On Ugliness of Blobfish, Culpable Ignorance and God’s Guilt
Smartphones are becoming an extension of us, so if you have one in hand, the probability of which is 99% considering that you are reading this and beginning to regret it, I ask you to google blobfish and come back to this page (the probability of which is 30%). Assuming that you have now returned after your google search, I am going to apprise you of something that could have saved you that search. I wanted you to take a good look at the blobfish. Ugly? Is it? Cute? That misshapen fish sells. The blob-ity of it, the roundness and pinkness, the ugliness of it has turned it into merchandise. You can now purchase a huggable blobfish stuffed animal, you can purchase t-shirts saying, ‘blobfish is my spirit animal’ or ‘blobfish for president’. You will find blobfish memes. You can find cute blobfish comics where blobfish is the friend of a fragile little girl and listens to all her problems because her boomer parents won’t. But what is the story of the blobfish and why does it look like misshapen pink gooey jello?
Blobfish was declared the world’s ugliest animal in 2013 but for a good reason, now the question is how reasonable was the reason? The Ugly Animal Preservation Society used public votes to declare this “gelatinous” animal ugly. Wonder why? Because this society wants to save and preserve these ‘ugly’ animals by getting them some public attention. The under-threat overly-ugly blobfish became their mascot because the species needs attention. Did it get the right kind of attention? A fish that is very far from a delicacy or an attractive menu item is currently endangered. Their biggest threats are trawling traps, ridiculous, isn’t it? Only 420 of these deep-sea ‘sticky blobs’ were left in 2019. There do not seem to be aggressive conservation initiatives being taken right now to save them either. Back to the original question, did blobfish get the right kind of attention?
The truth is blobfish is not ugly, it just gets an ugly representation like most non-white people in Hollywood movies. An alive blobfish does not look pink, cute, and ‘relatable’ so would not sell. Blobfish looks like any other normal fish underwater but pulling it out of its high-pressure deep-sea environment turns it into the image that you see on the internet. The blobfish in the memes and comics is an animal that goes through rapid depressurization and turns into a paste. In simple terms, its insides get squished and it suffers as it dies. The droopy face representation that makes you relate to it when you are sad is a crushed and dead animal which then got turned into some sort of comedy to get your attention. If you ever laughed at the shape of it or the absence of the shape, are you guilty of ignorance? Or of ‘culpable ignorance’? You did something atrocious, simply because you did not know. Are you to be blamed? It was just a blobfish meme, but the creature suffered immense pain and you laughed at its corpse. Are you guilty? Are those fishermen who pull these fish out of the sea for no reason guilty? Is God guilty for making a fish that would suffer? Are we all guilty? Are we all ugly? Who will declare us ugly and when? Why cannot things be protected till they are packaged to make them relatable, till they stroke our egos? Why are we obsessed with ourselves as a species? Save what is not relatable.