Memers Love Distorted Videos Of Team Fortress 2's Solider Smiling

Team Fortress 2's Soldier has long-been a memer's favorite. But in recent months, a series of disturbing and mind-bending reactions featuring the characters have surged in popularity on Twitter, Reddit and everywhere in between.

Team Fortress 2 memes are nothing new by any stretch. For more than a decade, sectors of the internet have been inundated with a near-nonstop deluge of TF 2 memes, many of which are reaction images of those blocky characters standing next to their name. Most, I assume, are pretty tired of them at this point.

But the overuse of TF 2 memes have helped make this new trend feel fresh. Rather than the frankly lazy, run-of-the-mill Team Fortress reaction, these new ones add a bit of the uncanny into our daily meme-ing. First, through the resurgence of the long-running Solider smiling meme, which makes him look malevolent in a way the game never could. More recently, through this acid-trip of a GIF that features that character maniacally laughing as the texture around his face bends, shifts and dissolves through "Content Aware Scaling", which parodies the JonTron I'll Take Your Entire Stock meme.

Is this the beginning of a new kind of Team Fortress 2 meme? Probably not, but it's fun to see people finally getting a little more creative with em. Check out some examples below.