Brock Obama

About

Brock Obama is a fictional hybrid character which combines the 44th President of the United States Barack Obama and Brock, one of the main trainer characters from the anime series Pokémon. The character is usually manifested in the form of photoshopped images with Brock’s head or face superimposed onto portrait images of Obama or President Obama’s face placed onto pictures of Brock. On some occasions, character images of rock-type Pokémons like Geodude or Onix may be added into background for humorous effect.

Origin

Though its exact point or date of origin remains unknown, the mash-up was most likely inspired by the similarity between the two names, Barack and Brock. The earliest known iteration on the web can be attributed to a number of YouTube videos uploaded in November 2008.

Spread

The Facebook page^[1] titled “Brock Obama” was launched as early as on January 30th, 2010.

According to the Facebook profile description, Brock Obama is currently serving his term as the President of the United States from his office in Pewter City and presumably the party leader of Brockists, a fictitious political-religious group of users who support Brock Obama. In addition, the administrator of the Facebook page has posted numerous status updates with the so-called scriptures from the book of Brockism. As of July 2011, Brock Obama’s Facebook Page has over 123,000 likes and 2,404 related images.

The Urban Dictionary^[2] entry for “Brockism” was first submitted on July 1st, 2011, which reads:

Brockism is the political and religious philosophy of Brock Obama. Contrary to popular belief, Brock Obama is not just a personality on Facebook. He is the single most powerful political mind in the Kanto region.

Brockism centers on kicking as much ass as possible with rocks, trolling religious extremists and political zealots, and addressing honest concerns about Pokemon and the Internet in general. Brockism has spawned a storm of Brock knockoffs, all of which should be trolled, save for his archenemy Amabo Kcorb.

As the Facebook page continued to gain membership, other related pages in tribute to fictional political candidates began popping up on Facebook, the most popular example being Amabo Kcorb^[3]. Amabo is Brock’s evil twin, whose name is the palindrome of “Brock” and dons an evil-looking mustache and goatee. Some of the other fictitious candidates promoted through Facebook pages include Brock Ollama^[4], Brockoli Obama^[5] and Brockette Obama^[6]

Hijacking of Facebook Page

On September 18th, 2011, Brock Obama’s page was hijacked by a relatively unknown troll. According to the Facebook page, the hacker took control of one of the admin’s page and vandalized the Brock Obama page. As a result, the page shifted focus from Pokemon-related satire to My Little Pony images and the profile picture of Brock Obama was replaced with a picture of Hitler photoshopped onto Abraham Lincoln’s head. In addition to vandalizing Brock Obama’s Facebook page, the hacker managed to take down another Facebook page for Amabo Kcorb.

For three days, the hijacker continued to post what would be considered very ‘un Brock-like’ status updates and photos. Fans of “Brock Obama” page were dismayed with the irrelevant postings and the page lost nearly 10,000 subscribers in three days. Meanwhile, a mirrored version of the original “Brock Obama” Facebook page was launched and gained over 12,500 members in the first 72 hours. Many other copycat pages soon followed suit, claiming to be the back-up version of the original Brock Obama page.^[9] On September 21st, the original administrator regained control of the Facebook page, but similar takeovers of the Facebook page have been reported since.

Search Interest

External References