Anyway, what brought me to that was thinking about something. I’m very much a text guy so I kind of categorize 4chan and stuff like that as a primarily text medium with occasional illustrations, but there’s a reason they’re called imageboards.

And one really interesting thing about imageboard culture is how big it is on the concept of personification. I’ve talked about polandball and the other countryballs, which come from Krautchan, and Pepe (”sad frog”) and Feelsguy, but also things like the suit/greenface Anon, Fawkes mask Anonymous, /v/irgins, Le Happy Merchant, Captain Sweden, Iron Pill, and Big Red. Always been fond of the Japanese-style moe anthropomorphization, too - ebola-chan and all that.

Like, it’s telling that the very first thing GamerGate did, on coming to self-awareness and realizing they were a thing, was to create Vivian James and start investing charisma in her.