Meme Report 6/22
She's a 7 but She Has A Substack about Meme Critique
Ryan Gosling Ken
Ryan Gosling is the best boy we have. He’s a proto Adam Driver but he dipped right before he had to debase himself for the Marvel machine. His work encapsulates both male and female fantasy, but one that is more adult and complex than the fantasy of superheros. I’m not interested in arguments about whether or not this is the right direction for Ken. It’s certainly the funniest. Can you imagine looking at Malibu Gosling for two hours while he tries to pass off his affected Brooklyn accent as California cool? I’m excited. I’m glad they released this still a year before the movie came out so we have time to get used to the image, meme him to death so we don’t have people passing out from shock when the trailer plays. We can’t have another arrival of the train situation.
This Is That Movie
It is a timeless classic to use kids movie marketing and replace it with a movie for grown ups. Replacing the Lightyear marketing to be about Se7en? It’s just funny! The less the movie appeals to kids the funnier this meme is.
Kim Better Not Touch This Dress
It’s time to play “everyone name an iconic dress from history” again! A game we play every so often on the internet, where everyone tries to think of a dress and then posts it. It’s usually semi related to a news story but not always. This time it’s about Kim Kardashian stretching out the Marilyn Monroe happy birthday mr president dress. Everyone decided they were a fashion historian last week and debated it. Personally, I’m team “if it was really an important historical artifact it wouldn’t be at the Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum”. Sure there’s the argument that fashion is an important element of history and should be well archived and protected, which I agree with. But if that's the case, maybe it should be at the Met or the Smithsonian. Maybe this also isn’t as important a part of history as everyone is suggesting. Anyway, I digress. The meme is lame, the dress discourse is lame, and I hate getting into the weeds with fashion people.
“Drag will Confuse Kids” What Was This?
Listen, you don’t have to preach to me about the value and power of memes. That’s exactly why I think this meme is so bad. It’s tired, it’s not funny, we trot it out for every argument with conservatives. It’s not for their benefit, so it must be for ours. It is neither angry enough or funny enough to do any damage. It’s a tossed off attempt to get the high ground by being both funny and correct. However, with this meme, they’re just morally correct. Not necessarily funny. Memes that are about what is or is not “confusing” never really prove the point well. Oftentimes, the things people are comparing it too, are never that confusing. It just makes OP look dumb for not understanding basic concepts. I know there’s a good meme for getting one over on conservatives about the drag and kids “conversation” (bigoted attack), but it’s not this one. Let’s try to show a little effort and actually be funny. At the very least we owe the drag queens more than a recycled pronouns meme.
She’s A Ten But (Twitter Version)
I hate the twitter version of this. It’s all about how we’re mentally ill from twitter use. Ok? And? What else you got? Oh the plot of a movie? Great. Twitter is ready to call everything from TikTok stupid and unfun that even when they participate in a meme that originated on TikTok, they have to be ironic and detached from it. No genuine fun allowed! We all have to be jaded all the time. Like the older brother in a Disney movie. This whole version of this meme on twitter is when you have to admit that the game your dumb younger sister is playing actually looks fun. No one can admit that though, so we have to sit through this. You got to play with the Dalle last week and she’s not smart enough for that, so you have to let her have her fun this week.
TikTok
What Moisturizer Do You Use Trauma Dump
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Well ladies we’ve done it! We’ve condensed the subjugation of women into one meme! This meme is about the unending quest to perfectly adorn oneself that is fueled by capitalism and the violence that we suffer at the hands of men! Imagine that, combining blase talk about skincare with confessional stories about the violence inflicted upon us by men! It’s the more insidious version, when these elements are used as tools for female bonding rather than trying to explicitly sell us something but it’s still evil at its core. I don’t believe the girls making these are evil, I just think this meme is upsetting but not for the reason everyone thinks. It’s condensing all the bad parts of a women’s magazine into one 15 second video. (It’s short on purpose so it can garner more views.) The problem with this one is that the girls themselves in these videos are the products, they just don’t know it. The TikToks one makes are an extension of themselves and these girls are opening themselves up to be scrutinized and consumed. Always remember, if you’re not buying something, you’re the product and never cry on camera for free.
Horace
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I love him. I love when TikTok gives us a new creature and we collectively decide on his lore. I believe Horace is good but weird. He has his quirks but ultimately he is not nefarious. The world made him this way and he adapted. That’s the lore I just made up that I choose to believe. I want to see what everyone else thinks too though. Feel free to disagree.
PS1 Hagrid
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If I had to make some kind of deal with the devil about which Harry Potter media to keep and which to memory hole so that JK rowling never has any power or influence, I would pick the video games. I think they could stand alone and we could all pretend that they were an original idea for a game. The iconography of it is almost entirely separate from that woman and what made it special was intrinsic to the game, not the story. I have a deep real love of the video games. I played them on my PC as a child and they brought me a lot of joy. This sound and this filter combine to make us all reminiscent of Hagrid from the game the first game for the playstation 1. Hagrid the most iconic because his face was so fucked up. He’s a comforting presence of both wisdom and malfeasance. I believe this is the part of the collective cultural wound that is H*rry P*tter that we should be allowed to reopen with impunity.
What?
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We don’t need a new version of a sound where it’s just someone saying What? Every week. We need to come together from all sides of Tik Tok and vote on one. I’m tired of doing this. I can’t find new things to say about everyone’s fun facts and weird stories. I don’t care. I’m over it. From now on I’m not reviewing them anymore. They’re boring and lame and easy.
He’s A Ten But
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As a parlor game enthusiast, I love this. I played it with my friends this weekend and it was so much fun. I think what is maybe not coming across is how specific you can get with your friends based on various factors like age, location, and belief system. The videos that are really good highlight this. When I play with my friends as twenty somethings in LA, we tended to focus on all the ways social climbing and wanting to work in the entertainment industry can poison your soul. I watched one recently that I loved that was christian girls but they were being really funny. He’s a ten but he has philippians in insta bio? 3. I love learning about subcultures and I love seeing the specificity of other’s lives and this meme is at its best when everyone is hyper specific to their location and subculture. It’s most fun (and funny) when everyone is genuinely engaging with the premise.
Picturing a very dweeby boy watching those hot girls in that tik tok say a backwards hat makes guys hotter then going out and buying like 16 snapbacks and making that his whole personality
Horace 💛💀