Fauxtivational Poster

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"I think that communication skills have really improved around here since we all went on that course, and put up that blue poster that says 'Communicate!'"

"I totally agree; and I think that what that course showed me is that sometimes it does help to pay someone really quite a lot of money to state the obvious."

—That Mitchell And Webb Sound

If you've ever been in an American 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.

An Undead Horse Trope: Straight motivational posters are still in use in schools, offices, and some gyms (and prisons), but the parodies and subversions far outweigh straight uses everywhere else. Therefore, it's a classic example of the Weird Al Effect. 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", regardless of their content; the name is taken from a series of posters by Despair Inc with genuinely demotivational themes. You have been warned.

Not surprisingly, there are various websites that let you make these poster patterns very easily. Which is why there are a ton of them floating around the internet.

Compare "Faux To" Guide. A specific type of Detournement.

Examples of Fauxtivational Poster include:

Comic Books

• 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."

Films -- Animated

• In Megamind, upon taking over the city the titular supervillain has posters made of him in the style of the famous "Hope" poster of Barack Obama, except with the caption changed to read "No, You Can't" instead (referring to Obama's famous "Yes, We Can" message).
• 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!"
• In Igor, Dr. Glickenstein's girlfriend gets him an inspirational poster of a kitten hanging from a tree, but since the movie is set in a Bad Is Good and Good Is Bad world, the kitten is hanging from a noose. "To remind you to always take time in your day for a little torture."

Literature

• In Who Moved My Cheese?, Haw has a habit of drawing (straight) motivational graffiti on the walls, both to motivate Hem and to act as a landmark when searching the maze for New Cheese.

Live-Action TV

• Arrested Development: "Fun and Failure start the same way".
• The Doublemeat Palace in season 6 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer has these in its employee break room, and manager's office. It is duly lampshaded:

Tara: I have this sudden urge to dedicate my productive cooperation...

• 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 IT Crowd: The basement has several memetastic posters hanging up.
• 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.

Videogames

• 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.
• From the F.E.A.R. factory level: "Remember it's Quantity, Quality, Safety, in that order."
• In office level of BloodRayne 2 there are several posters including
  • a sinking boat - caption "this is your life"
  • a marble with the caption "You are this sharp"
  • stick men - caption "Just remember you are an individual, just like everybody else"
• In Sam & Max: Beyond Time and Space, Hell's office is full of motivators of the Seven Deadly Sins.

Web Animation

• The Strong Bad email "no loafing". In addition to the eponymous sign, Strong Bad purchases some more traditional posters, featuring windsurfers and Space Whales.

Webcomics

• In El Goonish Shive, the principal of one of the high schools values motivational murals more than anything else. Those things range from odd to disturbing to hilarious -- "READ or the owl will eat you", or "Homework rules!", or "Thespians are neato" (as The Rant points out, a play on Tedd's motto "lesbians are neato!").
• Gunnerkrigg Court: "READ. It makes you cool. Honest." "Knowledge is power."
  • Also, the First Treatise could be considered a straightforward motivational poster for those who know Latin: "Pray, read, read again, work, and you shall find."
    • And the page is also a spiffy reference for those who know alchemy: it's from the Mutus Liber, a 17th century Huguenot alchemy text, Latin and all.
• Starslip Crisis had a Story Arc (beginning here) in which curator-snob Vanderbeam sees the "Hang In There" cat poster on Jovia's wall, and becomes obsessed with finding out what a fellow lover of True Art could possibly see in such a piece of obvious shlock.
• This appears to be a literacy poster showing Kestrel from Queen Of Wands sitting in a beanbag chair with a book to illustrate the slogan "READ". On closer inspection, the book she's reading turns out to be titled "Porn".
• Fauxtivational posters are one of the most popular subjects on the twin art-remix threads on the Erfworld forum.
• Concerned had Frohman make some of these, with slogans like "Being beaten hard, or hardly being beaten?"
• Sluggy Freelance:
  • There's a somewhat sillier take on the "Hang In There Baby" poster in this strip.
  • Torg's cousin sends him the Christmas present of an "inspirational calendar" with a picture like a motivational poster for each month, illustrating various captions such as "Inspiration" and "Success" with inspirational pictures... all of which are the same picture of an alligator eating a guy.

Riff: "Hey, 'Relationships'! That one works!"

• An early Bizarre Uprising comic had a poster saying "Reading is KITTY!" in a classroom background.
• Mike of Shortpacked has one in his bedroom of a koala hanging from a branch with the caption "You're fucked."
• In the Zodiac spinoff Quetzalcoatlus, a "demotivational poster" can be seen in Leo's office contaning a picture of a nuclear explosion and the caption "Patience: Don't expect any. Ever."
  • Related to the above is a similar poster depicting a lion. Its caption: "Humor: See notes on Patience."

Web Originals

• 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.)
    • And, yes, there are things Too Spicy for 4Chan.
  • On that note, there used to be an anime motivational poster thread (nicknamed /amp/ or /mot/ as a homage to something...) on Crunchyroll that had about 2000+pages growing at about 8 pages daily. Unfortunately its contents started to live up to its name resulting in its deletion and a permanent ban against the creation of any other such threads.
• 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.
  • See also this collection of RPG Motivational Posters.
• 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.
  • And more.
• Polish site Demotywatory.pl.
• Doctor Steel's riffs on the ALA "READ" posters and Got Milk? posters
• Wikipedia has one accompanying the essay "Somebody Else's Problem".
• RPG Net used to have a monster thread full of specifically RPG-themed instances of this genre, but in the end it was deleted because of its server-crushing posting volume.
• In The Nostalgia Critic's review of The Movie of the Care Bears, he produces one of these around Mr. Cherrywood creepy smile. In his later commentary on the episode, Doug explained that he had seen several of the other visuals he had used in his reviews being made into these, and decided to try and save fans the trouble.

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 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.
• Futurama--
  • In the 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!"

• • There was another 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, Chicken?
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 puppy 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.
• Family Guy. When Peter took over his father-in-law's company, Brian had a poster of a ball in his office that said "Go Get It. Go Get It, Boy".

"I will. I will go get it."

Real Life

• Successories
• AllPosters.com's top-selling motivators. - One of the few places where real motivational posters are located.
• Despair, Inc.
• The famous British "Keep Calm and Carry On" poster from World War II, which either thanks to irony or nostalgia has experienced a revival.
  • And one of the hundreds of inevitable parodies.
  • And one of the responses.
• The American Library Association (ALA)'s famous "READ" posters.
  • ...and the inevitable parody (see El Goonish Shive above).
• A painful example of wildly inappropriate (and probably sadistically ironic) Straight Lesson in the wrong environment would be the infamous "Arbeit macht frei" (Work makes [you] free) at the entrance of Auschwitz and Dachau concentration camps.
• Another painful example is the use of so-called inspirational posters in a classroom whose teacher is so utterly repressive as to recite the occasional Dystopian Edict to the students.