The Death of Irony
“Being ironic” is something a lot of people aspire to nowadays, especially if they have a vested interest in popculture. These days, popular culture is a brightly coloured wasteland. You’ve got your Lady Gagas and Justin Biebers, people and things risen to irrational fame because of how “cute” they are, or because their scope of experience is so narrow, they think they’re innovative and shocking. This is nothing new in the past century, and people that feel they know better have reacted in various ways. Some bohemian, like the Beat poets of the ’50s, some idealistically, like the hippies of the 60s, some aggressively, like the punk scene of the 70s.
Going into the 80s and 90s, though, it felt like we were beginning to lose our energy for rebelling against this sort of thing. Every attempt to defy the vapid norm lost its energy along with its practitioners, when they aged, and the world they tried to revolt against hadn’t been much affected.
In that spirit, we started to become more subversive. The grunge mentality was on the rise, a fashion and lifestyle that celebrated indifference. Just as hair-ruffling, with less work. This soon wasn’t enough, and the hipster mentality followed, which was like the grunge look with one more turn of the screw. Sarcasm and irony replaced the activism and aggression of past counterculture movements; people wearing Care Bears shirts because men that age shouldn’t wear that sort of shirt, deeply analyzing any music or media you come across when people of the mainstream are quite happy to consume anything poured in the trough for them, and a general distrust and distance from too many obsessions, unless it was one that one would think would raise an eyebrow or two to indulge in them.
Be us not proud.
And now, with the advent of the internet and instant communication, this subversive movement may have picked up too much steam. Newer adapters don’t get very invested in why they dress and act the way they do, just be sure to do something. The internet has also given the irony-lover a new playground, Livejournal for those that don’t exert much personal courage, 4chan for those that exert too much.
The face of modern counterculture, disappointingly.
Irony is at the forefront of this latest development of the countercultural attitude. Deliberately hoary, annoying, or meaningless things are sarcastically beatified to lead along those not in on the prank. The renewed success of Rick Astley, Rebecca Black’s “Friday”, the multimillion dollar funny cat pictures empire, never mind why you like it. It’s absurd and trite, let’s celebrate it to repeatedly call attention to it.
The most important part of this attitude, though, is that you never quite let the other party in on the joke. They think your disparate opinions of something are sincere and legitimate, and they will yell themselves hoarse to make you see reason. But who needs reason? “Reason” is a single, obvious perspective. People may seem “reasonable” to tell Rebecca Black to get an eating disorder, but your playing the video at every opportunity (until it was taken down, of course) and enjoying its terribleness, you have much more than “reason”.
I’m concerned, though, that as this mindset becomes more and more subtle and hidden, it will turn back around on itself. The feigned, ironic enjoyment of something will become so massively meticulous, even we will fall for it, and the ironic enjoyment will morph into genuine enjoyment, not incongruous enjoyment. We will convince our detractors, so completely and convincingly, that even we aren’t in on the joke. It hadn’t happened for a while, as there was always a smug grin behind every repeated meme and irrational remark, but now I think we’re there.
What, exactly, happened? This:
You stand in the presence of your betters.
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. This is it. This is something that, before it came out, no one would bat an eye at. It would occur, be briefly ridiculed, and brushed aside. My Little Pony has existed for years as an icon of the must puerile features of the 1980s, and was a common source of ridicule towards that era, along with similarly girly, dated cartoons like Rainbow Brite and Jem and the Holograms. It was already Old Meme by the time this happened.
But this was different. The show’s creative director, one Lauren Faust, was aware of the daunting task in front of her. Of it, she said:
“When I took the job, I braced myself for criticism, expecting many people – without even watching the show – to instantly label it girly, stupid, cheap, for babies or an evil corporate commercial. I encourage skeptics like this to watch My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic with an open mind. If I’m doing my job right, I think you’ll be surprised.”
This wasn’t going to be the 80s show, dusted off and given a fresh coat of paint. All involved insisted it was something new. This was an upstart of a reboot being foisted on the world, and the usual sarcastic enthusiasm wouldn’t cut muster. The internet would need to indulge themselves in it. Soak in it. Let it sink into their every pore. This was too good an opportunity to pass up: a 22-minute toy commercial from the 80s, intended for today’s youth? Already the skepticism was trickling in, and it would be business as usual to flummox these naysayers.
But this would take a hell of an effort to slip past them. We had to become entirely enamoured with this thing. We had to obsess with it. We had to express our enthusiasm for this show in everything we did, because it was already causing mass confusion on the 4chan boards. The endless image macros and inside jokes were already starting to pile up, and a fan community was quickly formed. The fans were called “Bronies”, and they were all-inclusive (“Welcome to the Herd”) and yet strangely defensive in their all-inclusiveness (“I’m gonna love and tolerate the shit out of you.”)
The ensuing pony mania was quite a ruckus. Fan pages for it sprang up all over, Bronies spread out far and wide into other forums and sites, and in the midst of all this, something was drowned out. Their fervour for this cartoon was so immense, so thorough, that they eventually forgot it was all a big put-on.
Not a shred of self-consciousness.
Not to pooh-pooh the idea that this show entertains a lot of people, of course, and it has its fans that enjoy it sincerely as authentically enjoyable, independent of its oft-maligned origins. This was conceived by one of the creative forces behind The Powerpuff Girls (another “girl” show that shrewdly targeted a different demographic, albeit more crudely) and Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends. Hell, I’ve designed my own Pony character and written some Pony fanfiction, but this was mostly out of a morbid curiosity of the show and its fevered fanbase, and an interest in subverting them in my own way.
One of the reasons I write fanfiction is to take something minor and simplistic and attempt to inject some complexity and difficulty into it, to challenge myself and the other fans of it. I’ve also been thinking of writing some scripts for the show and trying out for a position in the studio that animates it, Studio B Productions, because, hey, it’s a popular show. They’ll probably need a lot of animators for it.
But let’s step back, away from the shock value of telling people you adore My Little Pony and say that Rarity is your favourite (though mine is Fluttershy, if you’re curious), and look at the show itself. A lot of Bronies will tell you it’s the most magnificent cartoon to come out in years, but speaking from the standpoint of a professional animator, I can point out a few things.
It’s compositionally uncreative, since scenes often consist of a static shot of a character on the left talking to a character on the right (or over the shoulder, for extra-dramatic moments). The animation is overly bouncy, a hallmark of low-budget Flash animation (along with repeated background characters). The show has its occasional terrific action scene, especially in “Sonic Rainboom”, and I’m impressed with the flexibility of their character builds, but this is hardly Warner Bros-level animation, or even Hanna-Barbera. The episodes are also often erratically paced.
For instance, in the episode “A Dog and Pony Show”, a fan favourite, all that happens in the first act is Rarity and Spike digging for jewels. The second act consists of Rarity being captured by giant, greedy dogs that want the jewels, and the third act consists of them just letting her go because she whined too much. Fans of the show will say Rarity’s whining was a brilliant and unique escape tactic, when really, it’s been a staple of cartoons for years.
Again, no disrespect to the show, I can appreciate what a monumental creative effort it is to make characters as ostensibly silly as magic, multicoloured Ponies be occasionally funny, often entertaining, and definitely fun, but it’s not something to get uptight about when someone calls it “just another kid’s show”; it’s at this point you’ve officially given up being ironic. Bronies will react defensively when you call My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic a “fad”. It’s inconceivable to them that this thing that’s suddenly become of great interest to them could ever, and I mean ever, grow tiresome. Never mind that the very definition of a fad is “any form of behavior that develops among a large population and is collectively followed with enthusiasm for some period, generally as a result of the behavior’s being perceived as novel in some way.” I mean, sure, My Little Pony is a form of behaviour that developed among a large population and is being collectively followed with enthusiasm, generally as a result of it being perceived as novel, but this is different! It’s not like every other thing that became popular through the internet, which is infamous for its stunted attention span, this is ironclad! It might linger as a curiosity, like Rick Astley and LOLcats have, to be sure, but I don’t think this has the energy or clout to become the new zeitgeist of children’s TV.
But this isn’t a rant about My Little Pony and how I don’t “get it”, it’s simply a description of the moment when irony lost its meaning. It used to be something powerful. When making people angry wasn’t effective anymore, we instead made them confused and irritable, playing them like a fiddle rather than just goading a reaction from them. It was a tool we used when we didn’t want to fit into the typical way of things, but we’ve lost, well… the irony of irony. It’s become such an automatic, knee-jerk reaction, we’ve forgotten why we do it, and even that we’re being ironic at all. This is why I try to rebel against these sort of things in my own way: I’m mired in irony, and when it’s the norm, it’s counter-irony that still means something.
