Why the Right Love Amelia

As we all know, the left can’t meme. That’s because memes require brevity of expression, the ability to make a concise point and, above all, a sense of humour. The left are chronically incapable of any of those. When their memes don’t completely fall flat, they blow up in the left’s faces. Consider Hillary Clinton’s ‘basket of deplorables’.

The left’s latest attempt at co-opting ‘yoof’ culture in the UK is ‘Amelia’, a purple-haired demi-goth white British girl, began her virtual life not as a meme, but as a particularly sinister far-left re-education tool.

Posing as an ‘online prevention game’ created by Hull City Council in England, Pathways: Navigating the Internet and Extremism allows players to choose between a young man or woman, both named Charlie, who has just started university and wants to socialize and make new friends. In fact, the ‘game’ is an indoctrination tool from the heart of the authoritarian UK government, funded by the Home Office’s sinister Prevent program.

The game is meant to teach the youth about the dangers of radicalization and extremism in both real life and online. This is done by putting players in the role of a character named Charlie, who must navigate six different scenarios relating to extremism.

In the second scenario, the player is introduced to the character Amelia, a staunch anti-immigration protestor depicted as a goth girl with purple hair, a pink dress and a choker.

Amelia is, as the plot progresses, a supposed ‘far-right’ extremist. If the player chooses the ‘wrong’ options, such joining Amelia in a protest against mass migration and in favour of traditional values, the game ends with an auto da fé, oops, ‘referral’ to the Committee for State Security, I mean, ‘Prevent’.

In fact, according to media and user reports, it does not really matter which decisions players make: the game reportedly ends with the same Prevent referral regardless. After the character is ‘cleansed’ of the ‘corrupted ideas’ of border protection, national unity, cohesion, and public safety through counsellors and workshops, they become popular again and, overall, more successful in life.

The message and purpose of the game are clear – and outrageous, though not entirely surprising: if you believe in preserving your nation’s culture and traditions, and want to protect it from mass migration by people who do not respect those same traditions, then you are cast as the villain and excluded by your peers.

The sinister ploy has backfired spectacularly.

However, the game’s developers and the progressive masterminds behind it made a glaring mistake. They turned Amelia, the game’s main antagonist, into an archetype that is widely popular in global meme culture among young people: the goth girl. As soon as the game escaped its ‘educational’ bubble, right-wing social media latched onto her. Suddenly, timelines were filled with Amelia fan art, edits, and screenshots. Rather than being seen as a ‘dangerous nationalist extremist’, as the creators intended, she became an ironic hero – a kind of mascot for resisting the very ideas the game was designed to promote.

So instead of making teens more wary of questioning mass migration or defending their country’s identity, Pathways did the opposite. They made their over-the-top villain a meme. Now, she’s spreading the ideas the council tried to stamp out, and honestly, the whole thing just makes the prevention programme look ridiculous for treating normal patriotic feelings like some slippery slope to extremism.

Here’s one of my favourite Amelia memes.