By David Futrelle
As I noted the other day, the big thing among right-wing shitposters at the moment is the “NPC” meme — an attempt to insult and dehumanize so-called Social Justice Warriors by declaring them to be, in effect, a bunch of “Non-Player Characters” who respond to everything right-wingers say with a few meaningless catchphrases, much like NPCs in video games.
So, yes, the trolls are trying to convince the world (and, I suppose, themselves) that their opponents are basically repetitive robots by … all using the same insult against them at once. The NPC meme is even more of a self-own than the “cuck” and “soyboy” memes that preceded it.
Now they’ve upped their game — I guess you could call it that? — by creating dozens if not hundreds of obviously fake NPC Twitter accounts to prove that … well, I don’t know what they’re trying to prove, honestly.
I discovered this phenomenon earlier today when a couple of these fake NPC accounts — complete with grey-faced NPC avatars — responded to my original article on the NPC nonsense. Here are their Twitter profiles.
As you can see, they’re not exactly trying to hide the fact that they’re trolls. (I don’t think even these idiots are idiotic enough to think this half-assed trollery is convincing.)
Here are some of Mr. Orange Man’s recent tweets. You might notice a couple of obvious patterns here. Along with the repetitiveness of the posts, most of them are replies to other fake NPC accounts.
I took a quick look at Mr. Orange Man Bad’s profile and saw that he had 70 followers, which is a lot more than one might expect from a throwaway troll account.
So who exactly would follow a completely worthless troll sockpuppet account like this?
Other completely worthless troll sockpuppet accounts. Page after page of them.
What are you even doing, guys? Why go to all this trouble to push a meme that everyone outside of shitposterland sees, at best, as a massive self-own or, at worst, a creepy way to dehumanize your enemies that makes you look a bit less than fully human yourselves? What on earth is the point?
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I wouldn’t have thought this one had legs, and as of a moment ago, still didn’t think it was going to last – a flash in the pan moment. But then I remembered that surely they couldn’t be so stupid as to actually think that “not only is soy feminising, LIBTARDS like… being feminised, presumably… that they eat soy constantly, loving it desperately despite the fact that, flavour-wise, it’s famous for tasting like whatever’s around it, and what do you even do to buy ‘soy’? Soy chips, tofu, and soy sauce, and that’s… about it? Yeah, but that’s what libtards do” and make that a thing for longer than a week or two, and here we are. I guess they’ve decided this is the latest stupid for the long haul.
It does annoy me, so I suppose they can dance around screaming “yay, we triggered a libtard soyboy!” for that. But I can’t picture much they’d be taking to their bosom that wouldn’t annoy me, since I’m not putting money on a vast wave of “oh god what have we done we must make amends” or even “oh god we’re ridiculous let’s hide underground for ten years and then never speak of this again”. So now I just know what’s going to be annoying me for the foreseeable future.
I also saw on David’s twitter that we leftist soyboy NPCs started it by calling “anyone right of centre” (so… most Democrats?) Russian bots or trolls. These are equally dehumanising. Shrug.
It is something to know that every time they hurr-hurr “the left can’t meme”, this is what they think is high-quality memework. I mean, sure, I can’t meme like that. I have dignity and self-respect. But you do you, you strange, strange right-wing Internet people.
For serious. A couple dozen or so put it in that “two buttons” meme, and it’s the weirdest thing. Like…they know the buttons are supposed to be contradictory statements, right? “Calling someone an NPC is dehumanizing” and “everyone right of center is a Russian troll/bot” aren’t mutually exclusive.
The only way it could make sense is if they somehow didn’t think Russian troll farms exist. And no one could possibly be that stupid.
…not even being sarcastic, no one is that stupid. It’s 100% bad faith.
“I don’t have the time to unravel your logic.” — Felix Unger
This article was poorly researched, but thank you for collating screen shots of the NPC tweets. They will be very handy! The act of publishing this article shows me the meme is successful. If you want to see an example of actions that lead to the creation of the NPC meme, look at the youtube video of Dave Rubin at a turning point USA event in new hampshire. I thought the activists were behaving like robots and this NPC meme fits them perfectly.
Not only here, but also in almost all Left leaning sites I’ve read on used the word ‘dehumanizing’. And see it here again…..and somehow you think NPC is a wrong depiction of you. You just spew same talking point, same ‘words’. Just like robots. Pathetic
Well quite, Izuu. You see, when one observes a thing happening, one generally uses words that refer to that thing. If lots of people observe the same thing happening, they are quite likely to use many of the same words, because, and stop me if this is too hard for you, that is how language works.
And I guess weather reporters are all bots by always using the same words too – “windy”, “sunny”, “high temperature”…right?
If that’s what it is, that’s what it is.
@Space Battleship Bear,
It is absolutely a successful meme – it carries a meaning, and it’s propagated well throughout the social space it’s been introduced int-
oh, you mean to say it’s true? No no, my duck, success and truth have nothing to do with one another when talking about a meme. Meme propagation has to do with a good number of things, truth is not one of them.
No big surprise this one has gotten big. Given that the community carrying the meme is based on the ashes of GamerGate, video game associations carry a lot of weight. I’m willing to bet this meme won’t spread beyond its current boundaries because of that, no traction. Good memes rely on attaching themselves to existing concepts. Most of us have “NPC” as a concept already, so the meme works. It doesn’t work if the audience doesn’t have that attachment point already.
(Notice the internal contradiction here. They’ve always portrayed us as not being “gamers”, as being interlopers who’ve just come in to ruin their space. But their meme relies on our understanding of gamer jargon.)
Thanks for the comment, it’s done me up a think. And that leads me to
@Izuu,
turns out that sometimes 2 + 2 does in fact equal 4, and the correct way to describe the additive result is the word “four”. We don’t have a lot of words with the same meaning as “dehumanizing”, so you see it repeated a lot.
Sorta like how it’s been said in response to all of the alt-right dickbutts using the word “NPC” in chorus, like an army of meme-spewing robots.
(Did you catch how I was able to turn that around on you there? It was quick, go back and read it again if you missed it.)
It’s almost like both you and I exist in communities, and ideas propagate and move throughout communities in response to the environment that community is in. We call that sort of independent propagation memetics in the science-based world. Memes, in relation to the biological functionary genes. Perhaps you’ve heard of them?
You two are a riot. Thank you for stopping by!
This is giving my positronic brain a recursion error.
Oh dear. I’ll give Susan Calvin a call.
Space Battleship Bear,
David writing about something is not proof that it’s a success. He wrote about Roosh’s gaming site that never took off, the 2nd annual AVFM conference that never was, the “sink misandry” protest against the Titanic women and children first policy, the debacle that was the Sarkeesian Effect and so on.
But sure, go on thinking that all attention is good attention. It fits with the spoiled child mentality that your ilk has.
Great. Thanks for leaving a list of fake leftist SJW NPC accounts to follow.
@weirwoodtreehugger: chief manatee “my ilk”, bullshit assumptions about me, and a comparison to something unrelated. I won’t go to your level. I can see you have completely failed to understand the NPC meme.
@ space battleship bear
Mate, you couldn’t get to WWTH’s level with a team of Sherpas. Stick to base camp; you’ll be more comfortable there.
I love how every time someone mocks the meme, trolls come along to say “you just don’t understand it.” I’ve seen it for days all over Twitter.
Again. Acting like a spoiled child who thinks none of the adults understand you.
If your meme is incomprehensible to everybody but the ones making and posting them, it’s not a very good meme. It’s not much of a defense to say we all just don’t get it. Of course, I think we do all get it and it’s a claim made in bad faith, but, whatever.
@Space Battleship Bear,
Ah, so it’s “evade what’s being said by complaining about how insulted you are” as the order of the day?
Please give us a moment here, my dear bear. I’ll take care of this for you. Would you like a drink while you wait? No? Okay. It’ll just be a moment.
(WWTH, these poor manosphereans are very fragile and sensitive souls, you know! We have to be gentle with them or they’ll run away crying! They frankly don’t have a woman’s constitution, so we really shouldn’t hold it against them.)
There we are. I’m very sorry about that, my duck. My egg. What she was trying to say is that just because a meme propagates doesn’t mean it’s true or that it’s good to propagate it. That’s not a very contentious thing to say, now, is it? She was just listing examples of other memes that have been both false and negative, and we’re very sorry that they were so hurtful for you to hear.
Unrelated, have you considered a nickname change? Space Battleship Bear doesn’t seem entirely … appropriate to your character. Maybe something a little more communicative. How does Star Schooner Stoat tickle your fancy? I quite like stoats, myself. Theatrical little monsters.
Anyways, all’s well, no harm done. And if you can’t quite follow the reasons WWTH was trying to communicate, don’t worry. We can do all that cognitive heavy-lifting for you.
Heaven knows, on a societal level it wouldn’t be the first time.
We’re laughing at how outraged people like you get.
That’s it’s function. That’s why it works. You make it work. This article is _exactly_ why this meme exists.
They made it incomprehensible and stupid, and you took not one but two posts that could have been opportunities to explain it and faceplanted instead. But somehow your, and their, failures are *our* fault? BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!
Wow weirdos come out because I suggested people pay attention to the events that lead to the creation of this meme. Do I really need to spell it out? The meme is a joke, and if you don’t see what the joke references, then the joke may be about you.
= failure to understand. You are actually admitting you don’t get it and proving what I said.
Character attack is not my game. I do not participate in childish games. This behaviour you are displaying now is funny. Its cartoonish. Keep it up mate. This shit is why you have the orange man for a president.
yes calling it incomprehensible does indicate to me you do not get it. You can reference back my original comment where I indicated there have been events in the last two years that created this meme, and worthy of research, or you can keep replying to me with immature adhom, ducks, and eggs.
Oh hey, you found the blockquote button! Excellent, well done!
Your reply is excellent and well-formed, I’ll leave it on its own, as it needs no accompaniment. I hope you don’t mind if I diagram it for the members of the audience, though? Thank you!
(for the audience; this sentence is completed thusly: “Character attack is not my game, even though I’ve come here to defend a meme that’s all about a character attack.”
This is a typical pseudorationalist behaviour, in which they are acutely aware of the slights others put upon them but see any insults they themselves might be delivering as either “a joke” or “objectively true” or both.)
(Pseudorationalists have many tricks to evade a criticism, this one is common – minimize the critic as “childish”, “stupid” or – well, “NPC” if we want to be meta about it. Instead of engaging honestly, the critique is minimized so that it can be discarded. This is also how the right wing tends to evade criticism on a national scale as well – watch how the right wing political machinery across the world uses “fake news” as a universal rebuff!)
(Similar to the above comment about minimization instead of engagement, “humour” to the pseudorationalist is largely a tool used to signal group membership. Jokes are largely about insulting some segment of society instead of – you know – being funny. You can very quickly get a gauge for whether someone is on the in-group or not by what jokes they laugh at. That’s universal across humanity, by the way, though it seems like the right wing seems to find more humour in viciousness.)
I don’t, actually! I have a handsome feminist for a Prime Minister. Very lucky, and hoping my luck holds. Canada’s doing pretty well and we just celebrated the legalization of cannabis here today, so hopefully that can ride out into another term!
(Pseudorationalists often search for hypocrisy in those they argue with, seeking it out aggressively enough that they’ll strike on anything at all if it has the whiff of it. They’ll often fabricate or exaggerate in order to accomplish this. Interestingly, studies show that people who hold right-wing or traditionalist beliefs are less troubled by hypocrisy than others, though! This behaviour seems about attacking the beliefs of others rather than an actual concern for consistency, but studies are thin on the ground for that one.
Oh, and just to be clear – Trump lost the popular vote.)
(This one’s sort of sad, really. Pseudorationalists are often poor communicators. Communication is about working with a shared understanding of the world, about compromise, about negotiation and empathy. Pseudorationalism requires avoiding or distorting reality in some way either large or small in order to fit it into the required preconception. When facing a contradiction, pseudorationalism denies and subverts.
This often means that they end up saying things that communicate in one way to people within their pseudorational circle, but in another with the world at large. This extends beyond simple jargon and into what constitutes evidence or what a given statement might imply. So they’ll say ‘look at this thing I said earlier’, believing it to be a convincing statement, whereas the statement is poor evidence or often completely contravening evidence for their claim.)
(Another sad one! Research, to the pseudorationalist, involves looking something up on google and reading the first few links, or alternatively looking at wikipedia. This is usually coloured by a worldview that leads them to reject anything that suggests something they don’t already believe. That in and of itself is not unusual – we all filter media according to our biases after all – but the pseudorationalist considers this a valid replacement for actual research.
The pseudorationalist considers the elimination of bias to be largely one of willpower, and since they have no metric for determining whether they have any biases, they can easily come to the conclusion that their perspective is free of bias. In reality, people understand that willpower has nothing to do with objectivity, and the cry to “do your research” is mostly a sneer.)
Oh, my duck, that’s not an insult. It’s a term of endearment! I call the people here “my duck” all the time! It wasn’t an ad hominem I was using at all.
See, an ad-hom is when you use an insult instead of an argument. I was insulting you in accompaniment with an argument. That isn’t a fallacy.
Do keep up, my duck!
(A defining trait of the pseudorationalist is their desire to be perceived as rational – hence the term. For this reason they often throw around accusations of fallacies or biases instead of engaging with actual points of discussion. Amusingly, there’s a name for this, the ignoratio elenchi fallacy.
Because the pseudorationalist does not have a deep understanding of fallacy or bias, they instead consider any personal affront or insult to be an ad hominem, and any conclusion they dislike as a strawman.)
Thank you much for posting, @Space Battleship Bear. It’s nice to stretch the analytical muscles once in awhile!
Space Bear thinks he’s this
But he’s more this
No wrong. You think the meme is character attack. The meme is not attacking any single person, it is an observance of a type of behaviour of a group of people who do appear to be crazy. I do reserve a right to not participate in name calling with immature people. You have claimed several times that I am playing some sort of right wing tricks. You do not know where I am on the political compass. I’m not playing any tricks. I’m merely telling you that the NPC meme has gone over your head and there is more to it than screen shots from twitter. See Dave Rubin at TPUSA New Hampshire, this video is a perfect example of what is behind the NPC meme. You people write some real nonsense. I think I’m talking to children here.
Turning Point USA? As in the group that was just discovered to be sharing extremely racist emails?
https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/turning-point-usa-fiu-chapter-shares-racist-sexist-pepe-memes-10827433
Cool source. It really sells me on your “I’m not a right winger, I just happen to think they’re being rational and clever and the left are all meanie pants irrational babies” schtick.
@ lazy ass space battlebutt bear
You came here. Put up or shut up about your claims involving the meme. No one looks your shit up for you. If you claim the meme is something, link it, time point it, quote it, explain it. All. All else is worthless.
Not once have I seen a proponent of that garbage demonstrate that there’s a robotic-like assertion of buzzwords, the meme proponents themselves simply assert. Fuck, I saw someone actually do work with the supposed buzzwords right here on this page. And the best you can do is “go look at this thing”.
I’m not a fucking mind reader you lazy piece of shit and it’s your assertion. NO.