From Rickrolls To Stick Bugs: What 'Get Stickbugged Lol' Means For The Future Of The Bait-and-Switch

The wisdom that everything comes back in style sooner or later is as true for memes as it is for fashion trends. It might be presented differently, and the little details may change, but the building blocks remain evergreen … and sticklike, swaying hypnotically to Roblox music. One of the most mesmerizing new memes to emerge over the summer picked out the best bits of detritus floating around a Discord server and rearranged it around the concept of the bait-and-switch, confronting our perceptions of the time-honored format along the way.

While Get Stick Bugged Lol is very much representative of content for our times, it also maintains a vintage feel that makes its presence instantly comfortable. Its use of Impact font and the way it lends itself to a YouTube compilation acts as a signifier of a simpler time online. It isn’t a pure throwback, though, as its three-word caption offers a classic example of studied zoomer nonchalance, the success of which is confirmed by its 7.5-million-views-strong hashtag on TikTok.

By early August, eBaum’s World had declared it the "Rickroll of Gen Z," and true to the generational divide, the meme had its own unique take on that which had come before it.

Beginnings and Development

The origins of the bait-and-switch are quite literally transactional, as the term was first used to define a type of retail fraud. It can go down one of two pathways, both of which begin by enticing the customer into a store with an attractively priced product. The first option eventually reveals to them that this product is not being sold at all, while the second pressures them into buying a different, more expensive one.

Many old-school versions of this format started out as representing the former option, especially when they came in video form. In place of the promised content, they offered a cheerful void in the form of half-forgotten pop muzak, strange video game offcuts and random clips — the typical throwaway internet ephemera that we find ourselves bombarded with on a daily basis.

Of course, the giant among these is the Rickroll, the ultimate old-school example of repurposing cultural content through the means of memes. The masterclass in anodyne '80s songwriting and music video direction was the perfect anticlimax for almost any given situation, its tackiness an essential part of the package. Successors like Trololo Guy were used in a similar way, with the bonus of his strange, '70s Soviet Union censorship context.

Rethinking the Genre

Over time, though, many of these classic memes have morphed into the latter option, as the bait-and-switch has come to be appreciated as an art form in its own right. While it still had the power to annoy, people began to acknowledge it as part of the vast ecosystem of online culture. "Never Gonna Give You Up" became repurposed as a defining anthem of the internet, as Rick Astley enjoyed a career boost out of his hit single’s second wind and people began to genuinely enjoy the song as a standalone piece of music. Similarly, Trololo’s Eduard Khil was widely mourned upon his death in 2012 after the amusement he gave to millions of people online.

As for numerous instances of the format that came afterward, they began to get more inventive, breaking from the cult of the individual and requiring an increased amount of effort from meme creators. Examples like I Just Wasted Ten Seconds of Your Life attached the conceit to any and every piece of pop culture they could think of. Others such as the Scary Maze Game pushed the genre into an interactive format. Something like Beaned, meanwhile, went even further, making up entire shitposting storylines and references for its vegetable protagonist.

Get Stick Bugged treads a middle ground between these with its endless variations. Meme creators have manipulated all sorts of media to make things lead to stick bugs, and the lengths they have gone to can sometimes reach a level of abstraction comparable to everyone’s favorite "webcomic turned referential one-upmanship challenge" — Loss (and yes, a Loss/Get Stickbugged mashup does exist).

The Stick Bug Philosophy

Of course, getting "stick bugged" still has the trolling element of its simpler forefathers too, but we know the score now. It’s more of a statement than a mere trick. The feeling it seeks to provoke differs, as we skip the rage to go straight to the appreciation stage.

In most cases, older bait-and-switches were initially intended to irritate, whereas Get Stickbugged takes a more meditative approach. It is evidenced by the origin story provided by Discord user YeetACookie, in which they describe their friends watching the video and its soundtrack together for an hour on mute “kind of like a mini-cult.”

It grows from a mixture of the good-natured, wholesome joke that some of the most beloved bait and switches grew into, and the attitudinal shift we have seen as meme culture has become more dominant — one in which memes have become a lifestyle enhancement, not just a distraction. As a result, Get Stickbugged has taken on an extra dimension not afforded to the earlier examples in the genre, acting as much as a mindset as it is a punchline.

The Future

While the trancelike state of Get Stick Bugged proves much about how the bait-and-switch has grown, it only shows us one strand of its development, which is being continued in other memes. Coming right after peak stick bug, You Just Got Hey Stinky’d has revealed to us the alternate side of the future of the format, one which connects to its origins differently.

Where Get Stick Bugged is a masterclass in making the randomly acquired appear intentional, Hey Stinky is a lot more focused. Rooting itself firmly in childhood nostalgia with long-time internet culture icon Mario, his catchphrase underlines the taunt that something like the Rickroll merely implied and acts as more of a direct insult than the state-of-mind concept behind Get Stick Bugged. This hasn’t stopped it from gaining a similar versatility, with the meme inserting itself, and its protagonist occasionally being replaced, by a number of different video game contexts.

You Just Got Hey Stinky’d represents the merging of both worlds, putting in the extra effort and variation we have come to expect while retaining the innocent trolling pleasure found in the very first bait-and-switch videos. If there is one thing we have realized through these contemporary takes on the format, it is that we are not ready to give up that innocence just yet, even as it adapts to our current times.

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