The Rise Of The #Gentleminions

July 4, 2022 1:56 PM

Like all forms of Gen Z internet humor, the #Gentleminions meme is based off a bunch of other bits of internet ephemera that are all in conversation with each other.
posted by Etrigan (53 comments total)

"It’s about bringing a bunch of people together, doing something objectively weird, and then sharing videos and posts about it back on internet platforms with the expressed desire of inspiring others to do the same."

So... flash mobs? Invented by a Gen X?
posted by tllaya at 2:10 PM on July 4, 2022 [21 favorites]

The article links to further press about how some movie theaters are BANNING groups of kids in suits from attending the film.

....Why the hell?....

And for those of you who say that "oh those kids must be doing some kind of rowdy stunt during the film like a backflip or something" - first of all, they aren't. And second of all, a story: my friends sprung a surprise movie outing on me for my 16th birthday, where about 12 of us all went to an afternoon screening of Pretty In Pink where we were the entire audience. And at some point mid-film the guys got bored and started a volleyball game in the middle of the theater with one of the balloons they'd brought for me - and THAT theater didn't even bat an eye.

So I'm genuinely not getting the objection to "groups of kids in suits showing up to attend a movie and taking selfies right before the trailers" or whatever.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 2:11 PM on July 4, 2022 [13 favorites]

I heard it being described as a Gen Z Rocky Horror Picture Show, and frankly I'm fine with that, as long as they clean up after themselves. (Don't throw prunes at the screen, please.)
posted by SansPoint at 2:13 PM on July 4, 2022 [6 favorites]

....Why the hell?....

Because some cinemas have had issues with these groups throwing things at the screen, running up and down, filming each other and doing other dumb shit during the screening. Also doing shit like this, disrupting moviegoers using the bathroom and causing problems for the staff.

I'm all for kids getting together and doing fun harmless things in the name of absurdity, but that sympathy ends right when they start making the movie going experience (already not super fun these days) an even worse experience for anyone who actually wants to see the movie itself.
posted by fight or flight at 2:15 PM on July 4, 2022 [25 favorites]

Okay, yeah, that's different.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 2:21 PM on July 4, 2022 [2 favorites]

The article seems to imply that these ‘events’ necessarily end in some kind of riotous or disruptive behavior IRL which can be captured in pictures or video to be fed back into the internet via social media. Is that really the only net product of this kind of exercise?
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 3:00 PM on July 4, 2022 [1 favorite]

Worth noting that the bans are in the UK, too. It was only on seeing a film in the US that I heard any audience noise of any kind during a film that wasn’t crisp rustling, laughter, or gasps.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 3:12 PM on July 4, 2022

“I think this meme is largely rooted in nostalgia for the Minions franchise”

I thought the kids were alright, but apparently I was wrong.
posted by a box and a stick and a string and a bear at 3:37 PM on July 4, 2022 [26 favorites]

This explains why, in the Saturday afternoon screening of The Minions Rise of Gru that I took my son and his friend to here in Iceland, there were some kids dressed in suits. They looked between 10 to 13 years old.

But the only shenanigans they got up to was applauding politely, if exaggeratedly, after every trailer.

Then they just sat, watched and laughed like the rest of us in the audience.
posted by Kattullus at 3:50 PM on July 4, 2022 [19 favorites]

Gen Z are all weird edgelords. Gen Z internet culture is a constant shitpost, happening irl and online simultaneously.

.
posted by glonous keming at 4:14 PM on July 4, 2022 [4 favorites]

I found this amusing, but then I just tried to imagine what it must be like to be a teenager right now and I just got desperately sad. Even this thread... man it's like the hatred of the generation younger than you is just ramping up, hard. Seems like a bad sign.
posted by Stonestock Relentless at 4:47 PM on July 4, 2022 [9 favorites]

I'm not hating on this or a younger gen...I'm trying to understand what the author of the article linked to above is trying to explain to me about this behavior which they seem to imply sets it apart from other similar things, e.g groups of cosplayers showing up at a public event for their own entertainment and sharing it via social media in 'real time.' Is the thesis that these events are consciously staged with the specific intent to disrupt 'real life' which using the descriptor 'constant shitpost' would seem to imply.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 5:02 PM on July 4, 2022 [2 favorites]

Gentleminions who look cool and have their own jokes and don’t damage anything is charming and funny and I would like to be next to them in the diner afterwards. Briefly, because I am old, but I would go home fondly remembering shenanigans.

Hashtag competitions to get thrown out of places as fast as possible seem really risky, and also that … hm … someone who’s a good video editor can make themselves look like they got away with something dangerous they didn’t quite actually do, and then the next group really does it. Gossip was bad enough for that without video.
posted by clew at 5:06 PM on July 4, 2022 [9 favorites]

[Situationism intensifies]
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 5:23 PM on July 4, 2022 [25 favorites]

Pretty much every Gen Z meme has followed this exact pattern ever since. An internet meme goes viral, but in such a way that it can’t really be commented on by brands or mainstream society at large, either because it’s too weird or too niche. It continues to grow as a cultish inside joke thanks to TikTok. Then it finally spills over into real life, seemingly inexplicably. And then, if real life can’t handle the viral stress of the internet leaking out into a physical space, chaos ensues. Police show up. A riot breaks out. Movie theaters ban teenage boys from wearing suits to see a Minions movie.

*wipes single tear from eye*

That'll do, overly-broad-generalization reducing millions of heterogenous people into a single leaky abstraction vis a vis shitposting. That'll do.
posted by Mayor West at 5:46 PM on July 4, 2022 [32 favorites]

Anyway, is this the the thread where we post our would-be graduate theses on contemporary memetics and the evolution of disaffection in adolescents? Because I too was a nihilist/dadaist in high school, and if there was TikTok in 1999 I would 100% have been at a goofy movie premiere wearing a suit, probably instead of doing whatever other dumbass stuff I did. In this essay I will
posted by Mayor West at 5:52 PM on July 4, 2022 [40 favorites]

MetaFilter: doing something objectively weird, and then sharing videos and posts about it
posted by Splunge at 5:54 PM on July 4, 2022 [3 favorites]

Thanks, Mayor West.

Yes, that's feeling about right to me. Sorry I even bothered.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 5:54 PM on July 4, 2022

I am very glad that I, an Old, now understand where the Gentleminions originated.
posted by meese at 5:59 PM on July 4, 2022 [1 favorite]

The Zillennial experience is completely getting it, but also sighing in exasperation.

Sort of like, I see you on my lawn the 3x3 square of grass in front of the apartment I rent for an exorbitant amount, and I'm not going to chase you off, but I am going to be sitting on my porch cosplaying Ben Affleck.
posted by brook horse at 6:22 PM on July 4, 2022 [7 favorites]

That said a lot of this really seems like teenagers being teenagers and the inclusion of internet culture suddenly rendering adults incapable of recognizing age-old childhood experiences. The "shipping page" bafflement for example. I'm pretty sure that used to be called "gossip" and people drew stick figures kissing and labeld it "Johnny & Sue" and passed it around class giggling. Weird and inappropriate? Absolutely. But not remotely new.
posted by brook horse at 6:30 PM on July 4, 2022 [9 favorites]

Being on the wrong shipping page getting you attacked from around the world, with this confusing low probability/high damage virality power law thang, does seem kind of new.
posted by clew at 7:12 PM on July 4, 2022 [2 favorites]

I'm not hating on this or a younger gen...I'm trying to understand what the author of the article linked to above is trying to explain to me

Same.

I think the kids are probably alright. Except for the ones who aren't. But some of them will be someday, and some of the alright ones won't be. Because, you know, not a monolith.

Me and my friends used to take our punk rock outfits (in our very, very, very suburban world) and go the mall and demand to know "What are you looking at" when people inevitably looked at us. We were so edgy. My gen also had Rocky Horror Picture Show. We had zines to help organize us, and the internet was licking at our heels.

Really young gen x and millenials had actual flash mobs. This seems like a cross between that and Rocky Horror.

I'm sure generations before me had similar stuff. I'm not sure what the author is getting at, other than maybe "adolescents use the tools available to them to gather together and sometimes be silly and sometimes be destructive, but always to intentionally be confusing to the older generations in an incomprehensibly (to the older gen because they don't use the same tools in the same way) organized fashion."
posted by tllaya at 7:13 PM on July 4, 2022 [8 favorites]

Sounds like the kids are being a relatively minor public annoyance in a way that's baffling to those not in their cohort. Kind of the way kids were when I was their age. Reading about these things makes me cringe because it reminds me of the cringy things I did with my friends as a kid, when we thought we were being cool and clever. When we were really just being dumb and/or inconsiderate.
posted by 2N2222 at 7:35 PM on July 4, 2022 [5 favorites]

I will speak for the elder millennials: seems like a good time, have a blast, try not to foment a neo-fascist authoritarian nightmare faction replete with its own ecosystem-eating currency-cult while you’re out having fun with you friends like we did. Oh, and call if you’re going to be out past 11!
posted by mmcg at 8:08 PM on July 4, 2022 [27 favorites]

I am mildly surprised there are so many young men with suits.

But moshing in suits to animated movies - surely someone can set up an all-ages venue? Gentleminillions! Uh, terrible pandemic idea, though.
posted by clew at 8:25 PM on July 4, 2022 [1 favorite]

#Notallminions
posted by FJT at 8:44 PM on July 4, 2022 [2 favorites]

My preteen daughter, who generally prefers Stranger Things to quality animated movies these days, absolutely insisted that I take her to the drive-in for the Minions showing this weekend. Instead of wearing a suit, both she and a friend dressed in head-to-toe yellow, and they were extremely upset when they saw that no one else had done the same. It seemed to have the same energy as her desire to watch very bad animated Christian movies like "Finding Jesus".

This is going to be the rest of my life, right? My kid does something I can't quite figure out and then I learn about it from some article on the internet.
posted by Alison at 9:03 PM on July 4, 2022 [16 favorites]

Briefly mentioned in the article, Adrian's Kickback is the actual posterchild for Gen Z virality getting real real weird in meat space.
posted by kaibutsu at 9:08 PM on July 4, 2022 [3 favorites]

Being on the wrong shipping page getting you attacked from around the world, with this confusing low probability/high damage virality power law thang, does seem kind of new.

The thing is though is that it isn't the world - when burn book type of stuff get out of hand it tends to be the same sort of social circles doing the damage that it would have been when we were kids. Mostly peers and mostly local, because wtf does Lai Chan Hong Kong or Marie DuBois in Orleans about some random American high school drama?

I mean when you hear about high powered cyberbullying cases that have tragic real-world consequences it's almost always local - classmates or neighbors, people in their local community. Sometimes even other parents. You might get a bit of brigading but it's at the behest of someone known personally to the victim.

"The rest of the world" is a bit of a boogyman for parents of Gen Z kids but its really not a huge deal. All those other kids have their own shit going on too and don't often wade into each other's business in a significant way. Like they might see it, and the view count might go up, but invariably the damage is done by locals.

I am generally of the opinion that there's nothing particularly weird about how Z kids function. It's just I think a lot of us adults forget how deeply bizarre the teenage mind can be at times, and all Z kids are doing are externalizing a lot of that weirdness in a way that adults can experience. I rather enjoy Z shitposting, as a Millenial shitposter I feel they are holding the torch wonderfully for us. Like I read over my LJ or whatever and it's a bit....ah. There we are. Good work children. You honour us with your strangeness.

I found this amusing, but then I just tried to imagine what it must be like to be a teenager right now and I just got desperately sad. Even this thread... man it's like the hatred of the generation younger than you is just ramping up, hard. Seems like a bad sign.

I feel much the same way. They're just being kids. And they're often not even doing anything that strange or dangerous. Like, I dressed in full Matrix kit to view those films. At that age I used to go to toy stores and set off all the talking teddies at the same time, and on one notable occasion slalomed all the way through one of the more prestigious malls in my area in a supermarket shopping trolley, the mall being conveniently possessed of a gentle downhill slope that had a definite impact on speed. I didn't die, it was great. If I'd had a chance to record it to show my mates I would have done it in a heartbeat. Sometimes that's all that is - I want to show my friends this cool thing I did or saw or whatever. They aren't aliens, they're just kids.

A lot of Gen Z weirdness is just....very public in jokes and the same sort of stunting we got up to, they just have some very handy tools to share it. And I think they're under some really unique pressures that we never had to deal with, and it colours how they express themselves. Like the nihilistic streak is a totally reasonable response to growing up under plague and climate collapse. Their movements are far more constrained than even the worst Millennial hothouse flower so their key area of freedom is the internet.
posted by Jilder at 9:51 PM on July 4, 2022 [16 favorites]

Planking did this.
posted by NoThisIsPatrick at 10:14 PM on July 4, 2022 [7 favorites]

Every era gets the Teddy Boys it deserves.
posted by acb at 1:02 AM on July 5, 2022 [18 favorites]

The one other thing that comes through all this is that the initial posting of activity is picked up and exploited by others, whether local or not. This is highlighted in the mention from the parent article that these kids have lived their entire lives documented online. Because we have created the dystopian version of an internet, anything that goes online gets exploited for a gain the original poster typically gets a nothing from, and in some cases actually loses. I don’t even know what level of irony that Adrian kid is at when the article wraps up with the line “But this may be the beginning of his career as an influencer”.
posted by herda05 at 1:28 AM on July 5, 2022 [1 favorite]

"Millennials are individualist, entrepreneurial, and focused on a personal brand"

After reading possibly the least accurate description of everyone I know in my age cohort, I can't say I have much confidence in the rest of the article's thoughts on Gen Z as a group.
posted by wakannai at 1:38 AM on July 5, 2022 [25 favorites]

Kids have always been weird, and trying to push boundaries. I certainly was. It’s part of finding out why the boundaries exist.

Suspect the internet has made the stakes a little higher, though. Semi-strangers on the internet egging us on, insulated from the consequences… That’s just the same problem it brings to all of us.
posted by breakfast burrito at 2:07 AM on July 5, 2022 [2 favorites]

Remember when GenX were all perpetually ironic grunge slackers? Or when boomers were long-hair hippie potheads who were probably commies? Fun times.
posted by acb at 2:09 AM on July 5, 2022 [8 favorites]

It seemed to have the same energy as her desire to watch very bad animated Christian movies like "Finding Jesus".
This is going to be the rest of my life, right? My kid does something I can't quite figure out and then I learn about it from some article on the internet.

Your daughter seems awesome to me. Watching very bad animated Christian movies sounds hilarious. Maybe we should do that at MST Club this week....
posted by JHarris at 3:01 AM on July 5, 2022 [3 favorites]

When I was 15 in the 1980s, we had a thing where we'd all dress up in improvised Batman outfits and go out at midnight to fill all the holes at the local golf course with sand.
posted by pipeski at 4:09 AM on July 5, 2022 [28 favorites]

My friends and I repeatedly went to Back To The Future (often sneaking into a showing after seeing something else that we paid for), waited for the moment when Huey Lewis has his one line (as the judge in the band auditions), shouted “That’s Huey Lewis!” and then left the theater.

Our brains were still growing, guys.
posted by Mchelly at 5:03 AM on July 5, 2022 [24 favorites]

There is an entire two (perhaps three?) Generations of people who largely misunderstand that Attention does not equal Affection and that is why this stuff keeps happening.

Logan Paul is exhibit A.
posted by Faintdreams at 5:46 AM on July 5, 2022 [4 favorites]

This post was times perfectly. My girlfriend was just asking yesterday why this was such a trend. I found the article to be a clear breakdown to describe why the newest Minion movie has been such a hit and why there are all the Teenage boys in suits!
posted by calais.cat at 5:57 AM on July 5, 2022

Jfc this post just drove home to me again that my son is now a teenager. He does not own a suit and has not asked to see Minions. He does however have a weird fascination with some silly memes his friends send him but so far it’s harmless enough that he shares it with me to see if I also find it funny.
posted by caution live frogs at 6:02 AM on July 5, 2022 [1 favorite]

enough people my age (give or take a decade) like to haul their asses around on massive N. American motorbikes. The exhaust systems deafen the block. Apparently there is not a damn thing anyone can do about that, but yes.. it's kids in suits at movies who need our scrutiny.
posted by elkevelvet at 7:12 AM on July 5, 2022 [8 favorites]

Metafilter: a constant shitpost, happening irl and online simultaneously.
posted by evidenceofabsence at 7:40 AM on July 5, 2022 [3 favorites]

if real life can’t handle the viral stress of the internet leaking out into a physical space, chaos ensues. Police show up. A riot breaks out. Movie theaters ban teenage boys from wearing suits to see a Minions movie.

Dogs and cats live together.

Biblical.
posted by flabdablet at 8:46 AM on July 5, 2022 [2 favorites]

enough people my age (give or take a decade) like to haul their asses around on massive N. American motorbikes. The exhaust systems deafen the block. Apparently there is not a damn thing anyone can do about that, but yes

And judging by the lawn signs they put up, at least in my neighbourhood, they vote in ways that are both self-destructive to themselves and the young people who put on a suit to go to Minions movie.
posted by Ashwagandha at 9:48 AM on July 5, 2022 [2 favorites]

Weird randomness and vandalism in youth as a social activity seems to be cross-generational and cross-social scenes imo. Consequences are mediated by race/ethnicity and class and gender. Do your parents get called when you break into the junior high school gym in the middle of the night or are you handed over to the cops? In high school I really liked affixing googley eyes to random objects and then leaving them for random passersby to discover. The grossest one was a ball made out of my friend's freshly washed and cut hair.
posted by spamandkimchi at 11:27 AM on July 5, 2022 [4 favorites]

In high school I really liked affixing googley eyes to random objects and then leaving them for random passersby to discover.

Thanks, Craft!
posted by flabdablet at 12:45 PM on July 5, 2022 [3 favorites]

I really liked affixing googley eyes to random objects and then leaving them for random passersby to discover

I have a packet of mixed-size googly eyes in my go-bag, sad to say I'd forgotten all about them, but now you have reminded me. Thanks, spamandkimchi. I bought them with a victim in mind: the little step-assist in my partner's workplace.. you know, you see them in libraries and warehouses? Tell me that isn't screaming for a pair of googly eyes
posted by elkevelvet at 3:04 PM on July 5, 2022 [4 favorites]

I just googled Finding Jesus. OH MY FROG. It's called that because it's trading off the name of Finding Nemo. It's a movie about Christian fish!
posted by JHarris at 1:26 AM on July 6, 2022 [3 favorites]

JHarris, that “OH MY FROG” just made my morning (btw, thanks for the Amphibia posts in Fanfare; I wouldn’t have discovered the show without them).
posted by a box and a stick and a string and a bear at 6:31 AM on July 6, 2022 [1 favorite]

One of my favorite moments in Amphibia is when Anne says "Oh my frog!" like she's adopted the Amphibian religion. Considering how the show ended, that doesn't seem implausible....
posted by JHarris at 6:36 AM on July 6, 2022 [1 favorite]

I just googled Finding Jesus. OH MY FROG. It's called that because it's trading off the name of Finding Nemo. It's a movie about Christian fish!

Fish are apostles, not food!
posted by Mchelly at 9:49 AM on July 6, 2022 [1 favorite]