Mooses

The original Moose Drawing.

Mooses is a community meme of Rolling Lounge which has been created and popularized by AZMindroma. The meme has not only spread inside of Rolling Lounge, but also affected other servers like MediaPlay Discord. Ever since its start in 2017, it has found great appeal in the communities it has been exposed to.

Drawing Characteristics

The image is a 1280 x 720 pixel sized png file, which features a drawing inside of it, which is supposed to represent a moose. It can be seen that the moose consists of two stick-like antlers, two dot eyes and a long carrot-like nose. It also features an incompleted mouth, giving the moose a happy expression. The mouth overlaps with the nose, preventing a 3D effect in this area. A spare dot can be seen right of the left antler, which can be assumed was going to be another antler. The body of the moose is big and not too thin, and it features 2 legs in the foreground with another 2 legs drawn as a 3D Effect for the moose. It has a long, hairy tail which falls all the way down to the moose's feet.

History

The german graphic designer and animator called Steve from the YouTube Channel KAOZTAINMENT had planned a sequel to one of his series, "Blacky and the Black Hole". This series was about a stickman who had fallen into a black hole, upon which he falls into a parallel universe and has to take decisions of what to do in the next episode, which is then decided by the audience. The first 5 parts were completely mute, but for the 6th part and onward, KAOZTAINMENT searched for voice actors and offered several voice positions. This was done in a german forum for YouTube, where several people applied for a position as a voice actor - including AZMindroma, who was interested in the series. Once everyone applied, the positions were chosen and AZMindroma had received a position of a side character in a marketplace who would desperately ask their parent to buy everything for them. AZMindroma had received this line to voice act for:

Ich will das da! Und ich will Schierenflügel! Los, kauf mir welche! Ich will... Ich will... Ich will!

This audio file was recorded on a Samsung Galaxy J7 2016 on Android 8.1.0, a device which had a voice recording program preinstalled which had the feature to loop specific parts of an audio file. This was discovered by AZMindroma and shown to his sister, upon which she did a lot of experimenting and playing around with the audio files AZ had on his phone. At the time she had also decided to do the same with AZ's audio file he just recorded, and cropped it in a way where from the word "welche" in the sentence you could only hear "elche", which meant "Moose" in german. The siblings found this funny and therefore became a meme inside of the family beforehand. They also wanted to share this sort of meme with the internet in AZ's newfound channel, for which a basic moose drawing was drawn in the mobile app FlipaClip. Reference couldn't be used due to the abscence of any internet connection as they were located in Turkey, and due to neither of them knowing how a moose looked like, it got its inaccurate form. Over this drawing AZ yelled the word "Elche!" and uploaded it on his YouTube Channel later, which can still be accessed here. This 1 second video surprisingly got a lot more attention than the rest of his videos, and therefore he continued doing content with moose.

This continued on YouTube, until AZMindroma joined a Discord server called DerNerdiTV, a server created for the local german animator community where AZ also wanted to partake in. In that server he met NichtNils, another german animator. Once meeting, they found each other sympathetic and became friends closely after. At this time AZ introduced NichtNils to his moose meme, which NichtNils found appeal in. They continued making jokes about the audio and the look of the moose itself, until NichtNils came up with the idea of making a "religion" out of it, and therefore the first Discord server related to moose was created in October 23rd of 2017. They began making a cult about mooses even outside of the server, which popularized mooses in the local community there. Often it was seen as an annoyance due to the unfitting and annoying nature of the moose's promotion, upon which it was often called a "sect".

This held on until the hype around Mooses slowly declined in this local german animator community. When that decline was active, AZ however joined the Rolling Lounge server and became active there. In the server, he posted an image of the moose while SHAvibe and he were talking, upon which SHAvibe asked whether it should be added as an emote. Like that, the moose emoji was one of the first emojis ever created in the server. It was questioned by the community but found funny nonetheless, and it got the same appeal that mooses had in the previous community, even more in some cases. This moose then was posted a lot of times by not only AZ, but other members as well who liked the idea of obsessing over something like that due to the sheer repetition of the phrase and the way the drawing looked, and soon after the community was heavily impacted by it. Upon AZ getting staff, this was even heavier reinforced due to his high position in the server.

Soon the rising community would also proceed to make fanarts of mooses due to how simple it was to draw and the relatively creative way it looked like. This would stack up to eventually over 40 fanarts, which were then compilated in the two MEE6 commands !mooses and !mooses2. The promotion of these fanarts resulted in even more drawings and also cameos in other videos. This also resulted in the community spreading mooses around not only in Rolling Lounge, but also other servers in the local community like Rhythm Games Hub, The Bite-Sized (formerly Crafty Mike Discord) and MediaPlay Discord.

Grammatical Mistaking

Due to a lack of grammatical knowledge, AZMindroma had mistakenly used an incorrect plural of moose, Mooses. Later this was found to be an incorrect plural form, but it was kept nonetheless because it added an icon to the moose's unique characteristics. It is also to note that in the Reflex Games Discord era, a fight between two wrong plurals, Mooses and Meese had taken place, where Meese was used to fight against the Moose supporters.

Psychology behind Mooses

Mooses had always found a relatively good appeal in the servers it was exposed to, but it was questioned why they got so much appeal for a drawing. In Rolling Lounge, Mb B and AZMindroma wrote a theory of why this appeal had happened in such a large scale. This theory was partially polemically written and was published in the literature channel in July 4th, 2020:

[...] That "weird shaped white animal" is supposed to be a moose, that got really popular in this server. [...] but now you might ask: "Why did a bad artwork like that blow up?" and the reason why it blew up in popularity is exactly because the moose character is simplistic in design and is appealing. With its accentuated long nose, two sticklike antlers, dead eyes and idiotic expression, you just can't help but relate to the character. This causes a positive effect to the moose since people enjoy things they can relate with, it gives the person a good feeling knowing they're not alone. The character got introduced by a member called "AZ [] Mindroma [] Sticky" in early 2018, after a gain of the moderator role, the user kept posting that picture over and over from time and time, adding it as emoji and generally presenting it to many members. This lead to a drawing of several fan-made artworks later (you can check them out by typing in the commands !mooses and !mooses2) due to mooses being really really easy to draw. This made the meme ultimately strong because the fact that it was possible to gain more attention by drawing intentionally bad artwork than in a genuinely effortfull art attracted many people. The moose has been used in videos with over 100k views since then, has over 50 fanarts, and is still alive after around 3 years of existence. [...]

—AZMindroma