Crunchy Corn, Yum!
The daimonic energy of anime aesthetics feeding on men’s loneliness.
Yes, elves are real. But most of us won’t see them in the woods anymore as we spend most time staring at the enchanted dopamine drip fairyland of our screens.
Pornographic actress and online influencer Cherry Crush is one such “elf” making bank on TikTok livestreams where she eats or acts out reactions based on paid-for virtual objects which are gifted to her by mostly lonely men.
Cherry often sports her elf-like anime inspired aesthetic while acting like, in her own words, “ʕ •ᴥ•ʔ Your very own AI Tamagotchi”, which for us 90s kids was the original keychain pocket pet that’s apparently still around and has recently experienced a sizable growth in popularity. But this is just the latest incarnation of an already established trend more commonly seen with VTubers (Virtual Streamers) who use a digital avatar instead of their face in order to convey simple emotions, many of which are also anime inspired and have grown enormous fan bases.
Despite Cherry’s robot-like way of acting being labeled as cringe by the naysayers, the engagement speaks for itself, but what is it about the anime inspired e-girl elf aesthetics which drives this engagement in the first place?
Elf of the Self
Leaving the other 32 valid genders aside for a second and focusing on heterosexual men, Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung wrote about how most of the fellas long for a sense of completion by finding their “anima” or “the totality of the unconscious feminine psychological qualities” and project those qualities on potential love interests. When there is less opportunity for this interaction to happen outside of the virtual, it is understandable that such projection will be taken advantage of by online entities like Cherry Crush who will best mirror this longing while cutting out anything that gets in the way of instant gratification.
But these aesthetics being of a level beyond merely human point towards an equally strong longing within men towards the realm of fantasy always at work in our collective unconscious.
Long before the internet and e-girls, the fascination with gods and lesser entities was an instrumental part of life for most pre-Christian cultures, but even after crosses dotted the tallest structures of most European villages, there remained a pagan superstition when it came to these spectral beings. Depending on the culture, Christianity either demonized and drove these fairy and elves to ever remoter places, or they were “Christianized” and lived more peacefully alongside the now dominant religion which was especially the case for Ireland.
There were even cases where springs inhabited by nymphs became holy places to worship the Virgin Mary, though these entities of beautiful young women did not always explicitly express themselves as such and seemed to adapt to this new identity over time.
Such shape shifting shows us how the creative power of the collective unconscious reflects the expectations and desires of those who encounter it within their mind or allegedly in the real world. It is no different with the “alien” visitations of modern times according to ufologist and internet pioneer Jacques Vallée who wrote about the cultural and temporal context affecting how these beings look.
Anime Aliens
Should we open ourselves up to the possibility that such collective experiences of otherworldly phenomena were not fabrications (even if they were “hallucinations”), there would be no reason for such beings not to make themselves known through the pencils of Japanese artists as well.
While of course this would not be limited to the Land of the Rising Sun, it is unlikely to be a coincidence that Japan’s ways of depicting girls have resonated with the entire world as an online ideal which ladies like Cherry Crush or the “Gamer Girl Bathwater” Belle Delphine stylistically adapted into their own persona.
The daimonic power of such design exhibits degrees of sophistication based on how imaginative and sophisticated the creators and artists themselves are, or if we attribute everything to the muses, how clean the lens of their mind’s eye is to be inspired in the first place. So it makes sense that you can experience a more realistic persona in anime characters such as Chihiro from Hayao Miyazaki’s “Spirited Away” or Mima Kirigoe from Satoshi Kon’s “Perfect Blue” than any of the elf-like characters a three dimensional e-girl portrays to her simps.
Such a lack of depth has been a general trend online with brightly colored excuses for children’s entertainment contaminating the iPads of neglected children worldwide, but it touches every lowest common denominator piece of content in a race to the bottom of the quick dopamine hit.
This becomes a time trap and money-suck for men who gave up on testing themselves in a game they feel there is no hope of winning, with both simp and seductress encouraging each other to discard pieces of their humanity leaving nothing but a self-abasing robotic desire on both sides.
Integrating the Shadow Forest
But even at the abject level of interaction with these e-girls, there’s a comparison to be made with the aforementioned world of elves and fairies, as frequent myths speak of men seduced by such beings in the mysterious forest only to find themselves never heard from again.
But there are also myths such as that of “Thomas the Rhymer” who was carried off by the "Queen of Elfland" only to return the gift of prophecy.
Yet this transcendent journey does not require a physical forest to get spirited away from and return, as it equally applies to the Jungian integration of one’s shadow self which is made of the suppressed aspects of our subconscious.
In this same way, beautiful elvish girls are the unconscious feminine Anima seducing men to step into the chaotic forest of the Shadow. And Thomas's gift of prophecy from such a journey is akin to the foresight granted to humans by the Titan Prometheus, whose name signifies "forethought," through the act of stealing the “fire of the gods”.
To prophesize is to reach a higher level of utilizing the same imagination which inspires all of our creative actions, and in doing so helps to shape reality itself.
And in a smaller but no less significant way, those unexaggerated faces of women that men have gazed into lovingly since time immemorial contain this same aspect of the fairy who beckons you into her mysterious forest. And this siren song has kept a good number of men going for the same amount of time to shape their local reality through personal and collective accomplishments.
But with instant virtual gratification there is nothing to create and nothing to accomplish save for working to make enough simp-bucks for Cherry Crush to meow at you from the comfort of her luxury pod. Can such a life for both sides even be called human by that point? Yet with relationships being in such a sorry state as they are today, it is understandable as to why some men will go down this unfortunate path when they feel that all the others have been closed off.
Such is the “simpdom” of our societal dis-ease, which is the current challenge for males and females (31 other genders set aside) to overcome.
That most will overcome such a difficult situation with the way our minds have been altered by social media is unlikely. But contained within this downward spiral is the antidote for those who are paying attention as we come to understand what causes such a state of discord for both sexes to begin with.
Going beyond even worthwhile relationships, the internet as a whole is our digitally projected shadow forest which is very much high risk and high reward depending on how we use it. For the multitudes of future stimuli junkies at the beck and call of the latest Cherry Crush, there will be the few who become extremely selective with how they venture into these digital woods and use the opportunity of having such unprecedented access to instantaneous information to its full extent.
And the most wonderful unexpected things may happen at this dividing time when those aware enough to build loving relationships and expand their consciousness find themselves to be the only ones mentally capable of shaping our reality.
I'm still leaning towards some harsh societal controls over this sort of stuff, until we figure out what's going on.
People and corporations are really hard to be trusted around freedoms, rights and the sort these days.