Twitter, Getty ImagesUPDATE: Ah, this makes much more sense! Though the humor was pretty much lost in tweet-lation, Oates later clarified that she was joking.
"it was meant as a joke...." she emailed Newsweek. "many of my tweets are meant to be funny; but I guess that is not always a good idea. when you'd originally written, I could not open the link & really had no idea what you meant. now I remember. sorry! The Internet & Twitter are filled with jokes. Why is this so unusual?"
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Finally! Someone is taking a stand against that ruthless, evil henchman Steven Spielberg. He's been terrorizing this planet for years. First it was those innocent Tauntauns in the '80s and then he murdered all those dinosaurs in the '90s…all for a park? A Jurassic Park?!
OK, that's not what's happening here. What is happening here is American author Joyce Carol Oates tweeting a old-school photo of Spielberg posing next to the animatronic triceratops from the set of Jurassic Park and calling him out for "killing a defenseless animal."
"So barbaric that this should still be allowed..." she tweeted. "No conservation laws in effect wherever this is?"
Well, there probably isn't a conservation law in Jurassic Park because it's a fictional world. But if the dinosaurs are roaming an island somewhere off the coast of Costa Rica, we hope that there are some dino-laws protecting them. Dinosaurs are animals, too. #SavetheDinos
Now, we'd like to think that Oates is just joking here, but probably not. She hasn't tweeted anything about it, even after hundreds of people pointed out that the photo was of a director and his fake animal. You'd think she'd reply back to people making fun of her if she was just kidding around. And also, don't make fun of Joyce Carol Oates!
Our theory is that she didn't get a good look at the picture on Twitter and just saw a photo of a bearded man posing happily next to what looked like a rhinoceros or some other wild animal. We'd also be pissed off if we saw a photo like that, so we don't blame her one bit.
Either way, let's start a campaign to stop Steven Spielberg from killing animatronic beasts.
(Originally published June 10, 2015, at 10:59 a.m. PT)