The first parodies of Gabe that appeared on the web were pretty much what she expected: low-tech affairs, posted by people with names like SmurfVadar, that basically animated the still of her smashing XactlySo’s equipment to different soundtracks: the banjo music from Deliverance, a steampunk version of “Bring the House Down”…. If the fun that people were having with her video was going to just fizzle away, the memes would have ended here, as they usually did. But as the number of views continued to climb, so did the memes, as well as their sophistication.
“Uh oh, uh oh,” she said to Dan as they watched her skin turn green in one animation, the big E that was the logo of an ecology movement sprouting from her head like horns. Whoever had made this one had access to studio-grade F/X. The same E sprouted from the top of the microphone stand she was wielding, turning it into a pitchfork. A few days later, a meme of this meme showed her as a giant ear of corn. Then a robot. Then she was the farmer in American Gothic, holding the trident pitchfork that had first appeared in the earlier animation, made from the ecology ‘E’. In another, someone photoshopped her face to make her a freckled hillbilly, turning down the corners of her mouth to make it look less like a scowl than a drool. Coming from her mouth was a cartoonist’s speech bubble: “The corncob: free-range toilet paper.”
TikTok:
Grrrl-punk@gitargirl 4 days ago
1,950 Hearts
A blazing guitar solo with a zoom-in to the guitarist's shoulder that has a tattoo of Gabe busting amps.
Insta:
LilPennyRap
118 posts 2.7M followers. 118 following
More tattoos of Gabe as Godzilla breathing fire.
3 days 735K likes
Replying: @StandingMyGround
Rockers, druggies, and gangstas never crackaBible unless its to find a caption for their tat.
Replying: @FoundHimInPrision
So long as they #cometoJesus everthang else is earelephant or irelephant or however u spll it.
In the weeks that followed, Instagram and other sites grew a crazee-quilt of Gabe tattoos and memes, each a commentary, in its way, on who she was and what she did: Circus Freak, Trust Fund Baby, Savage, Idiot Savant, Star-Trek-Con Geek, New Ager, Anime CosPlayer, Neo-Hippie, EcoNazi, Music Hater, Anarchist, Nut-Job—and also the backlash: Hot Eco-Chic, She Guevara, Joan of Ark. She figured Dan had put up that one….
“Relax,” he said, “this is just how people share opinions. It’s not like this is about you, you know.” Then he added. “Isn’t that what you wanted?”
How far would it go, she wondered, watching the images proliferate. Stupid question. And just as well. Just as Dan had said, the more images of her that were created, the more she was dissipating: the original getting more and more diffuse, drop adding to drop till there were so many drops—a pool—that the truth began to sink in. No one cared. Except NGers: NG hackers continued to generate hundreds, then thousands of false addresses, IPs, dead ends, and forking paths—to protect her, she saw, even if what they really liked was the folk-hero idea they’d made of her, not her. And apparently XactlySo’s PR people had decided that the churn was giving him pub that he couldn’t buy. Five more strangers claimed online to be her—the woman in the video smashing XactlySo’s stuff. Instead of Waldo, she was becoming Kilroy: the name that WWII GIs came across so often—‘Kilroy Was Here’—that they began to believe in him, or at least take up his cause, signing his name instead of their own. Or maybe there was no original, no Kilroy, no them, the way that the ‘Guy’ over in Congo was not the ‘Guy’ who they knew here, or she, dressed in a pastel dress when she was six wasn’t the ‘her’ who was standing here thinking about that other ‘her,’ the one who had smashed the equipment, each playing its part before morphing into another, everyone only a prequel and a sequel to themselves and each other, at so many ages and in so many ways that sometimes she herself didn’t know which of them to ask, Who are you?
She liked the way this one avatar of her did her hair. Looking at her reflection in the computer screen, she swirled a curl around her finger to bend it the same way.