is a fictional

manga Manga (Japanese: 漫画 ) are comics or graphic novels originating from Japan. Most manga conform to a style developed in Japan in the late 19th century, and the form has a long prehistory in earlier Japanese art. The term ''manga'' is u ...

character Character or Characters may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Literature * ''Character'' (novel), a 1936 Dutch novel by Ferdinand Bordewijk * ''Characters'' (Theophrastus), a classical Greek set of character sketches attributed to The ...

that originated on the Japanese internet

textboard A textboard is a simple kind of Internet forum; most textboards require neither registration nor entry of a screen name. Textboards, like imageboards, were invented in Japan, but they remain relatively unknown outside it, in contrast to imageboar ...

2channel , also known as 2ch, Channel 2, and sometimes retrospectively as 2ch.net, was an anonymous Japanese textboard founded in 1999 by Hiroyuki Nishimura. Described in 2007 as "Japan's most popular online community", the site had a level of influe ...

and was created in 2015 after a series of incidents in which Japanese nationals were kidnapped and beheaded by ISIS. The character is portrayed as a ''

moe Moe, MOE, MoE or m.o.e. may refer to: In arts and entertainment Characters * Moe Szyslak, from the animated television show ''The Simpsons'' * Moe, leader of The Three Stooges, played by Moe Howard * Moe Higurashi, supporting character in ''Yash ...

''-style girl.

Overview

ISIS-chan was originally conceived by users of

as a response to the propaganda of the

Islamic terrorism Islamic terrorism (also known as Islamist terrorism or radical Islamic terrorism) refers to terrorist acts with religious motivations carried out by fundamentalist militant Islamists and Islamic extremists. Incidents and fatalities f ...

group

ISIS Isis (; ''Ēse''; ; Meroitic: ''Wos'' 'a''or ''Wusa''; Phoenician: 𐤀𐤎, romanized: ʾs) was a major goddess in ancient Egyptian religion whose worship spread throughout the Greco-Roman world. Isis was first mentioned in the Old Kingd ...

. The character is a ''moe'' anthropomorphism of ISIS and soon became a

meme A meme ( ) is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural i ...

across some Japanese social media. Their intentions were to flood the web with ISIS-chan's images to make the character rank highly in Google's search engine results, the goal being that an internet search for ISIS would come up with the ''moe'' character instead of militant propaganda sites. The campaign has become a part of the social media war that the US and the UK have already launched against ISIS. ISIS-chan received an Utau voicebank in December 2015.

References

{{Islamic State Fictional characters introduced in 2015 Moe anthropomorphism Twitter Propaganda 2channel Works about the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant Internet meme characters

Overview

See also

References