The Tumblr Files - Official Thread - An exposé on the media and people that destroyed the Internet

[Retardation Kick]

My main takeaway for what the thesis of this thread has been is the slow, but ultimately relatively short change in broader "Internet culture" going from cynicism, irreverence, anonymity, while also simultaneously its users not taking themselves too seriously and enjoying and embracing a shared love of niche popular culture interests; to one of toxic positivity, ecelebrity, no anonymity and in fact building a "brand", the politics of identity that can be exploited for personal gain,

I appreciate what Willis has done but I feel like it would be greately improved through understanding the role of the managerial class on the internet, normie culture and further cultural backgrounds dating to atleast the 1950s and 1960s. I know it is beyond the scope which is why I may do a similar type of essay thread to this that acts as an unoffical grander historical analyses.

 

[The Wise Shaman]

To be honest, seeing all this, which faction is on the throne this decade?
On the wokefolk side:
Several studios that draw directly from Tumblr
Hazbin Hotel was a hit this season.
As was TADC, along with two other Glitch projects.
Homestuck is getting an animated series.
Deltarune still has episodes to be released.
Recently, Netflix (aka Disney's gay cousin) bought Warner Bros. and all its content.
And I don't know what the English-speaking Twitch scene is like, but the "dark-woke" culture and the influence of breadtubers (or...breadstreamers?) like Hasan Piker are very noticeable.

But on the other hand, with everything that's happening now: Trump's second term, Musk's Twitter leadership, the Palestine fatigue, Grummz and his Gamergate 2: Gooner Boogaloo, Charlie Kirk's death, the backlash against TikTok culture (which some consider "the new Tumblr"), the AI phenomenon and the artists' war against it

Is this enough to say that Tumblr culture is losing steam? Or are these just wishful thinkings until another game full of sodomy comes along and changes everything?

I think this progressive culture will remain dominant for quite a while because there isn't really any alternative culture for most creative people to participate in. The constant sanitization of the internet has resulted in an environment where progressives could thrive, and that cultural domination also resulted in assimilating other websites like Newgrounds.

While there is some form of "edgy right-leaning counterculture," it is too disunified for its own good. You have Kiwi Farms, 4chan, Soyjak.party, different Xitter groups, niche Telegram and Discord servers, etc. When you have so many different groups of people that don't have the easiest time getting along with each other, they are destined to be more insular, thus harder to find and fit in for someone with creative talent. The most creative groups this cultural sphere has are the Soyjakkers and those Gen Z Neo-Nazis who make #SaveEuropa edits and other stuff, which means we are fucked. There will be successful outliers who do not conform to this Tumblrite culture, but none of them will share any major similarities with each other.

Since we got some pushback towards progressivism, I think it is more likely that this mainstream Tumblrite culture will fracture into two groups, with one being more centrist and willing to be offensive (similar to what liberals were like during the 1990s and the 2000s) and another being stuck in a perpetual purity spiral towards progressive ideals, than that the new alternative will grow out of one of the edgy right-leaning communities.

One other thing that we should note is that MAGA being a cultural alternative for artists could never work. Most people who do any form of art either want to innovate or to tell a message, and MAGA leaves no room for that. MAGA has a core base of Gen X and Boomers who just want to grill and watch TV, which means you will have a hard time finding people who want to innovate and make art. In fact, most people you'll find just want to do the same things without a desire for change or challenge.

As I said, it is more likely for liberals to rethink their ideals and get less purist and radical than for the pro-status quo conservatives to become innovative suddenly. Even "alt-right" groups are more successful creatively than conservatives by virtue of desiring major changes to society and allowing some self-criticism, even if those changes are just exterminating entire countries for having brown people.

 

[Drugged Flamingo]

And by sheer coincidence, despite growing up in this time period and being well familiar with all of these things, I've always had a strange aversion to Tumblr, livestreamer culture, Overwatch, Undertale, Calarts (hate using that term but it's useful), etc. Glad to know I'm on the right side of history :^)

Conversely as someone else who was in this time period and barely dodged pooner grooming, I’m glad this thread confirms my conspiracy theories about why the internet is a troon infested sjw swamp now. At one point I was into a lot of these things and only because I was active on Tumblr and later Twitter (after the Tumblr porn ban I followed my “friends”). Glad I got out of that shit.

 

[Kari Kamiya]

Something I think that could have been covered was Fanfiction and its scene. While it predates Tumblr, Fanfiction was about as important to its culture as art/animation, and its alumni have also had inordinate impact on the publishing scene, to the point where they de-facto control it and have turned fantasy into a byword as smut for women.

This would be an interesting case study for sure, though I don't know how much information there is on the people who kickstarted this back in ye olden days. Like what happened to all of those Spock/Kirk writers who submitted their smut to Trekkie fanzines? Where did Cori Falls disappear to? What happened to the author behind "Agony in Pink"? Or "ChibiUsa's Seventh Birthday"? Or that "Pokémon Story" with the Gardevoir? Like how many of these badfic writers are still around? Why did the Citrus Scale become obsolete? Is the history teacher behind "Back to the Frollo" dead or not? Is Farla a hack? Is there more to the MsScribe story?

And there's just so much out there that it's hard to compartmentalize.

 

[Computer God Autism]

Is Farla a hack?

Imagine being so inadequate at writing fanfiction that your only way of getting validation as a wordsmith is by obsessing over the usage of proper nouns in stories written by teenagers when you're pushing thirty.

 

[Kari Kamiya]

Imagine being so inadequate at writing fanfiction

The hilarious part about this is she actually wasn't a terrible writer, she just hated the fans. Really hated them, because they're plebs, the lot of them.

 

[Computer God Autism]

wasn't

This made me check to see what she's been up to - and she's still writing.

She and Yoshizilla are going to outlast DSP at this rate.

 

[Paper Machete]

This would be an interesting case study for sure, though I don't know how much information there is on the people who kickstarted this back in ye olden days. Like what happened to all of those Spock/Kirk writers who submitted their smut to Trekkie fanzines? Where did Cori Falls disappear to? What happened to the author behind "Agony in Pink"? Or "ChibiUsa's Seventh Birthday"? Or that "Pokémon Story" with the Gardevoir? Like how many of these badfic writers are still around? Why did the Citrus Scale become obsolete? Is the history teacher behind "Back to the Frollo" dead or not? Is Farla a hack? Is there more to the MsScribe story?

And there's just so much out there that it's hard to compartmentalize.

I'm thinking of writing up something about fanfic myself since a lot of ficcers used Tumblr. And "fandom" the way people who liked shipping and such was basically centralized there for a while.

In regards to why there are no more "classic" badfics/writers I think it has to do with a couple things.

1. it's just really normal to run into insanely bad fic these days. It's so banal nobody bats and eye.
2. there is no longer a culture of critiquing or making fun of fics in the way they used to as that's considered le bad.
3. a lot of stuff written is so cringey and tarded and also fanfic has been mainstreamed enough to the point that a lot of writers go to some lengths to at least ensure they're RL identities aren't tied to the fics they're writing so you can't follow their antics, just the writing. Which again, there is no end to.

 

[Steven Soyberg]

Immaculate thread. Here's hoping for the inevitable Turkey Tom video. More people must know these things.

 

[legtard respecter]

wow.
my favorite writeup on this forum in a long, long time.
from reading the shmorky bit it turns out i actually started browsing this forum in very late 2016, a bit earlier than i thought since i remember it being pre skype leaks but post amanda crashout.
needless to say the tumblrization of a lot of these hobbies lead to my gradual major loss of interest in all this stuff in the late 2010s but seeing a simpler time of the first half of the decade really brings back a lot of youth and nostalgia for me.

 

[Irregardless]

Or they went through four years with a president that was actively shitting in his pants and made literally zero jokes about him the entire time.

Yea, I'd love to give them the benefit of the doubt, but the reality is, if you're just going to entirely ignore the weekend at Bernies shit that was the Biden presidency, or the absolutely insane political cycle that was the Trump vs Biden debate and the resulting Harris/Waltz 2024 Democrat ticket, you have no business making political satire.

Shitlibs can cope and act like what Trump and his cabinet are doing right now is uniquely "bad", but to act like anything Trump is doing is in anyway crazier than what the Democrats tried to pull in 2024 is insane.

 

[Aero the Alcoholic Bat]

Yea, I'd love to give them the benefit of the doubt, but the reality is, if you're just going to entirely ignore the weekend at Bernies shit that was the Biden presidency, or the absolutely insane political cycle that was the Trump vs Biden debate and the resulting Harris/Waltz 2024 Democrat ticket, you have no business making political satire.

Shitlibs can cope and act like what Trump and his cabinet are doing right now is uniquely "bad", but to act like anything Trump is doing is in anyway crazier than what the Democrats tried to pull in 2024 is insane.

Whether Trump is just as bad as Biden, or even worse than Biden, shouldn't even matter. Those who chose Biden solely to stick it to the right wing are just as idiotic as miggers who idolize Trump in order to own the libs.

No matter how much they might have hated Trump (and there's actually so many good reasons to hate him), you can't really claim to be a good satirist if you're willing to side with those who are equally deserving of ridicule, like Hillary or Biden.

Trump derangement syndrome really is frustrating and exhausting, and I hate Trump myself.

 

[volatile puar]

TTYD

Nice write up. Anyway, what does the Y stand for? And why did Tumblr like it so much?

---

Thread Tax: Three things go unmentioned in this thread that are very relevant for our modern cultural rot: the popularization of anime, the release of The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild, and of course the Covid-19 lockdowns. As for anime, I'm sure most people here are old enough to remember when it was a very niche hobby (this is mentioned in the thread), and in fact a certain Conrad Collins made his career trying to direct normie newcomers into anime away from series that appealed to normal people way back in 2014.
In the 2010s anime gradually became a normie hobby through 4 main anime series: Sword Art Online in 2012 (although its popularity to my memory really started in 2014 when the second season released), Attack On Titan in 2013, My Hero Academia in 2016, and Demon Slayer in 2019. The big problem with this is that the anime community has always been the proverbial wretched hive of scum and villainy (just as one example, it was very common for anime conventions to hold showings of Bible Black, an infamous hentai), and the normalization of anime necessarily had to lead to the introduction of anime culture into mainstream culture. Relevant to the example I just gave, one of the first major impacts anime culture had on broader society was the trend of "recommending" and reacting to the child porn anime Boku no Pico, with even Pewdiepie doing a reaction back in 2015 (I can't help but feel the enormous popularity of "Boku no Hero Academia" probably was directly responsible for this). The main reason that I mention all of this is that in 2016 and 2017 two animes, Re:Zero in 2016 and Fate/Apocrypha in 2017 introduced their very well known "trap" characters Felix Argyle and Astolfo, which caused traps to become pervasive in anime culture (I still remember when a certain small-time anituber and Digibro orbiter, The Pedantic Romantic, released a video explaining how Felix was actually a troon, and incidentally that tranny met his troon "wife" in Digibro's patreon discord server.
Then we turn to Breath of the Wild (2017), and you might naively wonder what Zelda could possibly have to do with all of this. Of course, Zelda, or I should rather say Link, is extremely relevant to all of this, with his Switch era redesign being famously (it ought to be infamous) twinkish/femboyish, and the main quest forcing you to crossdress and compliment a bearded troon on his "beauty", all of course in the part of the quest which deals with the redesigned Gerudo, who had always been inspired by Amazonians but now for the most part were "muscle-girls". There is a certain level of normalization which comes from seeing things portrayed as normal, such as in Steven Universe, but an entirely greater level of normalization which comes from forcing people to engage with their own actions, or in other words the crossdressing in BotW is directly responsible for a large amount of "egg cracking". It should also be mentioned that Nintendo very likely included this intentionally to appeal to the new zeitgeist among westerners, with the new Zelda herself clearly being designed to be appealing to Tumblr (it's no coincidence that this up-and-coming pooner is obsessed with BotW).
The final piece of the puzzle is the Covid-19 lockdowns, and I probably don't have to explain why. People were suddenly stuck at home with little to do, and children were forced to "do school" at home, which could only ever result in a further descent into goonerism for the normies of our society, and grooming at a scale never thought possible for our children. With the sudden government mandated shut in NEET lifestyle, there was fertile, blood-soaked ground for V-tubers to take hold, for paraphiliacs of all varieties, especially troons, to sink their teeth into the online feeds of normies and children (especially on places like Twitter), and of course the "world is ending" mindset caused by Covid hysteria was a great factor in helping to radicalize the members of our society who ought to be undesirables, which led most notably to the murder of Charlie Kirk, a man who foolishly believed that dialogue could tear out the tendrils that had taken hold of half our society since 2015.

 

[I_Am_Not_Bruce_Willis]

Thread Tax: Three things go unmentioned in this thread that are very relevant for our modern cultural rot: the popularization of anime...

I already mentioned quite a few Anime that went viral during the timeframe in Case II, like Madoka and Studio Trigger's stuff, at least. Though Sword Art Online and AoT are also big in their own right. The main reason I didn't cover them is because they didn't really catch that much steam inside the specific Tumblr bubble, unless you count SAO getting mocked or memed on a few times.

...the release of The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild...

The release of the Switch, the "reputation" it garnered online, and all the stuff that happened in its first year (and the years after) are its own discussion. In the grand scheme of things, BotW exists as a result of years of twists and turns the Zelda franchise went through between 2000 and 2016 (I.E. the backlash towards Wind Waker that I covered in Case IV). I'm open to writing about it some day, given I already went over the Wii U & 3DS in Case II.

...and of course the Covid-19 lockdowns.

Covid and its effects are definitely documented in quite a few threads on-site already, not to mention various YT essays. I'd probably have to do dumpster dives into places I would never in a million years tread otherwise if I were to ever do something like the Tumblr Files, but for the post-Covid Internet. I ain't in the mood to do that any time soon.

 

[Outer Space Traveller]

The release of the Switch, the "reputation" it garnered online, and all the stuff that happened in its first year (and the years after) are its own discussion. In the grand scheme of things, BotW exists as a result of years of twists and turns the Zelda franchise went through between 2000 and 2016 (I.E. the backlash towards Wind Waker that I covered in Case IV). I'm open to writing about it some day, given I already went over the Wii U & 3DS in Case II.

The fact they made Link be a closeted homosexual & even insert things with goat symbology with Tears of the Kingdom (paging a possibility of NWO-related symbols, as Coby "SyntheticMan" put it) will be something I will never forgive Soytendo.

 

[Wright]

kimono-based fetish art

Oriental furry bullshit is called kemono.
A 'kimono' is a dress.
.. Other than that, I got nothing to add. A+ my nigga lmao

 

[Sigg Kyle]

Immaculate thread. It’s begun to give me glimpses- I take it that they won because they attained a mythological system that has the potency, novelty, and organs needed to keep their ideas going.

Now it’s time to reverse-engineer the principles of their victory.

 

[Coolio55]

Now it’s time to reverse-engineer the principles of their victory.

Have the backing of every major institution and have everyone who speaks against it blacklisted.
E: I'm not a John K dicksucker but his rants on the 70's and 80's cartoon landscape are pretty much a mirror image of what we have now ...with everything.

 

[Blarmed&Dangerous]

Immaculate thread. It’s begun to give me glimpses- I take it that they won because they attained a mythological system that has the potency, novelty, and organs needed to keep their ideas going.

Now it’s time to reverse-engineer the principles of their victory.

Have the backing of every major institution and have everyone who speaks against it blacklisted.

That didn't happen overnight and not by accident. It's hard work that takes a long time. At street level, read "Rules for Radicals" and "Beautiful Trouble" - they're communist agitation handbooks.

Long term - run for school board and win. Get a PhD and get tenure at literally any school: it's never been easier - I'm seeing Computer Science professors getting tenure without being able to write hello world in any language. Honors awards at many schools are having to go to 4 digits of GPA because a B+ is the new F. Sleepwalk through class, get your doctorate, have ChatGPT write your diversity statement to get hired at any college or university. Once you're in and tenured, vote down the tenure case of anyone with pronouns in their email signature. Vote in your friends. Write letters of recommendation to T&P for chuds you don't even know. Build what the communists call a "counter-hegemony."

James Lindsay is a freier who would rather his kids be raped and brainwashed by communists than say a single cross word about Israel, but he helped a fellow-traveler going by the pseud "Charles Pincourt" write a book called "Counter-Wokecraft" that is actually a decent introduction to forming these parallel networks specifically in education.

They started to take education in the sixties because it gives you tendrils into literally everything else. They hold the keys to professional licensure and can gatekeep virtually every industry and site of cultural production thereby. Defeating them means doing something you don't want to do, for your entire life, so that future generations won't be ruled by insane tranny communists. We had such a high trust society that we neglected the fundamental mechanism of its cultural operation. We've gotta take it back, and it will not be in our or our children's lifetime, no matter who wins what election. It's gonna fucking suck but we have to do it or we're absolutely done. Go volunteer for that bullshit committee at work that's going to review the code of conduct, or write community guidelines, or whatever. You're going to have to give up nights and weekends to the PTA or the school board or parks and fucking rec. Go get involved and do nothing but make shit work like the West is supposed to and gatekeep insane people.

 

[Aero the Alcoholic Bat]

That didn't happen overnight and not by accident. It's hard work that takes a long time. At street level, read "Rules for Radicals" and "Beautiful Trouble" - they're communist agitation handbooks.

Not even just neo-marxist accelerationists or communist agitators, also degenerates seeking to normalize their fetishes at any cost. They don't necessarily give a shit about neo-marxist accelerationism, they just want to normalize their perversions.

Another very good example is After the Ball. I've gradually been improving on the OP in that thread to make it less autistic.

I've kinda been inspired by @I_Am_Not_Bruce_Willis 's example and started to do even more threads on LGBTQ history here.