The mascot's seemingly inevitable appearance was quickly recognized by Ben Jones, one of the Penn State students on the scene, who then tweeted a picture of Pedobear interacting with news reporters outside the courthouse:. Because this is what today has amounted to.
The Pedobear Presser. Later that same day, photographs of Pedobear ouside the courthouse were featured on various internet culture websites like Deadspin [30] , Mashable [31] and Huffington Post [32] , as well as sports news blogs like Bleacher Report [33] and Big Lead Sports [34] among others.
On July 19th, , Nestle's chocolate candy brand Kit Kat uploaded an Instagram photo of a man in a bear suit resembling Pedobear via its Facebook page [19] to announce the launch of its official Instagram account.
The similarity in appearance was immediately pointed out by Facebook commenters and the post was taken down shortly after. A spokeswoman for Nestle Australia and New Zealand told the Sydney Morning Herald [20] that they had never heard of Pedobear and did not intend for the photo to represent him.
Search for Pedobear peaked in February , when images of the character were stenciled onto the Pope's billboards in Italy. View All Videos. View All Images. Show Comments. They're still going strong in Here are some of the best text posts gaining recent popularity.
We invited them to sit down with us and recap everything from the early days of Schmoyoho to the present day, as well as getting to the bottom of which Gregory Brother was truly the master of memes among them.
Know Your Meme is an advertising supported site and we noticed that you're using an ad-blocking solution. Read Edit History. About Pedobear is a cartoon mascot that became a well-known icon through its usage on 4chan to signal moderators and other users that illegal pornographic content had been posted. This is revelatory of the fact that humorous representations of CSA extends beyond abuser and survivor to questions of generational struggles, traumatic image transmission and technophobia.
This brings us back to Pedobear, where the predator is punch line and parody, an interactive space to ambiguously engage in an imagined, imminent assault. In this system, you are not squeezing the teddy, the teddy is squeezing, or somehow scaring, you.
Such anti-cute inversions are found within a longer history of youth culture as comically corrupted childhood cuteness. The American cartoon series Happy Tree Friends —present which combines cute cartoon animals with graphic violence, and the Japanese character of Gloomy Bear , a pink teddy bear who is often shown attacking children, are two particularly vivid examples of this genre [ 53 ]. Here a young person may display their mature status as having outgrown their teddy bears enough to denigrate them entirely, displaying and consuming the anti-cute as evidence that they are no longer cute themselves.
The film degrades childhood innocence and rejects the responsibilities and rigours of adulthood, instead choosing the middle path of male adolescence. Comedy, after all, is about power; the comic can gain power through trickery, and assert power through humour within social insider groups. But comedy is also about relinquishing power, by momentarily positioning yourself as the abused child, and disrupting power, by switching roles between adult and child. Thus, the joke teller and listener can be both survivor and abuser, because a joke can travel in multiple directions.
The anti-cute Animal Comedy of Ted and Pedobear reflects the struggles of an individual growing up, deciding whether to occupy childhood, adulthood or adolescent, and struggling against the limited meanings of these age categories through play. This play, as Paul theorises, constitutes not just an individual exploration, but a larger struggle against the concept of adulthood, and the symbolic and structural powers these roles possess.
The adult meaning of a childhood symbol is therefore only accessible to those who occupy the Animal Comedy space of adolescent boyhood, which in the case of Pedobear is expressed through what Ryan M.
For the CSA theme is not explicitly evident in the image, the wide-eyed bear, but in the text, or rather the second part of the text, as the Pedobear meme structure relies on a paedophilic punch line generated from the subcultural capital of the viewers. The image, by association, is rendered obscene, itself a sign of its success for the joke teller. This push-and-pull relationship between the rational and the overblown, the simple and the complicated, the mocking and the affirming, the innocent and the criminal, is revelatory of wider online cultures of transgressive social interaction, most notably the act of trolling.
This is the art of wilfully exposing or mocking an unsuspecting user through playfully devious forms of off-topic interaction, and is again associated with 4chan. It really is as simple and as complicated as that. The bear has been unintentionally included in a range of mainstream media, from a front-page cover story on the Olympics Figure 8 , to a conservative column on U.
President Barack Obama in Figure 9. In this setup, each accidental appearance is lauded as a success by those in the know, serving as proof that the predatory Pedobear can infiltrate any respectable situation.
The insider figure of the outlaw online humourist cannot exist without the ignorant outsider, who ironically in the off-line world would be considered the insider. As Douglas explains:. Users of 4chan and similar sites love to see Pedobear show up in inappropriate places. To the initiated, any picture with a bear and a kid will look hauntingly like a Pedobear attack.
In its rigid demarcation between the out-of-touch off-line and the in-the-know 4chan, ignorance of Internet culture is positioned as an active invitation for targeting [ 74 ]. As digital researcher Kate M. This is evidenced in how Encyclopedia Dramatica revelled in such playful destabilisation of the statuses of innocent and abuser, documenting each victory with glee, serving as proof of normie stupidity against the comedic brilliance of their outsider culture [ 79 ].
The affirmation of their collective identity is situated in the creation of chaos within the moralistic belief systems of others, through infiltrating their image-making with socially taboo themes such as CSA. However, such borders between the mainstream and the marginal are not as clearly defined as these online insiders would like to believe.
In outrage, the users anything-goes comic ethos is overturned. Instead a sense of moralism is returned to engagements with the CSA subject in order to counteract a capitalist consumption of the transgressive culture they sought to build:. Pedobear has the distinction of being one of the first Internet memes to ascend to the level of a plush doll available for online purchase. Another way to accrue pr0fit has been discovered and its [sic] based on little kids being molested.
Your soul — deriving entertainment tertiarily from child sex abuse is no way to win points with the boss, unless you pray to Satan. In which case Kudos! During this period, Pedobear was increasingly out of the control of its original insider audience, due to its newfound commercial interest and decreasing cultural credibility.
However, the case of a student posting an image of Pedobear in a college dorm elevator as an in-the-know visual gag Figure 12 and facing unexpected consequences is perhaps the most vivid testament to this tension between insider and outsider within the Pedobear comic setup. Here the memetic character as an opportunity for anonymous expression closes. Instead, these characters become attached and embodied by a singular user who is subject to regulation.
In this sense, a meme making model of this kind is likely to blow back on the user, when it hinges so heavily on either culturally influencing other spaces to unwittingly adopt these memetic codes or infiltrating these images to mainstream spaces as an act of subversion.
Both acts require exiting the anonymous space of 4chan where such joke telling can most likely be told without consequence. In the case of the lift prank, when this secret sign making was discovered, the image then became an accusation, with commenters on the post expressing frustration at the way the Pedobear insider humour had grown out of control.
This tension of naming and identifying the abuser through incomprehensible insider humour is an important one. If a joke requires anonymity to be executed but is dependent on entering places where such anonymity no longer applies how can such a form of humour sustain itself? Such an urgency to name is located within the context of digital culture, where Pedobear emerges as affirmation and exaggeration of existing cultural ideas of the online child predator, so utterly unseeable and cartoonishly present.
In this sense, Pedobear, in all his contradictions, misunderstandings and constant movements, serves as a bridge between all manner of online media, linking seemingly unconnected spaces, from commercialised cute cartoon animals to institutional abuse, thus creating a cultural reworking of existing generational divides, discontent and misunderstandings.
This, in turn, inverts the existing power structures of the adult abuser and the youthful victim to create a culture of frustration and fear in older individuals for a CSA-coded, technologically embedded, context-specific youth subculture, that is seen as both baffling and frightening to the adult outsider. This reflects the tense border crossing between old and new media, and old and young people, in analysing and exploring online countercultural consumption and creation, whilst also problematising assumptions of the essential outsider nature of such comic capital for the taboo subject.
The Internet is not just simply a modern medium for the CSA subject to be represented. Instead, it exists as a new incarnation of the CS abuser in and of itself. The paper has made this argument by focussing specifically on humorous digitally embedded CSA-themed representations and audience engagements towards the online character of Pedobear. The study has specifically considered narrative media that were created within the context of their anonymous online audience, such as 4chan memes and trolling culture and has centred online resources, such as Reddit comment threads and Encylopedia Dramatica entries, as primary source materials.
The close reading analysis identified a further digital incarnation of the CS abuser, that of the youthfully masculinist Internet insider, whose history of transgressive consumption locates him within a longer history of bad taste humour and countercultural provocation.
This provides a unique example of the cruelty and violent undertones of the comic that have been historically identified in the humour theory of Freud and Legman.
However, in the study of the comic CS abuser character of Pedobear, who is a multi-layered example of the limits of CSA-themed, anonymous, outsider, online humour, such simplistic roles of survivor and abuser are once again complicated. Here, the CS abuser becomes not a signifier of an abusive adult, but rather a substituted symbol for the fears of an insider, online youth culture.
This analysis, complicates the fixed charges of innocent and abuser, and opens up a wider conversation on how the public engage with comic representations of CSA, and what role someone seemingly outside of the category of CS abuser or CSA survivor might occupy in these structures of power. Thus, the Pedobear example emphasises the wider questions of ethics behind even the most seemingly harmless example of online, CSA-inflected humorous representation.
Though this paper was limited to a small number of close reading studies within Anglo-American-coded spaces, its findings have the potential to be explored in a range of directions and via a number of methods. Given the right team of researchers, the subject could be developed through an ethnographic lens into a series of interviews into who found the humour of Pedobear funny during the mid s to early s and why.
Furthermore, given the many uses of the Pedobear character, the figure still has further close reading potential, particularly in relation to its use in protests surrounding the Catholic church sex abuse scandals.
This is an issue that will only increase as the original association between digital humour and youth culture of the s and s recedes, and generations of all ages grow up familiar with the comic codes of the digital. Bethany has recently completed her Ph. She is the founder and editor in chief of Doll Hospital , an art and literature journal on trauma and mental health and lives in Bristol, U. E-mail: bethanyroselamont [at] yahoo [dot] co [dot] uk. Whitney Phillips, Lee Knuttila, Mediated and embodied practice on imageboard 4chan.
Mind and matter. Ryan M. Milner, b. MemeFactory book, beta version San Francisco: Scribd , p. Jana Herwig, Wait, kids don't go to libraries anymore, what is this, the s?! UnAnything Wiki. UnAnything Wiki Explore. Article Navigation. Explore Wikis Community Central. Register Don't have an account? Unsafe for kids Dead guys Dudes who were chucked into captain 0 land jail. Pedo Bear. View source. History Talk 0. Universal Conquest Wiki.
This means it is among the best UnAnything has to offer! An iPhone app containing the bear was removed from Apple's online store in only weeks after its release. In , police in California rushed to issue a warning after a person appeared at an event dressed in the costume. Pedobear ruins Nestle's Facebook party. Please try again later.
0コメント