Mismatched Shoes And Other Stuff

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burn that life you’ll only live once

I’d like to briefly talk about this image, because it exemplifies something I think about constantly.

So much of modern culture - especially humor - is predicated upon having an intimate knowledge of extremely niche subjects, how they have morphed over brief periods of time, and how they intermingle with other extremely niche subjects (that themselves have likely morphed over time).  To understand this image, the viewer needs to first know who this character is, i.e. Miia from the anime Monster Musume, and they need to know that Miia is a lamia, or snake girl, for little in the image indicates as such.  They must also know that “snek” is a common intentional misspelling of “snake” in order to make any connection between the character and the hat she is wearing.  And of course, Miia is laughing, though the action is rendered in standard anime iconography. This is all assuming the viewer is well versed in anime to begin with, for its numerous idiosyncrasies can be the subject of an entirely different essay.

So the viewer may be aware of the tentative connection between the character and the phrase “snek”, but to know there is a joke at all, they need to be acquainted with this rather complex hat, which normally reads “top kek”.  Here “kek” has been substituted for “snek” because they rhyme, yet from where does “top kek” originate?  It comes from Turkish confectionary Topkek.  Why is a Turkish confectionary on a hat?  Because it is a stone’s throw away from “Top Gun” - at last the original phrase written on our inscrutable cap - worn by Workaholics character Adam DeMamp. But Topkek wasn’t chosen solely because it sounds similar to Top Gun.  Perhaps most importantly of all, the viewer must know “kek” is a corruption of “lel”, which is corruption of “lol”, which is an acronym standing for “laugh out loud”, and the hat is often placed on laughing persons and characters to emphasize their frivolity.

By pairing a laughing Miia with the phrase “kek”, but simultaneously transmogrifying the phrase into “snek”, the viewer perceives the double entendre; two vastly disparate entities and their entire histories coming together to create something new.  It’s truly astounding how much we internalize so that we may build on top of it.