Friday, February 19, 2021

Narrative Warfare: The Master Rhetorician, Stonetoss

If anyone alive comprehends Rhetoric better than Stonetoss, then I don't know who that man is.

Stonetoss's audience is the demographic that would know what Among Us is and therefore its core jargon term, "Sus". Short for "Suspect", it's the word used to convince other players to vote the player suspected of being a murderous Imposter off the ship and therefore out of the game.

That word, being created for the in-game chat application players use by default to discuss who the Imposter is, has broken containment and spread into the Internet at-large.

That's why this works. In three panels, Stonetoss gets across the universal sense of disgust. It's also why he's hated so much by the Enemy; they get what he's doing, and they see that he's very effective- such that there are multiple accounts trying to ape him to push the Death Cult poz while attacking him.

It all comes off like water off a duck's back, because they suck at Rhetoric in this fast-paced online medium. It's a place for jesters and comics, and the Enemy is neither.

That last panel, replicated and posted with "Sus" as a caption, would produce the freakouts we saw when folks posted fliers saying "It's OK To Be White" a while back.

If you don't know Stonetoss, hit up his site. He's been doing this long enough that he's shown to be /ourguy/, and Empire's lesser Thralls hate him for naming them.

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