![]() ![]() They're a mirror held up to our current political reality, and like every mirror, in them everything is inverted. The Minions are animated by a genuine desire to commit acts of evil, but they're entirely incompetent against their better judgement, they end up doing good. There's a quiet, buried terror in Minion hate: the possibility that this chirpy, cyclopean, computer-generated moron might actually be better than you are. It's not just that people are afraid to admit that they're no better than the Minions. The Minions might well be deliberately annoying: It's their unpopularity that lets the slow enshittening of all reality carry on unimpeded. If we've all been turned into giddy, jam-smeared infants, clapping our pudgy hands at every new entertainment, then hating the Minions lets us pretend to ourselves that we're still adults. People who call themselves scholars and intellectuals happily and uncritically munch down anything a cynical culture industry squeezes into their mouths, whether it's a stupid two-hour car chase or a music video torture flick, so long as they can claim it's empowering. Any new radical thinker is now required, as if by law, to spend most of their time engaging in irreverent readings of Hollywood blockbusters. In the same way, all anxieties about the current state of culture can be soaked up by the spongy, grinning form of the Minion. The German Marxist August Bebel described anti-Semitism as the "socialism of fools." All the evils that the capitalist class actually commits are displaced onto a mythologized figure of the Jew. It's a narcissism of small differences: If you're infuriated by stuff for children, it might be because you're not actually all that sure how far above it you really are. Instead, there's a familiar triad of unsatisfying objections: They're stupid, they're annoying, and they're taking over everything. With a few exceptions, most complaints about the Minions have nothing to do with their intrinsic evil. Strangely, though, the fact that the Minions are complicit in the crimes of the Third Reich doesn't seem to be why people hate them so much. ![]() Minions falling from the guard towers at Auschwitz. Minions in Einsatzgruppe uniforms, chasing bananas into the mass graves. Helmeted Minions directing artillery fire in the wrong direction during the siege of Leningrad. And eventually, the Minions would have allied themselves with Adolf Hitler. Pith-helmeted Minions fumbled the quinine as the British Raj starved millions in India. Minions must have been there, piling human skulls on human skulls, some of them still blood-splattered, some hanging with stringy trails of human flesh, when the Mongols came to sack Baghdad in 1258. This potted history papers over a few cracks. If it weren't for them, your hatred would spill out everywhere, and then nothing would be safe. In the same way, it is you, the Minion-hater, who needs the Minions. It's been noted of Islamophobia that the Islamophobe is dependent on Muslims to maintain his identity-if there were no Muslims, the EDL and Britain First would have to invent them. The sight of a clitoris makes you want to puke. You stamp on bags of Wotsits until dust pops from the seams, your arms flailing in pointless circles, your face contorted into an inhuman snarl, until supermarket security drags you away. Bile, not blood, bubbles under your skin.Įven things that superficially resemble the Minions now have you foaming with rage. ![]() You're not quite sure why, but hating the Minions has somehow become an incredibly important part of who you are. The internet is full of pictures of Minions on fire, and you love to watch them burn. Every poster for their upcoming film, every plush toy and brand tie-in, fills you with fury and dread. ![]()
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