The powers that be in Singapore tend to be, er, a little misguided when it comes to making big, faceless governmental agencies and branches a little friendlier to kids. Take, for example, Lim Kopi and Zippy Maree — the former a polar bear mascot to unironically represent the Corrupt Practices Investigations Bureau, while the latter is some butterfly-shaped abomination used to promote a car-lite Singapore.
The government’s endless thirst to introduce cutesy mascots into every single unnecessary thing has no end, and this time they might have amped up the cringe levels. Say hello to Parley, a chubby flying anthropomorphic lion that’s supposed to be “your friendly parliament mascot” who listens to normcore tunes by Ed Sheeran and Camila Cabello, and enjoys reading and indexing official parliamentary debates in his free time. He also does weight training with the “thickest Parliament library book” because, at this point in time, why the hell not.
Understandably, his role is to be a friendly face for the Parliament of Singapore’s newly launched Instagram page. But really though, if the purpose is to connect with today’s youth, they should’ve just hired a hypebeast rooftopper photographer to shoot and edit VSCO filtered images with vapid poetry (*cough* Rupi Kaur, Nicole Choo *cough*)
Oh look, the name Parley is an acronym too, so that’s yet another Singaporean thing about him.
There are just too many questions that come to mind about this.
Who is the target audience? Are kids actually supposed to be enthralled by the mascot enough to be interested in Parliamentary proceedings? Why does Singapore’s legislature even need a mascot?
Why is the mascot fat, and why does he have wings? Why does he have bad taste in music? How much did it cost for the marketing team to come up with this unflattering idea?
But you gotta give it to them — if the idea was to spread the word that the Parliament of Singapore is now on Instagram, then succeed they did. Cringe-worthy as it is.
