Thoroughly Modern Millie

Brief Notes on a Phenomenon

In 1924, the French explorer and polymath Alexandra David-Néel managed to penetrate the virtually forbidden city of Lhasa disguised as a mendicant Buddhist monk. The record of her unprecedentedly lengthy stay in Lhasa, and her other travels around Tibet, published in 1929 as “Magicians and Mystics in Tibet”, contains the first mention in Western literature of the concept of a tulpa, a thought-form to whom Buddhist mystics could impart a measure of concrete reality on the physical plane through months of absolute focus. Over the last week, I’ve found it increasingly hard to shake the feeling that we’ve all just witnessed Hull City Council, a fourth-rate educational software provider and thousands of Twitter accounts somehow replicating the sort of effect that would normally require the sustained attentions of an entire isolated monastery of the sort painted by Roerich.

For the benefit of anyone reading this who might have missed out on a few days of good clean fun, Shout Out UK, one of those vaguely sinister para-State entities that seems to specialise, according to its website, in the provision of “impartial Political and Media Literacy training and campaigns focused on democratic engagement and combatting [sic] disinformation online, tailored to local circumstances and culture” was commissioned by Hull City Council, in partnership with the deeply Orwellian Prevent, to produce an educational game for secondary schools illustrating the dangers of RADICALISATION and DIVISION and MISINFORMATION and all those other things that cause important people to jolt out of uneasy sleeps in the middle of the night. The resultant game, “Pathways”, appears to be a blend of 1984 and The Rake’s Progress, wherein “Charlie”, the protagonist, is led increasingly astray by the blandishments of a much more politically active female classmate with ultimately disastrous consequences. So far, so uninteresting.

There was, however, one feature which set Pathways apart from a dozen other educational computer games occupying an identical space. For reasons best known to themselves, the developers decided to put the views they thought particularly dangerous in the mouth of a rather fetching alt girl with a purple bob and choker. The response, once it hit Twitter, was immediate and frenzied: its byproducts, at the time of writing, include a vast array of fan art, a memecoin and even serious talk of repurposing Pathways as a dating sim (somewhere along the way, Shout Out UK ended up removing Pathways from its website out of sheer embarrassment, which is remarkable given the rhinoceros-like hide and invincible self-regards of the average QANGO employee). Despite the remarkable longevity of Ameliamania by internet standards (the phenomenon is currently entering its eighth evening), there comes a time when all tides must ebb: I have written this article as an attempt to set down some thoughts on Amelia and what she represents before we all inevitably Get Excited for Next Thing.

• Much that has been made both of the game’s unusual aesthetic choices and its astonishing Orwellianism can be more easily ascribed to incompetence than to the application of any guiding principle: Amelia was clearly randomly chosen from an assortment of cheap Corporate Memphis art assets; Charlie is given gender-neutral pronouns because the player is given a choice between a male and female character and the developers couldn’t even be bothered to record two separate narrations; the understanding of what constitutes illegal speech is exactly that that a not particularly reflective or intelligent person who vaguely understood the legal environment would adopt (much as the more egregious arrests for “hate speech” largely happen because interpretation of the law rests in the hands of the police, people whose sole qualifications for the role are three weeks of on-the-job training, three years studying Sports Science at one of those universities that advertise themselves on Spotify and a lifetime of identifying weaker targets to harass). I go back and forth as to whether these people are completely incorrect or whether they understand the deeper principles driving the British State with that crystalline clarity of insight occasionally vouchsafed to the severely retarded.

• There is clearly a deep, deep hunger on Anglo Twitter for the Alt Girl Who Agrees With You. As someone who’s spent his entire adult life trying to get the Right to be nicer to art hoes (generally in the face of universal and furious opposition), I feel the same sense of grim vindication that Cassandra must have felt when Clytemnestra and Aegisthus cornered her in the baths of Mycenae. At last, at least in theory, people are willing to contemplate colourful hair and nose piercings and a whole grab-bag of other cultural appurtenances as something exciting and fun rather than the complete deal-breaker they would have been during the Internet’s dourest and most prescriptive period in the mid-2010s (that unlovely age of the Thot Patrol and infographics on aposematism and Danger Hair). It’s impossible to say at this point whether the deep fondness of the Online Right for two-dimensional alt girls will naturally extend to their counterparts of flesh and blood, and frankly initial signs have been somewhat mixed. Still, I live in hope that my life’s work will be realised. One must, after all, imagine Sisyphus happy.

• If my more optimistic predictions come to pass, I really am hopeful that there’ll now be a proper and very visible escape route for women who’ve carved out niches as Trads at a time when that was more or less the only position available to them on the Twitter right. I strongly suspect at least a few of these are feeling rather uncomfortable with Political Christianity on British Twitter becoming increasingly the preserve of idiots, and nasty idiots at that.¹ The knowledge that they are one £10 pack of Boots purple hair dye and a haircut away from joining an accepting world of fun and whimsy and without having to jettison any of their views in the process will likely be a deep comfort.

• One of the interesting things about Ameliamania was that, at least at the outset, no large accounts on Twitter were boosting it or guiding its evolution: nobody can really take much credit for popularising what has been a completely organic phenomenon. This is the first instance for a long time where I can say that this is entirely the case. To the extent that this represents a genuine shift away from a few larger and more prescriptive accounts, locked in an increasingly unhealthy two-way parasocial relationship with their audiences and forced to endlessly retread old material and well-worn views to cater to tastes they have come to actively dislike, and towards a kaleidoscopic decentralised many-headed Hydra capable of remarkable concerted effort whenever something sufficiently catches their collective attention, this is an enormously positively development. The first two weeks of 2026 have been very weird indeed. The remainder of 2026 is going to get much weirder. I’m looking forward to it.

1. Parenthetically, I think it’s very likely indeed that the CHRIST IS KING movement in Britain will be forced to abandon any opposition to immigration because the only people prepared to listen, nodding solemnly, to their fulminations about women with nose studs being whores are people who fundamentally believe Christ was an unusually powerful witch doctor oooo