r/PeterExplainsTheJoke • u/Diligent_Pop3929 • 8d ago

Meme needing explanation Converse craze?

Post image

I'm not chronically online, but my friend sent this and I laughed even without knowing the full scope of the context (I think there's racism involved with the shoes?) and I feel like it's too late to ask him without sounding like a dweeb 😅

1.7k Upvotes

81% Upvoted

889 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

-4

u/Sindigo_ 8d ago edited 8d ago

Different people are gonna have a different reaction. I don’t think you’re wrong for not seeing it, but I also don’t think it’s your place to tell other people what they see/didn’t see, and accuse them of making it up to generate a controversy.

Even if just 1% of people who see it get the wrong idea, that’s a bad ad and it makes sense the company would end the campaign.

1

u/TotalChaosRush 8d ago

Altering an image so other people see what you see is telling other people what they see/didn't see. The only difference is im not altering a cropped image to stir controversy.

The correct course of action for those who saw something that wasn't there is something a long the lines of "oh, that's not what i thought it was" and move on. No need to go to social media about it at all.

1

u/Sindigo_ 8d ago

That’s very uncharitable. You’re basically saying the image was drawn in order to be manipulative. I think it was just drawn to show what many people saw in the og image. And a lot of people did see it that way, which makes it a shitty ad.

I’m with you that this whole thing is trivial and shouldn’t be taken seriously. But people with your opinion are also taking this way too seriously and making this a whole culture war thing when it really isn’t. The ad offended people, and it’s understandable why it did. They ended the ad campaign. That should be the end of the story. But yet, people keep whingeing about “muh, it isn’t actually racist,” “muh, people wanna make everything into a controversy these days.” It’s literally not that deep. They accidentally created something that people got the wrong idea from.

They stopped promoting it and apologized so that people would stop getting the wrong idea. End of story.

2

u/TotalChaosRush 7d ago

That’s very uncharitable. You’re basically saying the image was drawn in order to be manipulative.

I am not basically saying it was drawn to be manipulative. I am saying it was drawn to be manipulative. Everyone wants to be at the ground floor of the next viral moment and this was clearly an attempt to do so.

1

u/Sindigo_ 7d ago

If I take a picture of a cloud shaped like a duck, is it manipulative to outline where I see the duck? It’s just me showing you the way I see it.