a trauma response so much as it is one designed to save the ego of people who towed the party line long after the truth was obvious. So far as I see it, justifying what happened by almost any metric is pretty much impossible, so the only way they can save face is to claim it never happened or, at the very least, never enforced (I've seen that claim made in various pieces of media, that there was a "lockdown", but it was "strictly voluntary"... as if we didn't have field guys getting pulled over by cops for literal "Papers please" checkpoint stops to make sure they were "essential workers"). Admitting anything or making any concessions would, I believe, upend their entire worldview. They buy into the narrative set by the MSM so wholeheartedly that even the slightest discrepancy in the story would force them to reevaluate their entire worldview. Shame is definitely part of it, but I think it's also just that they straight up can't admit to any of it. At least, not without having to do some serious soul searching.
Awesome article. I enjoy how you weave all these different things together and thoroughly investigate them all. And then the wrap up at the end to tie it all together was excellent. Thank you for this awesome and fascinating work.
I have this persistent notion that future historians, centuries from now, are going to try to make sense of what happened to us in the modern day, and they simply will not be able to.
For one thing, my guess is the Internet will function as a technological event horizon. Things are happening that are -impossible- to explain to anyone from a culture that doesn't have the Internet. (And I'm assuming our future historians will not have anything like it.)
But more, as you say, everything in our society is breaking down. The vaccines, fentanyl, rampant despair, phone addiction, the schools turned into torture factories, military and economic policy crafted in defiance of all known reality. And so on, and so on.
"So you guys didn't think it was a bad idea to give cancer drugs to prepubescent kids?" I can hear the historians ask. "Did no one think it was a warning sign when elementary school children started taking antidepressants? What made you think you could fight Russia when you lost to the Taliban? Why were you just ignoring all of it?"
I have no answers for them.
I tend to agree that there will be no internet in the future, at least, not as we understand it, whether that be because it's evolved into something more advanced, regressed and curtailed, or (and this is the best case scenario in my opinion), there's an IRL Butlerian Jihad. And, on that note, I think regardless of whether or not the internet exists, or what state it is in, or if its been replaced by an alternative network system, future historians will look back at the internet as it is now as one of the major contributing factor to our ultimate undoing and, again, like Dune (can you tell I love the way the Dune series approaches technology?), I can't imagine it will be viewed with anything but superstitious fear at best. As it rightly should. I have no answers for any future historians, either, but I would tell them that the people of our time really had no way of knowing just how things would turn out.
A Butlerian Jihad, you say? Hang on, let me get my crysknife.
I had an idea for some sort of answer, a starting point at least, to my questions:
By the 2020s, the American population had been subjected to multiple decades of psychological warfare, the scope and pace of which was wildly accelerated by the advent of the Internet. Some of the more notable results were rampant insanity, complete demoralization, and a profound blindness to looming realities.
I'm serious when I say that, when I was a kid, I was like, "I can't wait until the future is like Star Trek and computers are everywhere", and, now, even though I'd hate the lose the internet for... reasons, I'm more like, "Wow, I can't wait until the future is like Dune and we destroy computers forever."
The absolute relentless mass media psy-op will probably be what most people point to, yes. There's simply no other way to explain how everyone, as it often feels like, simply went batshit insane overnight.
Great comment. I feel very similarly.
I was a brony from ages 6 to 12, and I can confirm that Rainbow Dash would die first.
Good to know the math checks out and it's not just my personal bias against the most annoying character in any given show.
Bruh. Mince your own garlic. Cans of minced garlic are for boomer stepmoms.
I do sometimes, depending on how much effort I want to put in, but I also use so much that if I was going to mince it all it would take quite a while. Though I've also taken to just crushing it and roasting it in the oven a bit. Not quite the same but good in a different way.
"And I looked, and behold a pale horse"
Your ability to use pop culture fads as a lens to examine the underlying pathologies of our society remains strong as ever. As does your propensity for wandering off the reservation mid-essay - although the look at reactions to the great medieval plagues was a nice touch (If I might nerd slightly about it, both the Plague of Justinian and the Black Death coincided with usually poor conditions. The former occurred around the time of a massive volcanic eruption and generally worsening weather, which led to several years of poor harvests, as well as Justinian's reconquests of Carthage and Italy. The latter appeared in the wake of the Mongol Conquests, in the midst of a Europe which had been experiencing intermittent famines for over thirty years as the burgeoning population of the continent bumped up against the productive limits of medieval agriculture).
We moderns have a bit of a habit of corrupting cutesy things and subjecting them to nightmarish worlds, but ponies certainly seem to attract a lot of it. Fluffy ponies and the like have dogged the fandom since its infancy (I prefer Rainbow Factory to Cupcakes, myself). This new wave of grimdark cartoon horses does seem to be mostly a pressure relief for the insanity of the Plague Year - one that, like everything else mainstream in the current year, is painted up in Brands, corporate or otherwise. It definitely is a little unnerving; perhaps it's the half-exposed horse skulls. This particular trend, however, has passed mostly under my radar. The divide between the older, adult fans and the newer, childhood fans that you mentioned is mostly likely to blame.
I am mad as FUCK I didn't think of "Behold a Pale Pony" to be the title of the article now. I don't think most people got that the title is a play on one of Cormac McCarthy's lesser known novels. Taking into account factors that exacerbated these plagues, though, it makes me wonder how long it takes them to start playing the "climate change" card to drum up fear of a new black death (or even just COVID-20). I mean, climactic shifts can obviously worsen conditions dramatically, but I feel like if they tried to lay the blame of some new plague solely at the feet of climate change, it would be extremely reductionist.
I totally forgot about fluffy ponies. I remember seeing those on 4chan. It's funny that even that was a mutation and extension of an older meme from the Touhou community, which I've always said was almost a prototype for the Brony community in a lot of ways. Namely, an obsessive adult fanbase with an immense output of high quality, multi-media fan content, proprietary fan conventions, a veritable myriad of esoteric memes that can be difficult for outsiders to understand, and the content itself features a cutesy all-female cast that would not conventionally appeal to male audiences. Oh, and their similar penchant for producing excessive quantities of lewd material. Can't forget that.
I'm also curious to get your opinion on something, since you have experience with the community; do you see trends like this opening the door to new fans? Do you think it's likely that someone who's, say, fourteen or fifteen and wasn't really old enough to engage with the brony community during its heyday can get drawn into the larger FiM fandom from this, of all things? I'd be hard pressed to say that there won't be at least one, but I genuinely have to wonder if this major uptick in interest and popularity won't have greater effects on the fandom. Or even the franchise. I've been doing research into G5 and it's kind of shocking how it appears that Hasbro squandered a huge opportunity to parlay the success of G4 into a new series.
Climate change can cause anything now, don't you know? Although, barring a major volcanic eruption, the reaching of Malthusian limits that fundamentally drove the increased mortality of the most famous plagues - thankfully - don't really apply to the developed world; we have other, more civilised comorbidities now. Not that the powers that be would ever care about that
Touhou is definitely a prototype for the brony menace. The musical output in particular is the most salient similarity to me, since I can't really think of any other fandom that approaches these two in that regard. I recall you mentioning that (though in which article, I cannot recall) Japanese neet and consumer culture in many ways prefigured the same in the West, as certain parts of their own crushing social realignment to electronic modernity began one or two decades earlier than our own. This similarity I think is a point in your favour. QRD on the fluffy ponies-2hu connection?
As for new fans, I do think that there's been a slow trickle of new blood into the fandom (like me, for instance), but I don't think it's yet outpaced the rate of attrition to HRT, furries, and general loss of interest. But I can't really speak with any authority on that, since I habitually avoid the sites like twitter where new fans tend to congregate. My personal pet theory on the Hasbro front is that they've been trying to get rid of the adult fanbase for years out of embarrassment and have only belatedly, if at all, come around to just how profitable adult fans can be.
That was the article about Digimon Tamers and the prelude to the consoomer wave, predated by the early otaku community, yeah. As for the fluffy pony-Touhou link, the Touhou community had this... meme, I guess you could call it, called "yukkuri", where the touhou characters were depicted as - and, yes, this is weird as fuck, but bear with me - semi-sentient anpan (red bean sweet rolls). Basically, just very simple heads with the easily identifiable parts of a touhou character (headware, hair, wings, etc.) slapped on. Each character was a different species of yukkuri, but the uniting factor is that they were basically dumb animals that could be kept as pets that spoke in baby talk. And, much like fluffy ponies, someone decided that it would be really, really funny if they killed these things in extraordinarily gruesome, graphic ways. Yukkuri torture was a huge thing in the community and those guys ate it up. I mean it was grotesque. A lot of piss, shit, and gore. I'm not usually someone who equates liking fictional media with personality traits, but it was graphic and excessive to the point that I suspect some of them actually were predisposed to animal abuse, because a lot of it seemed like stuff that a normal person just... wouldn't think about, you know? Sounds hyperbolic, but if you ever saw it, you'd probably agree. Of course, there was plenty of less violent, more wholesome content produced with Yukkuris, but obviously the more depraved content is what stuck with me. I never did much digging into the fluffy pony meme but from what I have seen it seems like pretty much the exact same thing with the exact same conceit of excessive and gratuitous abuse against dumb animals. Obviously fans of this stuff are in the minority of both fandoms, but you didn't have to look that hard to find it in the Touhou community (which, at the time, I was pretty engaged with). It's just weird that the two have such a similar phenomenon and I'm positive that there's a direct correlation between fluffy ponies and the yukkuri.
Interesting idea that Hasbro was trying to shed the adult fans. It makes sense - they probably didn't want the bad publicity, but at the same time, in the world of marketing, there's no such thing as bad attention. Especially when it comes to consoomer types that will unquestionably and reliably buy your stuff. I was revisiting the third part of my brony articles (which will hopefully come out in the next month or so) and was kind of struck revisiting the conversation with my friend about the quality of the merchandise, and how he said he never bought any of it (outside of the Mane 6 figures, which, I think were mandatory purchases for most bronies) because it was all so inaccurate to the show and clearly made for children. The official Hasbro licensed pony plush toys were so shoddy compared to the fan-made ones that I can only think they would have made a mint off plush sales alone if they had looked somewhat decent. I mean, judging from the pictures of bronies and their merch collection, they still bought them, but I think they would have bought even more if they'd been putting out products like many of the custom pony plushes I've seen.
There are great many lessons to be learned from our recent history, lessons that can be further bolstered by looking at ancient history, much like you did here. Unfortunately, as you also say here, there are a great many people simply are not willing to do this. Is it any wonder that history rhymes as it does when this is the case?
Time is a flat circle...
A fascinating meditation on disease, death, and culture. There's so much more from Medieval culture that the modern world has forgotten. I hope to write more about it.
As a friend of mine told me recently - "The more I read about the old world, the more I realize they were right about a lot of things." There's something to be said for a more medieval mindset, as he calls it.
And believe me, I'll be there to read if you do.
Brilliant work, well worth the read time. And woe betide any who dare skip the italics! Fluff for the fluff god! Style for the style throne!
Once again, a million thoughts about this piece, but due to time constraints, I'll try and bullet point a few:
1) I totally agree about this kind of cultural, Lamarkian inheritance of trauma, and both marvel and tremble at the sight of the psy-op shattered American psyche's combination of willingness and desire for repression, suppression, and avoidance regarding the extraordinary trauma being foisted continuously upon it.
2) The "This is fine." Tiger King binging of this era reminded me of a similar point I made in an article about those dark times, in this case regarding the juxtaposition of the Woke Race Crusader/Plague Doctor/Government Enforcer's ability to simultaneously waste countless hours obliviously watching Tiger King and playing Animal Crossing, then somehow spring into action the instant they receive the new firmware download and act with frenzied, fanatical zeal in attacking anyone who doesn't follow suit in addressing The Current Thing. You may get a kick out of it: https://honestlyre.substack.com/p/happy-black-history-month
3) I can't express in words how happy I am to see someone else talk about Marble Hornets.
4) "We are a profoundly sick people." I agree. That's why I find myself quoting Krishnamurti pretty much daily at this point haha when he said: "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” And yet that is where we are, near-complete inversion. No bueno.
5) Alternative BGM for this article: https://soundcloud.com/hirosashii/ponies-x4
Hey, I won't lie - I watched Tiger King and played a LOT of Animal Crossing during the early days of the Lockdown. It was actually a good time. Working remote. Sleeping in. Spending more time with my family than I had in a long time. Despite the world falling apart outside, my life improved dramatically. For a while. Everything gets old after a while (except for the remote work part, I'd actually, sincerely kill someone to do that again). But, still. I'll be sure to give it a read.
Also, if you're happy about the brief aside about Marble Hornets here, I've got an entire article on Marble Hornets and Slenderman here: https://yakubianape.substack.com/p/creepypasta-al-dente-tall-dark-and?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2 It's one of the pieces I had more fun writing ;)
I hear ya; it is such a complex, multifarious phenomenon! I totally agree about all of the positives you listed (e.g,. most jobs should have the option for remote work, quality of life & work/life balance, saving on commuting costs and pollution, more time to collect trash to wow Blathers the Owl over at the museum...). But, of course, that's how they getcha! The downsides being that it was all part of a dystopian, Machiavellian powerplay to orchestrate the single largest wealth transfer in history (As far as I know. People say that, but maybe Mansa Musa going on a spending spree in Cairo was greater, what do I know!?) and a brain-melting psy-op that murdered millions and fundamentally, perhaps irrevocably, fractured society and the minds of the masses. Sigh. Globalists: this is why we can't have nice things.
But, I digress... as always haha. I will definitely check out the Marble Hornets article. I was obsessed with that series back in the day haha. Can't wait!
To be fair to Mansa Musa, I'm not sure he knew the effects his shopping spree would have. The guy was fabulously wealthy, not an economist. But that also might be giving him too much credit.
I was obsessed with Marble Hornets, too. I'm pretty convinced it's one of the greatest pieces of amateur art ever produced by the internet.
Were it not for you, I would know nothing of the Bronies, or of these latter-day developments. I guess that I don't find it surprising, exactly; no oddity, or depravity, is surprising anymore. As far back as goatse.cx, one could see where the internet would be going. But I think that linking COVID to past plagues, and the fear of plague throughout history, explains only the first three months or so, at best. Here is what I mean.
In early 2020, I was living in a rented townhouse in a "nicer" suburb in a very "blue" area. This was never planned to be permanent, but these events caught me before I was able to escape to what passes for a rural area in this region. Between my so-called "community" and my place of employment, I observed the full effect at close range. And around here, it wasn't really over until... what? late 2022, early 2023? It's hard to recall when it started getting memory-holed.
Personally, I was vaguely apprehensive at first. Given the number of people in Wuhan, and the reported death tolls at the time, it didn't seem like that big of a deal. And yet all these drastic actions were being taken by the people who should have been best-informed. So I thought, perhaps, something was known that wasn't being publicized, not even in the unusual circles in which I move, professionally. Something very bad? I knew the history of past plagues, and had been inoculated with smallpox in 2002 along with the rest of my squadron; it didn't seem impossible to me. And so, in March and April 2020, I can attribute what happened to the fear of plague, and the exaggerated reports coming from distant locales.
By the end of April, though, it was plain to me that the whole thing was a ridiculous overreaction. By the end of May or June, I found it hard to believe that this wasn't plain to *everyone*. And yet it didn't stop -- if anything, it intensified -- and it continued for *years* after that.
Now personally, as I've written elsewhere, I had long seen that the sun was setting. What I learned from covidism was that the hour was far later than I had thought, that the spread of smartphones, used in the way that our culture would use such a thing, was somehow even more horribly pernicious than I had imagined. I understand that hoping for a general realization of these things is futile. But for "society" at large, how can they just *not talk* about it? It was all that was talked about, for *years*.
I don't believe that they're avoiding the topic to repress trauma, not exactly. Yes, some people, mostly old or sickly, fell ill and died. But if somone claims that this was like the plagues of the past, even the Spanish flu, I will be forced to laugh in bitter mockery. Instead, I think that "we" refuse to discuss the pandemic out of shame. Not shame at the initial panic -- I suppose that the masses can be excused, although the leaders cannot. Instead, shame at the two years that followed the initial panic, at all of the small individual actions and statements, repeated day after day, week after week, that deformed everything everywhere for a very long time. Remember the scorn that met calls for "pandemic amnesty," maybe sometime last year? The bulk of the population -- at least around here -- which either fervently advocated, or more or less agreed, with all of this, wants desperately to avoid considering, much less answering, the questions: how could we have *done* all this? how could we have thought and said all that? for *so long*? what is *wrong* with us?
I think that shame is definitely a part of the equation as to why the lockdowns have been so swiftly and brutally memory-holed, for sure. I meant to imply as much with the passage about "lockdown amnesia", as that, in my opinion, is almost certainly not a trauma response so much as it is one designed to save the ego of people who towed the party line long after the truth was obvious. So far as I see it, justifying what happened by almost any metric is pretty much impossible, so the only way they can save face is to claim it never happened or, at the very least, never enforced (I've seen that claim made in various pieces of media, that there was a "lockdown", but it was "strictly voluntary"... as if we didn't have field guys getting pulled over by cops for literal "Papers please" checkpoint stops to make sure they were "essential workers"). Admitting anything or making any concessions would, I believe, upend their entire worldview. They buy into the narrative set by the MSM so wholeheartedly that even the slightest discrepancy in the story would force them to reevaluate their entire worldview. Shame is definitely part of it, but I think it's also just that they straight up can't admit to any of it. At least, not without having to do some serious soul searching.
Awesome article. I enjoy how you weave all these different things together and thoroughly investigate them all. And then the wrap up at the end to tie it all together was excellent. Thank you for this awesome and fascinating work.
Thanks Jenn, I'm glad you enjoyed it :) And read 'til the end.
Well worth the time investment, thank you for all the work that went into it!