Can being exposed to too many ridiculous things cause you to lose your sense of irony? I wonder.
It all began when I watched this video by Dream Evil: The Book of Heavy Metal.
I watched it and thought: „omg, what a bunch of posers. Am I a wannabe? YES! Have I no dignity? Obviously not!“ I was so unnerved by the stupidity of it all I immediately put the band’s name into my „knowitalreadyitsucks.txt“ file. I really have that file and it serves me well because I tend to forget the names of bad bands, comedians etc. and then I read their name somewhere and I check them out again, suffer again and then I’m sick for the rest of the day.
Even reading this part of the lyrics didn’t make me change my mind:
Don’t need no flashy house
No car or ugly wife
The only thing I want
Is what my parent’s don’t
I thought it was a song against people who call people I’d call posers posers. Gods know it wouldn’t be the first one. So it didn’t even occur to me that the song might not be all serious. Until I started reading the comments under the video the next day after playing it to my sister (and telling her „omg i found this band and their liek uber p053r5 lol wtf“). It was then that I first realised that the song and the video were most likely meant ironically as most commenters said so.
I was relieved.
But this is something, I now realised, I had to struggle with before. I remember getting bad marks for essays in German and English classes because I failed to recognise the irony in texts when everyone else recognised it. At the same time people tell me I have a very ironical sense of humour myself.
The problem is this: I’m used to so much ridiculous bullshit that nothing seems particularly unbelieveably to me anymore and thus I don’t have this „Oh, they can’t be serious“ reaction when I see another piece of it. The video above, for example, resembles that of Within Temptation’s „Ice Queen“ and don’t get me started on the number of bands who’d sing these lyrics and mean them. I also tend to take people seriously no matter what they say or do because I’ve so often seen pain and insecurity caused because people’s honest self-expression was taken to be a joke. Now I see the downside.
Also, whoever gets the reference in the headline will receive a cookie 
