By David Futrelle
Alt-right trolls have a new insult: NPC, a sort of all-purpose replacement for formerly ubiquitous anti-SJW putdowns like “cuck” and “soyboy,” suggesting that everyone who doesn’t agree with them is a mindless, even soulless, robot, akin to a videogame Non-Player Character who can only respond to stimulus with a small number of preprogrammed lines of dialogue.
As an insult, NPC has been floating around the chans for some time, but it took off in a big way recently after a two-year-old 4chan post resurfaced on social media. In the post, one disaffected anon wrote about how he — I’m assuming it’s a he — had started to look upon most of those he encountered on a daily basis as little more than real-world NPCs,
soulless extra walking flesh piles … who autonomously follow group think and social trends in order to appear convingly [sic] human.
For these NPC “flesh piles”, he continued, politics is literally no more than a collection of handy catchphrases.
If you get in a discussion with them it’s always the same buzzwords and hackneyed arguments. … it’s like in a vidya [game] when you accidentally talk to somebody twice and they give you the exact same lines word for word once more.
As journalist Cecilia D’Anastasio has recently noted in Kotaku, this is literal dehumanization, a way for alt-rightists and their fellow travelers to reduce their “enemies [to] objects, pawns, strawmen, tools.”
But, I would add, it’s also proven to be a great way for the trolls to demonstrate what completely original thinkers they are, and how seldom they resort to meaningless buzzwords.
By the way, did I mention that these guys really hate buzzwords?
Press F to Pay Respects to these brave and original thinkers.
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Glad to see this covered; I read the Kotaku article a few days back. The projection with this meme is staggering given how these guys respond to any explanation.
Self-Awareness is not their strong suit, is it?
Also, to me, NPC is less irritating and meaningless. What does it mean? “Non-Player Character”? “Napkin Plate Cup”? “New Paper Clip”? A TV network from an alternate dimension?
I guess it’s the first but it’s still goofy.
Dear, Alt-Wrong/Machosphere guys; Your insults are garbage because they are goofy and stupid and would only work if we shared your worldview (You constant crowing of ‘cuck’ makes you sound like fowl with mouthfuls of peanut butter).
So I guess I’m supposed to be devastated by yet another meaningless “alt-right” buzzword? Whatever should I do?
@ SpukiKitty:
Non-Player Character is what they’re referencing (apologies if you were being sarcastic and I missed it.)
Sorry incels but Shakespeare beat you to the NPC meme with his “All the worlds a stage” speach by centuries. Nothing to see here.
A-HA! I WAS RIGHT!
Also; As far as insults so; It sounds as insulting as being called “Zork”. It’s even stupider and more hilarious than cuck.
At least “cuckold” implies in an unfortunate situation (getting cheated on….unless you’re into ‘open relationships’ or something).
It’s like calling someone “background scenery”, it’s neither complementary or an insult, it just IS.
Given you get xp for killing npcs this metaphor of theirs is a bit more disturbing than you give it credit for. There’s a lot of gamers in these groups that I stg think call of duty is a training sim.
Pfft.
They wish we were nonplayer characters.
They wish we were stereotypes who spoke in cliches and buzzwords.
It rankles their burrs that we’re savvy and well informed and are very much in the game (of politics and of life itself). That’s why we write our Congress members, turn up at rallies, sign petitions, go door to door for causes and candidates, and debate right-wingers on the Internet.
We’d very much like life, all kinds of life, to continue to flourish on planet Earth. Too bad the same can’t be said about the right wing.
Has anyone else got the feeling that those “hackneyed” statements they keep hearing are something along the lines of:
“That’s factually incorrect”
“Women don’t have lower intelligence”
“As a field of study, evolutionary psychology is often extremely flawed”
“Everything you just said is racist”
File this oxymoron under Not Clear On Concept (NoCOC).
See, my automatic assumption was that it was a panicked self-description on their part, namely “Not a Person of Color!!!!”
HAHAHA!
“We believe survivors.”
https://www.brettkavanaugh.com
Friend of mine’s reaction. Fitting, I think.
My attempt to embed a friend of mine’s quote as an image seems to have failed, so let’s do a text version:
@Doomcup
You’ve summed it up nicely.
@kat
I wish I’d thought of it. It’s perfect.
I’m reminded of the XKCD comic where a bunch of people riding on a subway are all thinking that everyone else on the train is a mindless sheep, and that they are the only independent thinkers in the world.
Do you know why you keep hearing the same responses, boys? It’s because you keep making the same arguments! Just like the Cretinists before you, you keep repeating the same tired old PRATTs, getting refuted, and making the same PRATTs again. This “NPC” term is nothing but an ad hominem they’re using as an excuse to ignore the refutations.
@TB Tabby
Beat me to it. Yup, they just keep stubbornly worshipping the same alternative facts and demand everyone else have a new angle to come at every time. There’s no discussion to be had with the post-fact right wing.
@Godzilla Roberts
I give it a year before a mass shooter cites “NPCs” in his manifesto.
Speaking of internet slang, I was greatly amused recently when someone on a Finnish forum referred to fly-by reactionary commenters as “nym-in trolls”
(my translation from Finnish “nyymipeikko”, hopefully conveys the Moomin reference)
So their new insults are based on some of the more helpful characters in video games?
Why?
Also, TS Eliot.
They should be more literate and refer to the people they see as supporting players with only simplistic, functional lines of dialogue as “attendant lords”
That does kind of depend on the game you’re playing. A lot of games (especially stealth ones of the Hitman, Assassin’s Creed type) strongly discourage killing regular NPCs who aren’t the characters you’re supposed to be hunting.
It may say something about their attitude, though, if they’re the type of people who like to kill random strangers in games anyway.
When I play a game, I like to imagine the NPCs have a rich daily life that is being cruelly interrupted by the player hero bumbling chaotically into it.
I wonder if any of them are going to go full solipsist on us?
Does anyone else find it fitting that these ppl would call others “npc”‘s? Seeing as, like the character in a video game RPG, they think they’re the hero of the world when the entire time they’re being controlled by someone else’s desires. Like flesh piles whose only purpose is that which is assigned to them. They don’t create their story, it’s pre-written for them and they just act it out as they are told to by someone else.
I mean, how does it feel? To find your every action merely the realization of someone else’s whim. To find your every thought merely the parroting of someone else’s design.
Well . . . it’s the alt right. So I guess it feels normal to be a character.