Do you know what Minions are? I’m serious. I keep thinking that I know what Minions are, and then I’ll lose three hours on poorly maintained Facebook pages and Pinterest tags and emerge from my trance sweaty, short of breath, and somehow more baffled than I was before.
It probably doesn’t help that there’s a wide gulf between the Minions that have appeared in two—and soon, three—feature-length motion pictures and how we see Minions on the Internet. The Minions of the Despicable Me canon exist as, well, minions—hapless henchmen for a comically inept villain with a heart of gold (and worrisome body proportions). The Minions as they appear on social media are an altogether different beast.
Let’s start with canonical Minions. They are maybe the platonic ideal of franchise mascot. A better question, for my idiot lizard brain, is what aren’t Minions? They have just the slightest identity to be interpreted as “distinct” or “realized,” but every facet of their design is also so vague that they are nothing. Minions are blank slates of cosmic dust and computer processing power, just like the rest of us.
