Memetic Mutation/Headscratchers

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Describe Memetic Mutation here For Massive Damage.

  • Why does M.Bison find Guile being beat up delicious?
  • Why is it pronounced like "meem?" This troper learned French before he was exposed to Internet culture, and the word "meme" in French means "the same" and is pronounced like "mehm." I still have trouble pronouncing it like "meem" and so I frequently sound like an imbecile.
    • The English vowel-consonant-e rule. In most cases, if there is a vowel, then a consonant, then an e, the vowel becomes long and the e is silent. Other examples from the English language are tame, lime, home, and fume.
    • More precisely, it shares its vowels with the word "gene", since the study of memes began by drawing the analogy between bits of genetic code and bits of cultural data.
  • I can has defonition?
  • Old catchphrases... they bug me. Zombie Shakespeare die already!
    • Only if Chuck Norris kills it.
    • Five Words: Romeo x Juliet THE ANIME
      • So are the Montagues pirates and the Capulets ninjas, or the other way around?
        • Sadly, neither.
          • However, Basilisk is Romeo & Juliet with two superpowered ninja clans instead of the Cs and Ms.
  • I find your lack of original conversation disturbing.
  • You do realise the irony in that sentence, right?
    • Of course not.
    • Thank you for stomping on the throat of that particular joke. Hey that rhymes!
  • On a serious note, how these things catch on and become Memetic Mutation? What made Chuck Norris so special? Pirates and ninjas?
    • I have a theory about pirates and ninjas, that they basically embody completely opposite ideologies from each other, kind of the ultimate in Order Versus Chaos (as well as other dichotomies like anarchy and monarchy, practicality and principles, progressivism and traditionalism, clarity and obscurity, et cetera).
      • I always thought it was an East (ninjas) vs West (pirates) thing.
      • It's rumored that the first e-mail ever sent (as in "we're testing this system to see if it works so the actual message doesn't matter" first) was "Who would win in a fight between pirates and ninjas?"
      • The first email ever sent was "QWERTYUIOP"
      • Depends on how you define email. If you assume any message sent over the internet to a dedicated recipient (instead of 4chan-style open slather) is email, the first one was "LO" because the computer crashed before they could type "GIN".
    • You don't ask the easy ones, do you? I don't think anyone really KNOWS what makes something catch the imagination to become a Meme. A combination of ridiculousness and/or impressiveness seems to be the basic start point. Take "9000". It's the delivery(massively over-the-top for the line) rather than the line itself which does it-at least to these eyes.
      • There is, however, some regularity in meme generation - apparently, some source material is especially likely to generate memes. Allow me to demonstrate. "9000" is a meme used to indicate something overblown or otherwise exaggerated, and was taken from Dragon Ball Z, the sequel to Dragon Ball. Dragon Ball, in turn, was loosely based upon the Chinese story Journey To The West. In it, a character gains the ability to jump 108,000 Li. The number 108,000 is now a Chinese idiom used to indicate something that's overblown or otherwise exaggerated... sound familiar?
      • I have the feeling that it also has to do with Snowclone-ability.
    • This video should explain it all.
      • It's a trap!
      • What do you mean? I don't see Bridge- oh, not that kind of trap.
        • Another question, why is the Rick Roll so popular?
    • Trying to be serious (and when I'm the Only Sane Man you know things are bad) here, I think it goes by a similar principle to the Overly Long Gag- something is fairly amusing or silly when first invented, and repeated until it gets tired, but STILL repeated until the sheer disconnected absurdity of it becomes funny again. That and they become in-jokes, catchphrases and even secret codes for nerds.
    • I like memes. They're repeated by Internet nerds.
    • It's magic, pure and simple. The perfect storm of memorability, relative simplicity, publicity, and a bit of luck.
  • Is there a trope for meme killing, or being a meme killer, or something along those lines?
  • Memes in general bug the hell out of me. Usually they're pretty stupid from the get-go, and are done so much to death that they become extremely annoying. Take the Candle Jack meme, for example (and no, I'm not going to do the "stop your next sentence after you say his name" gag, and besides, I'm good at rope escapology); it's basically the Bloody Mary myth redone in a zany cartoon, and it gets annoying when you're having a conversation with someone and they do it. Doing the entire segment from the cartoon, though, is just overkill; I recently saw an entire Let's Play get derailed because the guy did the entire segment, complete with live-action video addendum explaining his escape. There's also the pronunciation of the word "meme"; why is it pronounced "meem" and not "may-may"?
    • It's supposed to sound like "gene", and you don't pronounce that "jay-nay" do you?
      • I thought it was "meh-may", emphasis on the first syllable, and that the name of this trope was "meh-meh-tic" mutation.
      • It is meh-meh-tic. The E gets shortened, like in genetic.
      • It's pronounced "meem". The person who coined the term went out of his way to specify this, for the similarity with "gene" specified above (although of course he coined it to mean something slightly different than the usage we're discussing here).
      • I thought it was "mehm" first time I read it, short for memory. I still can't get the other pronounciation into my head. I always end up with "mehm". It just sounds better that way.
      • It's "Magic 'E'", hence the preceding vowel becomes long. When turned into "memetic" the E is no longer magic and thus the first E remains short.
      • Yeah but, the problem with that is the fact that even though it's meant to invoke the parallels, he was comparing the EEN with the EEM sound and for some that can be confusing without knowing what he intended. Anyway, I'll always pronounce it mehm (and now it's short for memory since that's basically what it's about)
    • My two cents: people don't know when to quit, even when the meme is seriously getting in the way. It's a way for people (especially outsiders of one kind or another) to affirm connection between them, because they share the same inside jokes.
    • It's not hard to halt their spread if you try to. For example, just tell people you found a God Mode code for The Game. (It's "judiflex". No, you didn't just lose.)
    • Memes are supposed to be little in-jokes. When regular people find them and abuse them, they become fads. That's when a meme is dead. So the good memes out there are possibly the ones you haven't heard yet.
  • If you can figure out what makes memes catch on, Madison Avenue will make you a billionaire
  • Am I the only one for whom Monty Python has been Ruined FOREVER because I've heard damn near every line shoved into conversations by people who are incapable of making their OWN jokes?
  • One question: How DO I shot web?
    • Invent, buy, or steal webshooters, then doubletap the trigger.
    • And even the trope page doesn't explain the origin of the meme correctly. Can we have precise explanations, please?
      • Go right on ahead.
  • M&Ms. The chocolate doesn't melt in my hand, but the dye sure does.
    • And if you leave it in your hand long enough, or in hot enough weather, the chocolate will too indeed.
  • But Why a Goat?
  • Putting Rickroll on a fucking t-shirt. People should've realized by that point that the meme died.
    • As far as I understand what a meme is, it just means it's not dead. After all, it's still replicating itself...
      • Like Cancer which is killing /b/
        • But the cancer itself isn't dying. It's going along fine.
  • The definition of meme. People think it's equivalent. It's not, guys. It's not. Memes are INSIDE JOKES. Jeez...
    • Ironically, the more accepted meaning is much closer to the original meaning of the term...
  • When people make big lists of memes, why don't they at least TRY to explain them? If you don't know the context of a meme, you just start spewing it out at random moments, thus slowly divorcing it form any humor it once had!
    • There's this site called Encyclopedia Dramatica...
      • ... which doesn't explain them correctly or just confusingly.
    • The answer: We're all a bit crazy.
    • a website called "Know Your Meme" has documented and detailed every meme in existence.
  • It kinda bugs me when I see gags based on a Memetic Mutation being used completely out of context, and then lampshaded as such. Two examples: T-Bone Stankus's "Existential Blues" revolves around a sequence taken from The Wizard of Oz, and at one point the Wicked Witch screams "I'll get you, my pretty, and your little dog Toto, too!" "I don't even have a little dog Toto." Second: "A Day In Dracula's Life", and the part where Dracula reacts angrily at Richter spouting lines from the beginning of Symphony of the Night when they don't fit the conversation at all. Just... the idea that because someone said something hilarious, they can't say anything but that, and making fun of this... it feels like the creator's saying "this is funny because it's a Shallow Parody".
    • This is the kind of guys that'd make parody movies ending with "... MOVIE" filled with super-cheap sight gags, toilet humor, easy referencing and Leslie Nielsen.
      • Leave Leslie out of this. Downward sloping career aside, he has only been in three movies ending in "Movie", and none were directed by Seltzer and Friedberg. You are right that those two count as this, though. Their Snakes on a Plane parody in Epic Movie is a particularly effective third example.
  • Is it possible to parody a meme?
    • Yes. You can A) put so many memes together that people know you're joking B) create an overly long gag out of meme or C) look at what is done on this very page and subvert it. For instance: "Head on: apply directly to the nasal cavity." You can also combine the meme with a random image/sound effect, assuming that is outside the bounds of the original meme. Keep in mind these can become their own memes, and can be not very funny parodies.
      • Now I want to see "Head on: apply directly UP the nasal cavity"
  • What's with the Troper Tales entry here? Isn't the point of a meme to be, y'know, widespread? If it's just with you and people you know, that's an inside joke, or at least a running gag.
    • The Other Wiki defines meme as "a self-propagating unit of cultural evolution having a resemblance to the gene" and just like genetic mutations can be contained to a very small group of individuals (for example, one patriarchal family line), so can memes be contained to a very small group. Yes, they're nearly indistinguishable from running gags/in-jokes for those not part of the group, just like "real" memes are to people who've never encountered them. The difference is often only in the usage and how funny we find them. (Not all memes are jokes.)
    • Also Rule Of Awesome. Finding a particularly obscure and tightly-guarded meme in the Troper Tales page is bound to raise some clamour.
  • What's with those two seemingly-unrelated links that say "NEVAR FORGET"?
  • What's the origin of the snowclone [Three Digit Number] do [Something] every day?
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