The Heck is the NPC Meme and Why Has it Gone Political?
Memes went political again and this time, the meme that went political is NPC. The MS Paint rendition of Wojak is meant to represent "normies" or people who mindlessly follow trends and social norms, but the meme is said to have taken a turn for the political, namely making fun of the left. NPCs are incapable of having internal monologues and instead exist to create scenery and contribute to the settings of their player counterparts' lives.
The NPC meme was mostly apolitical in origin and applied to society's mindless automatons no matter which cliff they decided to jump off of. However, I recently caught wind of some NPC Twitter profiles posing as liberals when the people behind the accounts are actually pro-Trump conservatives. After finding and visiting one of these profiles, I took a screenshot.
These news outlets could be wrong and the NPC phenomenon could be a hoax like a Helen Pluckrose rape paper, but they could be right. After all, we have something to go off of with Pepe becoming a symbol for France's alt- and far-right. These memes portray liberals as mindless conformists who accept everything that society tells them. Interestingly enough, liberals used to be seen as some dangerous fringe group that would undermine morality little by little until the world descended into anarchy. However, this meme suggests that the opposite is true.
Dehumanizing one's "enemy" is common practice in war and this war is a battle of ideas playing out on a battleground where limits don't seem to exist. Anyone familiar with World War II will know that German and Japanese people were portrayed as caricatures rather than people and that's the case here. Painting liberals as "NPCs" makes them easier to "defeat" as well as appealing to potential allies to today's conservative cause. After all, who truly wants to understand the other side when you can just make fun of them with MS paint Wojak?
Sources and Photos (DOA 10-18-18):
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/16/us/politics/npc-twitter-ban.html
https://www.google.com/search?q=npc+meme&oq=npc+meme&aqs=chrome.0.69i59j0j69i60l3j0.1915j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
https://www.albawaba.com/loop/what-npc-meme-and-why-are-progressives-not-amused-1200456