{"id":100502,"date":"2026-01-24T03:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-01-24T08:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=100502"},"modified":"2026-01-26T11:25:01","modified_gmt":"2026-01-26T16:25:01","slug":"britains-amelia-phenomenon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2026\/01\/24\/britains-amelia-phenomenon\/","title":{"rendered":"Britain’s Amelia phenomenon"},"content":{"rendered":"

On his Substack, Fergus Mason<\/a> talks about the new Queen of English Resistance, Amelia:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Amelia, the new queen of the British right.<\/p><\/div>\n

Independent journalism is a pretty grim business right now. Writing about the state of our poor broken country can be soul-destroying. Good news is thin on the ground; new calamities seem to arrive daily, either a fresh atrocity committed by an illegal immigrant or some new Labour assault on our freedom. So it’s nice when something a little more light-hearted comes along — even if it does make some serious points, too.<\/p>\n

A couple of weeks ago the media started reporting a new online game funded by Prevent<\/a>, the government’s (completely dysfunctional) department for diverting people away from extremism. Commissioned by Hull City Council and produced by “creative social enterprise” Shout Out UK, the game — called Pathways<\/em> — is intended to “Encourage learning about the concept of extremism and radicalisation through the process of choice and safe exploration”.<\/p>\n

As games go, this is a spectacularly dull one. Players choose a character, from a very limited selection — there are two, one male and one female, but they’re both called Charlie and use they\/them pronouns. They then have to navigate their character through a series of scenarios, answering multiple-choice questions. The idea is that if you give the “wrong” answers you’ll get referred to Prevent, but it soon becomes obvious that almost any answers will get you referred to Prevent. The constant theme is that there are approved views and ways of acting — which don’t, for example, include doing research to find out if something you saw on the internet is true or not — and that, if you deviate from this, the state will step in to “support” you. A lot of this support looks suspiciously like re-education:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

Of course, if you know much about the online right, you’ll probably see the problem already. As one stunned Reddit<\/em> user commented, “Wait, are you telling me they made the cute goth e-girl the ‘racist’? Do they understand how the internet works?<\/em>”<\/p>\n

Well, they certainly do now.<\/p>\n

The Daily Telegraph<\/em> published an article about Pathways<\/em><\/a> on 9 January, bringing the game to public notice. That same day, X user Bovril-Gesellschaft posted “I think I’m in love with Amelia”. It seemed many other right-wingers were too, because within hours Amelia memes were appearing in large numbers. Mostly produced with AI, these depicted Amelia in a wide range of styles (probably reflecting their creators’ personal tastes), but all featured her purple hair and most stuck with the outfit of a pink dress and purple hoodie or cardigan the game depicted her in. Images ranged from cartoons in the style of the original game to photorealism. […]<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

There’s a lot to laugh about in this. For example, brightly coloured “danger hair” has generally been the hallmark of women on the far left<\/em>. Amelia subverts this by giving our new heroine her distinctive purple bob. Will we see the pro-Hamas nuts and trans cultists abruptly return to natural hair colours to dissociate themselves from Amelia? That would be funny.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On his Substack, Fergus Mason talks about the new Queen of English Resistance, Amelia: Independent journalism is a pretty grim business right now. Writing about the state of our poor broken country can be soul-destroying. Good news is thin on the ground; new calamities seem to arrive daily, either a fresh atrocity committed by an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,14,84,28,53],"tags":[1612,570,58,1171,593],"class_list":["post-100502","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-gaming","category-government","category-media","category-politics","tag-amelia","tag-england","tag-internet","tag-populism","tag-socialmedia"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-q90","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100502","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100502"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100502\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":100507,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100502\/revisions\/100507"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}