There's a new meme becoming popular in the Anglosphere called Gondola. It's a derivative of Spurdo Sparde with no arms or dialogue, generally walking around in various scenes from classic artworks to everyday life. I think they could be most easily characterized in opposition to Pepe or Spurdo, both of whom are subversive in the classically Ironic Meme style of inappropriateness: Pepe will murder Wojak over and over while Spurdo will spout every satirizable position in misspelled and poorly drawn way possible. As usual, everyone's worry is about how normies will ruin Gondola. Not if or when; it's taken for granted that Gondola will become corrupted.

I disagree. It's been four years, and Baneposting is still alive and very well. Pepe is dead the same way Loss Edit is—dead to the Underground, immortalized in the Mainstream with barely a trace of its antecedent undercurrents outside the history books of Know Your Meme. The reason Baneposting lives on is its 'normie-proof' nature: Baneposters simply love it whenever a big guy reference makes it into the Mainstream. This works because the Banepost is a fundamentally aesthetic project. Unlike a Loss Edit whose function is technical creativity, a Banepost must be beautiful also. As much as the Ironics hate the normies, they must accept that what's beautiful is beautiful.

Gondola goes further. It's about beauty. As the child of the neo-aestheticist movement that is the now ironically overused 'New Sincerity', a Gondola is as silent…