Well then, our absurd world seems to consecrate the strangest of things, among which, once, was an image of Shrek’s Lord Farquaad, heavily artifacted, his face replaced by the famous gamer Markiplier’s face, and captioned in the Impact font by the single letter ‘E.’
We may well guess this meme was not created by chance, but with intent; and among memes it received precedence as a demonstrative example of late Millennial humour. I have two hypotheses regarding the origins of this particular image, called representative, and begin with the first: that the E of Farquaad is born from nihilism and leads to nihilism.
The argument to nihilism rests on the inherent absurdity of the meme; pointless and random, incorporating as much diversity as possible in as few elements, none even remotely related to each other. The image quality is taken from oft-copied lossy image formats. The principal subject, Lord Farquaad, is the antagonist of the 2001 animated film Shrek. Lord Farquaad’s face is replaced by ‘Markiplier’, a man famous online. The ‘E’ itself, much like Plutarch’s, is ultimately a mystery, but one may assume for the sake of the hypothesis that it was chosen at random, a brief interjection into otherwise wordless chaos. The meme therefore comes from nothing, possessing no significant meaning, and it communicates nothing except its own absurdity. For the Millennial generation to see itself reflected by such is a self-indictment of that generation as purposeless and without reason.
Second, if we discard the proposition that the E of Farquaad has no meaning, logically, it can only otherwise have a meaning; it is therefore incumbent on a prospective analyst to determine as far as possible what that meaning is. Beginning with Farquaad: a corrupt king, Napoleonic in psychology yet impotent in capability, he is at once all-powerful and crippled, able to command legions, yet unable to reach the top of his own dresser. The system is strong, but the individual is weak. The artifacting, the result of a lossy image (possibly a JPG) being saved repeatedly across different devices, represents the corruption of information passed along a fallible conduit. A metaphor for the fragility of modern communications and the inverse fidelity of information, it is a comment that, ironically, while modern technology allows for the transmission of high-definition video which in a younger world would allow nothing to be concealed, contemporary conditions are such that finding out the truth of an event is more difficult than it has ever been in human history. The placement of Markiplier’s face atop the king’s body indicates two things. Firstly, the replacement of royalty with the god Entertainment; secondly, the resulting tyranny of that entertainment.
Finally, we come to the E itself. The E, in this second reading, could firstly stand for ‘entertainment.’ More compelling, however, is the argument advanced by Palaiodorus, that the E is not an acronym for any word in particular, but instead, being three-pronged, signifies the Trinity. It synthesises the image’s elements, and implicitly stands for Everything.
verso folio 