Forums / Discussion / Meme Research

So this is something I've seen pop up a lot recently and I have no idea what it could be called. Its actually used in combination with a lot of different memes, but it seems distinct enough to note. I've been viewing this site for a long time and I have not seen an article on the subject.

The general pattern is taking a screenshot, a box cover, an advertisement or something else and pasting unrelated parts of the image together to form a caption. Since I have no clue what it's called, here are some common examples:

(also, hope these show up, I haven't posted here before).

Think this warrants more research? Do we already have something that covers this?

also, I remember one made from a donkey kong box that said "EXPANSION PAK" with his face zoomed in on. I cant seem to find that one.

Well I'll be damned. I typed in "expand dong meme" into google (yet another caption I remembered) and this popped up.

link

(NSFW)

This seems to be a thing on tumblr now.

Oh I get it. It's like those murder threat letters. (image also from tumblr. After searching all combos of the words "magazine" cut out" "letters" and "murder" tumblr was all I could find. I'll try again after the police question me about my search history.)

waves to NSA

I believe that this is what you're looking for.

Well yes, that's one instance of this pattern being used. However I'm looking for the name of the pattern itself. This seems to be one of those trends that's shown itself in several other memes. Was there a specific term on that page I should be looking for?

OH, I see. Looking through the image gallery, that pattern is everywhere in there. That's definitely a huge pool of examples. It seems like that kind of de-railed from the why meme itself though and became something else….

I think a case could be made for splitting it into a separate Meme in and of itself. Or at least devoting a section to the spin-off.

That sounds like it could work either way. I suppose the option we take would largely depend on

A) how large the meme has become

B) how much the new images have to do with the original "why"

I don't know about A at the moment, but I have been seeing this used in a lot of places where the "why" image would not really be appropriate. I believe this still falls directly into the category of reaction faces though.

Right now I'm mostly concerned about finding out its name, or perhaps naming it if it doesn't have one. How does one go about "naming" a meme anyhow?

Hmm actually… going a little deeper….

Are we sure that the why meme actually spawned those derivatives, or did this pattern already exist and "why" was just a highly notable variant? In the second case, "why" would qualify as a spin-off of this.

"WHY" is mostly the slightly more notable example. But there we also have to remember that "WHY" mostly centers around Tony Kornheiser, including with different texts below it or both him and the "WHY" shooped into something else.

The practice of that "title cutting" itself as you are talking about here, and how big it is, can be worthy of a seperate article yes.

Woo! Sweet.

Well, I've been lurking on this site for a while, but I haven't really ever done research before. I'm sure there's gotta be a post or an article that describes that process. I'll look around the forum. I feel like that cant be too far away.

Thanks RM.

eesh…. boy this seems like a hard one. So the two posts I found (stickied) talked about image and google searching. One assumed you know the name of the meme. This one may not even have a name, although maybe we could identify a particular example that popped up early on.

Image searching seems slightly more feasible, but I have no way of telling what the earliest images are or how far back their archiving system goes.

I suppose I can throw some random, early images into search, or perhaps start back at the origin of WHY and see if I find any leads. Thanks for the help so far and I'm sure I'll be back with more questions.

If you've got any better ideas I'm all perked-up-ears.