Momo is Still Not Real (But Memes Are)

D&D is no stranger to moral panics, and there's a new boogeyman taking the place of demons in the 80s: Momo, a fake picture of a fake sculpture about a fake trend.

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Moral panics can arise from a popular trend that is unique to children and is foreign to some adults. Sociologist Stanley Cohen outlined the social theory of moral panic in his 1972 book titled Folk Devils and Moral Panics. It proceeds through five stages, beginning with a perceived threat to social norms; news media coverage; widespread public concern; authorities responding; and actions that result. This is precisely what happened with Dungeons & Dragons.
[h=3]Dungeons and...D'oh![/h]Joseph P. Laycock lays out what happened in the 80s with D&D in Dangerous Games: What the Moral Panic over Role-Playing Games Says about Play, Religion, and Imagined Worlds:

Anyone who was aware of fantasy role-playing games in the 1980s and 1990s was equally aware of claims that these games were socially, medically, and spiritually dangerous. A coalition of moral entrepreneurs that included evangelical ministers, psychologists, and law enforcement agents claimed that players ran a serious risk of mental illness as they gradually lost their ability to discern fantasy from reality. It was also claimed that role-playing games led players to commit violent crimes, including suicide and homicide, and to the practice of witchcraft and Satanism. In North America, the United Kingdom, and Australia, activists mobilized against these games. Several school districts and colleges banned gaming clubs and removed gaming books from their libraries. In the United States, activists petitioned federal agencies to require caution labels on gaming materials, warning that playing them could lead to insanity and death. Police held seminars on “occult crime” in which self-appointed experts discussed the connection between role-playing games and an alleged network of criminal Satanists. Dozens of accused criminals attempted the “D& D defense,” claiming that they were not responsible for their actions but were actually the victims of a mind-warping game.
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There were several factors that led to D&D's moral panic, ranging from the disappearance of Dallas Egbert III while supposedly playing a LARP in the steam tunnels beneath Michigan State University )and the subsequent dramatic retelling in Mazes & Monsters) to a game called to task for straddling the line between adults and children. We discussed previously how D&D's target audience was slowly defined not by its creators (who were more interested in tabletop wargamers) but by market forces, with the Eric J. Holmes Basic set creating a curious dichotomy of younger players who eventually would graduate from Basic to Advanced...and their parents weren't happy with what they saw. Art & Arcana explains:

In no time flat, new allegations emerged, often driven by a casual perusal of the imagery: D&D was a clandestine recruitment vehicle for Satan worship and witch covens. TSR did little to calm these concerns when it unveiled another AD&D hardcover core book, the 1980 Deities & Demigods cyclopedia—a revision of the 1976 release Gods, Demi-Gods & Heroes, but this time with all new artwork instead of the mostly public domain medieval header pieces and ornamental designs that had been used in the work previously. It contained a mix of sections nominally based on historical beliefs as well as pantheons of gods and godlings drawn from fantasy fiction.
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Art & Arcana succinctly demonstrates what a "casual perusal" might look to a parent flipping through the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual (above). All this added up to a moral panic in which the media breathlessly reported the threat of children being corrupted by the game, police offered warnings, and worried parents blocked access. If this sounds familiar, it's because it's happening again with a modern twist.
[h=3]You Again?[/h]We've already discussed Momo, a photo of a disturbing-looking sculpture that encourages children to commit suicide. She's back again, this time attracting hundreds of thousands of views on Facebook, dominating the news, and even showing up in supposed Peppa Pig videos on YouTube aimed at children. It wasn't real then, and the Guardian explains it's not real now:

Child safety campaigners say the story has spread due to legitimate concerns about online child safety, the sharing of unverified material on local Facebook groups, and official comments from British police forces and schools which are based on little hard evidence. While some concerned members of the public have rushed to share posts warning of the suicide risk, there are fears that they have exacerbated the situation by scaring children and spreading the images and the association with self-harm.
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What changed to make Momo popular again?

Although the Momo challenge has been circulating on social media and among schoolchildren in various forms since last year, the recent coverage appears to have started with a single warning posted by a mother on a Facebook group for residents of Westhoughton, a small Lancashire town on the edge of Bolton. This post, based on an anecdote she had heard from her son at school, went viral before being picked up by her local newspaper and then covered by outlets from around the world.
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This in turn propagated in the tabloids, led to celebrities chiming in (which created more headlines), and police and schools issuing formal warnings (which led to yet more headlines). YouTube says the claims are false:

After much review, we’ve seen no recent evidence of videos promoting the Momo Challenge on YouTube. Videos encouraging harmful and dangerous challenges are clearly against our policies, the Momo challenge included. Despite press reports of this challenge surfacing, we haven’t had any recent links flagged or shared with us from YouTube that violate our Community Guidelines.​

Snopes agrees. And yet Momo persists despite evidence to the contrary. It's entirely possible children are now being exposed to Momo not due to a pernicious Internet monster, but because the media has plastered her face everywhere. Like parents flipping through the Monster Manual or Deities & Demigods, all it takes is one picture of Momo next to a kid's video to propagate parental fears:

It’s important to note that we do allow creators to discuss, report, or educate people on the Momo challenge/character on YouTube. We’ve seen screenshots of videos and/or thumbnails with this character in them. To clarify, it is not against our policies to include the image of the Momo character on YouTube; that being said, this image is not allowed on the YouTube Kids app and we’re putting safeguards in place to exclude it from content on YouTube Kids.​

The rise of streaming video has its benefits, as D&D can attest. That's not to say that the threat of self-harm or of children being upset by pernicious Internet videos isn't a concern. But like anything else, parents should exercise judicious restraint over what their kids do by educating themselves before blocking YouTube...or throwing out their D&D books.

Mike "Talien" Tresca is a freelance game columnist, author, communicator, and a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to http://amazon.com. You can follow him at Patreon.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Now that I have kids of my own, I certainly look at some of those images from the early D&D books with a different eye.

But what I also look at with a different eye is how my parents, who clearly weren't crazy about all of it, didn't tell me I couldn't have those books or otherwise restrict me from the hobby.

And that makes me appreciate them more, and helps me in how I want to parent my kids.

 

[Celebrim]

I quoted and bolded exactly what you said.

I suggest reading what you wrote, and what I quoted, before getting your hackles up.

I know exactly what I said. IIRC, the anecdote about the neo-Druidic membership form was related to me as a funny story by an active neo-pagan. I've never had the form in my hand to verify that, but seeing as I have first hand experience with people who got into paganism or Satanism (in most cases for a short while) after first exposure in D&D, the story was believable. I prefaced that I could not in fact verify it, in case it was an urban legend and because knowing that there is an active pagan community on EnWorld, I thought I could possibly get confirmation.

There is no need to tell me not to get my hackles up. It's quite obvious to anyone reading the thread that I first got your hackles up before you got mine up.

As for your other issue ... it is a tragedy when anyone ends their life. But if you are accepting that someone ended their life because of D&D, I would suggest that either you don't know a great deal about mental health, or that the idea that his "suicide was connected by his family to his playing D&D" may not be 100% accurate.

You don't know what I'm saying or thinking, because I haven't given you my take on the death of my first cousin (or on Jack Chick for that matter). I'm just addressing the idea that I'm making statements based on hearsay, which was the main thrust of your challenge to me.

That the suicide of my first cousin was connected by his family to his playing D&D is not something you are in a position to gainsay. Whether that diagnosis is accurate is not something you have the information to comment on, because regardless of your claims to be an expert in mental health you are wholly and completely unfamiliar with the details of this particular case. How I connect the two is not something I've talked about, because seriously, I don't consider EnWorld the sort of place where you can carry on serious conversations with any expectation that they'll be seriously thought about. Though, I think it's probably fair to guess that as an avid RPer, I probably don't have the same take my family has nor that I agree with Jack Chick about much of anything.

The truth is not that my hackles are up, so much as soon as someone offered an opinion that diverged even slightly from your world view, you took it as carte blanche to be insulting.

 

[billd91]

As someone who was targeted by religious groups in school, for a long time I reflexively felt that there was nothing wrong with how D&D presented itself. But after re-reading Art & Arcana and looking at the art through the eyes of a parent...yep, I would have had a problem with it.

I think D&D's split focus was largely to blame for this. D&D co-opted a variety of religions in Deities & Demigods and the Monster Manual -- and none of that was an issue. I think that came from wargaming, where there was a certain deatchment from the whole thing -- replaying historical events didn't mean you agreed with the nation's policies that you played -- and so D&D treated religions like more data, independent of cultural concerns. And that's all fine and good in the scholarly world of wargaming played by adults.

It falls apart when you have Basic D&D, which was marketed to kids, that was meant to be a stepping stone to Advanced gaming. The disconnect was sharp -- Basic D&D was almost independent of Gary's AD&D, and as a result the two different depictions of religious symbols varied greatly.

It was only a matter of time before D&D got tarred with the same broad brush and parents got upset.

Honestly, I doubt a more nuanced treatment of religions and demons would have mattered much. Any form of witchcraft or magic would probably have been enough to provoke a response once D&D got popular enough with kids. Just look at the anti-Harry Potter hysteria. The stories incorporate some strong and positive moral messages, yet they are the object of a senseless moral panic among some groups because of their inclusion of magic.

 

[talien]

I think one important piece I missed pointing out in the article is that the traditional forms of authority are no longer trusted. D&D was outside the experience of a lot of groups (including police and religious institutions) and similarly we don't know what to make of social media's push to target kids. There's no "Internet police" to help us determine what's right and wrong, so people react this way "just to be safe."

Which is how we get "authorities" (principals of schools, police) issuing statements and their statements only adding fuel to the panic.

 

[Celebrim]

Honestly, I doubt a more nuanced treatment of religions and demons would have mattered much. Any form of witchcraft or magic would probably have been enough to provoke a response once D&D got popular enough with kids. Just look at the anti-Harry Potter hysteria. The stories incorporate some strong and positive moral messages, yet they are the object of a senseless moral panic among some groups because of their inclusion of magic.

The two things aren't alike.

For anything, there is always a small amount of people that are outraged about something. The interconnectedness of modern media tends to create a platform that can magnify the actual scale of concern, without actually giving people any concrete sense of how widespread the outrage or concern actually is. That someone protested 'Harry Potter' doesn't surprise me. But I'd guess that disapproval among Christian groups in the United States for D&D at the height of the Occult scare hit 50% or higher.

A comparatively high scale protest, but which attracted less media attention, was concerns within the Christian community concerning Pullman's 'His Dark Materials' series, and I invite comparison between how well accepted the Harry Potter series was on both sides of the pond, compared to how well Pullman's work was accepted in still largely religious America compared to the largely post-Christian UK. Pullman's work certainly 'raised some hackles' in a broad way; protests of Rawlings work was a blip largely confined to a few highly insular fundamentalist groups.

In the case of Harry Potter 'hysteria' I can feel pretty safe in saying it did not remotely match the scale of the occult panic with respect to D&D. The groups that are offended by Harry Potter very strongly overlap the groups that think for example that CS Lewis and Tolkien were Satanist promoting occult ideas. That these groups represent a miniscule fraction of the evangelical Christian movement is hardly something that needs to be said. In the vast majority of even evangelical churches, using or quoting Tolkien or CS Lewis in a sermon illustration is considered perfectly acceptable, and for that matter, considering the mid-story conversion by Rawlings to Christianity, the later books are decidedly pro-Christian in context.

Similarly, while I hardly have a survey I can point to prove this, I think I can safely present myself as subject matter expert, and say that while there certainly would have been congregations that objected to fantasy as a genre as a whole, they are vastly outnumbered by the congregations that object to explicitly occult and Satanic content specifically. This things have a scale to them, and while you may be right that some response would have been forth coming, I feel fairly safe in saying that had the comic book code been in effect on all of TSR's publications, and had no overtly occult symbolism been used, the scale would have been so small we wouldn't have been having this conversation.

 

[Mark Craddock]

/facepalm

My older brother's best friend told me that those scorch marks outside of town were left from people sacrificing babies to Satan.


(It is difficult for me to believe, in this day and age, that there is a defense of the terrible moral panics of the 80s ... on a TTRPG website. What next- "Jack Chick, misunderstood genius who truly understood D&D?")

Leave it to someone on the internet to excise a well articulated point and focus on one small bit of the statement to make their argument.

 

[Arma virumque]

A casual perusal of the images at the top of the story generates a game of "One of these is not like the other".

The occult panic of the 1980's almost certainly wouldn't have occurred or reached the scope that it did had the game not deliberately included imagery and content meant to connect the game to the occult beliefs pertaining to a real world religious group (or groups). A parent perusing the content of the 1e AD&D game, casually or intently, would have immediately recognized the connection between some of the content and traditional depictions of Satan, devils, and demons. The names given to many of the characters - Baal, Asmodeus, Beelzebub, and so forth - would be recognizable as references to demonic forces in either their sacred text of the Religion or in the occult practices of splinter groups. The depiction of horned bat winged figures would immediately be recognizable as depictions of demonic forces. The 1e PH included spells for binding demons that have been notably lacking in later versions of the game, which tend to strip occult associations out of the base line Wizard or at least make them much less direct, much less core to the game, and leave the imagery up to the individual table.

For many parents and guardians these depictions absolutely would have been offensive in context even if they made no assumptions about the purposes for which the content was included in the game. One doesn't have to believe that the games creators were actually Satan worshipers to object to the content. In the context of depictions of the occult, depictions of paganism and magic which might have otherwise been perceived as relatively innocent would take on an entirely different character to many pious believers. A parent that would have had no objection to reading a fairy tale as a bed time story, could still object to depicting Satan or Beelzebub in a story otherwise divorced from an appropriate religious context.

Nor from one perspective were the parents entirely wrong in there concerns, to the extent that I can personally attest to several people I know developing (usually passing) interests in the occult or paganism following experience with D&D. I've even heard (but not confirmed) that in the 90's one neo-Pagan druidic group added to its membership form, in answer to the question, "How did you first become interested in Druidism?" a multiple choice answer, "By playing D&D or other RPGs"? While I haven't confirmed that story, based on my personal anecdotes it's a very believable story. So regardless of the intent, from the perspective of the religious, even the innocent association with the religious ideas that they found objectionable were in fact religiously objectionable.

Parallel objections can be found in some religious and irreligious communities to the pro-Christian content of CS Lewis's Narnia books, even down to the objection that it is inappropriately and covertly trying to influence the religious beliefs of children.

Similarly, the 'Momo Challenge' hoax likely would have gotten no legs at all, had it not followed on the heels of a number of equally unbelievable and yet apparently true assertions involving Tide pod challenges and boiling water challenges, and even innocent challenges like ice water challengers. In the context, a person could reasonably object the hoax even knowing that it was a hoax. It's simply not something which it is appropriate to joke about, nor is trolling parents about child safety a particularly funny thing to do. Starting a hoax about suicide can be objectionable even if it is a hoax, and while people might be relieved to discover it is a hoax, less shame falls on them for having fell for someone's hoax than on the hoax maker.

There is a certain disingenuousness involved in wanting to name drop imagery associated with a religion in order to piggy back on the story telling power of that religion and the associations that provokes, and then pretend to be shocked when the people for whom those stories are more than stories are offended by the usurpation of those stories for commercial purposes. For those wondering, depiction of a horrible skeletal monster for most religious people is very different than appropriating the traditional depictions of Satan and his minions. The Lich picture might have been deemed inappropriate for young viewers, but it wouldn't have been deemed inherently inappropriate by most the way the sexualized Succubi or Satanic Asmodeus were, however innocently it was done. Writers like Tracy Hickman who is himself devoutly religious had no objection to depicting vampires and mummies and other monsters of movie horror in his works, nor are would his works like I3: Pyramid or I6: Ravenloft likely have drawn negative attention or skepticism from the broader religious community had they not been called into question by association.

Thank you for that well-articulated explanation of the perspective of some parents and religious leaders in the 1980s. I also experienced everything you write about as a teenager in the 80s; in college, in fact, I had to formally petition and argue for the right to include D&D as part of a school-sanctioned gaming club. But as a parent today, I have a more nuanced and forgiving understanding of the situation.

I thought it was obvious that you weren't arguing for the correctness of the 1980s moral panic, but rather for some level of understanding of (and sympathy for) the people involved. You accomplished that goal well. It makes me sad that some people don't understand the difference between showing empathy and showing agreement.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[Celebrim]

I thought it was obvious that you weren't arguing for the correctness of the 1980s moral panic, but rather for some level of understanding of (and sympathy for) the people involved. You accomplished that goal well. It makes me sad that some people don't understand the difference between showing empathy and showing agreement.

Thank you. Sadly, such is our present culture, about which much could be said, but not to any avail.

Speaking of people I don't agree with, I actually even have some empathy for Jack Chick, while at the same time I also think that he is a complete idiot. This should not be surprising. I find I have no trouble maintaining a great deal of empathy for myself, while also and at the same time thinking that I am a complete idiot.