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.
'The Last Positivist has
done a
Bright death blossom on the neo-positivist trolls and intellectual dark web again.'
'Look out. Twitter death blossom activated.'
'Bright just did a death blossom on
Twitter.'
