let's all go to mcdonald's and ask for the nurupo burger
ktkr!待ってたお！
あれが帰ってくるお！
でもたったの12日間しか復活しないおorz
kwskは明日2/21(金）、みんな待っててくれるかお？
ぬるぽ
Loki Technology, Inc.
— マクドナルド (@McDonaldsJapan) Feb 20, 2025
did you see this tweet? it’s better if you don’t go out of your way to these days, and instead allow them to waft in like intrusive smells, but we have to acknowledge that they continue to be launch pads for some of the best banter. there is a focused lens to short form broadcast, with no room for nuance or hesitation, that makes them especially potent mind viruses. this is sort of like the crisp, refreshing hit you get from taking that first sip of mcdonald’s sprite. that one dollar any size drink deal you scored off the app is a rush. at the bottom of the cup, the last swills watered down in melted ice, there is only regret, and a realizing acceptance that we need to eliminate corn subsidies and regulate the doomscroll.
television is the original mass media mind virus, when such critique was limited to neil postman, and commercials were their short form analog before we ever had to worry about world leaders tweeting their bluster. the accomplishment of these forms feels at its clearest to me today not in the soundbites of political ads wed to the dementia cloud of american exceptionalism on truth social, but in the unrelenting cadence of collaborations coming out of mcdonald’s japan. the wit and syntax of the commercial, mcdonald’s has long known, has always been best cracked with celebrity, and it is an effective shorthand that has only amplified in entertainment throughout the last century. michael jordan and larry bird duking it out is a pretense to sell big macs not especially because they are champion big eaters, but because they speak for the brand overall by implicating their own authenticity. unit-02 and char aznable are indeed celebrities, so these may already align with your and my basic understandings of celebrity endorsement, but portraits next to products is an especially narrow view of how endorsement is performed today for digital niches. instead, as I see the simulacrum of subculture from touhou and vocal synths elevated for promotion, I look more to david lynch promoting the PS2 or michel gondry hawking jeans in uncompromised cinematic styles, though always punctuated with a logo so you are sure to be arrested with the proper meaning, even if you can’t parse what the rest is yammering about. the already golden denpa lyrics from ika and ARM tagged in for commercial spots, touched up ever so slightly to now be about beef patties and fried potatoes, feels no less dissociating to me than having the local diner from my sleepy town show up on the national news.
the producers across the full breadth of vocaloid’s boom era and the doujin stalwarts from flash’s heyday now participating in mcdonald’s advertising campaigns is, in my characterization, japan discovering an activation matching the celebrity meal deal. celebrity meals, like the ones you may know from travis scott and BTS, roared back into the mcdonald’s advertising language beginning in 2020 by repackaging existing menu items with the blessing of musicians, often with a unique instructional flair or condiment. japan, and many other locales, have been opted out of these campaigns, and while these tie-ins are mostly focusing in on names with global recognition, there does feel to be a recognition in them that the monoculture has waned, and these promotions are not targeted especially towards a mass public, but a wave of cascading social media engagement beginning with fans. the blueprint in the mcjordan special, some 28 years prior to the second attempt in the travis scott meal, was in fact a regional exclusive to the chicagoland area, and was reportedly allowed only to jordan’s exacting standards after years of experimenting with combinations. perhaps, we can imagine this campaign having performed nationally, or even globally – miku certainly is pulling on that sort of soft power now – but a targeted influence on the fandom surrounding jordan is where it was, already initially, deemed most effective.
what strikes me is not necessarily that these campaigns mirror in similar attempts to court authenticity, by letting hiiragi magnetite shine as-is subbing in teriyaki burgers or by having travis scott remix the quarter pounder to his own specs, but that we are seeing subculture elevated to a promotional stage where it is being presented not only in uncompromised expression, but in amazing process. these are imaginations of remixes that would not betray a period appropriate upload by an amateur creating them with some irreverence, and still they are now expressions celebrated and recognized enough today to rake in huge repost counts that even campaigns with promises of free food do not meet. subculture, at this point, we must recognize graduates to simply being culture when it is promoted by a multinational brand, the same way vaporwave has evolved into a cloud of ideas rather than a specific aesthetic presentation. vocaloid similarly may continue to be recognized as having sprouted certain musical idioms in japanese pop, from unbroken melodic runs with no breaths to frenetic key changes, but ceases to have specific subcultural identity the more it is folded to become pop music unto itself. to audiences below a certain age bracket, it has already diffused across a cultural membrane that makes this undoubtedly the case today. as these campaigns add on to more general campaigns trafficking an anime style and a singing double cheese burger mascot, mcdonald’s has clearly placed a stock not so much in massaging subculture by rewriting it for jingles, which they have already leaned on, but in placing it on a pedestal as a readymade icon, now with a wide enough recognition, that can sell the brand on the side.
there is an anxiety with this elevated stage, notwithstanding other recent cultural clashes we have seen play out even in vocal synth spaces recently, that is present at all ends. the digestion, bad faith reads, and misappropriation of japanese expressions by global audiences is an ongoing saga. doujin cultures, once predominantly skittish of commercialization, have realigned their criticisms to audiences leaking outside of japan, and tie-ins more often than not are now causes for celebration at all commercial levels of subculture, rather than something to be reflexively rebuffed. mcdonald’s is neither stranger to subculture nor remix culture through countless anime parodies and the streaming video boom, and yet it has also chosen to restrict non-japanese audiences from so much as peeking in on these recent vocal synth promotions by putting them behind region blocks. regional promotions no longer have clear cultural context when yet another mcdonald’s campaign distributing a transparent PNG, allowing anyone to be a mcambassador, traveled through japanese vtubers without incident, yet caused rosemi to retract from criticisms adjacent to the BDS movement. geofences may slow this scrutiny, but they are rarely all that useful, and the anxieties of a constant watching is an equal dynamic to western celebrities that no longer feel free to lend their image to mitsuya cider or sankyo pachinko, knowing they may be immortalized online rather than confined to broadcast or tape trades. instead, it often ends up preferable to neutralize an expression instead of testing whether it explodes when tossed into a social media swamp. mcdonald’s, in many cases, is likely beholden to licensing restrictions to begin with that keep their promotions from leaking, but it does not take much of a leap, as an example, to imagine something like a benign popotan trace in the current environment unintentionally blowing up sky high. lord knows the suits in production committees, searching twitter and sweating over a handful of critical takes, have balked at far less.
subculture being raised into a commercial spotlight, admittedly, triggers a similar sort of fight or flight response in me that makes the overture difficult to swallow. nature valley, we know with hindsight, committed the original sin in the west by quoting a screencap shop of akechi kokoro now over a decade ago, and became the inflection that gave red carpet to great regal cultural moments like smug wendy’s and a bad KFC dating sim. these approaches are now almost goads manufactured to inspire a groaning reaction, without specific or really any reverence for their quotations, and while “selling out” still feels part of my vocabulary more than many only a touch younger than I am, the reappropriating of a shared net culture probably orients most why I take pause with even a loyal remix done by mcdonald’s, despite lamaze, daniwell, and miko being brought into the loop. they are just as catchy as they were when they weren’t promoting french fries, and we probably need not demand some strict non-profit celibacy if it’s good enough for the interests that retain some actual ownership. nevertheless, straddling the walk of lauding creators and stripping a loose commons for commercial interests is, I must admit, an approach I will always bite my tongue on with some unease and disdain. if I acquiesced so easily on these feelings, I wouldn’t have a shred of otaku cred that allows me to care about such things to begin with.
to reject the approach on its face would also be denying the opportunity to experience when it fumbles spectacularly. mcdonald’s, in attempting to invoke 2ch slang like a hip netizen, is almost quaint in how easily mocked it is. unlike marisa stealing the precious thing, or a teto spinning on one leg, these are expressions that haven’t really been iterated on since their inception a quarter decade ago. nurupo is table stakes. perhaps the only ones left to parse the rest of it are handily clearing middle age by now, scoffing at the coupons on offer as they can recall an era of 59 yen hamburgers after school. 2channelers, more than most other subcultures at their height, are so infamously reticent of being marketed towards that the attempt feels doe-eyed and innocent the way only someone born this side of the millennium could ever attempt to be. there’s a sense that everything is slightly askew when the twisted usage of kwsk feels like an invention only a chatGPT feigning curiosity could arrive at. the “loki technology” sign-off, a copyright notice that was only introduced with the site’s seizure as 5ch, only confuses eras further. the cultural context seen in the replies is fortunately shared in a way I do resonate with, and that we can agree has still successfully siphoned my own engagement in writing this post: silence, brand. shut up and lurk for six months as a ROM before you post again. when you’ve done your time, though, let me know if you have any of those red comet or blue comet burgers waiting under the heat lamp. it’s okay – I’ll still keep eating that garbage.
