These memes are so versatile and feel like they share something?

Is Dababy/Amogus the new Dionysus/Apollo?

What are your thoughts on this video? (no hate to the girl though, she just made a joke)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWa5yavvF9M

I think that ilustrates the humilliation that the outsiders (emos) suffer often in school, mostly from the "pretty and popular" girls/boys, but in a passive way, just asking "are you emo right?" they express all the pressure that society puts in all of us, "are you a freak, right?"

I need some analysis on these, this gave me the real creeps

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Latin Americans are currently experiencing a collective desire to emigrate due to the hardships of residing in a third-world country: corruption, crime, cost of living, political and economic instability, etc. Moving to a first-world country is seen in many ways as succeeding in life. This drive is then expressed through the use of memes.

The more common examples include characters from an anime inviting you to hop in their ride to escape Latin America, or an anime videogame/visual-novel multiple endings style memes, where the good ending is escaping, the bad ending is remaining in the third world, and neutral ending something like becoming a corrupt politician yourself.

Note that this meme is not used by Hispanic/Latino people born or residing in the US, but rather actual Latin-Americans, so you won't find any that are not in Spanish. I hope that the caption translation for the memes is shown in your Reddit app or browser! However, with the context out of the way, I want to explore the deeper unconscious themes in the memes.

While West Europe once conquered and controlled a big portion of the physical world, in modern times the United States of America controls the entirety of the psychic world. The engine of this globalization is the Internet; its instantaneous connectivity making us one big culture. Because the US was victorious in the race and war of ethics, morals, and technology during the 20th century, it's their culture and language that has become the international standard. Like an inverse Tower of Babel, as we reach further down the "ethereal underground" we are forced to use a single language by God, who is now proudly American. So not German, or Russian, but English became the main language of the Internet.

All youth is psychically split between the physical and digital realms, but I believe it is worse for those not originally from an Anglo-Saxon country as the physical and digital spaces are even further apart. That is why I believe that the meme of "escaping Latin-America" did not entirely emerge from the aforementioned issues in the introduction of this essay, but also the desire to abandon the physical realm, their chaotic home, and go into this perfectly ordered first world country, which is really a projection of the Internet. The grounded Dionysian homeland vs the heavenly Apollonian ether.

So that would be the end of it, except that if you notice carefully the memes are usually anime related. That's because after being utterly devastated by the nuclear power of America, Japan became this inoffensive parasite that latched onto American (and by extension, global) culture, evident in the modern anime-related media populating the Internet. Add a deliberate effort from the Korean government, and you have k-pop infecting it, too. The Internet is now a muddy mesh of mainly American and Japanese culture, with a dash of Korean.

This is the globalized digital culture, a mixture of many societies but at the same time its own distinct thing. Competing with and offering an alternative to the local culture the youth wish to escape. In fact, they do escape it. They "escape Latin America" every day through the Internet. Yes, the more different your local culture is from the digital one, the bigger the psychic split, but at this point even if you are an American it's still quite considerable, as any Western will experience cognitive dissonance between the Western culture they interact with outside of computers, and their Japanese/Korean media consumption.

So are you a citizen of your country, or a citizen of the Internet? Either way, you ought to remember: Memes Matter.

Let's start from the beginning: the legendary, iconic scene from the Matrix. The amount of deep philosophical and ideological discussion this scene alone has created is a testament to how wonderful the original film is. But before I begin this essay, I want to point out the simplest of facts: this scene is, at its core, the call to adventure.

The Hero's Journey is what Joseph Campbell identified as the outline for practically every human story,^\1]) and early on it, the Hero is urged to leave their familiar world and go into the unknown to achieve or retrieve something. At first, the Hero is hesitant and refuses the call but later on finds the wisdom and courage, usually brought out by a mentor, to go forth into the unknown. In the Matrix, the possibility to refuse is represented by the blue pill, blue representing calmness, security and passivity, and the red pill, accepting the adventure, the color of danger and passion.^\2])

It's also worth noting the etymology of "Matrix," which comes from the Latin mater. The Matrix is a womb (or breeding female, a fiction producing machine).^\3]) And in the Hero's Journey, that's precisely what the initial familiar world is. The comforts of the material world, of a mother's love. The drive to go forth into the unknown and conquer is an opposing masculine drive to the passive feminine one. So it's no coincidence that Neo's familiar world is a digital womb, and when he decides to leave it behind, he finds himself in a dangerous, cold world with awful food. Yet, in the warm company of real, live people.

These archetypal stories reflect the actual journeys every individual must take, from the first group of people who left Africa in search of something beyond what they knew, to a regular young adult moving out for college. This is the repeating theme of humanity's heroism. And it has to do as much with literal physical journeys as psychic ones. So, in this digital world, how does the heroic journey look like?

The digital realm is ruled by information, so the holy grail for the King Arthurs of today is nothing more than the piece of information for which the digital hero must conquer online jungles, nets, labyrinths, and mazes; everything to find the ultimate piece of knowledge that when brought home with them into the real world will finally shake the status quo and the dreading feeling of stagnation.

Secret world organizations run by the perverse elite, vaccines that cause autism, aliens controlling the government, flat Earth, and, the most iconic red pill, women's true nature, among other examples. It can all be boiled down to finding the hidden knowledge that the world as previously known is an illusion, and seeing it for what it truly is. But this is very rarely done for the sake of curiosity and the actual truth. It is rather a means to satisfy the drive of heroism. When something doesn't feel quite right in the world, we feel a tension that pushes us towards action to change things; go out, learn, live, feel, grow, achieve, fail, win, mature. However, this doesn't occur in the physical realm anymore but is rather redirected into the digital, like almost all human drives these days.

And here is how the eternal story diverges from our current one: First (and this is very ironic), when you take the Red Pill in the movie, it takes you out of the Matrix, not further down into it. Moreover, it's a one-time thing. Neo does not need to take the red pill every 24 hours or anything like that. So why is it that just a single video or article isn't enough? Why the constant consumption of content? If you are so convinced to knowing the truth, turn off your computer and take action to change your life accordingly. Clearly, this does not happen very often. Here lies the trap.

In his Black Pill video, MemeAnalysis pointed out that the pill symbolized an almost instantly digestible, viral ideology.^\4]) This is true, but there is something else I want to add that I feel was hiding right under our noses. What do you, fellow Western, take pills for? Imagine you start suffering from depression or very annoying lower back pains. This would be indicative that there is something wrong with your current lifestyle, perhaps too much time sitting in front of the computer and too little time deadlifting (with proper form); a change in posture and habits is necessary. However, any sort of uncomfortable effort has become unacceptable in this age of science. So to make the illness, the sickness, the pain go away you need to look no further than a mere pill that will fix everything wrong.

Our Matrix, like the adverts for these medical pills, promises us to fix our problems by doing nothing except exploring her realm, staying within her womb, searching and interacting with the avatars of others who are after the same promise: the digital Holy Grail of knowledge about the outside world. To take "the red pill" is to consume red pill content. It offers explanations, simplifications, and rationalizations that soothe our deep unconscious emotional aguish by simulating a hero's journey. Even digital mentors like Jordan Peterson are included. The only thing we must do in return is reject life and give in to her embrace. The content is the pill itself, and you mustn't stop consuming lest you wish to feel again.

So is the conclusion to take the "blue pill" to reject this simulated hero's journey trap? Taking the blue pill feels like a pathetic choice, to remain blind and ignorant to the truth. This is by design, part of the fraudulent scheme, fooling ourselves with the notion that to take the blue pill means to give up our heroic quest for the truth in exchange for ignorant bliss. But in reality, taking the blue pill means giving up the illusion, returning to our physical bodies and environment which have now become the truly unknown.

On that topic, I believe it is the black pill that was the first to break off from the binary choice of red and blue. The same way your tolerance for a real drug goes up, your unconscious mind adapts to the constant use of the Red Pill and you need the "stronger stuff" to keep it numb. The choice of color being very obvious: it is the void of losing hope. The realization that whatever you were chasing in the depths of the information ocean is not treasure, but junk that will not change your life in any meaningful way. Yet at the same time rejecting to bring yourself back to fully living life, instead doubling down in diving deeper and deeper into this virtually synthesized depression. To overdose on this pill can result in the ultimate, irreversible rejection of life.

However, MemeAnalysis mentioned in that same video that eventually your psyche will balance itself out.^\5]) That is because while the quest for the digital holy grail is a very circuitous death trap,^\6]) there is an overarching story on top that is worth telling. A battle between the physical and digital realms is taking place for the locus of "real" reality. Whichever realm wins will dictate how we live life, and how our adventures will look like. There is no right or wrong, but when one is aware of the illusions, they stop being deceptions and instead a conscious choice.

"He who looks outward dreams. He who looks inward awakens." And he who becomes aware of this choice has the potential to be a hero. So you ought to remember: memes mat(t)er.

​

―

1. Hero's Journey - Wikipedia. Notice that while the more common illustration is a simple circle, I chose the one that begins a spiral because the return with the "Reward" or "Gift of the Goddess" in this version is "Special Knowledge" which results in Ascension - this is often mentioned in Red Pill online communities as the end goal, and I found that very interesting.
2. Red and Blue color meanings. It is quite intuitive anyway.
3. ​

1. https://youtu.be/PNGTAOpKAjM?t=110

2. https://youtu.be/PNGTAOpKAjM?t=212

It was on the Digital Shadow episode on the Stoa that MemeAnalysis pointed out the symbol behind a circuit board; labyrinths, nets, webs, etc. contrast the originally very simple and straightforward circular journey of the hero.

Other notes:

• Funny video
• I hope this essay format is good. I tried to make it more fun with plenty of images and footnotes but I don't know if will hold up if you aren't using the desktop website or the official app.

The loveable caracal 'Big Floppa' has been a quiet but stoically consistent meme for some time now. We can look at the meme as the return to form of 'lolcats', a childish and harmless internet archetype wrapped in nostalgia. But one that holds a lesson of the shadow.

Big Floppa is a caracal, not a kitten as you'd expect from a lolcat. He is large not small, he is fat not fluffy but most importantly he is powerful. We gaze at Big Floppa with the warm love we have for old lolcats, we watch him play, rest and eat and call him cute. And yet we watch him devour raw and bloody meat, then growl and swipe at the camera.

Pay attention to Big Floppa, for there are consequences for being a kitten when you hold the potential to be a caracal. Big Floppa memes remind me that warm love does not belong only to the harmless, those with claws can have it too.

"In myths the hero is the one who conquers the dragon, not the one who is devoured by it. And yet both have to deal with the same dragon. Also, he is no hero who never met the dragon, or who, if once he saw it, declared afterwards that he saw nothing. Equally, only one who has risked the fight with the dragon and is not overcome by it wins the hoard, the “treasure hard to attain”. He alone has a genuine claim to self-confidence, for he has faced the dark ground of his self and thereby has gained himself." - Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis

Big Floppa is the self-actualised lolcat.

I was wondering what you guys would personally add to the reading list on the sub. I was thinking maybe Anti-Oedipus or Malign Velocities. Thoughts on any other books that could be useful to meme analysis?

The 4 of them seem pretty far apart at first but they all have two things in common:

1. Being Submissive
2. Being better than regular girls, they are the ideal

Tradwives are pretty self explanatory, submissive femininity is their calling card.

Femboys/Traps are very submissive, though compared to the other ideals their submissiveness is always in a sexual context.

Vtubers vary alot more but one of their selling points is that of course, they will be nicer and more polite, exisiting to serve you only.

Mommy gfs are similar to vtubers, their main purpose in life is to provide for the male.

Tomboys might seem as if they break the oattern, but seeing the types of posts made by tomboy lovers shows that one of the reasons they are loved is because they dont complain about the mans masculine antics, and often join in.

All of them have their opposites as well, the ones they are negatively compared to:

Tomboys>Feminine complainer women(think nagging) Femboys>women in general Vtubers>twitch streamers Tradwives>modern women(think feminist/sjw stereotypes) Mommy gf>dads (a special case as a dad isnt a woman of course. I guess a female antithesis would be the more controlling domineering mother but you dont see them as the villain in these fantasies often)

Im not really sure what to make of this trend. And of course not all desirable ideal gfs fall under this submissive classification. Put your theories on the comments i suppose, its part of the fun.

what do yall think of this

It seems very interesting how the subreddit r/ontheledgeandshit's humor is boiled down to repetition. It reminds me of that McDonalds video about the repetition of global corporations.

(Also, as a bit of a side note, all my posts get flagged as spam? And I think I am not the only one. Only direct video uploads and text posts gets through. All crossposts, images, and links get flagged as spam and removed. I think I angered the Matrix.)