What I mean by that is that Pepe was never intended to be a fascist/reactionary shibboleth, and was originally intended to be a college stoner that liked to pee with his pants fully down because it felt good, man. Attempts to steer Pepe back with additional comics, lawsuits, and attempts to regain control of the character by the original maker had mixed results and to this day Pepe (and Groyper and other mutations) is unfortunately still generally a fascist/reactionary shibboleth, especially when seen in the wild and presented by strangers.

There was some validity to the original usage of “the curtains were fucking blue” in its original context, especially when it came to the kind of “have a conclusion and look for evidence” sort of bad-faith analysis that was all too common in my upper division courses at university. Not every professor did that, of course, but those that did had a prepackaged expectation for what they wanted to find, everywhere, regardless of what the author or artist originally intended for any given work, or even if you subscribe to “death of the author” it was also regardless of what the viewing public or the class for that matter would have otherwise seen with it. A hammer-shaped ideology would see everything as a nail, so to speak.

Having said that, when I see “the curtains were fucking blue!” said online (or worse, in person, as has happened more times than I would have liked), it is used the same way as saying “shut up, I don’t want to think about that, reductionist evaluation of the thing with pretenses of objectivity only” but with less honesty. If a game (or movie, or show) has skeezy or otherwise questionable content or messaging, the curtains must be blue to that person.

The consequences of the proliferation of “the curtains were fucking blue” can be seen in the fairly common belief that the only good art is only photorealistic drawings, done with some specific medium for novelty’s sake, and typically done of pop culture characters that the viewer is already fond of, as is common on Reddit.

Yes, sometimes the curtains are indeed fucking blue. But other times, it is aggressive ignorance to say so. The most extreme example I can think of that I have personally experienced was a discussion on another site about the ideology of 80s television following Reagan-era deregulation of entertainment, news, and media in general, and the topic of GI Joe came up. I personally enjoyed that show as a kid, but as an adult, I could certainly see just how thick and heavy the messaging was from the introduction onward. “GI Joe is the code name for America’s highly trained special mission force. Its purpose: to protect human freedom against Cobra, a ruthless terrorist organization determined to rule the world.” I didn’t even have to look up that text; it’s burned into my memory, so successful was that messaging.

I heard those exact words, dropped like a bomb into the discussion: the curtains were fucking blue. That same person then said that GI Joe had NO political messaging whatsoever, that it was “nonpolitical” in his own words, and that saying otherwise was wishful thinking and, again in his own words, “having an agenda for your narrative.”

I truly believe it’s possible to enjoy (or have enjoyed) entertainment while both criticizing it and accepting criticism of it. But this wagon circling attitude when it comes to literary analysis is disturbingly common now. I still enjoy Tolkien’s works, for example, but for some fans, something like this: https://existentialcomics.com/comic/175 can and has been seen as a threat, somehow, to the continued enjoyment of the work.

The curtains are sometimes more than blue. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. :rat-salute: