Can a Meme de-evolve?

This has been bothering me for a while. I recently got Editorship of Invisible Protis Sniper, which is a variation of Candlejack. What has me bothered is that there is no spread of the Invisible Protis Sniper outside of the Starcraft subculture. So, a few questions:

1. Can a meme de-evolve? (e.g. go from general mainstream to a subculture)
2. If it can, is it still a meme?
3. What should we do about Invisible Protis Sniper? Merge it with Candlejack or make it a sub-meme of Candlejack? It wouldn't go under interruptors, I think, because it's just like Candlejack, the phrase stops mid sentence.

Thanks,
Ryan.

There has been evidence of sniper interruptors threads on 4chan before 2010. It usually was picture of a sniper starting the thread (or anything related to a red dot) and then nothing but cut mid-sentence one-liners in replies.
I bet it's related to your meme entry.

I know my input's relatively unimportant, but
1.) I'm not sure if Invisible Protis Sniper de-evolved, as much as it merely stayed within starcraft's ranks.

2.) Is IPS memetic? I would say so, but again, my input's kind of weak in this regard.

3.) A merge might work, as they're quite similar in nature…

On a related note; I thought IPS was more about you puposefully cutting yourself off, whereas Candlejack just straight-up comes to ge

Last edited Sep 05, 2011 at 01:19AM EDT

To answer your first question, yes they can. It can be an inside joke to a subculture. Even if a meme is a subculture joke or no longer popular it should still be logged here though.
Wait, what's this nut doing her
[photo:170865]

I suppose a meme can "de-evolve". Like part of the meme itself also becomes a smaller/bigger meme? Like a meme within a meme. Althought thats not really de-evolving its more like adding another branch to a tree.