Shrek on the Internet

The underground internet fandom of DreamWorks' Shrek film series, based on William Steig's book of the same name, started around 2009. With the fanbase described by some people as an ironic liking towards the series, there have been several sexually explicit memes based on the titular character. The most notable example is a 2013 metameme based on a fanmade video called "Shrek is love, Shrek is life". Fans of Shrek are known as "Brogres", a take on the name "Bronies", the young adult fans of the show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. A "Shrek Filmmaker" movement of Source Filmmaker animators making videos based on the internet's obsession towards the character has also occurred.

2001–2012: Background and early history

The 2001 film Shrek, based on William Steig's novel of the same name, garnered acclaim from critics and won an Oscar, while Shrek 2 (2004) was the highest-grossing animated film ever at the American box office. However, Dave Sims of The Atlantic's The Wire marked the second film as the start of the decline in quality and commercial success of the franchise, writing that none of the sequels were remembered due to the jokes relying on "cheap topical gags and flimsy celebrity cameos."^[1] He noted that "the joke of Shrek's mediocrity was then filtered through the internet's many weird joke filters, which end up in a weird mix of sincerity and surrealism."^[1] While fans had been creating and positing their own comics and pictures of Shrek depicted outside of the films on DeviantArt ever since Shrek's 2001 release, "it took about 11 years for the Internet's Shrek obsession to go from cute to cult-like" as The Daily Dot wrote.^[2]

Shrek's official Facebook page was launched by DreamWorks on December 1, 2009. This is where the company promoted the products and spin-offs of the franchise and made the titular character "speak" to his fans through posts. These posts were very popular, garnering 1,000 to 2,000 more views than the typical promotional post at the time.^[2] In 2010, the year of the release of Shrek Forever After, a comic on DeviantArt pairing Shrek with Shadow the Hedgehog, a character from the Sonic the Hedgehog series, went viral,^[3] and what followed was several memes, including what The Week journalist Scott Meslow described as "awful puns, half-assed Photoshops, bizarre fan fiction," and a horror game revolving around Shrek stalking the player through a swamp, most of them sexually explicit.^[3] There have been lists compiling online Shrek fan art, including a January 2014 list by Chloe Cole of the CollegeHumor site Dorkly of "The Most Upsetting Shrek and Shadow Fan Art On the Internet"^[4] and official Smosh website writer Daniel Dominguez's list of "20 Uncomfortably Sexual Pieces Of Shrek Fan Art" published in November 2013.^[5]

2012–present: ShrekChan, "Shrek is love, Shrek is life"

May 2012 marked the launched of ShrekChan, a 4chan-esque imageboard for fans of Shrek to satirically and occasionally seriously comment on anything related to the Shrek series. Fans of Shrek are named "brogres", which is a take on the name of the young adult fans of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic known as bronies.^[2] The board had garnered 500,000 visitors as of March 22, 2014.^[2] In 2013, Shrek's online popularity went to what the The Daily Dot described as a "whole new demented level" with a fanmade video called "Shrek is love, Shrek is life".^[2] A metameme based on this was posted on 4chan's paranormal board on January 31, 2013, which led to many "deranged illustrations" posted online influenced by the post.^[2] Many duplications of the video were also uploaded, with the video and its replicas garnering over three million views as of May 2014.^[1]

On March 25, 2014, the video was a "Cartoon Brew pick",^[6] and the award was number 13 on their "Top 20 Stories of 2014" published on the site.^[7] The video was also put by Gizmodo writer Ashley Feinberg's list of the "11 of the Weirdest Videos on YouTube".^[8] In 2014, ShrekChan was shut down with a message from the board's founder:

The Shrek meme is dead, and it's time to stop trying to keep this going. It is inevitable and it has to happen at some point in time. Many of you who truly love the Shrek movies may think that shutting down ShrekChan is a bad idea, but I hope that you may find another website to discuss the love for Shrek.^[3]

A "Shrek Filmmaker" movement in which Source Filmmaker animators made videos based on the internet's obsession with Shrek was described by a PC Magazine journalist as "One of the craziest and funniest underground Source Filmmaker movements".^[9] The videos involve the character placed in "glitchy worlds of horrifying imagery and Smash Mouth references." These videos have included parodies such as "Shrek It Ralph" and "Shreking Ball", as well as the crossover with R. L. Stine's series of novels Goosebumps "Shrek Gets Spooked", which had close to two million views by October 2015.^[9]

Analysis and reception

Purposely-bad fan art and animation of Shrek and loyalty towards the song "All Star" by pop rock group Smash Mouth, which played in the first film of the series, are also considered traits of the Internet's obsession towards Shrek.^[1] David Sims of The Atlantic's The Wire wrote that one possible reason of Shrek's internet fanbase was that the franchise was a depiction of "everything that was initially exciting and then quickly patronizing" about the early 2000s, saying that "It's symbolic of so many things we briefly loved before quickly realizing their emptiness." He also said that with many other memes, Occam's razor is a factor: "Shrek has a funny, stupid face, and putting that face in a weird place provokes a cheap laugh."^[1] The online appreciation of Shrek has also been described as ironic. Know Your Meme's former researcher Amanda Brennan described it as a "subversion of brony culture, again taking something relatively childish with good intentions and flipping it to an ironic appreciation."^[2] Sims shared a similar sediment by noting that, like other memes, it was "one giant agreed-upon joke. No one ever admits that the Shrek series is pretty crappy, even though DreamWorks drove it into the ground as hard as it possibly could."^[1]

Alan Hanson, a contributor for The Awl who made fun of ShrekChan and similar fansites, found the darker side of the internet's obsession towards Shrek:

A lot of Shrek content is him making awful faces, being very leery. Children's movies and fairytales are already inherently very dark, and Shrek on its own tries to show the even darker side of that, so it's almost the natural progression to get into the real "swamp" of Shrek, the "Drek" as they say. If Shrek is love, Drek is everything that's not Shrek/love.

He described a fan's apartment as a "swamp," which "is lovely because it's your place, made of the things that comfort you, even if they're gross and unliked by others." He also described people against fans of Shrek as a "Farquaad. Then it gets pretty derogatory past that, lot's of f-words and n-words unfortunately."^[1]

References