About

Fire is a chemical reaction where flammable substances come into contact with a heat source and react with oxygen in the air, releasing energy, light, and heat. It is also the most awesome shit in the entire universe. Originally used as a survival tool to avoid being eaten by grues, fire is often used in the modern era to cook murdered things, or to murder previously unmurdered things, including people, buildings, small insects, and furries.

History

4 million years ago, before the existence of written language, the Internet and the vast porn cache known as Know Your Meme, a caveman used two sticks to masturbate to one of those stone statues of a naked fat lady that cavemen liked to make for some reason. The friction created sparks which caused a fire and accidentally burned down a neighboring forest. This is considered by many archaeologists to be not only the invention of fire, but also the first known evidence of inflation fetishism and hot gluing.

The Ancient Greeks were known to have a hard-on for fire, to the point where the philosopher, astronomer and Bill Nye's ancestor Aristotle made fire one of his 5 classical elements that he claimed were a part of everything in the entire universe. Unfortunately, he was wrong…. but HOLY SHIT HOW METAL WOULD THAT BE? In fact, the concept was so fucking metal, that every ancient civilization from Egypt to India to Japan stole borrowed it, and persisted even throughout 17th century Europe where chemists theorized that things combusted due to a terribly-named substance called phlogiston.

In stark contrast to their pyrophiliac neighbors, the Romans though fire and lava and all that stuff was fucking stupid, as it kept reking all their shit (See: Pompeii). The most notable example of this shit-rekage was in 68 AD, where the friction caused by too many orgy members rubbing against each other caused the city of Rome itself to burst into flames. The emperor Nero (pictured below), instead of going "HOLY SHIT ROME'S ON FIRE, FUCK YEAH!", just ignored it and played a harp like the pretentious douche he was.

Roman Christians saw this douchebaggery, said "Screw these boring dweebs!", split the Roman Empire in half and created the Holy Roman or Byzantine Empire: like the Romans, but with blackjack and Jesus. Historians assume that it was their hatred for the other half of Rome that, in 672 AD, made them decide to make fire 100,000x more awesome. Through what can only be assumed was voodoo bullshit and copious amounts of hax, they managed to make fire that was so fucking fiery that water itself couldn't do fucking shit against it, giving it the ability to burn in fucking water, as well as murder even more shit than usual. They named the invention "Greek fire" in honor of the Greeks' legendary boner for flames and to spite those fire-hating jerkwads back in Rome, who were at the time getting rekt by barbarians. They then decided that other peoples' boats weren't as cool as theirs, and that those people needed to die for it, so they put their voodoo fire in a cannon and murdered them with it. (pictured below).

Unfortunately, after the Byzantines were rekt by the Ottomans in 1453 for insulting their boats, the recipe to make such awesomeness was lost to history, and so mankind lost the ability to burn the shit out of water.

After this horrific tragedy, man was rendered unable to use fire to reliably murder things from really far away. Russia made an attempt to fix this in the 1800s with the invention of Molotov cocktails, throwable bottles of booze with towels jammed in them, but soon realized that not only would that be a waste of good booze, but mass-producing them would likely cause their mostly vodka-based economy to collapse.

Then, in 1918, a magnificent German bastard named Richard Fiedler woke up one day and decided he wanted to burn someone to death for insulting his glorious mustache (pictured below, giving the stare of death to said stache-insulter).

However, he was too far away from him and was unable to use matches. Instead of giving up, the absolute madman took gasoline, put it in a tank, connected that tank to a hose-gun, and murdered the fuck out of said guy with his "flame-hose-gun 9000" (German: flammenschlauchgewehr nuen-tausend). However, since that didn't exactly look good on a patent, he changed the name to flammenwerfer. (American: FLAMETHROWER).

Years later, the United States stole borrowed Fiedler's flame-hose-gun technology, and made it shoot flammable Jell-O instead, improving the already-awesome flamethrower to throw flame even better. The U.S loved the idea of burning people with dessert products so much, they put their flaming Jell-O in a bomb, called it napalm, and used them in the Vietnam War to purge communist Asians for the grave sin of inventing hentai and Sword Art Online.

Spread

Fire spreads most easily when in the presence of flammable substances such as wood, gasoline and internet arguments. Fire can also be spread through the transfer of mixtapes.

Related Memes

Kill It with Fire

Kill It with Fire is an expression used on the Internet to convey extreme disgust. The meme is usually associated with image macros of people with FLAMETHROWERS burning the shit out of said thing.

Shit's on Fire Yo

Shit's on Fire Yo is a set of image macros of a Renaissance-era painting of a person in a hairnet pointing to some shit in the distance that is indeed on fire, yo. The reason why this man decided to pose for a painting instead of going to look at the burning shit has been lost to history, but the most likely theory is that he is descended from the Romans.

Fire Challenge

The Fire Challenge, also known as "self-immolation", is an Internet challenge popular among millennials, Darwin Award seekers, and people who believe Dark Souls was a documentary. In this challenge, the Chosen Idiot lights themselves on fire for as long as possible in an attempt to link the First Flame. However, since these videos are usually filmed outside of the Kiln of the First Flame and the participants have not yet defeated Gwyn Lord of Cinder, their attempts usually just end up failing spectacularly and hilariously.

The challenge was originally started in ancient times as a form of suicidal protest, most notably used in 1960's Vietnam by Buddhist monks (pictured below) to protest against government oppression. Decades later, the monks' ghosts were quoted as calling modern challenge-takers "fucking casuals", and that they did it before it was cool.