Remember the orca wars

If there was one moment in visual culture this year that cannot be forgotten, it’s when social media flooded with celebrations of orcas attacking boats, an animal uprising against humanity’s environmental destruction. Know Your Meme reports the jokes started in May after a family of killer whales sank a German yacht in the Strait of Gibraltar. That month, Live Science reported the incident was part of a growing trend of whales attacking boats that was initiated in 2020 by a family called the Gladises and had since spread to other whale groups. Following the article, more boats were struck, setting the Internet ablaze with tweets, TikToks, and memes cheering the animals on. Reactionary articles emerged decrying the enthusiasm, like the one in the Atlantic called “Killer Whales Are Not Our Friends.” But how could the meme generation stop rooting for them? For millennials and Gen-Zers, orcas are an extremely potent symbol for greed and humanity’s fraught relationship with nature. And as the climate crisis accelerates, we need a hero.

In the late 80s and early 90s, it seemed like everyone was making a buck off orcas’ appeal to children. Lisa Frank’s popularity was peaking, so school supply aisles were lousy with notebooks, lunch boxes, and Trapper Keepers featuring jungle animals and sea creatures—most often bottlenose dolphins and orcas—in vivid neons and glitter. Commercials for SeaWorld ran constantly between children’s programs, and the theme park sweetened its appeal with propaganda videos featuring James Earl Jones, the voice of Darth Vader and Mufasa. In 1993, Free Willy dropped, and radio stations relentlessly played “Will You Be There,” the movie’s theme song by Michael Jackson. Kids could not escape orca mania.

As much as Free Willy was a product of profit-driven whale worship, it was also a widely distributed children’s movie heavy with themes of rebellion in the name of care and conservation. The film follows a hardened tween abandoned by his mother who is caught spray-painting a whale’s tank at a declining aquatic amusement park. As his punishment, he’s placed in foster care and forced to help out at the park, where he befriends two whale trainers: a lesbian-coded woman and a Native American man. Both express feeling like outsiders. They love animals and are just trying to get by, the Native American man even going so far as to explain whales have been sacred symbols to various Indigenous communities and how his job—and jobs under capitalism in general—are the result of colonization. Exploiting the environment for money is not the only way to live, he insists, it’s just the one they’ve been forced into.

The protagonist develops a relationship with Willy, the killer whale whose tank he spray-painted. Turns out, Willy is kind of like him: unpredictable, reluctant to trust, and difficult to train! Slowly, the whale accepts training from the boy, just as the boy succumbs to his foster parents, but Willy still refuses to perform in shows. The boy can accept this but the owners cannot. Realizing they’ll never be able to use Willy to drive ticket sales, they decide to kill him and collect the insurance money instead, so the boy convinces his outsider friends to help him free Willy. And they do! Friends can do anything, including protect whales.

At the end of the credits, there’s a phone number for a whale preservation society, which received over 300,000 calls in the first six months. Over the course of a decade, this led to the actual freeing of Keiko, the whale who played Willy. Prior to filming, Keiko was underweight and kept in especially cramped living quarters, sharing a tank with several bottlenose dolphins. He suffered numerous skin infections due to his conditions. Warner Brothers used publicity from the movie to raise money—much from kids who are now adults—to secure Keiko a better home and get on the path to freedom. In 2002, Keiko was released back into the ocean, and a year later, he died. As many scientists and conservationists had warned, a lifetime in captivity had made it impossible for Keiko to acclimate to ocean life. If you were a kid who’d donated your piggy bank to Willy/Keiko’s freedom only to grow up and learn this was the systemic reality of his life all along, wouldn’t you want to join the Animal Liberation Front? At the very least, you’d probably want to make jokes to that effect online.

Orcas are called “killer” whales because they’re apex predators—that is, they’re at the top of the oceanic food chain. But in the wild, orcas are famously friendly towards each other and humans, and orca attacks against humans are extremely, extremely rare—and never serious or fatal. However, in captivity, orcas have been extremely vicious to other orcas and maimed and killed many humans, both facts which are explained in the 2013 documentary Blackfish. The movie centers on the death of Dawn Brancheau, a passionate and skilled animal trainer at SeaWorld who’d become the theme park’s most sought-after star. During a dinner performance in 2010, Brancheau was murdered by Tilikum, SeaWorld’s most prized breeding whale. He had a long history of being bullied by other whales and attacking trainers, possibly even killing one before coming to SeaWorld, but the company ignored both realities because they loved flaunting his size and milking him for semen. The documentary looks at not only how Brancheau’s death led to safety improvements for trainers, but also what causes whales to act like this and why whales in captivity are inherently unsafe.

From the devastation of families and relationships to the lack of physical space, whales in captivity are mistreated to the point of becoming threats. Orcas are extremely smart and social creatures. They have a unique part of the brain other mammals don’t that sits adjacent to the limbic system, the portion of the brain that governs emotional regulation and behavior. Scientists speculate this gives whales a more complex sense of self and more complicated friendships.

In the wild, orcas are tight-knit and root their identities in their communities. Families often stay together or in close proximity to each other with multiple generations existing in a herd, but whales also participate in looser social networks called pods. Encountering whales from other communities is a cross-cultural exercise, so much so that each community has its own vocalizations—languages, essentially, which don’t translate to other orcas. In captivity, families are separated and random whales are thrown together into tanks that are the size of bathtubs or small pools to them. Not only do these conditions cause the whales to act out, but it also takes a toll on them physically. Among other ailments, captive whales’ dorsal fins collapse and they die younger.

Blackfish was so effective at outlining why confining whales and using them for entertainment is cruel and dangerous that SeaWorld attendance steadily plummeted, reaching an all-time low in 2016. That year, the company announced it would stop breeding orcas and phase out orca shows—though it’s worth noting they’ve replaced them with “orca encounters,” which SeaWorld claims is fine because these are more educational. Edu-tainment as opposed to entertainment. Several varieties of orcas are now on the endangered species list, including ones in the Pacific Northwest, where SeaWorld first started sourcing whales. The process proved so destructive that, in 1976, the state of Washington formally requested SeaWorld seek whales elsewhere. Unsurprisingly, SeaWorld elides its role in contributing to the conservation problems it now exploits whales to highlight.

Whale experts have cautioned that the attacks initiated by the Gladises are playful rather than vicious, and it could be a trend that will lose steam in a few years. Whales have visual and behavioral fads that transcend formal language and jump between communities, but they always die. While publicizing this is a well-meaning attempt to protect whales from reactionary violence—both the passive and active kind inspired by arguments like “Yacht owners have a right to defend themselves!”—those who meme-ify the orca attacks don’t care.

These incidents symbolize ideas like: “Yachts are violence,” or, “Unfettered access to and disrespect of whales’ homes is violence.” NASA reports that the global ocean has absorbed 90 percent of global warming that has occurred in recent decades; whales are dying from no i se, plastics, sonar, and oil. When you know that, and you know how we’ve been raised to degrade whales for our own amusement, doesn’t the idea of a whale uprising seem . . . cool? Plus, orcas’ inky black bodies with white accents evoke other early 90s vigilantes, like Batman Returns’s Catwoman, The Crow’s Eric Draven, and WWF’s Sting. In real and actual life, there are fishes dressed like 90s avengers out there fucking up symbols of capitalist exploitation and human entitlement. Current online sympathy to whales’ suffering represents not only concerns humans share with whales (e.g., climate change is bad), but also two generations raised to be captivated by whales, but whose ideas about them have matured. May the memes continue until the orcas have won the war!

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