As CNN put it, “Mr. Peanut is dead for some reason”. Mr. Peanut’s Twitter account confirmed the “death”, stating “He died doing what he did best – having people’s backs when they needed him most.” Is that what Mr. Peanut did best? Or, you know, at all? I thought he just got rich selling out his own kind.

AJ Willingham’s piece is a good one though.

Does Mr. Peanut have a rich, haunted backstory that would lead him to such a decision?…Perhaps such self-sacrifice is in his nature. What a twist that would be! The monocled bourgeoisie icon contained multitudes all along.

Since absolutely nothing makes sense, all of the cookies, snack foods and other residents of Sentient Brand Land mourned the peanut’s passing on Twitter.

I can very much wait to see how this stupidity turns out.

Update (January 28th, 2020): Well, the whole thing managed to get even stupider. Following the death of Kobe Bryant, Planters has decided to pause their campaign.

If you’re keeping track, it’s apparently OK to create an ad campaign around the (almost certainly fake) death of a brand mascot at normal times, when countless millions of people are actively grieving their own personal tragedies and losses. But if a celebrity dies in tragic fashion, then it needs to be evaluated “through a lens of sensitivity”.