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Awesomebro
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About
"Awesomebro" is a term often used to describe the tendency of mainstream entertainment media to portray things, specifically prehistoric animals such as dinosaurs, more akin to monsters and appearing "awesome" in an attempt to appeal to the general public, than what they were thought to be like in reality.
Origin
Initially, the phrase "awesome bro" was likely an incidental pairing of the slang term bro with the word "awesome" as a general phrase of approval or used ironically akin to Cool Story, Bro. It wasn't until 2013 that the phrase would begin to be used in a specific manner.
On March 25th, the Australian paleoartist John Conway made a blog post titled "Jurassic Park 4: Awesomebro!"[1] following a tweet made by the director of the then-upcoming fourth film of the Jurassic Park franchise, Colin Trevorrow, which read simply "No feathers. #JP4"[2]. In the post (shown below), Conway talks about his dislike of dinosaurs in media are shown as monsters with changes to them being "to make things ever more 'awesome'" even if it doesn't make sense. He dubs this as "Awesomebro culture"
Jurassic Park 4: Awesomebro!
Monday, 25 March 2013
The director of Jurrasic Park 4 has tweeted that the Velociraptors will not have feathers, which has lead to quite a bit of backlash in the palaeo community. There’s not much point in rehashing the scientific in inaccuracy of this. Brian Switek’s piece will give you good rundown of the situation.
I want to take a different tack on this, and look at the broader culture this is occurring in.
Jurassic park became little more than a monster movie about halfway through the first film. I don’t think we should be at all surprised that the franchise continues on its monstrification trajectory. What I’m going to argue here is that the context in which dinosaurs are embedded in our culture makes this almost inevitable.
Most of us have come across or participated in what I’m going to call “awesomebro” culture: “dinosaurs in space with fricken’ lasers? AWESOMEBRO!”. Awesomebro culture is huge, and makes up a huge proportion of the people that buy dinosaur-themed stuff. At the really stupid end of awesomebro you have the people that complain that feathered dinosaurs look “gay”. You have less stupid grumbling as well. My problem is in how I, and many other people I agree with, have reflexively deflected these grumblings. We say something like “well, eagles look pretty awesome – watchya got to say to that, smart guy?”
The problem with this sort of defence is that it buys into the whole stupid assumption of dinosaurs belonging to awesomebro culture. What if dromaeosaurs really did look all fancy or goofy? What then? I say so what, animals often look fancy or goofy. The “awesomeness” isn’t the most sophisticated way of viewing the natural world, and one that I personally have very little interest in.
Of course, awesomebros are the prime market for the Jurassic Park movies (indeed, many of us probably started out with dinosaurs as awesomebro 13 year-olds). So we end up with the Axis of Awesome, the big money of big media, and the massive fandom of the awesomebros supporting it.
The problem with all this is that the fundamental aim of the awesomebro project is to make things ever more “awesome”, not to make things more accurate. Trying to find the “awesome” angle on the new discoveries about behaviour and appearance seems to me to be missing the whole damn point of what I’m trying to do -- which is come to terms with the truth. Nearly all dinosaur documentaries struggle with this, and nearly all fail, resulting in a hodgepodge of garbled science juxtaposed with flights of awesomebro fancy (Tonight on AwesomeDinoFights: Triceratops vs. a Brick Wall). Dinosaur artists, too, play their part in this, with their screechy slobbering theropods. I think it’s a fundamentally flawed approach, but one which has too much money behind it and cultural entanglement to change from within.
So what’s to be done? I say forget JP4, the awesomebro project will continue unabated by the complaints of a few dinonerds. Instead we need to build a credible cultural alternative to awesomebro dinosaurs. It’s a big task, to be sure, but it’s why I do what I do.
Spread
Following the coinage of the term by John Conway, this term gradually rose in popularity among the online paleo community, likely due in part to the success of the 2015 film Jurassic World.
in 2021, three different definitions of Awesomebro were submitted to Urban Dictionary. The most highly rated definition was posted on June 26th 2021:[5]
A "Awesomebro" is a term usually defined by Dinosaur fans to types of people/media who see Dinosaurs, rather than normal living animals of prehistoric times, as violent monsters who will kill anything in their path and make them look cool as possible, rather than making them accurate. This is usually given as a type of criticism.
On March 27th, 2016, DeviantArt user randomdinos submitted a satirical list of what makes a dinosaur "Awesomebro."[6] Such traits include:
To be cool, the animal must be carnivorous. Omnivorous animals are acceptable if only their carnivorous side is seen, but herbivores are out of the question entirely and can only be food for the cool dinosaur.
To be cool, the animal must be portrayed as the biological equivalent of an army tank. The size of the animal does not matter; if you feel that the logic is dwindling too low, just make it dodge all bullets directed towards it and everything will be fine.
Related Term: Monsterification/ Monsterization
While the term predates the internet, and refers to "The action of making ugly or monstrous; the portrayal of something as monstrous"[3], it has since been used specifically to discuss this being applied to animals in media. The hosts of the common descent podcast loosely defined it as when media takes a normal animal and changes it's behavior and traits in ways that make less sense as a real animal and more like a movie monster. [4]
Search Interest
External References
[1] John Conway's Blog – Jurassic Park 4: Awesomebro!
[2] Twitter – @colintrevorrow
[3] Lexico – Monsterification
[4] YouTube – Common Descent – Movie Monsterification – Animals Acting Badly
[5] Urban Dictionary – Awesomebro
[6] DeviantArt – The Ten Commandments of Awesomebro
Top Comments
Nox Lucis
Apr 22, 2022 at 08:03AM EDT
Commodore V
Apr 22, 2022 at 09:09AM EDT