A ‘Bright Death Blossom’, also known as a 'Twitter death blossom' is Tweet that seeks to take down all opposing viewpoints using sarcasm, snark, irony, and rhetoric.
The term comes from, or is inspired by, both the 1980s B-grade Sci Fi movie 'The Last Starfighter', and the Twitter account of celebrity Twitter influencer Professor Liam Bright, whose account '@lastpositivist' frequently exhibits very rhetorically clever 'Death Blossom' events.
In the movie, the very
white, poor American protagonist is kidnapped by an
alien who has secretly trained him for a battle in space using a video game. To complete his mission he is given a spaceship with a special weapons feature called a 'death blossom'.
When activated, the 'Death blossom' locks the
ship in position and causes it to wildly spin on all axes shooting all its weapons at converging enemies (who happen to all be using more than
one degree of freedom of movement), destroying them all, whilst somehow not turning the brains of the pilot into a
milkshake and not causing the ship to be destroyed by being the only thing in the space battle standing still.
As with many sci-fi movies and stories of that era, the protagonists and heroes are
white and Westernised, and the aliens are all
brown or dark in colour (or just – any non-
white colour) and have equipment, ships, and languages with aesthetics that are
based upon Middle-Eastern and
Asian cultures and cultural themes and aesthetics.
