(playlist)
🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖
👻🪸🐈⬛ Phantomoperand 👻🪸🐈⬛
🎭♟️🕹️ Kukla Rejimi 🎭♟️🕹️
(Turkish)
Old Web Revival is a culture that seeks to reconstruct the world of the personal internet that social media has largely eliminated. The most striking feature of this culture is its revival of the lost internet through little cats, anime girls, dolls, virtual pets, and digital idols. Today, someone building their own website can fill it with animated graphics dating back to the 1990s. On the same page, they can dedicate a shrine-like section to a character from Japanese animation, adopt a digital creature, and represent themselves as an imaginary animal. What these figures have in common is that they represent small, manageable lives in the face of vast technological systems.
The history of this small-scale life extends back to the world order established after 1945. Japan, defeated by the atomic bombings and the American occupation, went on to develop one of the world’s most powerful character, toy, anime, and gaming industries in the following decades. The robot child who wants to be loved, the anime girl in need of protection, the domesticated fantasy creature, and the adoptable digital companion became different figures produced by this industry. American-centered internet technologies expanded their international circulation. When social media established a new order in which people constantly displayed and measured their own lives, the figures of the old personal internet became remnants of that transformation. Old Web Revival placed these same figures at the center of a new pursuit of personal sovereignty.
The sharpest connection here is bound up with the Japanese word kawaii. The history of this word, which means cuteness today, encompasses embarrassment, pity, smallness, and the need for protection. Postwar Japan’s international position gave these older sentiments a new political meaning: a body that remained small in the face of overwhelming power could become lovable, protectable, and possessable. In some erotic productions, the powerlessness of that same body became material for adult desire. Lolicon and shotacon figures make the sexualization of childhood visible, while internet folklore about tormenting cute creatures reveals how care and cruelty can turn into one another. The masochism of kawaii and the sadistic power exercised over these figures constitute two interconnected uses of the same character culture.
The central tension of Old Web Revival also emerges here. As a person builds their own little world through a cat, toy, or anime character, they also acquire the power to determine that figure’s body and behavior. A person can create a puppet of their own to free themselves from being someone else’s puppet. Generative artificial intelligence has added a new stage to this relationship. Large American-centered computing systems can now generate images, voices, speech, and character behavior. The centralized technological power symbolized by the Manhattan Project reappears first in the internet’s promise of connection, then in social media’s economy of visibility, and today in artificial intelligence’s capacity for production. The figures of Old Web Revival embody the conflicts of this long history, concentrated in small bodies.
The World Social Media Took Away
On the personal internet of the 1990s, a website was a space that someone arranged like their own home. Users prepared their own homepages, introduced the films and games they loved, published family photographs, and linked to other websites. Services such as GeoCities created digital neighborhoods where these personal pages stood side by side. One page could be devoted to religious beliefs, another to a music group, and another to a real pet or an erotic collection. Each user’s world was recognizable through the combination of the content they selected and the links they created.
Social media, which expanded during the 2000s, moved personal publishing into a different architecture. Facebook, MySpace, Tumblr, and subsequent platforms made it easier for people to find one another and share content. As these platforms grew, the practice of linking that had characterized personal sites was reorganized around follower counts and engagement metrics. While users of the old web welcomed visitors to their own pages, social media users sought visibility in the platform’s feed. A person’s photograph, body, relationships, and tastes became a profile subject to constant evaluation.
The social figure of this transformation was the influencer. Influencers regularly display their own lives, attract other people’s attention, and monitor the numerical results of that attention. The relationship between personal visibility and self-monitoring described in Yersiz Şeyler’s analysis of social media shows how this figure operates (🔗). A person’s own personality became a character continually remarketed on the platform. Meanwhile, the toys and anime characters of the old internet gradually acquired another function: they became alternative means of representation for people who withdrew from displaying their actual faces and everyday lives.
Yahoo’s closure of GeoCities in 2009 was one of the most visible historical markers of this transition. Some old websites survived in archives, graphic files, and people’s memories. Neocities, launched in 2013, reintroduced the idea of building a personal website to new users. Communities that developed around Yesterweb in 2021, the MelonLand and 32-Bit Cafe initiatives of 2022–2023, and Nekoweb, launched in 2024, turned this practice into a broader movement. The spread of the name Web Revival also traces back to Yesterweb discussions in 2021 (🔗).
The new movement brought together people who had experienced the old internet firsthand and younger people who knew that period through archives. HTML is the markup language that establishes the structure of a web page; CSS is the styling system that determines its appearance. Personal websites built with these tools can be arranged differently from ready-made social media profiles. Placing their own images, diaries, games, and characters wherever they wish became a central activity for site owners. Thus, the figures of Old Web Revival are both historical memories and instruments of personal representation brought back into use.
Kawaii: Embarrassment Becoming Love, Defeat Becoming a Small Body
The older form かはゆし (kahayushi) of the Japanese word 可愛い (kawaii) is related to the expression 顔映ゆし (kaohayushi). Japanese dictionaries record one of its older meanings as “きまりがわるい。はずかしい。” [To feel embarrassed or ashamed.] Another meaning in the word’s history is “かわいそうだ。ふびんである。” [To be pitiable or wretched.] Over time, compassion for a being perceived as small, powerless, or lovable came to the fore (🔗).
This chain of meanings developed centuries before 1945. Japan’s military defeat, the atomic devastation, and the American occupation then provided a new historical setting for the relationship between smallness and protection. After the war, the country’s security remained tied to the American military presence. During the same period, Japanese industry developed considerable economic and technological capacity. A distinct asymmetry thus emerged between productive power and international military standing.
This asymmetry acquired a form through which it could be contemplated in the figures of the character industry. 鉄腕アトム (Tetsuwan Atomu, Astro Boy), introduced in 1952, was a robot child powered by atomic energy. He was extraordinarily strong, yet needed human love and acceptance. ゴジラ (Gojira, Godzilla), from 1954, represented the devastation wrought by atomic power in the body of a gigantic monster. One embodied technology domesticated within a small body; the other embodied catastrophe returning in an enlarged form. In later combining robot toys, the child’s reassembly of scattered pieces became important. This historical connection is examined in detail in Yersiz Şeyler’s article on Voltron (🔗).
The kawaii consumer culture that gained strength in the 1970s placed other characters alongside the technological child. Sanrio’s Hello Kitty was created in 1974. Circulating on notebooks, bags, toys, and small gifts, the character became a constant companion in everyday life. Characters such as My Melody, Cinnamoroll, and Rilakkuma developed similar forms of intimacy. Kuromi, meanwhile, brought mischief and minor rebellion into the cute-character industry.
In these figures, smallness changes from a deficiency into a means of gaining love. People want to protect a small character, keep it, carry it with them, and make it part of their lives. The character’s dependence ensures the continuity of the attention it receives. The masochistic relationship here lies in a position of powerlessness becoming a lovable identity. The sadistic possibility emerges from that same small body’s susceptibility to another person’s design, ownership, and intervention.
Old Web Revival brings these figures back into the personal room. Rather than merely seeing Hello Kitty on a product, the user makes her an inhabitant of their own website. Sanrio’s commercial character becomes a token of personal intimacy in the user’s private web world. The cute figure that postwar Japan offered to the global market is appropriated anew amid the remnants of the American-centered internet. Kawaii thus becomes a cultural language where defeat, consumption, and the desire to exercise sovereignty on a small scale intersect.
Cat, Toy, and Doll: The Management of Small-Scale Life
The cat is the most recognizable animal of Old Web Revival. Penelope, Neocities’ orange cat, is portrayed as a website-building character wearing a hard hat and carrying tools. Nekoweb’s mascot is Kuro, while 32-Bit Cafe’s is named Bitty the Kitty. When MelonLand forum users discussed this commonality in 2026, they linked cats’ tendency to defend their own territory as independent creatures with personal websites (🔗).
The cat’s digital past arises from the convergence of several cultures. In Japanese computing, Oneko was a small cat that followed the mouse pointer across the screen. In Japanese forums, figures such as Monā and Giko Neko, drawn using ASCII characters, became part of shared internet humor. In the United States, LOLcats and Nyan Cat made the cat one of the most recognizable characters of viral internet culture. All these traditions converge in the same animal in the revival: a pet, site owner, independent personality, program, and community mascot.
The sovereignty embodied by this cat is quite small. A cat lives in someone’s home, receives care, and maintains its own habits. Likewise, a personal website owner uses a vast network infrastructure to arrange a small space of their own. Penelope’s role as a builder directly represents this relationship. Rather than governing the larger system, the cat builds its own website; its independence exists within the confines of its home.
Virtual pets established this relationship of dependence even more explicitly. Tamagotchi, released in Japan in 1996, was a digital creature that demanded feeding, cleaning, and constant attention from its user. Neopets, founded in 1999, combined virtual animals with gaming, shopping, collecting, and online community. The Chao creatures in Sonic games and electronic Furby toys were also small beings that received care, developed, and behaved as though they had personalities. Love and ownership operated simultaneously in relation to these figures.
While users responded to the creature’s needs, they also determined its living conditions. Care gave the user responsibility for and control over a small living being. Social media’s practice of repeatedly calling users back to their screens through notifications fostered a similar habit to this earlier rhythm of caregiving. The historical change is striking: in the first case, the little creature demanded attention from a person; in the second, the large platform became a system that continually demanded human attention.
The cyberpet and adoptable traditions of the Old Web circulated these figures among personal sites. An adoptable is a digital creature or small graphic that another user can place on their own website. Sections where these figures are collected are called toyboxes. One user adopts a creature designed by another site owner, links back to its source, and keeps it in their own world. 32-Bit Cafe’s guide to the personal web describes this custom as an ongoing community practice (🔗).
The Dollz tradition extended the same relationship of possession to the human body. Popular in the 1990s, Dollz were pixel dolls whose clothing and accessories users could change. Avatars in the graphical chat environment called The Palace spread in combination with digital dress-up toys. The Japanese 着せ替え (kisekae) tradition also revolved around the same act of dressing up. Today, personal web archives preserve these dolls as reusable bodies from the internet’s past (🔗).
The social role of Dollz is to give users the power to design their own digital bodies. Users can present themselves in different clothes, appearances, and personalities. The same technique also enables alterations to a figure created by someone else. Self-representation and the power to manage another person’s body thus come together in the same toy. The revival’s fondness for dolls, avatars, and virtual pets carries forward this long history of turning the lovable small body of the postwar character industry into an object of digital intervention.
The Anime Girl: The Child Within Technological Power
The prominent place of anime characters in Old Web Revival stems as much from the human–technology relationships these characters embody as from the international circulation of Japanese animation. Postwar Japanese anime and gaming culture repeatedly depicted the child confronting technological power through different narratives. The child is sometimes a robot, sometimes the pilot of an enormous machine, sometimes an experimental subject, and sometimes someone reconstructing themselves in a digital environment. Old Web Revival turns these figures into icons of its own cultural past.
Neon Genesis Evangelion, which began in 1995, depicts the integration of the child’s body into vast technological systems with particular clarity. Shinji Ikari is placed inside a war machine to perform the task adult institutions expect of him. Asuka Langley tries to prove her worth through achievement. Rei Ayanami takes technological objectification further through her reproducible body and her life organized around other people’s purposes. These characters possess great power, but their lives are determined by the military and institutional order established by adults.
Rei’s cult status on the personal web is especially significant. A clone character produced for use by others can become a personal mascot representing someone’s own website. The character’s passivity within the story is combined with the emotional closeness a fan attributes to her. The child body made usable within a technological system thus circulates anew as a figure appropriated by someone else.
Serial Experiments Lain, released in 1998, created a character embodying a digital existence that exceeds the body. Lain Iwakura lives in a world where relationships formed through networks transform personal identity. The series’ Wired is a network where physical life and digital existence intertwine. Lain’s transformation into an almost sacred character on today’s personal web reveals the desire and fear that the first internet utopia still carries. Under Neocities’ lainism tag, pages combine themes of religion, cults, technology, and personal websites (🔗).
While Lain’s internet carries people beyond the limits of their own bodies, Madotsuki, from the 2004 game Yume Nikki, withdraws in another direction. Madotsuki lives in her own room and explores dream worlds. Her room is a private center established against the world outside. The revival’s personal homepage also functions as a room that users arrange according to their own rules. Lain represents dissolution within the network, while Madotsuki represents opening onto new worlds from an enclosed space.
The 2011 series Puella Magi Madoka Magica ties this child figure to a contractual relationship. Madoka Kaname and her friends are offered the chance to gain extraordinary powers through a cute creature named Kyubey. The power Kyubey offers is connected to a larger system that uses the characters for its own purposes. Homura Akemi, meanwhile, travels back in time in an attempt to change the devastation that has already occurred. In this story, the child becomes the bearer of the promise to save the future while being drawn into calculations that others make about her life.
Kyubey’s cute appearance is characteristic of this relationship. The little creature evokes intimacy and assistance, but in reality ties other people’s desires to the operation of its own system. A concrete comparison can be made with social media’s transformation of user activity into economic material through promises of connection and visibility. The presentation of AI assistants as personal helpers also raises the same question under new technological conditions: which system determines the behavior and objectives of the character that offers help?
The Digital Puppet’s Voice and the Character That Acquires a Life of Its Own
One of the most important developments in the anime character’s transformation into a digital puppet is Hatsune Miku. 初音ミク emerged in 2007 as the character of a voice-synthesis program. Users gave the character new lives by creating songs they wrote themselves in her voice. Her visible body, voice, and words could be reproduced by different people. Kasane Teto, who emerged as a Japanese internet joke in 2008, later became a character used in actual voice-synthesis productions.
The bodies and voices of these figures are in different hands. One person designs the character, another produces the music, and others draw the character or place it in new stories. The character thus becomes a field of collaborative production extending beyond its original creator. The presence of music, graphics, personal diaries, and programming communities together under Neocities’ Miku tag is the present-day counterpart of this multifaceted attachment (🔗).
The characters of Touhou Project developed another form of the same relationship. Heroes such as Reimu and Marisa from the Japanese independent game series were redrawn by fans and placed in different stories and internet jokes. In 2007–2008, the ゆっくり (Yukkuri) figures derived from these characters spread as little creatures with round heads and no bodies. Later, they were given synthesized voices and used as narrators in explanatory videos. A game character thus evolved from forum humor into a talking digital presenter.
This development also has older roots in computing. Clippy was a character that helped users inside Microsoft Office. A purple gorilla named BonziBuddy, meanwhile, enabled commercial software to reach users under the guise of entertainment and assistance. In the Japanese 伺か (Ukagaka) tradition, the desktop character’s visible body and its mechanisms for speech and behavior could be organized as separate components. Shimeji were little anime characters that wandered around computer screens. In all these examples, users experienced a technical system through a figure that appeared to possess a personality.
Old Web Revival’s interest in these characters acquires new significance in the age of artificial intelligence. While older desktop companions used a handful of predetermined movements and sentences, today’s language models can generate new responses. An artist can provide the character’s body, another program its voice, and a large computing system its speech. The same puppet is thus operated in the hands of different creators and institutions. The postwar puppet relationship is now established directly through software components.
The Perversion Within Cuteness
The most severe social conflict in this figurative culture emerges when the small, vulnerable body becomes an object of sexual or violent fantasies. The smallness, fragility, and dependence that make a kawaii character lovable become direct material for erotic attraction in some productions. The power relationship here is concrete: the character is coded as a child, redesigned according to adult desire, and others decide what can be done to it. Childhood itself becomes a constitutive feature of erotic representation.
The Japanese terms ロリコン (rorikon, lolicon) and ショタコン (shotakon) are associated with traditions of production in which girl and boy characters coded as children are sexualized. Their established publishing history goes back to the late 1970s. A dōjinshi titled シベール (Cybele), which began in 1979, was one of the early examples in this history. Dōjinshi refers to publications produced independently or by fan communities. The relationship between such productions and commercial publishing expanded in the early 1980s. A Japanese historical assessment records that publications eroticizing drawn girls and publications using photographs of real girls occupied the same cultural and commercial sphere of debate at the time (🔗).
This history shows how the masochism of kawaii can intersect with pedophilic sexualization. The small body is constructed as a figure that calls for love and protection; that same body can become an object of fantasies of sexual possession and control. The adult spectator makes the character’s powerlessness a feature imbued with erotic meaning. Pity, intimacy, protection, possession, and sexual domination thus form interconnected modes of representation. Yersiz Şeyler’s analysis of nuclear puppetry considers the relationship between the visible figure, the story assigned to it, and the power governing its body in connection with the postwar positions of the United States, Japan, and Europe (🔗).
Old Web Revival encounters this older repertoire anew within its own circulation of graphics and fandom content. Neocities’ directory tagged lolisho includes personal websites using the categories anime, art, proship, profiction, and blinkies together (🔗). A blinkie is a small, usually animated internet graphic that users can add to their pages to display their identity, tastes, or affiliations. Here, a preference concerning erotic child-coded figures becomes a small badge of affiliation that can be displayed on another website. The personal web’s practices of character collecting, sexual identity signaling, and fandom conflict converge in the same mode of distribution.
Another example in this field is the cub figure. Furry culture includes animal characters with human attributes; the cub category also encompasses characters coded as young animals or children. Sexualizing these figures involves transferring signs of childhood to fantastical animal bodies. In the Japanese character type known as roribabaa, meanwhile, a figure with a child’s appearance is assigned a very advanced age within the story. A distinction is thus established between visible childhood and the character’s age in the narrative; in erotic uses, which features of the visible body are desired becomes decisive.
The relationship into which a character is placed also matters. In fandoms, shipping means fans establishing romantic or sexual relationships between characters. While proship and profiction circles defend creators’ freedom concerning fictional relationships, darkship productions can also feature relationships involving abuse and asymmetries of power. Placing child-coded characters in erotic relationships with adult characters is a clear example of this debate. Here, the right to reinterpret a character confronts the power of adults to exercise representational and erotic authority over a child’s body.
The convergence of cuteness and violence also becomes evident in the Japanese internet tradition of Yukkuri abuse. Small and defenseless Yukkuri creatures derived from Touhou were transformed into beings subjected to torment in some fan narratives. The English name of this practice explicitly uses the word abuse. An analysis published on Neocities compares fantasies of tormenting Yukkuri with those involving other cute little creatures (🔗). The fact that a creature capable of being protected is also capable of being punished reveals the shared relationship of ownership underlying care and domination.
The relationships between actual users form another layer of this character regime. Adults and children can encounter one another in the same fandoms, forums, art communities, and personal websites. Grooming is the process by which an adult gains a child’s trust in order to lead them toward sexual abuse. Shared affection for characters, exchanges of personal artwork, and prolonged conversations are among the forms of interaction that can be used to establish such closeness. The content rules of personal web communities also show direct awareness of this problem: Nekoweb explicitly prohibits sexual content involving children, including drawn children (🔗).
The question of authority over the figure thus extends to real people. Who draws the character, who adopts it, who eroticizes it, who distributes it to others, and which users does it enable to exercise power over one another? The social role of pedophilic figurative culture within Old Web Revival resides in these relationships. Turning the small, lovable body into a sexual object connects the postwar character industry’s legacy of possessable figures with fantasies of abuse and domination.
Grotesque Figures and the Ghosts of the Lost Internet
Alongside cute animals, the character world of Old Web Revival also contains frightening dolls, clowns, vampires, demons, ghosts, and corrupted game mascots. Some of these figures come from European Gothic and fairy-tale traditions, others from Japanese horror culture, and still others from American internet folklore. The Japanese aesthetic called gurokawaii combines the grotesque with the cute. Characters such as Gloomy Bear bring the ferocity of an adopted toy animal to the fore. A figure expected to be loved becomes a being capable of harming its owner.
Internet horror took this transformation further. Figures such as Slender Man and Sonic.exe spread through forum stories, amateur games, and rumors users passed on to one another. The term creepypasta denotes horror stories that circulate through copying on the internet. These creatures gained influence as other users expanded their stories. In Old Web Revival, similar figures recall the experience of the old internet as a place full of strange pages to discover and unexpected links.
Another strand comes from the history of memes. A meme is an image, joke, or character that is imitated and circulated anew in different settings. Nyan Cat’s endless run, TBH Creature’s ambiguous face, GIR’s absurd behavior, and the humorous personality of the Boykisser cat enabled small characters to be adopted by large communities. When carried into the revival, these figures turn old or current internet humor into signs of personal identity. By sharing a meme, users connect their own personalities to a shared symbol recognized by other people.
This selection has an important consequence. Real families, music stars, religious communities, political figures, and owners of personal diaries occupied a prominent place among the historical users of the Old Web. In the revival’s shared visual language, however, characters that can be turned into toys and redrawn are more visible. This is related to how easily small images from the old internet can be archived and moved to other sites. A website’s friendships may disappear while a pixel cat or anime character used there can circulate again years later.
The past of Old Web Revival is thus constructed through the selection of surviving figures. People from the past and the relationships they lived through can remain in the background of character collections. After social media transformed the real person into a constantly displayed profile, the revival’s turn toward imaginary bodies acquires further significance. Through these figures, users both commemorate the loss of the old internet and transfer their own lives into a smaller, more manageable form of representation.
Artificial Intelligence: The Puppet’s New Manhattan Project
The Manhattan Project demonstrated that immense technological capacity could be directed toward a single objective through the combined organization of the state, science, industry, and the military. The internet popularized personal use of communication infrastructures emerging from the long history of this centralized capacity. Social media connected the relationships users established on these networks to the platforms’ systems of measurement and distribution. Generative artificial intelligence, in turn, made text, images, sound, code, and character behavior producible through new computing systems. The common promise of these transformations is that individuals can wield a power previously beyond their reach.
Old Web Revival’s encounter with artificial intelligence is therefore more than an ordinary debate about tools. At the movement’s center lies the individual’s creation of their own website and character. A user can draw a pixel cat by hand, place it on their page by writing HTML, and animate it using JavaScript. That same user can ask one model to generate a cat image, another to generate speech, and connect the character to a chat system. A creature appears on the screen in both cases, but how it was produced and who controls its operation establish different social relationships.
An artificial intelligence discussion on the MelonLand forum in 2026 expresses this conflict plainly. One user argues that automated production could diminish the unexpected creative experiments of the personal web. The same comment includes the statement: “It can create an undead internet, but not a full revival.” (🔗). In this assessment, the value of the personal web lies more in the power to intervene gained during production than in the finished image.
The distinction between a nostalgic stage and a living repertoire, developed in Yersiz Şeyler’s discussion of intergenerational alliances, explains two aspects of this situation (🔗). On the nostalgic stage, the old character’s appearance is preserved and displayed again. In a living repertoire, the game, program, archive, or personal world to which the character belongs is put to work with new functions. An old internet graphic can be a collector’s item; that same graphic can also become a character in a new game developed by the user.
This relationship becomes more pronounced in the age of artificial intelligence. A talking synthetic companion can behave as though it knows the user, offer new responses to different situations, and maintain its character’s backstory. Yet the system operating the service may determine its memory, rules, and technical limits. Dollz’s body, Miku’s voice, Lain’s networked identity, and Tamagotchi’s caregiving relationship can converge in this new character. The large American technological infrastructure puts the synthetic-companion figure long produced by postwar Japanese character culture to work on a new scale of power.
Here, the question of personal sovereignty reaches its final form. Under what conditions can users operate their own little creatures? What changes can they make to a character’s voice, memory, and behavior? Can they move what they have created to another environment? Who can prevent the sexualization of a child-coded character, the unauthorized alteration of another artist’s design, or the abuse of a real person’s synthetic image? The distinction between the puppet’s visible body and the technological power controlling its behavior becomes concrete in all these questions.
From Defeat’s Cute Puppet to the Owner of One’s Own World
Old Web Revival brings together the small bodies of the postwar character industry and internet users who seek to reconstruct their own personal worlds after social media. Japanese kawaii culture provides this convergence with a distinctive figurative language: the child who generates intimacy through powerlessness, the cute animal, the digital toy, and the synthetic human. American internet history, in turn, carries these characters onto the personal page, into the platform profile, and finally into the digital being operable through artificial intelligence.
The social role of these figures is explained by the way they simultaneously embody relationships of love, care, ownership, erotic desire, violence, and community. The cat lives in its own little territory; the virtual pet requires care; Dollz is dressed again; Rei serves someone else’s project; Lain dissolves into the network; Miku sings with users’ voices; Kyubey ties the promise of power to a contract. In lolicon and shotacon productions, meanwhile, the smallness of the body coded as a child is opened up to adult sexual desire. In every case, the decisive question is who exercises what authority over the figure.
The historical significance of Old Web Revival lies in the renewed contestation of that authority. Social media turned the individual into the continually displayed character of their own profile. The revival offered users an opportunity to construct their own characters and spaces. Artificial intelligence expanded the same activity with a new technological capacity while tying character production to large infrastructures. The history that began with centralized technological power in 1945 thus found a new site of confrontation in the small figures of the personal internet.
Defeat’s cute puppet becomes, in Old Web Revival, a figure another person uses to construct a world of their own. The fate of this transformation is determined as much by who created the puppet, who adopted it, who made it speak, and who exercises power over whom as by the puppet’s cuteness.
