Wednesday, March 12, 2014

On Skeletor Affirmations and Supervillain Psychology

If you and I are 'friends' on facebook, you may have seen me sharing images from "Skeletor is Love," now active for roughly one year. It's been buzzfed, and blogged, and anthologized, and fed through, and yet I still find it worth following.


In part, it is because the figure of Skeletor provides an ironic, tongue-in-cheek vehicle for straightforwardly earnest and possibly corny statements. I can feel safe that my social-media-hologram will not be negatively affected by sharing it, because the text is adjoining Skeletor, rather than a picture of a skinny white woman doing yoga on a beach. Of course, I also appreciate being gently uplifting, knowing that for all our snark, of the dozens of people who might see my post, one of them might really need it. It's a challenge to be positive and helpful without resorting to smarm. (This is one of the reasons that for all my wariness of TED-talk-types, I refrain from throwing Jane McGonigal under the bus.)

That's all well and good, but why Skeletor? Why not He-Man (or She-Ra) affirmations? I think this has something to do with the figure of the villain in an episodic cartoon format, and how that relates to positive thinking.