Monday, May 8, 2017

Let's All Drink to the Death of a Frog

To my knowledge, the first instance of an author killing off a character to prevent further appropriation by untalented hacks was Cervantes' killing of Don Quixote. Via Tengrain, we have the tale of Matt Furie killing off his Pepe the Frog character because it had been hopelessly corrupted by the Anime Nazi crowd. The problem here is that, unlike the knight-errant of La Mancha, Pepe as meme is much bigger than Pepe as character... for the record, Don Quixote is one of my all-time favorite books. Even more significantly, the crowd that co-opted Pepe is not exactly known for their respect for others' feelings, so they will probably carry on to spite Furie, who will be dismissed as a 'cuck' or a 'snowflake'. This isn't so much a funeral, but an uncontested divorce on Furie's part.

Rather than killing Pepe off, Furie should have sold the character off the Disney Corporation, which guards its intellectual property so fiercely that their lobbyists have fought to have copyright laws changed. A couple of lawsuits on the part of a deep-pocketed megacorporation, and the keks become mighty expensive.

The post title comes from one of my favorite Kinks songs:





Come to think of it, Pepe is a lot like the famous Disney rodent, a better example of graphic design than of interesting characterization... maybe Disney could have put his picture in the public bathrooms of their theme parks.

2 comments:

Vixen Strangely said...

Pour one out for the amphibian
dank meme hostage, Pepe croaked
and got rolled out of the plane;
For the sake of his name he was smoked--
An animation martyr to preserve
a fate of infamy no frog deserved
reading out white pride missives
written by cucks and submissives
at cursor-point, basement-dwelling
nationalist swelling, footie pajama'd
useless all, international perpetrators
one folk, one staters, fucked his
bewebbed footfalls and to reject the thrall
of this nonsense pall over all
(uber alles)one frog had to fall-
for great justice--so say we all.

Pour one out for the amphibian,
laid-back animation,
you deserved better than desecration
thus ends my oration.

Big Bad Bald Bastard said...

Mic drop, VS!