Blog
How I Tried to Start a Meme Religion and Failed Miserably
Recently, I embarked on a rather amusing and harmless little mischief – only to suffer a crushing (and, admittedly, instructive) defeat.
There’s a VTuber I occasionally watch named SmugAlana, and like any other community, hers has its fair share of organic, self-generated memes. Being an old fan of Robert Anton Wilson – one of the minds behind Discordianism – I saw an opportunity to try my hand at crafting my own playful, meme-based religion. I took the idea way too seriously. I meticulously designed a figurine specifically for this new parody faith, built around the foot fetish jokes that have become heavily memetic among her fans.
Then, at what I thought was the perfect moment – during her birthday stream – I unveiled the finished figurine, intending to give it away to a lucky commenter… only to be met with almost zero interest.
Looking back, I think my downfall was my love for long, intricate texts stuffed with cultural references and deep cuts into Alana’s own lore. That’s exactly how I framed that first Reddit post – and as it turns out, the modern internet user has zero capacity to parse even a moderately dense paragraph. Half of them didn’t even grasp that there was a figurine giveaway happening.
Alana saw my post during her stream and really liked it – please don’t get me wrong, I have absolutely no issues with her! – but she didn’t bother to read anything. Her fans, whom I was really counting on, didn’t read it either.
Almost a year has passed since then, and I’ve decided that this figurine deserves to find a home. So now you can buy it in my shop.
As for my attempts at creating parody religions… well, it looks like I don’t have much talent for that after all.
Victoria777… sounds classy! Wonder if the games live up to the name. Hoping for some high-quality graphics and smooth gameplay. victoria777
This might be a smart remark, but I’m afraid I missed the point.