Meme Hunting: Ralph Pootawn

I am utterly fascinated by memes. Because I've never really been a denizen of the Internet's many image boards and forums, I can't say that I'm ever up to date on what the latest memes are or even how most of them came to be. I suppose I'd like to keep it that way. I prefer memes to have a mysterious quality to them, as if they just materialized out of the ether one day. Most of them undoubtedly start as crappy photoshop jokes launched into the world by bored teenagers, but in the hands of the faceless many they achieve a transcendent quality. Memes are no longer just jokes, they're practically metaphysical. They are references to references, surreal alterations of individual moments in time. Memes are annoying and beautiful, disgusting and unique, immature and disarmingly smart. But inherent to the qualities of memes is a short lifespan. Memes disappear with little ceremony, their trails all but erased.

The most arcane memes out there are those that reference elements of the Internet itself. With no anchor in pop culture, history or language these memes are as impossible to grasp as vapor. One such meme is that of Ralph Pootawn, a figure from yesterday's Internet whipping boy, Second Life. A part of me laments not having this blog in the heyday of Second Life and its influence on the Internet. Sure, it's still operational and presumably profitable for Linden Labs, but SL is already entirely outmoded and is certainly no longer funny. The furries, age-players and vore fetishists who planted themselves there lingered long enough to no longer be shocking or absurd, so the griefers and trolls moved on. Those were heady times and they were not for me.

So what of Ralph Pootawn? The avatar and his exploits pop up on various image boards every now and then, but seeing as it's a meme from as many as four or five years ago a lot of admins and mods have made the mere mention of Pootawn a cause for account freezes or at the very least ridicule. As such, Ralph is strangely absent from most search engines. Occasional images without context pop up and some long-abandoned pages of complete nonsense bear his name. In my search I'm pretty sure I exposed my computer to at least half a dozen archaic viruses, judging by the way my security programs audibly sighed every time I clicked a rotten link.

Even though I couldn't really find much information about Ralph Pootawn I still couldn't get the concept out of my head. There's a genius to Ralph, a kind of condensed idea of what makes memes. First off, the Ralph avatar is literally a troll, which lends a self-awareness to his griefing projects. Also, his MO was remarkably subtle, which is something you can't really say about most Second Life disturbances. On a platform that allowed famous griefers like W-Hat to crash whole islands with flying, self-replicating dildos, Pootawn simply aimed to make people uncomfortable with his unwanted presence. The main meme surrounding Pootawn is the simple exchange, "Ralph pls go" and Pootawn's response "No" as two avatars engage in some kind of kinky simulated sex and Pootawn just stares at them.

It's a glorious meme, this one. It's the very picture of absurdity and a clear example of how the Internet has inverted concepts like privacy. I doubt history will remember Ralph Pootawn, but I appreciate what little record there is of his one-of-a-kind exploits.