Mooses

Mooses is a drawing which has been created and popularized by AZMindroma. Due to AZ being a part of the Legacy, it had also gained a "meme" status in the respective servers. The meme has not only spread inside of Rolling Lounge, but also affected other servers like Rolling Lounge. Ever since its start in 2017, it has found great appeal in the communities it has been exposed to, including the Legacy servers, which adopted the moose as a permanent emoji.

## Drawing Characteristics

The original image is a 1280 x 720 pixel sized png file, which features a drawing inside of it, which is supposed to represent a moose. It can be seen that the moose consists of two stick-like antlers, two dot eyes and a long carrot-like nose. It also features an incompleted mouth, giving the moose a happy expression. The mouth overlaps with the nose, preventing a 3D effect in this area. A spare dot can be seen right of the left antler, which can be assumed was going to be another antler. The body of the moose is big and not too thin, and it features 2 legs in the foreground with another 2 legs drawn as a 3D Effect for the moose. It has a long, hairy tail which falls all the way down to the moose's feet.

## History

The german graphic designer and animator called Steve from the YouTube Channel KAOZTAINMENT had planned a sequel to one of his series, "Blacky and the Black Hole". This series was about a stickman who had fallen into a black hole, upon which he falls into a parallel universe and has to take decisions of what to do in the next episode, which is then decided by the audience. The first 5 parts were completely mute, but for the 6th part and onward, KAOZTAINMENT searched for voice actors and offered several voice positions. This was done in a german forum for YouTube, where several people applied for a position as a voice actor - including AZMindroma, who was interested in the series. Once everyone applied, the positions were chosen and AZMindroma had received a position of a side character in a marketplace who would desperately ask their parent to buy everything for them. AZMindroma had received this line to voice act for:

> Ich will das da! Und ich will Schierenflügel! Los, kauf mir welche! Ich will... Ich will... Ich will!
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This audio file was recorded on a Samsung Galaxy J7 2016 on Android 8.1.0, a device which had a voice recording program preinstalled which had the feature to loop specific parts of an audio file. This was discovered by AZMindroma and shown to his sister, upon which she did a lot of experimenting and playing around with the audio files AZ had on his phone. At the time she had also decided to do the same with AZ's audio file he just recorded, and cropped it in a way where from the word "welche" in the sentence you could only hear "elche", which meant "Moose" in german. The siblings found this funny and therefore became a meme inside of the family beforehand. They also wanted to share this sort of meme with the internet in AZ's newfound channel, for which a basic moose drawing was drawn in the mobile app FlipaClip. Reference couldn't be used due to the abscence of any internet connection as they were located in Turkey, and due to neither of them knowing how a moose looked like, it got its inaccurate form. Over this drawing AZ yelled the word "Elche!" and uploaded it on his YouTube Channel later, which can still be accessed here. This 1 second video surprisingly got a lot more attention than the rest of his videos, and therefore he continued doing content with moose.

This continued on YouTube, until AZMindroma joined a Discord server called **DerNerdiTV**, a server created for the local german animator community where AZ also wanted to partake in. In that server he met **NichtNils**, another german animator. Once meeting, they found each other sympathetic and became friends closely after. At this time AZ introduced NichtNils to his moose meme, which NichtNils found appeal in. They continued making jokes about the audio and the look of the moose itself, until NichtNils came up with the idea of making a "religion" out of it, and therefore the first Discord server related to moose was created in October 23rd of 2017. They began making a cult about mooses even outside of the server, which popularized mooses in the local community there. Often it was seen as an annoyance due to the unfitting and annoying nature of the moose's promotion, upon which it was often called a "sect".

Around this time, AZMindroma met Deuzkorr. Deuzkorr had sent him an "surreptitious advertisement" (Schleichwerbung) to his server, the 1st Empire, to which AZ also sent him an "surreptitious advertisement" to the ElcheReligion server, which Deuzkorr joined. However, it wasn't until later that mooses became more prevalent in the Legacy; Its emoji addition date is unknown.

## Grammatical Mistaking

Due to a lack of grammatical knowledge, AZMindroma had mistakenly used an incorrect plural of moose, **Mooses**. Later this was found to be an incorrect plural form, but it was kept nonetheless because it added an icon to the moose's unique characteristics.

## Psychology behind Mooses

Mooses had always found a relatively good appeal in the servers it was exposed to, but it was questioned why they got so much appeal for a drawing. In a server called Rolling Lounge (in which mooses saw its biggest popularity spike), Mb B and AZMindroma wrote a theory of why this appeal had happened in such a large scale. This theory was partially polemically written and was published in their literature channel in July 4th, 2020:

> [...] That "weird shaped white animal" is supposed to be a moose, that got really popular in this server. [...] but now you might ask: "Why did a bad artwork like that blow up?" and the reason why it blew up in popularity is exactly because the moose character is simplistic in design and is appealing. With its accentuated long nose, two sticklike antlers, dead eyes and idiotic expression, you just can't help but relate to the character. This causes a positive effect to the moose since people enjoy things they can relate with, it gives the person a good feeling knowing they're not alone. [...] The moose has been used in videos with over 100k views since then, has over 50 fanarts, and is still alive after around 3 years of existence. [...]
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## References

1. ↑ https://ytforum.de/f/thread/14992-suche-synchronsprecher-innen-f%C3%BCr-animationsserie/?pageNo=1