Lolcats and the joy of demotivation

I admit it: I'm a huge fan of lolcat. I speak the language. I thought of writing this entry in lolcat, but decided against it, for fear of disgusting half my (so far hypothetical) readers. But why do so many people love lolcat, and so many others hate it? This entry will be a short, largely incomplete study of the lolcat phenomenon, which I will analyse until I get bored.

Lolcat fans such as myself usually love cats. I say usually, because there are also loldogs and lolrusses, as well as other lolcreatures, which can also be rather droll.


But there is something about cats - their singular expressions, their independance, that makes them both human and completely alien. We compare them to ourselves, and find our likeness as funny as our differences. I find cats quite fascinating.


Certain cat photos are funny all by themselves. Others need a caption. And depending on the cat's position, expression and the context, the caption can make the lolcat. They are usually in the lolcat language, which is supposed to parody the weblanguage used by people who can't be bothered to spell properly. In other words, it's an excuse for intellectuals to spell badly on purpose and take the piss out of bad spellers all at once.


To me, this is a phonetic language. Some people are good at making captions. I'm not one of them. I think captions also became popular with demotivational posters. Lolcat photos sometimes come in the form of one of these posters, which are a parody of the original motivational posters. Personally, I could spend hours making these. The captions are slightly easier to think of than the lolcat photos, because you can use any photo - the most popular being animals and celebrities. The idea is to cheer you up when the motivational posters don't work.


The lolcat phenomenon has gone quite far, though. People put captions on everything, and make demotivational posters out of other demotivational posters. There is a lolcat bible - the Bible translated into lolcat. On the other end of the religious scale, the Wiccan rede has also been translated into lolcat. The other day I found an online lolcat dictionary. I don't know if all this is a good thing, but I'll put links to them for you all anyway...


So this article is basically an explaination/excuse for the ones that will follow: I plan to use plenty of these images in all of my articles. Get used to it. I won't speak to you in lolcat, though - it does get tiring after a while.