It’s easy to forget that the controversial online forum 4chan, a notorious hub of anything-goes prank warfare and racism, began as a simple anime forum in 2003. It’s now been 11 years, and the anime community continues to post happily on the /a/ imageboard. The group recently started a delightfully off-kilter video project, hiring random dads for $5 each to bicker about anime.
At the Verge, Luke Winkie did some excellent sleuthing and dug up more about Rog and Tyrone, as they’re called.
Here’s the story: Roger Stockburger, the Australian man in the video, decided to put himself on Fiverr, the online service in which people offer their services for $5. Users on 4chan’s anime board hired the man and had him read a script. They then hired Gordon Hurd (who goes by the stage name Tyrone), a motivational speaker who had also put himself on Fiverr. The result: two dads arguing with each other about anime, in the most crude and 4chan of ways. The videos spread quickly.
These videos quickly became one of the most defining fixtures on the 4chan anime board, and eventually metastasized throughout the other 4chan boards and into other meme-factories like Reddit and Tumblr. Pretty soon Rog and Tyrone found themselves as the mouthpieces for, well, anything really. Remember the Team Rocket mantra from Pokemon?
Both Rog and Tyrone are taking it in stride. To them it’s lighthearted fun that isn’t meant to be taken too seriously, regardless of if the words autist and f****t are used derogatorily. Tyrone says the scripts he was given to read are “pure genius.”
“I was gobsmacked at first. The format was a bit different from what I was used to,” says a cheery-sounding Hurd, reflecting on the initial video requests. “I was surprised to see people insulting each other. I was like, ‘Man, why are these guys so rude?’ I was really uptight and really worried. But once I started to get a ton of requests, I realized there was something I was probably missing.”
The two have become a parody of inside bickering on meta subjects that go on inside the anime borads on 4chan. For example, here’s one of the two arguing about the merits of Persona 4 versus the Shin Megami Tensei series.
We absolutely recommend checking out the full story here. It just gets weirder.
H/T The Verge | Screengrab via EchoSierra/YouTube
