mujun-gatamari (meme)
(むじゅんがたまり, lit. "clump of contradictions" or "ball of radical contradictions") also known as 間違いAA ("wrong ASCII art")
A specific style of ASCII art that originated on 2channel. It can also be considered a style of meme.
In the most common form, many rows of fixed-width ASCII characters are arranged to depict a logo, above which appears a picture of a character or object, usually with a speech bubble beside it. Artists often make use of emphasis lines to give context to their subject. The defining feature of this meme is that no two components of the image can match. Quotes, onomatopoeia, artist commentaries, tags, furigana, and so on: no matter how many elements go into the image, each one is from a different source. Aside from the text, the picture itself often combines several characters into a kind of chimera. For example, the earliest known example of this ASCII art depicts a creature with Juushimatsu Juushoku's head and the body of a dog, with a speech bubble saying "meow!!" and the caption "chick".
2channel users often deploy these pictures to defuse tensions in heated discussion threads full of arguments and flaming. Posting a Mujun-Gatamari usually carries an implicit meaning of "C'mon, you guys, chill out." In these cases, posters often introduce their image with a catchphrase meaning "殺伐としたスレに~が!! (Into the bloody fray of this thread, *** has arrived!!)" This usage originated with another ASCII art character, Youkan Man. Images of cheerful Youkan Man, who keeps on smiling no matter how many times he is cut in half, were once a popular option for calming down flame wars. Now, however, posters eschew this ascii art as something that just makes everyone angrier.
See also
- out of character - some of out of character images on pixiv & NicoSeiga are incorrectly tagged as mujun-gatamari.
External links
The following tags are aliased to this tag: mujun-gatamari (learn more).
This tag automatically adds meme (learn more).
