Carles, the blogger behind Hipster Runoff, is a wanted man. After innocently contemplating the eternal question, “Will I kill my BFFs if I text while I am driving?,” in a post last night, Carles was eventually greeted with the following comment: “i purchased your shirt just to burn it. Your site will crumble beneath you and your followers will wander away from your site.” The post was signed by ‘Carles is Burning,’ and with it, a link to a YouTube video and the words, “I’m watching you. Down with Carles. Down With Carles. Down with Carles . . .” and so on and so on.
The YouTube video takes us to a shirtless boy burning Carles’ infamous “I am Carles” T-shirt. The boy looks like he is the younger brother of the Pretenders. He looks like he is pissed. In fact, he is burning the shirt as an “act of defiance against everything Carles stands.” In other words, he is indirectly burning $30 of his own money to tsk-tsk a blogger. And when someone is willing to burn their own doh – especially when that someone’s YouTube user account is, ‘theHorribleSanity‘ – you know they mean business.
Unfortunately for theHorribleSanity, his act of defiance has only reaffirmed the success of the IamCarles brand. If you hate Carles, but you still need to buy his shirt in order to prove you hate him, well, that’s a win-win situation for Hipster Runoff. So what made a seemingly innocent blond boy go arsonist? “[Carles] is a serious racist, a serious sexist, a heterosexist, he likes to make fun of gays, black people, Asians; he likes to make fun of women who are abused.” Keep in mind that Carles has explicitly denounced everything from his own blog to ten piece chicken nuggets. “So Carles, if you’re watching this: you are a bad person and you need to change.”
The YouTube video also illustrates one of the main components of Hipster Runoff — its duality. You are either in the pool of people who ‘get it’ or ‘don’t get it.’ The latter of which make YouTube videos. Carles often writes from the consumer perspective, what the masses are generally thinking or unconsciously feeling: An innate love for Am Appy to define their ‘alt’ personal brand, a bromance for Pashy Pit, a pressured appreciation of Animal Collective or the Dirty Projectors, the white man’s subconscious desire to ‘get with’ an Asian chick, and, more recently, the implications of killing one’s BFFs while driving and texting. Ultimately, theHorribleSanity has committed a confused and misdirected act of aggression against Carles. He meant to attack is his own culture — the one Carles willfully mirrors.
Let’s hope ‘theHorribleSanity,’ can’t afford the $3,000 personal shirt delivery by Carles himself. No man deserves to be burned alive in a YouTube video.
