Angry Love to the Fish

[08.21.01] » by Fritz Fraundorf

"Falun Gong Show is so not punk!"

"Gawd, I was just sayin' -"

"No, listen to me, Yuffie. Falun Gong Show is just one of those overrated MTV bands trying to cash in the success of real punk bands like the Blind Watchmakers."

Selphie bounced down the stairs into the quad. "Hey, guys! BOOYAKA!"

"Selphie!" Zell exclaimed. "Falun Gong Show is totally not a punk band, right?"

"I said 'BOOYAKA,'" Selphie repeated. Zell and Yuffie gave her totally blank stares. "Uh, you have to say it too! C'mon! 'BOOYAKA!'" She thrust her fist up as she shouted.

"Booyaka," Zell repeated half-heartedly.

"Uh, booyaka!"

"Aw, you guys are no fun >:P!" Selphie teased. "You all have to start saying 'BOOYAKA!'"

"Selphie, c'mon, you know Falun Gong Show isn't punk, right?" Zell repeated.

"Um, aren't they ^^;;?" Selphie frowned. "They sure sound like a punk band to me... o_O"

"No, no, no! Selphie, you don't get it! Punk isn't just about the music. Punk is an attitude; it's -"

"Oh blah blah lifestyle XP," Selphie interrupted. "You give me this lecture every time."

Zell held out his hands. "That's because you still don't understand!" he pleaded.

Selphie folded her arms stubbornly. "Well, I'm going to go train," she declared. "Remember, you have to say 'BOOYAKA!' all the time; I want it to catch on!"

the LAZIEST MEN ON FILGAIA present
a LUSTROG THE PROPHET fanfic
ANGRY LOVE TO THE FISH

Selphie marched into Quistis' classroom carrying a huge piece of tagboard in front of herself. "Hi, Quisty ^__^! Can I hang this poster in your classroom!"

"What is it?"

Selphie set the poster down against Quistis' desk. The poster depicted Selphie standing in a sunny field, grinning for the camera and making a V sign with her right side. A huge cartoon word bubble over her read read "BOOYAKA!". "It's a big picture of me going 'BOOYAKA!'" Selphie explained. "I'm trying to get everyone to say it."

Quistis smiled. "Sure, Selphie," she said.

As Selphie was hanging the poster, one of Quistis' students, a blonde girl with a furry tail, walked into the room. She tossed her backpack down on her ask desk stared at Selphie, trying to place her. "Hey," she said after a moment. "You run the Garden Festival Committee web page, right?"

"Er, yes..." Selphie appeared confused, then grinned. "Oh! Did you want to join ^^;;?"

"Do you want me to redesign your site?" the girl asked. "The layout is totally 1998. I'm an awesome web designer; I'll make you a new site with drop shadows, user-selectable SSI themes, a PHP backend, and content only from the games, not from the Internet!"

"Hmm." Selphie thought for a moment. "I kinda like it the way it is, without all the SSI or whatever stuff ¬_¬."

The girl laughed. "You don't know what SSI is? Did you flunk kindergarten, or what?" She laughed again, apparently seeing great humor in this fact. "No one is going to want to visit your page if it doesn't look good, you know."

"But it's my page," Selphie protested. "I don't want to change it ^^;;."

"Hmph. If you change your mind," the girl sneered, twitching her tail, "just drop me a line. Here, take a business card." She flicked a tan business card across the room and marched back into the hall.

"BOOYAKA!" Selphie shouted after her.

Selphie picked the card off the ground and looked at it. "'Mikoto Tribal, graphic design master,'" she read. "Talk about arrogant. Don't they have any kind of standards for students these days >_<?"

* * *

"~Train, train, take us away~" Selphie sang as she boarded the train out of Balamb. She smiled and waved to her partner on the SeeD mission. "Hello, Nida. BOOYAKA!"

"Hey."

Selphie giggled. "C'mon, you gotta say 'BOOYAKA!' It's my catchprase; I want it to catch on."

"Eh." Nida sleepily rubbed his left eye. "You need to add more to that if you want it to catch on."

The train rolled out of the station, bound for Timber, where the two SeeDs were to help contain an outbreak of "mad chocobo" disease. "But I thought, like, simpler things were catchier ^-^," Selphie said to Nida. "I mean, like, who's going to want to use a phrase like 'Mamimumemo?' I tried that once and it didn't catch on at all."

"Well, yeah. You need a quick, stand-out line that everyone will identify your meme with. But then you've got to have more content people can reference after they use the main line."

"Hmm." Selphie stared vacantly at the passing tunnel walls. "Yeah... I remember when everyone was making their own version of those Seventh Heaven beer commercials."

"Right," Nida said. "People love catchphrases they can apply to all sort of situations. You've got to have some sort of important noun or visual piece that can easily be replaced with something else. See, you want people to 'parody' it by replacing the characters and words with ones that apply to other topics. They think they're being clever and spoofing , but they're really just propagating your meme. Especially when it's intentionally cheesy or retro. 'Cause then they hilariousy unhip and ironic by liking Scooby Doo crap."

"Wow O__O," said Selphie. "I didn't know you knew all this stuff about catchphrases, Nida."

"Well, I don't, but for purposes of this story, I've been endowed with extraordinary insight and a predisposition for long exposition."

Selphie giggled. "Heh heh, predisposition for long exposition; that wouldn't be a bad catchphrase."

"Do you know about meme theory, Selphie?"

"Isn't that one of Zell's crappy punk bands?"

"Ideas are like viruses," Nida said. "They spread when people come together. Sometimes it'll only hit a few people. They get infected with it, lose their mind for a bit -- but it passes, and society's no worse for wear. But other times a few people get it and start passing it along to their friends, and then those friends' friends..." Nida grimaced. "It starts off silently, but pretty soon it's hard not to hear about it. And then the outbreak is inevitable -- when it goes overnight from being someone else's thing to the new craze. The more people that see it, the more people that have to prove their worth by jumping on the bandwagon. It's exponential."

He chuckled. "Fortunately, just like real viruses, ideas run their course. Eventually everyone gets over it -- first the people that started it, then all the other victims. And only the ideas that are really worth something stay in our meme pool. Just like how the bad genes get weeded out over time."

Selphie nervously directed Nida's attention to the LED indicator overhead. The train was now well on its way to Deling City. "Er, speaking of containing viruses, we seem to have missed our stop."

* * *

Costa del Sol

"Oh boy! More condescending, racist reviews of antiquated NES games! This stuff's the best!"

Cait Sith giggled as he paged through Lucca's review of Shinjuku Happy Jumpers. Nothing beat sitting in Cloud's villa basement with his cute animal bandmates and anonymously deriding the work of people he'd never know or meet. Such was the wonderful world of Internet humor. And the best part of it was that any idea, picture, or even video could be easily reduced into a handy line of text for distribution to everyone he knew, as well as lots of people he didn't know.

But not even his trained meme-distribution skills could have prepared him for what he was about to discover.

"Hey, guys!" he shouted through his megaphone. "You wanna see something hilarious?"

The other members of Cait Sith's band -- Neko, Hanpan, Spekkio, and Mog -- clustered around the computer. "Yeah, what is it?"

Cait Sith pointed at the screen. "Check this out -- it's this huge dumb picture of Selphie."

The other Bahamut Men all laughed at the scanned poster. "That's hilarious!" Spekkio exclaimed.

"Booyaka!" Neko repeated. "Oh, man, that's the stupidest thing ever!"

"Print me out a copy of that!" Mog said. "I want to bring it along the next time I visit Eiko. Ha ha ha, that's so lame."

"Yeah, I'm sure your girlfriend will get a kick out of this."

"Dammit, Cait, she's not..." Mog sighed and threw his hands up in despair.

Neko nudged Cait Sith out of his chair. "Dude, move over; I just got the funniest idea."

* * *

Selphie and Nida jumped off the train in Timber and hurried to the chocobo stables on the outskirts of town. "Sorry we're late m(_)m," Selphie apologized. "We kinda missed our stop o_O;;;. The trains are eeeebil~~ XP."

Nida gestured at the chocobos milling around in the fields. Some of them were stumbling or walking lop-sided; others had degenerated to chasing their tails around in circles. Of course, every attempt the chocobos made to bite their tail only yanked it back to where they had been standing. "Haha, those silly chocobos," Selphie giggled. "Don't they realize that it's impossible to ever catch up with their tail?"

"So we're going to have to... put the 'mad' chocobos to sleep?" Nida asked.

"Yeah," the stable hand said. "Once they get infected, there's no saving them. The only way to save the species is to kill the mad ones before it spreads."

Selphie and Nida nodded sadly and went about their gruesome work.

* * *

"There! It's finished!" Neko called the other Bahamut Men over to view his creation. He'd edited Selphie's picture onto a Time magazine cover. "BOOYAKA!" the headline read.

The other cute animal characters laughed and pointed at the screen with glee. "Dude, that rocks," Cait Sith said.

"Oh! Oh! Let's take that picture of that homeless guy we found on that one site and put 'BOOYAKA!' on his sign!" Spekkio said.

"Ha ha, yeah! That's almost as funny as subject-verb disagreement!" Mog chortled.

"Dude, don't forget about that naked guy running through the soccer field," Cait said. "We should put 'Booyaka!' on his back; that'd rule."

Hanpan raised an eyebrow. "What in world are you going to do with all this?"

"Put 'em into a Shockwave Flash movie?" Cait suggested.

"Yeah! That's perfect!" Spekkio nudged Neko sharply. "Lemme use the computer, dude."

Cait Sith bowed his head. "Thank you, God, for giving us Shockwave Flash, so that even the most technically incompetent lunatics can infect the Internet with audio-visual representations of their dementia."

* * *

Selphie carefully navigated her bright yellow Poké-Beetle into the Garden parking garage, being careful not to wing any other cars with her vehicles' long tail. She parked next to the Kramers' dark red SUV and hopped out of the car.

"Booyaka, Selphie!" Yuffie said, running to greet her.

"YAY YUFFIE!" Selphie cried, throwing her arms about Yuffie's shoulders. "You said 'Booyaka!'"

"Yeah! The movie was, like, awesome 'n stuff!"

Selphie pulled away, startled. "Movie o_O;;?"

"Yeah, you know," Yuffie said, "the Flash one, with all the pictures 'n stuff."

"What are you talking about?"

"Ohmigawd, you didn't make that movie? You have to come look, like, quick!" Yuffie hurried back to her room with Selphie scrambling after her.

"I found, like, this 'Booyaka!' video on Baofu's site," Yuffie explained as they stepped into the dorm room Yuffie shared with Chu-Chu. "It's like, totally, hilarious." She waded through the piles of refuse that comprised her side of the room and hoisted herself up into the chair seat bobbing in front of her beloved computer.

In the brief forty-five minutes that she had been gone, her e-mail inbox had been flooded with even more directives pointing her to the "Booyaka!" video. Yuffie quickly deleted them and . "Okay, watch."

Selphie gingerly stepped through Yuffie's clothes, books, and other pillaged goods to peer over her friend's shoulder. Yuffie started the music video again. Selphie first stared dumbstruck at the dozens of "Booyaka!" pictures, then started giggling. "BOOYAKA!" she exclaimed. "Who made this, Yuffie o_O!?"

"Uh, like, I dunno; I just found the URL posted on the Web."

"Weird," said Selphie. "I wonder what I should do."

"Gawd, Selphie, do you even have to ask? We post it everywhere we can!"

* * *

Mikoto drummed her fingers on her desk as she waited for her mint-green Apple G4 Dodecahedron to boot. Time to appease her ego by updating her website with more stories about herself. And today she wouldn't have to resort to rambling about her favorite cereal mascots or why she hated Colgate toothpaste; she had a full-scale rant ready. Some stupid skater had chewed her out for wearing a Falun Gong Show T-shirt. But she'd show him! She'd make bitter, sarcastic comments about how everyone hated her on a website he'd probably never read! That would be ironic and clever, because she actually didn't mean any of what she said! Or at least that's what the denizens of her personal message board told her. Mikoto loved her message board. After all, however much of a 1ish loser she might be, she could take solace in the fact that the sycophantic fanboys who worshipped her for her double X chromosomes led even less fulfilling lives.

Except today, not even her fan club was paying any attention to the irrelevant details of her personal life.

Mikoto's message board had been deluged with posts consists of only "BOOYAKA!", with the occasional "AKAYOOB!" or "MAMIMUMEMO!" tossed in as a marginally more clever reply. Mikoto scrolled through pages of the nonsense until she found its source: a post linking to a Shockwave Flash movie on some other site. "What the heck," Mikoto muttered. "Everyone has gone completely insane. This isn't funny at all."

The Garden cadet turned off her computer with disgust. Perhaps tomorrow the masses would again be tripping over themselves to read her real-time English homework updates -- after all, what true Mikoto fan wouldn't want to read her sentence-by-sentence reactions to chapter 4 of Gulliver's Travels?

But the outbreak was just beginning.

* * *

The next morning...

Selphie bounced out of bed. "Good morning, world ^__^!" She tossed open the curtains. "Looks like another beeeeaau -- oh wait, it's hailing outside X_X."

As Selphie dressed and showered, she pondered her plans for this dreary Saturday morning. Irvine always wanted to train in the morning, Yuffie would still be asleep for another six hours, and Chu-Chu... well, she didn't want to know what Chu-Chu was doing at this time of day. Perhaps she could make some new "BOOYAKA!" posters before the Balamb Book Club meeting in the afternoon.

"Hi, Selphie!" Quistis greeted her in the hall. "Booyaka!"

Selphie giggled. "Booyaka to you too, Quisty ^___^!"

"Booyaka, Sefie!" said Irvine.

"Booyaka! Mamimumemo!"

Selphie was in heaven. "Booyaka!" had instantly become Garden's greeting of choice. Posters plastered the walls; some with new phrases edited in -- "Mamimumemo!", "Lali ho!", "KILL!" -- or with new speakers -- Squall, Laguna, Woodrow Wilson. A few students had even taken the liberty of printing "BOOYAKA!" T-shirts for themselves. Selphie danced through the chaos with glee, revelling in the overnight acceptance of her catchphrase. "Booyaka!" she greeted each passerby.

"Booyaka!"

"BOOYAKA."

"...whatever."

Mikoto confronted her again as Selphie hung the new "BOOYAKA!" posters -- now with different pictures! -- in the quad. "Oh, still beating your dead horse, I see," the Terran girl said.

"Huh O_O;;?"

"'Booyaka!' is so stupid," Mikoto said. "It was funny back when you first tho7ught of it, but it's completely overrated." She invoked the favorite complaint of people who were shocked to discover that their opinions were not unquestionably parroted by all of creation.

Chu-Chu came bouncing towards them, with Yuffie jogging along behind her. "Booyaka, Selphie!"

"See what I mean?" Mikoto said. "Why do you have to constantly regurgitate everything you hear that's marginally funny?"

"Like, whatever. I bet you're just jealous 'cause, like, 'Booyaka!' is way more popular than your site," Yuffie said. "I mean, gawd, you'd probably do the same thing if you were in Selphie's situation."

"No, my site sucks. But I just said it sucks, so you can't complain 'cause I meant for it to be that way! Ha ha, I'm so clever."

"You're weird XP," Selphie giggled. Trying to ease the tension, she added: "I checked out your site; it wasn't sucky at all."

Mikoto dismissed the idea with a sniff of disgust. "My site's overrated. I hate it when people appreciate the work I put into it."

"Gawd, do you think everything is overrated?"

"No, just things that someone else, somewhere in the universe finds appealing," Mikoto said. "For example, I don't think Insane Clown Posse is overrated."

"Yeah, they're okay," Yuffie said.

"They're overrated, Yuffie."

* * *

Selphie and Chu-Chu bounced into the Balamb Garden library. The rest of Balamb Book Club was already waiting with their copies of Aerith Gainsborough's 1,001 Rules for Simpler Living. "BOOYAKA ^__^!" Selphie greeted them.

"Booyaka!" Rinoa replied.

"Have you ever considered a career in marketing, Selphie?" Xu teased. "Advertisers have wet dreams about starting something like this."

"That's not what I have wet dreams about," Chu-Chu announced proudly.

"Thank you, Chu-Chu. I don't think you need to elaborate any further."

"I think this whole 'Booyaka!' thing is getting out of hand," Squall said.

"Yes, it certainly is," Edea agreed. "Someone wrote 'BOOYAKA!' on every chalkboard in Garden this morning."

Selphie frowned. "Well, I guess maybe it has a gone a little overboard :(. I can stop putting up posters, if you want."

"Yeah, good idea!" Rinoa raised her fist. "It's time to wake up the mindless masses! Fight the power!" She grabbed Squall's arm and dragged him towards the door. "C'mon, Squall, let's set up an anti-'Booyaka!' site to take the power back!"

"Wait! That's not what I meant >_<! Come back!"

"Too late, Selphie," Nida said. "As soon as you suggested that it might be even edgier and rebellious to attack 'Booyaka!' than say 'Booyaka!', you unleashed an even more virulent meme. After all, who's going to pass up the chance to make themself look smarter than the rest of society?"

* * *

"This 'Booyaka!' stuff is so stupid," one of the Heart sisters remarked as she sat down to play Triple Triad with her sister.

"Oh come on, you were wearing a 'Booyaka!' T-shirt yesterday."

"Well, I was just going along with 'cause everyone else liked it. I thought it was lame right from the beginning."

Xu approached the sisters' table in the library. "Booyaka!" she greeted her fellow Card Club members.

"Shut up!" the first sister snapped.

" "Excuse me?"

"'Booyaka' sucks. It was kind of funny at first, but now it's turned into another stupid overused joke."

"Yeah, everyone knows the hot new overused joke is making stupid overused jokes about overused jokes."

And so the cycle began anew.

* * *

"Hey, you want to hear something hilarous?" Raijin said as the Disciplinary Committee stood in line at the cafeteria. "'Booyaka!' is a dumb catchphrase! Ha ha ha ha!"

Fujin kicked him in the shin.

* * *

Cait Sith was on the warpath. Mustering up all the righteous anger he could feign on the spur of the moment, he marched through Balamb Garden's dormitory to Selphie's room. He tried out several condescending scowls until he found one he liked, then rapped sharply on the door.

"What is the meaning of this?" Cait demanded as the door opened. "How dare you do this to me, you licentious howler?" He chuckled as his hilarious use of obsolete English vocabulary.

"Um, are you looking for Selphie?" Irvine said. "She went to the bathroom. She'll be back in a sec."

"Oh." Cait Sith set down his megaphone and lounged against the wall, his armed folded. His little red boots tapped impatiently on the floor.

When Selphie returned a few minutes later, Cait was busy dreaming about Luna. She was always down the hall before the cat noticed her. "Crud," he muttered, snatching out his megaphone. He scurried to Selphie's feet and pointing an accusing finger at her. "You! What is the meaning of this?"

"Meaning of what o_O?"

"You raped my in-joke! It used to be funny and hip and underground and now it's in Time magazine! How can I use it as a badge of obscure counter-culture credibility when every single person on the Internet knows about it?"

"I didn't mean to, really ^^;;;!" Selphie pleaded. "I've been telling everyone I meet to stop talking about it all the time!"

This was an unexpected turn of events. Cait Sith hadn't been expecting Selphie to agree with him. Was he so late that attacking "Booyaka!" had already jumped from being edgy and underground to the norm? This meme could be everywhere!

"Well, you don't have to be such a fascist about it!" Cait Sith blurted. "Why deos it matter to you what other people find amusing?"

Selphie started. "Huh O__O? All I was saying was that 'Booyaka!' isn't funny anymore."

"Right, and you're the divinely-appointed sole arbiter of humor in this universe."

Selphie stuck out her tongue. "Pssh, I think you're just jealous because it's not smugly iconoclastic to complain about 'Booyaka!' anymore."

"No, this whole thing is stupid," Cait declared. "People need to grow up and stop telling other people need what to do."

Dang it! Selphie thought. Cait had proven his eliteness once again. Now she was left looking like the guilty sheep caught in the act while Cait asserted his intellectual superiority. The only way to save her pride was to nod her head and pretend she'd been on Cait's side all along. "Yeah, people who attack other people just plain suck XP."

"Yeah, exactly," Cait Sith said, feeling satisfied even if he wasn't at all sure he'd actually gotten what he'd wanted. "Eliteness is dead. I'm going to spread the word." He marched off.

"Oops," Selphie said. "I did it again :(."

Nida had been watching from the end of the hall. "Congratulations, Selphie," he said. "Can you manage to say anything without pissing in the meme pool?"

* * *

Across the airwaves, from television to television and from web site to web site, the message dispersed: Being elite was no longer elite. In a world where anti-trendiness was trendy, the only way to be truly hip was to paint the oppositon to a trend as trendy.

After all, everyone wanted to be a rebel. And what better what to be a rebel than by rebelling against the existing rebels?

* * *

"Hey, are you one of those damn elite hardcore gamers?" someone accosted Nida as he stepped into an Electronics Boutique. "You sure look like one of those assholes who always goes around stereotyping people."

"Yeah, we don't allow any elitists in here," echoed the clerk, who was wearing a "QUESTION ICONOCLASM" T-shirt. "Get out."

* * *

A soldier in green clothing hurled a grenade into the settlement of a rival ethnic group. "This is vengeance for what you did to us!" he cried as a building collapsed. Blue-clothed soldiers rushed out, killed the green soldier, and burned down his family's house in revenge. The green soldier's friends then shot blue soldiers in retaliation, prompting the blue soldiers to launch an airstrike against the green soldiers' homes.

* * *

A crowd had gathered in the quad to watch Selphie replace the anti-"Booyaka!" posters that she had put up in place of the "Booyaka!" posters with fresh new "Booyaka!" posters. "Some people are such pricks," one observer noted with approval. "How can they get so worked up about what other people do? I hope they all die."

"BOOYAKA SUCKS!" Raijin shouted from the rear of the group.

"Hey, dumbass," Mikoto shot back, "whining about 'Booyaka!' is totally passé."

"Yeah, well, I think whining about people whining about 'Booyaka!' is old too, ya know?"

"Ooh! I think he's on to something!" another student proclaimed, shortly before running off to make an anti-anti-anti-"Booyaka!" poster.

Chu-Chu tugged urgently on Selphie's leg. "Selphie, what's that?" she asked, pointing across the quad. Selphie turned to look.

A troop of bipedal chocobos, all carrying Uzis, was marching out from the main hall. "This is definitely the place, Fat," one of the chocobos said to the leader, Chow Yun Fat Chocobo.

"What in the world o_O?" Selphie exclaimed. "What are these things doing here?"

"We're from the Timber Human Control Division," Chow Yun Fat Chocobo explained. "We've been sent to control the 'mad human' disease epidemic here."

"Huh?" Yuffie said. "'Mad human' disease? Like, no one's mad here."

"Not mad? Are you kidding me?" The chocobo indicated the "Booyaka!" posters, the anti-"Booyaka!" posters, and the anti-anti-"Booyaka!" posters with a wide sweep of his wing. "Look at this! It's completely insane!"

"But... but..."

"We can't let this spread to the rest of the world. The only way to ensure the survival of your species is to cull the infected humans." He raised his guns.

Students fled screaming in all directions as Chow Yun Fat Chocobo fired randomly into the crowd. Two students dropped to the ground.

"Oh my Wondrous Mambo God, they killed Biggs and Wedge!" Chu-Chu shrieked.

"You bastards!" shouted Quistis.

Chow Yun Fat Chocobo lowered his gun. "That was just the beginning," he threatened. "I'll be back tomorrow evening. If you can't put a stop to this madness on your own, I'll've no choice but to continue thinning the herd."

* * *

Selphie stared drearily into the water swirling in the middle of the Garden rotunda. "Oh dear. What have I gotten myself into this time -_-;;;?"

Her concerned friends gathered around her. "C'mon, cheer up, it's not the end of the world, Sefie," Irvine said. "There's always tomorrow!"

"Yeah, it's better than being blind or having your face eaten off by rats," Mikoto said comfortingly.

"And it gave Chu-Chu a great idea for a new Fei fanfic! See, it's going chu be a parody of 'Booyaka!', except instead of everyone saying 'Booyaka!', Fei's going chu get everyone hooked on Zero Wing quotes. And then I can make fun of the 'Booyaka!' fans and the people who hate 'Booyaka!' and the people who hate people who -"

"Chu-Chu, don't X_X," Selphie interrupted. "You're only gonna make it worse. I mean... even if you try to satirize it, you're only perpetuating its existence. I think this less said about the 'Booyaka!' wars at this point, the better."

"Yeah, for once I agree with you," Mikoto said. "This is one of those situations where the only way to win is not to play the game."

Selphie flicked a coin into the water and watched it sink. "Yeah... but if we're not playing the game so we can, aren't we still playing the game o_O;;;? I mean... I can't do anything now without being influenced by 'Booyaka!'. I don't know what to do. I just want 'Booyaka!' to have never existed >_<."

Zell strolled by and stopped beside the small group. "Well, guys, I've reached a decision," he announced as he thrust his hands in his pockets. "I think the punk scene has co-opted its own ideals and become the same as what it used to deride. So from now on, I'm going to be a true punk by refusing to do anything the true punks do. Comformity is the 'new rebellion.'"

"Uh, right." Irvine rolled his eyes. "I'm so happy for you. I think."

"Remind me again," Mikoto said, "How did you get from punk rock to Dadaism?"

Selphie sighed. "This is like herding oglops. Anything I say to people is just going to be trite and stupid ;_;." She looked up at Irvine. "C'mon, Irvy-poo, you're smart; you tell me what to say."

"I don't know, Sefie. I think all rational viewpoints lost their relevancy a long time ago."

"Hey, you guys wanna watch 'I Love Lucy?'" Zell suggested. "You can take your mind off all this. Maybe we can go to a sock hop later."

He regarded the blank faces of the others with surprise. "Aw, come on! It'll be swell!"

* * *

Yuffie rolled back and forth, trying to lull herself sleep. The girl had abandoned her usual late bedtime in order to be up in time for Selphie's speech tomorrow. Unfortunately, she wasn't quite used to going to bed at this hour -- and the loud music wafting through the wall from the SeeD dorm wasn't helping. "Gawd, there's probably, like, a reason that Zell is blasting '50s easy-listening music at 3 AM, but, like, I'm not sure if I want to find out what it is." Oh well, at least he was happy.

On the other side of the room, Chu-Chu was also tossing and turning, though probably for other reasons. "Hey, Yuffie?"

"Yeah?"

"Do chu remember when Web humor was actual, like, humor?"

"Uh, no, was it?"

"I dunno; that's what just Selphie said."

Chu-Chu's pudgy face creased into a frown. "Why can't just people enjoy what they like and ignore what they don't? Chu-Chu doesn't think they should care so muchu about being on the cutting edge."

"Uh... insect politics?"

"Huh?"

* * *

Selphie's sleep-deprived eyes scanned unfocused across the crowd facing the Garden Festival stage. Fighting the urge to just curl up in a corner and go to sleep, she stepped up onto the podium and hunched over the microphone. "Hi ^_^."

"BOOYAKA!" someone shouted. The audience laughed nervously.

Selphie took a deep breath. "Okay, all I want to say is that it's really silly to base what you do because of what someone tells you... no, wait, I'm contradicting myself >_<. Okay, what I meant to say is that you should just do whatever you enjoy and not listen... arrgh!"

The crowd stared at her expectantly. Selphie panicked. There had to be something she could say that wouldn't be completely hypocritical. All she wanted to tell them was that this whole feud was pointless and futile and to just get it over with -- but how she was supposed to deliver the final words to a situation as crazy as this? She couldn't be profound, she couldn't be decisive, or clever, or insightful, or original, or...

"DO WHATEVER YOU WANT TO DO X_O;;;;! I DON'T CARE! I GIVE UP!"

She stepped off the podium.

The chocobos never came.