Troll Dance! Troll Dance!

If you don't believe LOLcats memes fly through our culture guess what.

You're wrong.

I'm not sure where the troll meme actually first surfaced, but he's a huge staple in the Rage Comics arsenal. He's most likely to be seen charting on Memebase on the Lolcats site.

Probably that great Know Your Meme subsite on LOLcats has the complete documentation of the troll meme. That's a very well-researched site.

I just went to YouTube looking for Halloween videos and was lazy and didn't particularize my search. I just typed in "Halloween." And the first video that came up was this one.

And I love it.

TROLL DANCE! TROLL DANCE!!

The troll is sort of an uber-meme. Because it's not just this guy, who is the most well-known visual representation of the troll meme.

It's also, of course, any person exhibiting horrible, negative behavior--usually harrassment, nitpicking, obsessively revisiting places and things on the net one dislikes.

So it's a visual meme, a lexical meme, a psychological meme....it's a lot of things.

And it goes back to the mythological troll archetype, of course.

But then there's the endearing side to trolls (like the Russ ones or the ones from Denmark is it?). Or the ones made by 5 Arts Studio in Cosby, TN. About which I wish somebody would make a documentary...about that family and its history with trollmaking. I have one of their trolls on my stairs to my third floor even as I speak. He's made out of all sorts of forest things. Bark and flax and pebbles and acorns. I blogged about that family and those trolls, but I think it was on another blog.

The only bad thing about this as a costume is you're not gonna wanna keep that mask on very long at a party or anywhere else. And you might not fit into a taxi. The best Halloween costumes are those where you can keep in costume and still enjoy yourself. But this does make the uncool (net trolls) cute lol. To think of the Night of a Million Trolls on Halloween. Give them one night. Then tell them to shut the hell up.

Oh, postscript: I looked up the origin of the Troll meme (the face here). It actually originated on the deviantART site. That's a great site. I joined and posted a few items a few years ago but sort of drifted away from it. I'm not super visually productive. But when I go there I always find great stuff. I love that German guy who does the hamster pix and the oh-so-squee photos (kittens and such) that make you feel as though you ate eighteen sugar cubes in thirty seconds. I can't remember his name right now. He's a deviantART diva.