On January 17th, 2025, popular BlueSky and Patreon artist Snegovski (44.4k followers as of this article and over 2,000 patrons) made a bit of tasteless art, depicting characters from popular videogame Fortnite in a piece that happened to place one of them in a Schutzstaffel uniform, recognizable by the double lightning bolt collar tab (the runes utilized by the SS) in a rather poorly-timed edgy jest poking at the fact that the character in question, Kasane Teto, had originated on 2chan with early designs heavily inspired by historical military dress. Within the context of the United States having suddenly found itself tumbling headlong into a fascist nightmare headed up by foreigner white supremacist Elon Musk (who ostensibly gave an enthusiastic sieg heil and referenced the 14 Words at the second presidential inauguration of the Orange Shitgibbon), one would consider that any art that isn’t directly satirizing Nazis might end up on the receiving end of some…criticism. Unfortunately, Snegovski’s joke, which relied heavily on their potential audience’s refined knowledge of Teto’s origins in what amounts to “the old-f-g internet,” fell entirely flat among the witless, reactionary, and ill-informed “new-f-gs” of today’s internet. Can you say “C-C-C-COMBO BREAKER”?
Teto what’s-her-fuck stems from the fandom (yes, she is fan-made) surrounding Vocaloid, a software program made by Yamaha to create synthesized voices for use in music. Frankly, what it comes down to is that in her very origin, she has long had the dubious distinction of having a unique style based in militarism and was often depicted by fans in Nazi uniforms. Even one of her current outfits has an aesthetic and it’s not hard to gather why it would lift brows considering the poor girl has a high collar, a cross strap, and calf-high shiny black boots. Her coloration is also, as my friend put it, a “if you know, you know” callback to the black and red of Nazi color-coding and the austere gray of militarism—something that isn’t too hard to read off of this and I don’t even go here. (Aside: What purpose does that cross strap serve, it’s not even attached to a belt? It’s literally just to Hitlerjugend this bitch’s look.) Snegovski made a joke for a very specific subset of folks who would have been aware of the dubious origins of Kasane Teto and made the mistake of allowing their work to, as we say, “break containment.”
Snegovski immediately encountered backlash for releasing the art on their public BlueSky page, probably completely and entirely unaware of the implications of releasing such an image in the wake of ethnocentric Americans online falling into a pit of despair over their inherent individual uselessness against the tides of political sabotage far beyond their scope of influence. Call outs abounded, calling Snegovski a Nazi, demanding them to address the “situation” beyond what they had already done which was delete the offending work without comment. People began then tagging people who follow the artist with the implication that if they did not unfollow them, they were going to be labeled as Nazi sympathizers, something that did in fact happen in the case of another popular (and wonderful) artist on BlueSky: HamletMachine.
Hamlet, an outspoken advocate for anti-censorship and freedom-in-art, has a well-known no-tolerance policy regarding call outs. This is entirely understandable considering the fact that those who make call outs are usually not safe people to be around, being the sort of folks who would turn you in to the Gestapo if only to appear righteous to the neighbors and win brownie points with the people they consider authorities. Ironically, the Gestapo itself, founded in 1933 by Nazi Hermann Göring and later overtaken by the Schutzstaffel, was only as successful as it was due to the German people’s almost pathological over-willingness to turn in their neighbors over perceived slights or ideological impurity. -stares straight into the camera- When Hamlet did not do more than simply block those participating in the public spectacle of people collectively not being in on the Nazi joke, she was branded a “Nazi Sympathizer” by those who saw that she had been publicly named and shamed by an artist called “Paprika” when lamenting about being blocked by Hamlet as she had previously “loved” HM’s works. Though she may have loved Hamlet’s works, she certainly didn’t shy away from allowing context collapse to aid in the spread of the insidious rumor that Hamlet “supported” a Nazi: something that never happened.
Naturally, all of this culminated in folks allegedly finding Snegovski’s personal online accounts and full name, making disturbingly tone-deaf and denigrating remarks about their alleged Russian ethnicity, making disturbing threats, encouraging them to “follow their leader” (alluding to the fact that top Nazi officials committed suicide at the end of the war), etc. Granted, it is incredibly difficult to determine whether or not a person is a “secret” Nazi trying to dogwhistle to their fellow ideological partners in this day and age, as so many of those kinds of “hints” can slip right under the radar as “just an edgy joke” with plausible deniability (See: The zionist Anti Defamation League [ADL] insisting that Musk’s obvious sieg heil was just an “awkward” hand gesture so they don’t lose Republican support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza). Nevertheless, as Hanlon’s Razor states: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” It has become far too easy for us to casually throw away the humanity of those to which we have erroneously attributed malice. It’s unlikely that Snegovski is StoneToss’ing their way through the CryptoNazi scene as we would have been likely to see it far before now but: anything is possible as I don’t know them (and neither do you).
In an attempt to discover whether or not the call out account, sababylon, was acting in good faith (spoiler: they weren’t), I floated NaZine into their field of view, catching a few strays as was expected for the themes of Nazisploitation and managing to derive that in their eyes all Nazi symbolism, even in satire or anti-Nazi works, was a problem for them, ousting them as just your average run-of-the-mill moron who would burn books if it suited them as well as any Bible-Thumper. Though it is understandable that there would be a decent amount of concern and public chatter, especially among Americans, it became far more than it should have due to show-boating, grandstanding, mall cop, wannabe Staatspolizei. So, good work to everyone on BlueSky who are making it Twitter 2.0 and ironically asking Snegovski why they drew Teto in a Gestapo uniform as you goose step your way around from call out to call out throwing fellow queers under the bus as you go.
Anyway…
