Cracky Chan: The Goddess of 4chan
Script
Cracky Chan: The Goddess of 4chan
“Once upon a time a little girl who wanted to be a Goddess lived in Oxford. The first time she saw Lain, her brother said to her, “you’re just like Lain!”, because she also was a silent girl who liked to stay in her room with her computer.”
The web was a different place back then.
Today the internet is full of faces. But if we want to go back to the beginning, before the Internet became a book of faces, when it was anonymous, we need not look far.
The place? 4chan. The year 2005. An anonymous image board, full of anime fans and generally online people. A place that was faceless, making it free. Where ugliness and awkwardness hindered in reality, 4chan freed people, giving them an open and unbounded playground. A faceless place. Who’s embodiment was a faceless Green Man.
One day, the little girl who lived down the lane logged on. And posted her face on /b/, 4chan’s random board.
Today there are millions of young people who post their faces online. Not just on video sites and social media, but everywhere, each revealing a part of themself, opening themselves up to the digital ocean of energy. But back in 2005? Cracky Chan, the little girl. Was the first young woman to ever post herself on 4chan. The first e-girl. So what happened?
“Olivia says sup 4chan and her pictures make people go crazy, so they start frantically searching for her and mythologizing her. They turn her into a Goddess. They turn her into the religion of Anonymous, the de-hierarchized form of organization which some years later would become commonplace and filled with paraphernalia in media transmissions under masks of Guy Fawkes. Cracky followers are and were as well Anonymous, and you might never know who or how many they are.
"You are not alone. Whenever you connect to the wired, you will always be welcome. That is the reason you were born."
Just like in the eighth episode in Lain every avatar in the wired wore her face, the search of Cracky and that which is beyond her became an Internet madness like none before, and quite a few fans took pictures of themselves imitating her aesthetics as a tribute.
Some of them, mostly from the most devoted anons, were searching for some truth in her, just like the Knights who beyond their hacking in the wired are searching for some truth "Even we cannot still understand what you are. But I love you.", that is what the enemies of Lain say. “Nobody ever stops loving Cracky”, we say in our world.”
Cracky became the first in a line of royalty, she was deemed the Queen of /b/, a title that would be passed on to Boxxy and others. Cracky Chan, the Skyqueen. A perfect fit symbolically is the Biblical Mystery, the Whore of Babylon, who drinks from her cup of Abominations, and rules over the monsters of the Earth. A clear parallel to the young girl made queen over the faceless horde of anonymous men.
Before we go too deep into the magick occurring here, a brief synopsis of Lain, the anime Cracky was inspired by. A young girl who is obsessed with the internet comes to realize she is the Goddess of the Wired. The internet is revealed to be not only a network of machines, but of human psyches and energies. This anime was recommended to me a lot this summer, I was shocked while watching it, the coincidental similarities, or perhaps, shared intuitive grasps of the Web itself were many. Check it out!
Cracky wanted to be like Lain, a young woman, who becomes a Goddess online. Does this sound familiar? There are thousands who fit the bill now. One might even say Cracky became an archetype. That what she did became a form that would be repeated and imitated endlessly, to greater or lesser effects.
What can we learn about the modern e-girl phenomena, which has indeed become astoundingly popular, by looking into her origin?
Like my analysis of the psychic structure of the internet as a literal web and labyrinth, there is so much to learn from the early language and ideas that described the Internet. As with all archetypes, the closer we get to their source, the closer we get to their true meaning.
So in the origin of the E-Girl we already see the character of an Archetype, the human who by taking on a symbolic persona, gains immense attention, adoration, and even worship.
But as with all worship, the cult is horrific.
“Please leave me alone. I was really flattered, now fuck off. Fuck, I was barely 15 years old. She would have never thought she’d end up having a cult, nor did she want one. Thanks to all the creeps who frightened her. I’m never going to keep an online journal again on the Internet. Part of it made me laugh, but now guys seriously, stop.
Scared by the obsession and devotion her pictures caused among the Anonymous, Olivia fled. She didn’t want to be worshipped. She didn’t want to have her own cult. She didn’t want to be the Goddess that the Internet had turned her into.
And there has never been any further public appearance of her.”
She was right to flee. The fear of a cult of anonymous worshippers is not an irrational one. As many young women come to prominence as e-girls, the repercussions of having an obsessional audience become more and more apparent. One need not look farther than the tragic case of Bianca Devins, a young woman who was murdered, in a truly barbaric way, beheaded by one of her obsessional fans.
The devoted erotic obsession of these anonymous young men easily turns to disgusted, violent rage. The symbolism of beheading a goddess, and the relationship between sex and fear should be fresh in the memory of those who watched my video on Ahegao, and how it relates to Medusa.
The misogyny of the internet is a direct product of young men’s relationships with the digital feminine, what they experience in the worship of perfected, superhuman sex symbols, will quickly lead to a hatred and disgust of real women. So for those popular online women, be aware how thin the razor’s edge is between love and hate.
If you hate women, your soul is being feasted on by the Web.
Because of this glitch, the Web has begun to produce an ideal response. A living, but nonhuman Goddess. The Vtuber. No longer in danger of the hatred reserved for human women, the computer generated Vtuber is perfection itself. A perfect vessel. The immediate popularity of these things is no surprise. I will be covering this in one of my next videos, so be sure to subscribe for more investigations of the internet!
Before it ends, I want to share with you a prophetic post from 2005, something that intuitively grasped the psychological dynamics of e-girls, and the archetype I describe as the Digital Anima:
“Cracky is a psychic parasite on the human race. She feeds off of our minds. Do you remember life before Cracky? It is harder and harder to hold on to shit. Sometimes I think one day I will wake up and there will be nothing left of me. My dreams, hopes, fears, memories, everything that is me, will be gone, eaten up to speed her growth. It's like she is a memetic caterpillar eating everything in it's path and devouring her own world as she does so. Gorging herself on the collective unconscious, inching across it like a leaf. We each become part of her and willing or not she uses our interaction to pull more of us into her. Soon she will have made enough of us, her that she can survive metamorphosis. She will hide herself while she builds the form she will need to spread to other sentients. The world will forget her, but she will be there shapely legs and all. In every ugly act we commit against each other, every casual cruelty and petty violence. Growing in that fertile womb of negativity, she will change. I pray for the day she emerges from her cocoon. When she does leave the human mind will be surplus to her needs and so she will release us. I fear after holding us so long, without her influence holding us together society will collapse and we will die out. Alone, unmourned, and unloved.”
In this video I quoted Yemeth’s article “The Child who wanted to be a Goddess (On Cracky Chan & Lain) several times, be sure to give it a read, the link is in the description. Here: https://openmagick.com/en/a/new-magick/the-child-who-wanted-to-be-goddess-on-cracky-chan-lain
Hopefully this exploration of the E-Girl archetype has illuminated some of the nature of the Digital Anima, to dig in further, give a watch to the playlist linked here. As always, Remember Memes Matter.