If I’m being honest, I’ll admit to seeing some dark hilarity in this meme portraying Brown, who seems to be a sweet, tiny human angel, as a vile bigot who mows down gay men with new cars is so ridiculous that it pushes these statements into the realm of surreal humor. No one believes the Millie Bobby Brown meme to be true. And that pattern means that Brown quitting Twitter may cause a Streisand effect, in which the meme only gets more attention from trolls because of Brown’s reaction. The takeaway here is that these memes are designed to evoke a reaction, and the more reaction there is, the more troll-y the posts get, and the meme’s longevity increases. While not immediately related to the tweet that kicked all this off, the obviously bad photoshops that often accompany these tweets play up the painfully fake angle of the original meme.
There are also crasser, more to-the-point variations, which mainly consist of an obviously bad photoshop of Brown saying that she wants to run over gay men with her car and a recent variation that ascribes false stories of hateful racism to Brown. Like this one, a completely farcical tale of Brown throwing a hot McDonald’s McCafé beverage at someone wearing a gay pride T-shirt: Twitter
That spawned the “Millie Bobby Brown is homophobic” meme, with the accompanying troll hashtag #TakeDownMillieBobbyBrown, that’s circulated in the past few days, which has a few variations that resemble those initial reactions. #TakeDownMillieBobbyBrown- bash November 18, 2017 one day i saw millie bobby brown in the mall and i asked for a selfie and she said "i don't take selfies with fags, homo sex is sin" and broke my iphone X. What drives the joke further is the trollish response of asking for proof of this nonsense story and then responding with an obviously fake image: In fact, the meme actually started in November 2017 with portraying Brown as anti-Islam.Ī troll account, - who changed their account to which is now suspended - tweeted a preposterous, fabricated story about meeting Brown at the airport, which ends with Brown stomping on a hijab. Brown seems like a such a sweet, honest young girl, which is why contrasting her image with such heinous statements evokes a reaction. This meme about Brown is an exercise in sincerity versus absurdity. The story of Millie Bobby Brown being a monster bigot began as trolling It’s about a meme that only succeeds because of how absurd it is, how pristine Brown’s celebrity image is, and how outrage can drive the internet to be the worst version of itself. If you dig deeper, this is also a story about the internet’s deeply intertwined relationship with irony. Falsely portraying this young girl and child star as a raging homicidal bigot is heinous, and Brown deleting her Twitter to avoid this maelstrom is a logical response to the internet’s festering orgy of toilet humor. On the surface, the meme is shocking and in poor taste. These claims are part of the #TakeDownMillieBobbyBrown meme, which consists of low-effort pictures - usually screengrabs from Brown’s Snapchat - pasted over with absurdly homophobic statements. Just like no one honestly believes that Millie Bobby Brown bullies gay men by sliding into their texts and dropping f-bombs (the one that rhymes with maggots).īut what people don’t believe doesn’t really matter, as Millie Bobby Brown, the 14-year-old star of Netflix’s Stranger Things, deactivated her Twitter account this week, reportedly in response to assertions like these. Just like no one honestly believes Millie Bobby Brown throws piping hot McCafés at people who wear pride T-shirts at McDonald’s. No one honestly believes Millie Bobby Brown runs over gay men with new cars.