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ᓚᘏᗢ- i know this is not my usual research, but i remember when the momo challenge was taking over, we were terrified to even look at our phones. And because i am out of ideas i thought it wouldn't be such a bad idea to include her!
{momo}
Momo (モモ) is an Internet urban legend originating in 2018. She appears to be a young woman with long black hair, huge bulging eyes, a huge mouth with a big smile, and she appears to only have bird legs.
She uses her disturbing appearance to tormen her victims and eventually drive them to suicide.
{The Challenge.}
The Momo Challenge was one of the dangerous "challenges" circulating on the internet that caught the public's attention in 2018. In the said "challenge" aimed at teenagers, a gruesome face appeared to netizens, sending them messages and then challenging them to carry out a series of commands amid threats to harm themselves or kill themselves. The messages were accompanied by scary and disturbing images.
It was reported that a 14-year-old had contact with Momo, which escalated in the boy screaming rapidly. When the mother of the boy entered the room, she found the chat-log with Momo. Momo sent the boy a photo of a drawing, and two graphical disturbing videos, which escalated in the boy having a seizure, making the mother bring the boy to the hospital.
A 5-year-old boy called the police because of Momo. The boy was watching a cartoon, and the video cut to a photograph of Momo, threatening the boy that she is going to kill him.
Another video showed Momo's face with a hypnotic spiral in the background. In the video, Momo told the viewer ("kids" as she referred to them as) to grab a sharp tool from either their dad's garage or to get a knife from their mom's kitchen. She then instructed the viewer to cut their wrists with the sharp tool, and to not stop until they see a lot of blood coming out. She then threatened the viewer that if they didn't do this, she would find them in their sleep.
{The truth behind the Momo Challenge.}
Commenting on the numerous suicide rumors related to the Momo Challenge, internet security experts and people who study modern myths said the phenomenon is likely a case of moral panic: a hoax fueled by unverified media doomsday reports. The challenge uses the media to spread and spread panic, perpetuating its perceived dangerousness and, of course, increasing its popularity.
Concerns about children's safety have prompted thousands of users to share the warnings, but the danger lies in repeating rumors without solid evidence. As of September 2018, most of the phone numbers associated with "Momo" were out of service, while several of the suicide cases linked to the Momo Challenge were never confirmed. Thus, the infamous Momo Challenge tends to be considered a rumor, a fake myth or, quite simply, fake news.
{Fear, Reckoning and Virality.}
Fear of Momo has been acute for years, but now she has a name and a face. You can learn a lot about Momo by tracing the ways her myth has been reformulated for the culture in which it's spreading.
For years, in various online spaces, young people have been writing horror stories, often pseudonymously or in an iterative group process. Their tales are known colloquially as "Creepypasta," an iteration of the term "copypasta," shorthand for passages or blocks of text or chain-letter-type stories that are frequently copied and pasted in a given online community. The authors of these posts do so to scare each other, with the occasional bonus of going viral. (The Slender Man character, which inspired multiple games and a feature film, gained popularity through copypasta. Momo's virality no doubt owes to the 2014 stabbing of a young girl by two of her friends, who later said they were influenced by the Slender Man.)
Momo is what happens when the grown-ups start writing copypasta of their own, about their own biggest fears: what their kids are doing on the internet, and what the internet is doing to their kids.
{suicide.}
In August 2018, law enforcement investigated the influence of Momo on the death of a 12-year-old, globally to the potentially real dangers of the challenge.
It was also reported that a 12-year-old girl committed suicide by hanging herself on a tree in the family's backyard. The investigation goes on the say that the motive for her suicide was having a contact with Momo. The girl recorded the activities prior to the suicide onto her telephone.
The Momo challenge is eerily similar to the "Blue Whale" challenge, which gained popularity in 2017 and allegedly led to the deaths of two teenagers in the U.S., as well as others in Russia and a half dozen other countries.
{media}
Now there ar short films and video games of her.
* https://youtu.be/knwI3rW3p_M?si=YXbPamh1hVNPyGEr
{Momo as a Supernatural Boogeyman}
Momo, herself, was the ideal specter for this moral panic. The image of"Mother Bird" created an avatar that could personify the challenge in away that the symbol of a Blue Whale or faceless child predators nevercould. This figure also allowedthe challenge to draw from legends outside of the moral panic tradition.
While the Momo Challenge was undoubtedly a product of the longhistory of hoax-related contemporary legends, Momo the character drewinspiration from the boogeymen of popular culture and traditional folklore.
In appearance and behavior, she clearly echoes the malevolentspirit Sadako (Samara in the American version) from the horror film TheRing. Both have pale, gaunt faces andlong, stringy, black hair. Both are summoned using modern technology;and contacting them brings deadly results.
As a monster of folklore,Momo serves as a modern incarnation of Bloody Mary. As we will see,most encounter videos show someone attempting to reach Momo in thedark, with their face barely lit by their computer screens or phones. The connection between Momo and Bloody Mary is even clearerconsidering the way the Momo legend spread among children andadolescents.
We know from media reports that most young people learned aboutMomo from their friends in school, not by playing an online challenge.It is not hard to imagine them sitting in the cafeteria or at a slumber partydescribing Momo in hushed voices.
Itis clear that the Momo that lived in the minds of children and adolescentsis a supernatural creature, rather than the online threat feared by theirparents. When kids discussed their fear of Momo, they worried about amonster under the bed that would attack them when the lights were out,not a flesh and blood child predator encouraging them to do terriblethings.
It is manufactured folklore.The most famous example is Slender Man. Starting in2009, people began posting doctored photos depicting seemingly normalscenarios, like children playing, with an ominous, humanoid figure in thebackground. The figure quickly earned the nickname "Slender Man" andsoon dozens of new images, stories, drawings, and videos were postedthat further developed his legend. Like Momo,he is designed to be uncanny—blending human and inhuman qualities inan unsettling way. As Trevor Blank and Lynne McNeill note, SlenderMan is "the best example of an intentionally created legend that has hitall the right notes required to be believable". Like Momo,Slender Man was immediately associated with harming children. Thefirst images of him contained frightening captions explaining that theimages were supposedly linked to the death or disappearance of thechildren pictured. One of the most frequent themes of Slender Manfiction is his tendency to prey upon or protect children who are bullied,ostracized, or different.
Pre-figuring Momo, initialcommentary alleged that the photo was a selfie, edited by a troubled girlbefore she committed suicide. This explanation was dramatically alteredin subsequent descriptions.
read more here: file:///C:/Users/user/Downloads/35757-Article%20Text-93744-1-10-20230116.pdf
{ubume}
Apparently she was based on the Japanese folklore creature Ubume, the ghost of a woman who died in childbirth and seeks both revenge and the ability to have a child of her own by taking newborns from their mothers.
According to folklore, Ubume is the spirit of a woman who died during childbirth, manifesting as a ghostly figure carrying an infant. These stories reflect the fears and anxieties surrounding childbirth and the mysterious realm of the afterlife. Tragically, pregnancy-related deaths carried a heavy stigma in Japanese society. Women who died during childbirth or while pregnant were often blamed
"Such ghosts appear during the nighttime, and when they make a commotion during broad daylight, this is truly something to fear." ~ₖₒₙⱼₐₖᵤ ₘₒₙₒgₐₜₐᵣᵢₛₕū
So is Momo a descendent of the ubume, a being that lived for centuries at the intersection between reproduction and fear?
{information}
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/momo-challenge-resurfaces-police-issue-warning-to-parents/ + https://www.news247.gr/kosmos/i-alitheia-piso-apo-to-frikiastiko-momo-challenge-einai-akomi-pio-enoxlitiki/ + https://villains.fandom.com/wiki/Momo_(Creepypasta)
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