Milady Maker is a collection of 10,000 generative profile picture NFTs with a neochibi aesthetic inspired by street style tribes of Y2K Japan, according to miladymaker.net. They look like this:
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Animated GIF of various Miladys, 1 showcasing how their distinctive eyes are always more-or-less the same. |
The Milady brand supports a thriving ecosystem of derivative projects from its fan community, such as the Redacted 2 Remilio Babies. Specifically, here are some related projects: 3
- @miladymaker (Milady Maker)
- @REMILIONAIRE (Redacted Remilio Babies)
- @radbro (Radbro)
- @raddadbro (Dadbro)
- @MifairyMaker (Mifairy Maker)
- @cigawrettepacks (Cigawrette Packs)
- @muhladymaker (Muhlady Maker)
- @heiseimilady (Heisei Milady)
- @SquiggleMiladys (Squiggle Miladys)
- @OekakiMaker (Oekaki Maker)
- @schizo_posters (Schizo Posters)
- @PixeladyMaker (Pixelady Maker)
The most important to know, besides Milady herself, are Remilios. Some are depicted below. They are recognizable by their sharp eyes and straight eyebrows, as contrasted with Milady’s equally distinctive eyes.
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| Three Remilios |
Before moving on, here is some more info on the project:4
Each Milady NFT generates a variety of accessories, and their overall stylishness is rated with a drip score that helps tie value to aesthetics over pure trait scarcity, as per mythofcapitalism.com. The Milady style is inspired by the subcultural fashion tribes of Y2K Japan, and they are highly sought-after on Crypto Twitter, with a floor price of 1.95 ETH, according to mythofcapitalism.com.
Miladys are NFTs, which are financial instruments with their own discrete value, as per coindesk.com. The cheapest Miladys will cost you about $2,000 before fees, though they’ve historically sold for much more. The art for these 10,000 profile pictures was designed by a Remilia member called “Milady Sonora,” or “Milady Sonoro,” according to coindesk.com. The mastermind behind the project (and the self-identified “CEO” of Remilia) appears to be “Charlotte Fang,” also known as Charlie or Charlemagne, according to coindesk.com.
“Remilia” here refers to Remilia Corporation, an art collective known for nothing other than these NFTs at the moment. Charlotte Fang, like most other Miladys, is known mostly from his5 Twitter account, and like many other big Twitter accounts, Charlotte has an associated blog. More on him later. For more on the history of the Milady Maker project, see also this thread.
Milady Meme Themes
What follows is an overview of the main meme trends in the Milady Twitter community, as I see them.
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| There are memes, but the love is real. |
1. Saying “Milady”
Miladys on Twitter will often respond to Milady threads with the single word “milady”, whether capitalized or not. A beloved Twitter bot account, called Milady Responder, has been built to contribute to this behavior. Check Milady Responder’s comments and you will often find many human beings giving the same reply to the same tweet. This is especially common in reply to big Milady accounts, such as Charlotte Fang, and in context, is typically a way to celebrate a victory of the Milady community.
(Milady Responder seems to have gone down since this was first posted. A sequel was established, named Milady Replier, but that seems to have broken down too.)
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| A typical “Milady” bandwagon, seen here. |
2. Log On, Win Forever
A key idea in the Milady ecosystem is that, by having a Milady as your profile picture, you can “log on and win forever”. That is, as soon as you log on, you’ve already won forever – your victory is irreversible. No one can stop you. (This is a fixed phrase – don’t say “log in”, “sign in”, “sign on”, &c.)
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| Milady is astonished by how easy her victory was. |
3. Immune to Cancellation
There is the idea that setting your profile picture to a Milady undoes any past “cancellation” you might have suffered, and that this is part of the process of initiating you into the highly open & accepting Milady community. See, e.g., here.
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| Miladys are unfazed by the common claims that they are all racist, or otherwise problematic. |
4. The Discord Server
There is an official Discord server, called Milady Village. It is open to the public, but has a reputation for being highly gatekept, so that you might not fit in very easily.
5. Accelerationism, Cypherpunk, &c.
Milady is a hub for various highly-online and vaguely-extreme ideas such as accelerationism, cypherpunk, &c. This meme summarizes it:
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| Meme posted by Milady Maker |
As shown by the last line of the meme, the community is generally vaguely hostile to Reddit and, I would say, to those communities that falsely describe themselves as “rationalists”, such as LessWrong and RationalWiki.
6. Charlotte Fang’s Ideas
Charlotte Fang has a lot of ideas, as seen by his writing a blog, as well as making extensive use of Twitter’s new “long tweet” function. I don’t know much about him, but he seems to basically think that our future is highly digitalized. Some links:
- Here is a tweet where he recommends some books.
- Here is a blog post that serves as a sort of creed, and another post where he elaborates on one of its core ideas.
- In case you have heard allegations about him, here is a post where he beats the allegations.
- Here is a tweet with his views on luck.
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| Charlotte Fang is known for using many big words in a row, confusing this poor Milady. |
7. Religion & Network Spirituality
Miladys generally love God and Jesus Christ in a nonspecific way. Many Milady profile pictures have various kinds of cross ornaments.
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| A prayerful Milady. |
Remilia also endorses a concept of “network spirituality”, a new, digitalized form of spirituality. Linked here is a breakdown of what Remilia said on the topic.
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| A door-to-door evangelist for Network Spirituality. |
8. Schizophrenia, Insanity, Conspiracy Theories, &c.
Milady ties in with the general “schizoposting” meme trend, where people act like schizophrenic conspiracy theorists.
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| This Milady is totally nuts. |
In this context, I recommend checking out the beautiful posters put out by the Schizo Posters project. The following one is for illustration. They all have different colors and text and graphs on them.
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| Schizoposter with Remilio eyes and wood-grain texture. |
9. Fierceness, Resilience, Rivalry
Miladys are vaguely dangerous or terroristic, and since they’ve already won forever, they are also unbeatable.
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| A fragile Milady. |
They tend to have a rivalry with other big NFT projects, such as Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC).
10. Optimism
Miladys commonly tell each other that “wagmi”, that is, we’re all gonna make it. It’s all going to be okay!
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| Milady uses a logical division in order to prove her strand of philosophical optimism. Necessarily, from the principle of non-contradiction, we can derive that it’s either gonna be okay or it’s not gonna be okay. She then analyzes each case to find that, in both the former and the latter case, it’s gonna be okay. The possible options having been exhausted, the conclusion is ineluctable: it’s gonna be okay. This conclusion is absolutely general, since it is independent of what “it” is, so that we can know that it certainly applies to the entire universe. |
I should note that the phrase “wagmi” itself is most often said ironically, as it has been seen by many Miladys, including Charlotte Fang, as a gaslighting tactic used by inferior NFT/altcoin projects in order to rugpull the bagholders. All the same, optimism is a real feature of the Milady community.
11. Joining the community
To get into the community, start by following accounts from this Twitter list. For full immersion, set a Milady as your profile picture – the community really doesn’t mind if you right-clicked and saved it instead of buying the NFT.
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| Miladys often don’t own their Miladys. |
Charlotte Fang has endorsed this procedure as well:
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| Welcome! |
Appendices
As attachments to this post, I have made this Imgur album of Milady memes, and this second post on related cultural phenomena.
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In English, the plural would be Miladies, and this is even used by the website. (As of this writing: “Miladies were designed as separate asset layers, so they wre readymade for Live2D rigging for use as VRtube avatars.” [sic]) Charlotte Fang has used either spelling inconsistently, but I find that many fans have a strong preference for the plural “Miladys”.↩
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Most likely a euphemism for “Retarded”, a censored word in many websites. I have seen fans call things “redacted” on occasion.↩
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List modified from this tweet. I removed @riotgoolz (profile was taken down) and @reptilianbabies (profile was protected). I added Schizo Posters and Pixelady Maker.
A little after posting, I also removed Milad Maker (@MiladMaker), and it is an interesting case to note. A little after it came out, its satanic imagery had upset some Miladys, who ostracized it. Charlotte Fang has since referred to it as an “outsider derivative”.
There is a larger, less curated list of Milady derivatives at miladyderivatives.com.↩
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The referred blockquote, like some of the sentences before it, was copied from a phind.com readout – since the post is about the memes, I didn’t put a lot of effort into setting the context.↩
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Apparently Charlotte is male, despite the name.↩
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