#goncharov

[jacob-lovelace]

I got Goncharov

Goncharov Uquiz time for the memes, since it’s enjoying a renaissance!

[alexaloraetheris]

I was trying to explain Goncharov to my mom, and when describing the shoe origin I couldn't remember what the ACTUAL mistranslated movie title was. I know the word but my brain was refusing to spit out the damn word, and I tried to remember what else uses that word and then it dawned on me.

Except I ended up blurting out 'Sodom and Garfunkel' to my mom, who at this point probably thinks I'm having a stroke.

[pierog]

i'm so glad goncharov happened when it did, right before prolific public use of AI. that was pure honest gaslighting straight from the heart. real human whimsicality and trickery thru blood sweat and tears. we were a family. and we all gonched, together. you cant replicate that with any machine.

[annabelle--cane]

you have no idea how much it pains me that I can't watch goncharov. I want to watch this movie so bad it makes me look stupid.

[woodelf68]

Omg, it's the new way to find a tumblr person in the wild.

Standing in a checkout line, when an older man asks me about my Goncharov t-shirt. I say "It's a movie, " when the person behind me chimes in, "Oh, yes, Scorsese."

The original gentleman goes on to tell me about the author Goncharov, his favorite of his novels, and a famous character from one of the novels. The three of us discuss whether the main character in the movie is intentionally named after the author, referencing that character, or whether it just sounded good to the film maker. We discuss how steeped the movie is in symbology.

Two of us are having a very different conversation than the third.

[cassianandfenrysaremyboyos]

Goncharov coming third in tumblr's top 100 movies of 2023 is so damn funny. Imagine being a film studio exec who spent millions making some of the other 97 movies listed below it only to be beaten by a film that cost exactly zero dollars to make and doesn't exist

[haveyouseenthismovie-poll]

[art by @beelzeebub ]

[turntaxesgayer]

Goncharov was special because not only did we establish canon, we created a whole fanon gay interpretation and proceded to ignore the (not even real) original in favour of it. And thats what tumblr is all about.

[werewolfetone]

For me the funniest thing to come out of the goncharov meme was not any of the fake scenes or the nyt articles about it or whatever but the fact that due to the fact that he'd found it funny when I told him about it I got my dad several books by ivan goncharov for christmas that year as a joke fully expecting him to not even touch them BUT to everyone's surprise he read every single one cover to cover and liked them so much that he read dostoevsky and then read tolstoy and then pushkin and then gogol and now barely reads anything that isn't nineteenth century russian literature and also has started watching academic talks about crime and punishment and will randomly bring up shit like the politics present in bulgakov's writing in at LEAST half of our conversations. all because of goncharov

[tomassci]

we did it tumblr

[aruin3]

This quote always hits me in my heart

finally framed this @theshitpostcalligrapher goncharov original :) only twoooo years delay 😭😭 very delighted :)

[syl-stormblessed]

i’m gonna be so real with you guys. before i looked through the tag i thought that hbomberguy was some sort of Goncharov D.B. Cooper. i’ve never heard of hbomberguy in my LIFE before today i genuinely thought this was tumblr’s new made up meme of the week.

[coraclavia]

of all Riccardo Estli's compositions, I think "Katya's Waltz" from the Goncharov score is one of his most beautiful

[batcavescolony]

THE TIKTOK PEOPLE ARE SAYING THEY MADE GONCHAROV!!!!!

[haru-dipthong]

It's been a year, and still nothing has happened to the Japanese wikipedia for Goncharov. As Goncharov gradually falls into obscurity, I can't help but think that this wikipedia article is never going to be updated. Goes to show how easily history can come to not reflect reality!

How long will the japanese wikipedia article for goncharov last?

And how big is the internet, really?

I was in a wikipedia hole recently and I happened to notice that the Japanese article for Goncharov is the only language variant that is completely in-character.

Every other language specifies it as “Goncharov (meme)”. Japanese lists it as “Goncharov (1973 film)”, and formats the introduction as if it were a real movie:

Goncharov is a 1973 mafia film set in Naples, Italy. Produced by Martin Scorsese, the main cast includes Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, John Cazale, Gene Hackman, Cybill Shepherd, and Harvey Keitel.

— Wikipedia (my translation)

The rest of the article does go on to acknowledge Tumblr’s influence in Goncharov’s popularity, but every mention of this influence frames it as reviving the popularity of the supposedly real film. On two occasions the word 再燃 is used (the first kanji means “again” and the second kanji means “burn” - it means “rekindle” and can be similarly used in the metaphorical and literal sense, just like the english word “rekindle”).

Goncharov became particularly popularity on social media as a result of a reblog of a Tumblr post in August 2020. The post depicted shows the title of the film (Goncharov) in place of a brand logo on a shoe, which were described as “knockoff boots”. The image post and the comment attached to the reblog, mocking the fact that the original poster had not seen the film, became an internet meme. In November 2022, a poster made by a fan of Goncharov was uploaded to the internet, and the film’s popularity resurged. Various fan-made content about the story and production began to spread on Tumblr and other platforms. Goncharov has been widely covered in the media as an example of how fandom is born on the internet, with many prominent figures, including Scorsese himself, leaving comments.

— Wikipedia (my translation)

It’s clear the article is trying to adapt the real history of the meme and incorporate it as much as possible into the fictional history of the film. The rest follows quite similarly, and includes more analysis of how Tumblr culture created the “reignited” popularity, how Elon’s acquisition of Twitter resulted in an exodus of users to Tumblr which may have contributed to the increased awareness of the “movie”, etc. Though most of it is directly translated from the english, enough of it is original (such as the attempts to reconcile both real and fictional histories) that I suspect the article’s current state is intentional.

To get back to my initial question, how long will this article last like this?

Remember the whole Scots Wikipedia debacle? An american teenager had basically used simple word replacement to translate over 23,000 articles into Scots. Some people noticed this, but not many, and not loudly enough. It was only after a well researched reddit post pointed out the scale of the damage that people really took notice and action was taken. The wikipedia editor had apparently been doing this for 7 years before the reddit post was made.

If 20,000 articles could go largely unnoticed for 7 years, I imagine a single article could easily evade similar detection. Realistically, how many Japanese speakers are going to even hear about Goncharov and make it to the wikipedia article? Then, how many of them are going to do more googling and find out it’s all a hoax (or know already)? THEN, how many of them are going to tell a wikipedia admin that the article is a lie, or publicise it somehow in a way that forces the editors to update the article?

I think the reality is that although the internet may appear to be a massive open town square (or several), it also has side streets, and side streets of side streets. I feel like the number of active members in each online hobby or interest group are really quite small, and then they get divided between platforms, and even further divided into subgroups. I think if one decided it was something one wanted to do, it would be quite easy to become one of the most prevalent members of any online community you chose just by devoting the time and energy to it.

It’s also kind of shocking how much internet content is inaccessible on account of it being in a different language. English reigns supreme in terms of sheer volume, but there is original research and journalism and entertainment and art in every language, that hasn’t and might never be translated into english. For example, I found it very difficult to find any english sources or research for my post about the evolving conjugation of 違う, but I easily found several japanese papers and websites. In fact, if you google “違くない adjective or verb”, the first english result that doesn’t just handwave it as “informal” or “slang” is a tumblr blog with my post on it!

It’s a small internet indeed where my little hobby language blog is, according to google, the prevailing english source on what is quite a remarkable change in Japanese grammar that’s been happening since the 80s.

I think the Japanese unreality version of the Goncharov wikipedia article will stand for many years to come.

(below link shows the article at time of writing)

[mostly-funnytwittertweets]