Letting the cat out of the bag
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Let’s deconstruct narratives and decode some of the hidden subtexts in Caturdays that have been posted in this series and other catcentric media vehicles! As the raw material of our inquiry, let’s look at different Caturday genres and try to identify some of the various layers of meaning.
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Mainstream Caturday
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Here in this contemporary mainstream Caturday – the brutal first-string message is that the viewer has a maturity level of between 10 and 14 and is feminine. This is because the medium has its roots in the Internet posting habits of Japanese girls. The teenage origins makes the cute and silly layer of meaning of Caturday the most obvious, and it’s also the most essential layer for maintaining a consistent link to the Caturday style.
But between the layers of ironic text, is kitty warning us that it really doesn’t need our dumb, misplaced sympathy?
Maybe this subliminal attack on our self esteem – after the Caturday context has already eroded our common sense – is meant to prepare us for a life in the working class, the most abused in a modern industrial society. Prepare for senselessness and meaninglessness!
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Orientalist Caturday
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This Caturday ridicules the tribe-o-centric/trade-o-centric Orientalist representation of Arabs and Muslims in Anglo-Hebraic mass media. Notice how religion and oil are mixed together to construct the unlikely narrative of religious extremists coveting their own oil. Would this oil be needed so that their religious iconography can cry giant tears?
Muslims don’t have religious iconography to cry oil, but many comfortable people all over the earth seem to value their transportation myths more than survival itself. The elephant in the room is that it’s actually the Caturday audience’s motor vehicles that are the gods that need all the oil. And corn. And land. And air. And meow.
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Predatory Imperial Caturday
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Feline Cuteness Hegemony is back! The tiny, insignificant viewer is portrayed as a mouse who is staring right into the face of the media-tycoon hegemon who would consume him. Never blinkz evokes an all-encompassing mass media, and it hints at the totalitarian aspirations of a proto-barbaric ruling class.
Cat elites are proto-barbaric in the sense that they pit their working classes against one another in pointless wars and befoul the entire earth with pollution and deforestation in order to put bones through their noses.
This kind of metaphorical situation is a literary construct. Cats and mice almost never have this kind of dramatic face-to-face contact outside of housecat media.
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Consumer Caturday
Caste stratification and representations of ethnicity are issues in this pop-culture-reference-filled tribute to hyperconsumption and vanity.
The graphic design style evokes an advertising-driven culture of gluttony, superman worship and private ownership.
The word share is intentionally misspelled Cher adding the vapors of another pop narrative to the mix.
The earth is a big, wet breast for the cat-god’s favorite kitty.
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Caturday Fusions
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This is a hybrid political/apolitical Caturday.
In its attempt to be poignantly political and yet insipidly silly, it is possible that this lolcat macro has morphed into a novel form of communication, adding yet another pretentious layer of meaning to a hitherto empty discourse.
By portraying garish amounts of wealth as kitschy and vapid, the seeds of a transformative revolution have been germinated in the language of Japanese-girl Internet spam.
The wings with which to fly into the warm embrace of the truth have been crafted from the feathers of giggly pillow fights.
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qatzel ok 