If you're lucky, you've not heard of PoupeeGirl, the strange Japanese community founded on vicious consumerism and virtual paper dolls. It's like Facebook, except everyone's a 14-year-old Japanese girl or a 20-something-otaku.
The goal of PoupeeGirl is simple - show off your expensive-label fashion collection via unique photos, and thereby win the internet. Posting photos, and commenting on photos of others, gets you the game's virtual currency, which can be spent on questionable clothing for your virtual avatar.
The discussion here isn't very deep - comment threads can run to 10+ pages of "Cute!!!" and "Super-cute!!!" - which might have something to do with the gestapo-like thought police who rule this virtual nation from on high.
Led by authoritarian community manager Katharine, the jackbooted minions of PoupeeGirl's management will be quick to strip you of your photographs, your clothes, and your virtual currency for the slightest infraction of the PoupeeGirl rules. Such infractions include posting a non-unique photograph, depicting someone's face in a photograph, or mislabelling a scarf as a stole.
Spurred on by a certain PoupeeGirl player of my acquaintance (who shall not be named for fear of reprisals), I today entered this community for the purpose of what are commonly referred to as "the lolz". Soon my blonde-banged avatar "OuchMyFace" was installed in a brand new Poupee Room and ready to get fashionable.
I've always believed it's important to get ahead of the trend, and if you've been around the traps you'll probably be aware that the next wave in fashion is meat. Lots and lots of meat. So I quickly uploaded some "choice cuts" from my closet for the approval of the masses. Above you'll see my "meatbag". Other selections included a range of "phone dangles" that looked surprisingly like shavings of roast beef, a "hat" that bore a certain resemblance to a decapitated pig's head, and the home-made costume I wore to Halloween last year where I went dressed as an entire pork roast still on the spit.
Step two was to make some friends. I got busy! I whipped up a collection of effervescent teen-girl-style compliments, added a reference to meat to each one, and then parsed them through Google Translator into Japanese and back. Instant teenspeak! The garbled grammar made up for my suspicious insistence on capital letters and punctuation.
For perfume:
It captures the essence of meat in a brave waft of madness. Don't you think it is an INFUSION? A pork infusion. The smell of cooking meat makes me think of eternity. I rate you two pigs out of a possible three.
For Hello Kitty earrings:
Hello Kitty's cute - she is made of raw meat cat! This is all her life! It is the best - and now you can hang from her ears! Babe!
For pyjama pants:
Since wearing the pants, it is important today. Practically anyone, do not have the pants are fine and eating a hamburger meat. And both my feet, please refer to the trend of the development potential and the lamb chops! Fashion victory!
I was an instant success, garnering friends, comments, accolades, and attention on the LiveJournal Community.
But all good things must come to an end, and less than six hours after I created her, OuchMyFace discovered that her ability to post images had been revoked. The fuzz had found her, and now she was going down Rodney King-style. It seems that the bleeding edge of tomorrow's fashion was just a little too bloody for the powers that be at PoupeeGirl, and the humourless killbots that inhabit those dreary domains had begun spamming the "exile" button.
The account still technically exists - feel free to friend it and examine such meaty offerings as it still has attached to it. But the fire has gone out of OuchMyFace's meaty heart, and she will post her pork-clothes no more.
Rest in peace, OuchMyFace. We'll miss you.
