In 2017, I was having the worst summer of my life. I dubbed it my “summer of sad”. All I did that summer was endure. Every day was more painful than the last. I had very little going for me in all aspects of my life, so I did what any healthy person would do, smoke copious amounts of t-bowls and spend hours on social media.
2017 was the height of pride discourse for me. I was a bored active tumblr user before the great exodus while also being a bored active twitter user as well. We were batting 1000 then. We were funny and feisty about online pride as an idea. It was still fun to talk about pride on the internet then. As the years go on, and after the year we had, pride becomes more and more irl. People who actually go to pride events and hang out with other gay people in the real world are less and less willing to engage with people who are talking about the idea of “pride” and the “lgbt community” rather than “lived experiences”. 2017 was more than anything about the Babadook being a gay icon.
Now a lot of people think this was something that the tumblr lesbians decided to believe and then repeated until it became true. While they’ve been known to do that before, this is not one of those times. This one is based on a glitch on Netflix in early 2016. I’m guessing. I don’t remember the exact date and all the explainers list this an offshoot of the meme rather than the origin. They’re wrong about that and I’m right. The glitch listed the babadook as an LGBT movie. Someone took a screenshot and made a little joke. The joke then festered for months. Memes used to last forever. Pride 2016 had some gay babadook refrences on tumblr but nothing big. It grew and grew over time. By pride 2017, the babadook was everywhere. Everyone who thought they were sooooooo funny kept posting pictures of the babadook edited to be wearing target pride merch.
When a joke moves from Tumblr to Twitter, it changes. It goes from a weird thing weirdos joke about in their little cave on the internet to a much larger stage. Twitter is where the journalists and comedians are. People who use twitter for their jobs. I’m not saying Twitter is exactly formal but it’s the difference between sweatpants and jeans. Neither are exactly presentable but there is a difference. Quirky jokes on Tumblr are a dime a dozen. On Twitter there’s usually one quirky joke at a time and people align themselves with it to let us know how quirky they are. How quirky can one be while still drinking the free La Croix from their office fridge? Every twitter person is trying to let us know that the answer is very quirky, but they always use the same joke as everyone else also trying to let us know. Babadook was the It girl for these people that summer.
By the time it reached Twitter I was tired of it. I had seen it all year and knew what was coming. Hypersaturation. Jokes on jokes on jokes. Everyone falling over themselves to get a good take in. The longer it goes on the less funny it gets. Memes are essentially inside jokes with an ever growing audience. Once they reach a saturation point, they stop being funny. It’s if a person you hate makes the joke and it stops being funny but that person were a number.
The problem with the Babadook meme was also that it was seasonal. A seasonal meme can get tired real fast. Spoopy sure was funny for Halloween 2013 and is not funny anymore at all. But the over-saturation happens slowly over time with seasonal memes. Getting sick of a seasonal meme over the course of a month can get refreshed and renewed over the course of a year. The Babadook had a light following in pride 2016 so when pride 2017 rolled around we were happy to see the memes again. It had been a while. We were playing with an old toy we had forgotten about. We played with it too much, we had too much fun. We showed it off to everyone we knew and they all wanted it.
The true death of the Babadook meme came in the fall with the release of the first IT movie. When that movie came out, someone wrote an article saying that Pennywise the clown and the Babadook were dating, and together they were gay icons. While a compelling case could be made for the Babadook as a textual queer icon, the clown from IT is another story. One of the major plot points from the book is a hate crime against a gay man that the clown is responsible for. We don’t have time to get into all the ways this initial article is stupid and why we as a country and community have poor media literacy skills but this was the final blow that killed the meme. A step too far in the wrong direction from the wrong people.
We barely reference the Babadook meme anymore. Something that was once so ubiquitous is now nowhere to be seen. We’ve all grown up and moved on. Pride on the internet is so much less fun than in real life, as it should be, but now it’s almost purely humorless. It’s all discourse and scolding. Maybe because so much has changed in the past couple years both in the world and in the internet ecosystem. Maybe it’s because I’m getting older and I’m less in touch with how queer teens and college kids have fun on the internet. Maybe it was the Babadook itself. It burned too bright, too quickly. Proof we can’t have nice things. No joke will go untouched by the masses. No joke is too weird or nonsensical to not be popular, repackaged, and sold back to us.
You are 100% right about the origin of this meme! I remember it clear as day, and I'm fuming that these so-called splainers would say that the Netflix glitch is a result of the meme and not the cause. Who are these absolute fools writing our histories??