[1] David Nield, “What Does It Mean to Reblog on Tumblr?,” para. 1, accessed September 27, 2018.

[2] Christine R. Yano, Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty’s Trek across the Pacific (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2013).

[3] Jussi Parikka, “New Materialism as Media Theory: Medianatures and Dirty Matter,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 9, no. 1 (March 2012): 95–100.

[4] Brian House, “Machine Listening: WaveNet, Media Materialism, and Rhythmanalysis,” APRJA - A Peer Review Journal About Machine Research (2017): 5.

[5] Gary Cross, The Cute and the Cool: Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children’s Culture (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 44.

[6] Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings, New Ed edition (Harvard University Press, 2007), 91.

[7] Super Mario Bros., directed by Miyamoto Shigeru and produced by Nintendo, released September 13, 1985.

[8] “Toad (Character),” Wiki, Nintendo Wiki, accessed May 2, 2018.

[9] “But Our Princess Is in Another Castle!,” Wiki, Know Your Meme, “Origin” para. 1, accessed May 1, 2018.

[10] “But Our Princess Is in Another Castle!,” “About” para. 2.

[11] “Toad (Character).”

[12] Although this is generally true, there are exceptions. Toads have names in the role-playing video games in the Mario franchise. In the primary series, however, only prominent Toad characters have names, like Toadsworth in Super Mario Sunshine “Toad (Character).”

[13] “Identical-Looking Asians,” TV Tropes, accessed May 3, 2018.

[14] “Interchangeable Asian Cultures,” TV Tropes, accessed May 3, 2018.

[15] “Mistaken Nationality,” TV Tropes, accessed May 3, 2018. 

[16] Kristen Sharp, “Superflatworlds : A Topography of Takashi Murakami and the Cultures of Superflat Art,” 2006, 98.

[17] Larissa Hjorth, “Odours of Mobility: Mobile Phones and Japanese Cute Culture in the Asia-Pacific,” Journal of Intercultural Studies 26, no. 1–2 (February 1, 2005): 39–55.

[18] Matthew Hayes, “Nintendo Confirms That Toad’s Hat Is Actually His Head, and the Internet Loses It,” WWG, February 5, 2018.

[19] Matt Wales, “Nintendo Finally Confirms the Truth about Toad’s Head,” Eurogamer (blog), February 5, 2018.

[20] “Introduction,” in Mechademia 6: User Enhanced, ed. Frenchy Lunning (Minneapoli: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), xii.

The Red Toad Tumblr post is a chain post from the microblogging platform Tumblr. [Figure 1] Tumblr allows users to repost or “reblog” posts from their dashboard (a scrolling interface displaying posts from all the blogs one has subscribed on the website) to their blogs, adding new pictures or text as they go.[1] This device sometimes originates a long chain of posts, in which various users reblog one another. The Red Toad Tumblr post, in particular, begins with a post from Tumblr user discwars, the original poster (“OP”), chronicling their search for photographs of a red toad on Google. The first image is a screen grab from the OP’s Google search for “images of red toad.” Instead of photographs of real red toads, the first four results on Google are illustrations of Nintendo’s fictional character Toad, an anthropomorphized mushroom. The screengrab is accompanied by the OP’s indignant remark, “what the fuck is this bullshit.” In the following post, the OP tries again, this time using the search words “REAL RED TOAD.” This second search still returns Toad as the first result, followed by real red toads. Outraged, the OP comments, “HES STILL THERE.” In their final attempt, the OP searches for a “red toad ACTUAL TOAD LIKE REAL LIFE TOAD.” This time not only do all top results show different pictures of Nintendo’s Toad, but the very first result is a blue version of Toad, with blue spots on their mushroom cap and a blue jacket. “THAT ONES NOT EVEN RED,” writes the OP, exasperated. [Figure 2a]

After that, another Tumblr user, curepimmy, reblogs and reacts to the OP’s posts, writing that “This reminds me of the time I was having trouble drawing fists, like,” followed by screen grabs of their own Google searches. The first search for “knuckles” returns only pictures of Sega’s character Knuckles the Echidna, from the Sonic the Hedgehog video game series. Curepimmy’s comment accompanies the screengrab: “No shit I mean like on a PERSON.” On a second try, curepimmy searches for “human knuckles,” which returns only manga-style fan art drawings of Knuckles the Echidna as a sexy, red-haired man. Also, the last thumbnail visible in the screen grab is an illustration of human Knuckles romancing human Rouge the Bat, a supporting female character in the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise. Curepimmy offers no further comment, seemingly stunned into silence by such “disastrous” results. [Figure 2b]

The repeated appearance of Nintendo’s Toad and Sega’s Knuckles on Google Images is what drives the comic effect of the Red Toad Tumblr post, which gets more and more frustrating with each failed attempt to retrieve “real” toads and knuckles. As global icons of “pink globalization,” i.e., “the spread of goods and images labeled cute (kawaii) from Japan to other parts of the industrial world,”[2] Toad and Knuckles not only attest to the pervasiveness of Japanese pop culture in the real and virtual worlds, but they are fundamentally associated with fun and play (originating, as they do, from videogames). However, their presence in the Red Toad Tumblr post becomes irritating and obtrusive, short-circuiting a simple educational Google search for images of red toads or human knuckles. OP’s use of expletives, capitalization (which is netiquette for screaming), and heated remarks, demonstrate their disgust at the persistence of Toad and Knuckles. In fact, there is a borderline slapstick quality to the whole thing: one could easily imagine the sequence of screen grabs and comments playing out accompanied by some plucky silent film score. The Red Toad Tumblr post thus perceptualizes the many ways in which the natural world, and our human capacity to learn about and apprehend it, are corrupted by their intricate ties to capitalist simulacra. As these extra layers of “reality” are laid over the world, new (corporate) entities arise to replace the original forms of nature.

Even the fact that Toad is not actually a toad, but a mushroom, exposes the gap between reality and hyperreality in all its absurd and awkward glory. This is further reinforced by the nonsensical appearance of a blue Toad, despite the OP’s frantic attempts to access photographs of real red toads (“red toad ACTUAL TOAD LIKE REAL LIFE TOAD”). In the context of the Red Toad Tumblr post, the loss of even this residual chromatic connection to the OP’s search words is like adding insult to injury. It feels deliberately mocking, a coup de grâce to our collective illusions of transhumanist progress resulting from the Digital Revolution. At the end of Oshii Mamoru’s 1995 cyberpunk masterpiece Ghost In The Shell, cyborg “child” Kusanagi Motoko, reborn after she merged with the Puppet Master, tells the viewers that “the net is vast and infinite,” but over a quarter-century later, the net seems to have shrunk. [Video 1] Like a sea creature in a ghost net, we have become stuck in endless information loops from which we cannot escape. Indeed, the Red Toad Tumblr post becomes even more outlandish when the second Tumblr user, curepimmy, searches for “knuckles” and “human knuckles,” only to get official and derivative art of the character Knuckles the Echidna. The Google search engine’s resoluteness in returning dozens of fannish illustrations of Knuckles as a pretty boy, without so much as an actual human hand in sight, has a delightfully perverse ring about it. Curepimmy’s contributions to the Red Toad Tumblr post are thus a fitting conclusion to an irritating streak.

The lulz (Internet laughs) also result from a sudden transition, in the last screengrab of the Red Toad Tumblr post, from mainstream pop culture—Nintendo and Sega’s classic videogame mascots, Toad and Knuckles—to the subcultural regime of online fandoms. Within the Sonic the Hedgehog fandom, it is a widespread practice to turn the franchise’s funny animals (hedgehogs, foxes, echidnas, bats, birds) into bishōnen (“beautiful boy”) and bishōjo (“beautiful girl”) characters. [Figure 3] This specific trope requires an understanding of the trends of anthropomorphism in otaku subcultures and fan art. As such, the Red Toad Tumblr post provides an unwanted glimpse into the deep Internet, contrasting with the straightforward search words used by the posters (“red toad,” “human knuckles”). Japanese cuteness becomes a form of digital pollution, resulting in a series of “bad encounters”[3] which (as demonstrated) elicits negative reactions from the posters: shock, irritation, exhaustion. In the Red Toad Tumblr post, the Western “detached ocularity,”[4] whose scientific gaze permeates wildlife photography of the National Geographic variety, is thus overwritten by its negative counterpart, i.e., sentimental illustrations of corporate video game mascots from Japan. What is more, the agents of this boycott are adorably round, cartoonish, and positive about it. Toad smiles their candid smile; Knuckles flashes his cool grin. They are both blissfully unaware of the trail of negativity in their wake. After all, this is the foundation on which cute culture has been built: the “naughty child” who, as historian Gary Cross puts it, takes us “to the edge of the acceptable, even across the line of self-control, to a playful, unserious anarchic moment.”[5]

In the Red Toad Tumblr post, this “unserious anarchic moment” is a result of détournement, which means “rerouting” or “hijacking,” in this case, through the Google search engine that rewrites our mental associations of nature. Turning the online learning revolution on its head, Toad and Knuckles disinform and mislead us. Interestingly, this subversive vein is not new to Toad’s character. Toad—or Kinopio, in the original version, from the Japanese word kinoko, “mushroom,” and Pinocchio, suggesting an ambiguous “animatedness” (Siane Ngai’s term for the basic condition of being moved or innervated),[6] or even an association to lying and deception akin to Geppetto’s puppet—first appeared in Super Mario Bros.,[7] released in 1985 by Nintendo. [Figure 4] There, Toad uttered what would become one of the most famous videogame lines of all time: “Thank you Mario. But our princess is in another castle!”[8] [Figure 5, Video 2] According to Know Your Meme,

The phrase “But our princess is in another castle!” (or the template, “Sorry X, but your Y is in another Z”) is used as a reply to someone who is searching for something in the wrong place,[10] and also became a popular meme in image macros and parodies around the Internet. Toad’s revelation that Princess Peach is in another castle after the end of each level literally reroutes Mario by causing him to change his course or direction, which in turn causes “anger” and “disappointment” in players. This constant rerouting puts Toad in an ambiguous position where, on the one hand, they are an agent of order or progress, necessary for the game’s progression; and, on the other, a vehicle of chaos and frustration, preventing the accomplishment of Princess Peach’s rescue by Mario. Each step forward in the game feels like a step back, considering Toad’s detournement from castle to castle. From an affective viewpoint, Toad remains just as impenetrable. Is Toad mocking Mario and the player? Do they take pleasure in being a source of irritation in Super Mario Bros.? Unlike the unambiguous villain Bowser, it is hard to believe that Toad, cute as a button, has any malicious intentions. But maybe Toad is a bit of a naughty child or an oblivious trickster, made more irritating by their apparent honesty.

Another reason why Toad is such a destabilizing character in the Mario franchise is that, unlike other famous characters (Mario, Luigi, Princess Peach, Bowser), the Mushroom People, or Toads, are mostly anonymous and indistinguishable from one another. According to the Nintendo Wiki, “it’s hard to tell whether or not a Toad is the character from the previous games or just another member of the species due to his generic appearance.”[11] Contrary to social expectations, Toads do not have names, nor do they exhibit individual, racial, or ethnic diversity.[12] Like their famous line (“Thank you Mario. But our princess is in another castle!”) repeated at the end of each level of Super Mario Bros, the Toads themselves are an ontological ditto, the same entity stated again and again. In this sense, although Mario is Nintendo’s mascot, Toad is the one character who is corporate to the core. Toads are Nintendo’s bubbly version of conformity, the “drones” of the peaceful Mushroom Kingdom, ruled by Princess Peach who, unlike her nameless subjects, is irreplaceable. [Figure 6] On the contrary, Toads are interchangeable, and such interchangeability—if not in our eyes, at least before Google’s algorithm—is key to the Red Toad Tumblr post. Toad “hijacks” the real red toads because being interchangeable is what Toad does. Toad can replace or change places with anything as long as they maintain a residual connection to it, as shown in the third screengrab in the Red Toad Tumblr post—the one causing the OP to complain that “THAT ONES NOT EVEN RED.”

What is more, Toad’s (hostile?) takeover of reality echoes the anxieties that often surround the notion of Japaneseness itself. East Asian people are constructed as robotic by Western orientalism, with the racist Identical-Looking Asians trope often played for comedy in television and film.[13] This trope expands from the level of individuals to the level of ethnicity when East Asian people are lumped together as if they were a single culture.[14] While this trope is not exclusive to Asia, applying to other non-Western, non-White peoples and nations (e.g., Africa Is a Country),[15] as argued by Iwabuchi Kōichi, the “ability to be transportable and translatable is considered to be a marker of Japaneseness”[16] in the global market. This notion is at the heart of many techno-orientalist dystopias, like Blade Runner, where dehumanization, totalitarianism, ruthless megacorporations, and environmental disasters are associated with the globalization of Japaneseness. [Figure 7] While Blade Runner, released in the early 1980s, rendered this Japaneseness in grim and gritty tones, in the twenty-first century Japan is less a “robot nation”[17] than the nation of cute—the birthplace of kawaii superstars like Hello Kitty and Pikachu. Accordingly, the anxieties of techno-Orientalism have been transferred to the actors of “pink globalization” and their cybercapitalist entanglements. Such change can be observed, for instance, in cyberpunk anime from the 2010s, like Urobuchi Gen’s Psycho-Pass (2012), where a totalitarian society enforces the law via cute mascots called Komissa-chan [Figure 8]. In the Red Toad Tumblr post, Toad becomes both the target and executor of the paranoia that kawaii’s unvanishing, ever-returning commodity form can no longer be extracted from nature (the “real” red toad), threatening to eclipse it completely.

However, it is not just Toad’s pervasiveness that makes the Red Toad Tumblr post disturbing, but all of Toad’s variations. To survive the OP’s repeated attempts to eradicate them in searches for “red toads,” Toad reappear by mutating in whimsical, intricate ways. In the Tumblr post, not only does Toad appear mounted on a red Yoshi, itself a derivation on the original (green) Yoshi, but a Blue Toad (first introduced in New Super Mario Bros for the Wii, in 2009) shows up as the first result of the OP’s most emphatic search for “red toad ACTUAL TOAD LIKE REAL LIFE TOAD.” This search also returns one of the post’s most startling results: a picture of Toad without his mushroom cap, revealing a bald head underneath. [Figure 9] The image is a screengrab from The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!, an American television series produced by DiC Animation in the late 1980s and 1990s. This television series is not canonical by Nintendo’s standards, as according to Koizumi Yoshiaki, the producer of Super Mario Odyssey, Toad’s mushroom cap is indeed their head, not a hat.[18] Nevertheless, the picture has gained viral traction among fans[19] for the way that Toad looks in it: grabbing their mushroom cap like a lifeline, Toad stares at Mario with an expression full of regret, three short hairs sticking up from their bald head. All of a sudden, Toad is no longer Nintendo’s cute super-mascot but a sad, abject thing. As such, bald Toad makes a mockery of the OP’s frustration, of their desperate request for the “ACTUAL RED TOAD,” by showing an exposé of Toad’s “true,” pitiful nature.

Finally, it is noteworthy that Toad and Knuckles are supporting characters which evoke the heroes of their respective franchises, Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog, [Figure 10] but they are not the protagonists themselves. Other characters in the Red Toad Tumblr post are even more obscure: red Yoshi, blue Toad, bald Toad, and Rouge the Bat. [Figure 11] The fact that these lesser characters still manage to wreak havoc on Google dramatically contributes to the funny and frustrating effect of the Red Toad Tumblr post. Because Mario and Sonic are taken-for-granted icons of the contemporary mediatic milieu, it would not be at all surprising to find them in searches related to “plumber” or “hedgehog.” But darker undertones lurk in Toad and Knuckles’ impertinence, manifesting in a refusal to sink to the bottom of the digital ocean, making us much more aware of how pervasive the tentacles of global capitalism. In the context of the Red Toad Tumblr post, Toad and Knuckles are not just naughty children—their cuteness and smiles take up an obscene, mocking quality.

To be sure, in the second screengrab, “REAL RED TOAD,” the Toad appearing as the first Google result has a carnivalesque, almost riotous, pose. “Haters gonna hate,” Toad seems to tell us, confident that they cannot be stopped. Significantly, the images in the Red Toad Tumblr post feature variations not just in the characters but in kind, from official corporate illustrations to fan art and obscure licensing mistakes: Nintendo’s Toad, Sega’s Knuckles, Human!Knuckles, The Super Mario Bros cartoon. As such, the Red Toad Tumblr post offers us a glimpse into what Thomas Lamarre calls “not the inertia of a commodity-object but the stirrings of a commodity-life.”[20] As the worlds unfolding from commodities become increasingly complex, they rival, even usurp, the complexity of “real” life. In the face of the contemporary entanglements of nature and commodities, who knows what the “REAL RED TOAD” is? Rerouting. Hijacking. Our princess, after all, is in another castle. 

See in CUTENCYCLOPEDIA – Creepypasta & Ika-Tako Virus.

See in PORTFOLIO – Erro 404.

REFERENCES in Red Toad Tumblr Post.

Mild SPOILERS

• Ghost In The Shell (anime)