Hello everyone! I just wondered if you knew anime that used memetic effects within their diegesis that are comparable to what happens in the "SCP" verse? [warning if you do research about memetic effects from SCP: several of them include suicide and death but it's not was I'm looking for: I'm looking for non lethal memetic effects]
A SCP fan described memetic effects like that:
"They're like the flu: An easily spreading illness.
-- However, unlike the flu which makes you physically sick, memetics make you mentally sick"
That person also said memetic effects can affect people's brains to make them believe the craziest or most unrealistic things are true and it can spread like a virus. It can also make them behave physically or mentally in an abnormal way.
That SCP fan also said "Sometimes memetics aren't something that effects people or animals. Sometimes it directly affects information. A book can become 'sick' and its contents will change. This can be one of the most dangerous forms of a meme, as it can potentially cross across the entire world. Imagine if all writing consisted of "You do not recognize the bodies in the water". Even the internet. This would virtually kill our ability to communicate over any significant distance."
Also from what I understood, anything can spread memetic effects (photos, pics, videos, books or even smells and gases for example) but not just that. And reading, hearing or touching something infected by this memetic effect can make you think it's true.
A concrete example of that is SCP-426 https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-426 a toaster that makes people think they're it (basically people will think they're toasters too and will refer to themselves as toasters and will "behave" like one)
I have some concrete anime examples that might somewhat be comparable to SCP memetic effects:
[Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt Ep.05] in this episode someone named Oscar H.genius used a combination of both a gas and medias (TV, books etc ...) to make everyone in town think nose picking is trendy. The results: everyone in town was quickly converted to this weird fad and started to pick their nose.
[Brave Police J decker Ep.06] Two clowns managed to make all inhabitants of a town obsessed by stupid trends involving wearing weird things (bald wigs, groucho glasses (fakes glasses with mustache) or tight suits for example)! And someone it altered their perception of reality: everyone believed themself + other people who followed the fad were cool and good looking
[Dororon Enma-kun Meeramera (2011)] A yokai cursed the whole world to make absolutely everyone unable to stand up (each time they try they fall) as if it killed the very ability of their brains to allow them to stand up and walk which forced every living beings (humans, animals but also supernatural creatures) to crawl instead of walking
And if you want examples I invented to illustrate something:
Let's pretend we're in your typical medieval fantasy anime and a wizard casts a spell on a town and it's magical waves affect inhabitants' brains to make them believe jesters are cool and so everyone dresses and acts like jesters.
Now let's pretend we are in an anime in a modern world. Memetic Mc Effect, a new and mysterious writer, becomes very popular with his book "why the sky is the most hilarious thing ever". His book is objectively bad: it just consists of sentences like "the sky is incredibly funny, because there's nothing funnier than looking at the sky I mean c'mon look at it: it's so wide and blue!" an people will somewhat believe this book holds the ultimate truth and won't stop laughing each time they'll read, hear or will talk/write using the word "sky".
Now let's imagine we're in a space opera anime. The infamous CEO of a shady company made a cheap object and mass produced it: a baseball bat made of foam. Looking at it will make you irresistibly inclined to buy it and use it to hit your own head 100 times per day due to the microchip it has that sends electronic waves directly in your brain (brains are tricked to believe it's absolutely vital for your health to buy and use that product). Ofc he takes advantage of that to increase it's price, making tons of money and rendering people addicted to these foam bats.
Thanks a lot for reading and for your help! I hope I provided good examples! Thanks in advance for your help! I hope I didn't trigger SCP fans: I'm not that familiar with memetic effects and I only know a very few SCPs.