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alt title(s): Motivational Poster; Demotivator 
"The year was 1987, not a very good year for productivity. And as a result, productivity was down something-eight percent. I realized things were gonna spiral out of control unless I gave them a little jumpstart. A sign that said 'No Loafing' was the answer."
If you've ever been in a school or office environment, you've seen them: Posters encouraging the viewers to Reach For The Stars and to Never Give Up. Invariably, these lessons are accompanied by a cute picture or a vaguely inspirational stock photo. Are you feeling motivated yet?
One would have to be the most cynical misanthrope in the world to disagree with concepts like " Leadership" or " Teamwork", but one would also have to be the most optimistic Pollyanna in the world to deny that the presentation varies between painfully corny and unintentionally hilarious.
Thus, the Fauxtivational Poster was born in response. It takes diverse forms, all united in their use of the poster medium to play with the Motivational Poster. Some posters present a straightforward lesson, but exaggerate the Glurge to nonsensical levels. Others preach a patently ridiculous (or just particularly cynical) lesson. Still others use the Motivational Poster format to make a humorous statement about a completely different subject.
Successories is probably the most popular brand of Motivational Posters (inspiring many imitators); consequently most parodies follow the same layout that Successories popularized: A stock photo on a black background, with a one-word title in large text below, with a pithy saying or quote beneath that.
Something of an Undead Horse Trope: Straight motivational posters are still in use in schools and offices (and prisons), but the parodies and subversions far outweigh straight uses everywhere else. Even when media does use straight Motivational Posters, it's almost always as an ironic counterpoint to some soul-crushing environment where the poster is hanging.
Parodies are often called " Demotivators" or "Demotivational Posters".
Compare Faux To Guide. A specific type of Detournement.
Examples
Live Action TV
- Barney from How I Met Your Mother has a wall full of actual motivational posters, including a tailor made one for Awesomeness, but one seems decidedly fauxtivational which he showcased for Marshall (who questioned its motivational ability). It was an image of a group of Penguins, with the the text being the uplifting "Conformity: It's the one that's different that gets left out in the cold".
- The Sarah Connor Chronicles has two: In Gnothi Seauton five bad ass resistance fighters have a cute kitten "hang in there baby" in their hideout, which conceals a safe. In Dungeons And Dragons the future resistance have a badass mural of the same theme, except it's a lion jumping out of fire, a Terminator skull in its jaws.
Comics
- In PS238,the walls of the titular school are adorned with such posters as "Super Strength: If you don't have the power to move mountains,make friends with someone who can.".
Video Games
- Counter Strike Source has a level set in an office building, with these posters on the walls. The topics are all related to Counterstrike itself, in-jokes for the established community that had played the previous version obsessively for several years. For instance, a picture of a tent, and the slogan "Camping".
- Dead Space features motivational posters in certain areas; it would presumably be played straight, except the bright, happy posters with slogans like "Better Living through Science" etc are often seen next to scenes of Body Horror or Nightmare Fuel Unleaded.
Web Animation
Webcomics
Web Original
- Big Huge Labs has a web-based program for making custom posters. Go knock yourself out.
- An index of RPG and Geek-culture-inspired posters.
- 4chan has a long, ancestral tradition of making sometimes very lewd Fauxtivational Posters based on their own memes. You can see them in Macrochan (OH-SO-GODDAMN-VERY NSFW!!!).
- And basically every other -chan (especially those with a more... mature focus than 4chan.)
- Made especially famous by Television Without Pity. Here's a link.
- Something Awful's Photoshop Phriday once commissioned a number of these.
- Forum Warz has a whole minigame dedicated to creating these.
- Worth1000, a site which organizes daily photoshop, photography and other contests, has also run some contests where people had to create posters with photoshopped images.
- Encyclopedia Dramatica has a whole bunch, some that are hilarious, but after some you'll probably need to scrub your eyes (and those two types aren't mutually exclusive). You have been warned.
- This is a popular game over at the 9th Wonders Heroes forum.
- Halolz.com also has some of these. While not as bad as the 4chan example above, there's still some NSFW things there.
- Even more of them.
- Polish site Demotywatory.pl. This Troper, from Poland, noted the the demotivational posters being one of the biggest "new" internet fads of 2009 (despite of them being older than the internet. We're pretty keen on being late to all memes, for example the Badger Badger meme was only discovered by everyone on the internet here this year.)
Western Animation
- The Simpsons featured the "Hang in there!" cat poster. Marge notices that, since the copyright on the poster dates back to the 1968, the cat must be long dead, which she thinks is makes the poster actually "kind of a downer".
- It also had, in "And Maggie Makes Three", Homer's demotivational plaque: "Don't forget, you're here forever." Homer used pictures of Maggie to turn it into "Do it for her," in a Crowning Moment Of Heartwarming.
- The "Hang in there!" poster also appears in Dr. Katz.
- In the Futurama episode "Cryonic Woman", Leela reapplies for her old job at the cryonics center:
"Oh, I was hoping you would come back. I even saved your poster of a chimp expressing your distaste for Mondays!"
"Monday monkey lives for the weekend, sir!"
- Don't forget the one from the first episode which refers to the policy of people being assigned careers instead of choosing their own, which features a man in a hard-hat with a rather dubious look on his face giving a thumbs-up, with the caption "You Gotta Do What You Gotta Do".
- Paying attention to the background nets a few more of these as well. In one episode, a poster outside an army recruitment office reads:
"Join The Army Today!!
What are you, Chickien?
Bwak Buk Buk Bawk!"
- Peter Potamus has several posters with a hippopotamus "reaching for that thing" in Harvey Birdman Attorney At Law.
- Played straight but subtle in Transformers Animated. When we see Prowl's room as he meditates, there's a poster of a cute little kitty on a branch reading "Chin up!" Made hilarious as one wonders where Prowl found the poster (that size) in the first place, and what prompted the Deadpan Snarker to hang it in his zen spot.
- This is made interesting by the fact that it appears every time that room is shown. Possibly one of the writers has it in their office.
- On Monsters Vs Aliens, the "Hang in there" poster is hung on Susan's cell in a pathethic attempt to make her imprisonment more tolerable. It doesn't work. "I want a real kitten, hanging from a real tree!"
Real Life
- Successories
- AllPosters.com's top-selling motivators.
- Despair, Inc.
- This troper used to work with those guys, back when they worked for a major Internet company. In a supremely ironic twist, after the Internet company was bought out, one of the new VPs complained about one of those posters being in the operations room, citing its cynicism, pessimism, and poor company spirit. The poster in question stated, "It is possible your only purpose in life is to serve as a warning to others."
- This troper also feels a pointed real-life example would be the specialist school for Asperger's Students he attended for several years. The motivational posters were the classic black background, inspirational picture, inspirational line jobs (mostly of the 'it's alright to be special' and 'everyone's different' variety ), and it was universally agreed by those members of the student body capable of grasping the concept of being insulted that they were, in fact, downright insulting. Of course, such complaints were summarily ignored. And all this started when the idealistic founder was bought out by celebrity drug rehab group Priory...
- This.
- A painful example of wildly inappropriate (and probably sadistically ironic) Straight Lesson in the wrong environment would be the infamous "Arbeit macht frei" (work frees you) at the entrance of Auschwitz and Dachau concentration camps.
- This troper's father has this◊ demotivational poster in his office. He is a Master Sergeant for the U.S. Army and would be quite willing to point out that it is accurate to his work environment.
TV Tropes Wiki The following articles feature parody posters:
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