About

Max's Favorite Song, also known as Music That Would Save Me From Vecna, is an exploitable meme template that comes from the fourth season of the Netflix show Stranger Things, which depicts the character Maxine "Max" Mayfield (portrayed by Sadie Sink) being possessed by the character Vecna before she's saved by listening to Kate Bush's song "Running Up That Hill." The format is used as a way to show what piece of music the meme creator loves enough to save them from paranormal demonic possession, mimicking the show's scene, by photoshopping in various artwork or album covers over the cassette tape in the image. The meme began seeing use online shortly after the fourth season dropped in May 2022.

Origin

Within the context of the show that the meme comes from, the character Max needs to listen to her favorite song in order to break Vecna's possession over her, which is provided by another character who plays the song "Running Up That Hill" by Kate Bush to save her. The full interaction between the music and Max was uploaded to the official Still Watching Netflix YouTube channel^[1] on May 30th, 2022, where it gained over 6.2 million views in 20 days (shown below, spoilers for Stranger Things 4).

Taking select screenshots from the scene, a four-panel meme was made by showing Max possessed, then the music being put on over her, a zoom-in of the music selection and then her coming back to her senses upon hearing the song. This music meme template was first utilized in a Twitter post by the account @mikescomfort^[2] on June 7th, 2022, in which the question was asked on what song would save the listener from Vecna (shown below). Depicting the song "Jet Black Heart" by 5 Seconds of Summer, the tweet received over 3,400 likes and 100 quote tweets in 10 days.

Spread

The meme template started to spread around after the initial tweet on June 7th, 2022, with people posting their favorite musicians and bands as the thing that saves them by photoshopping it over the original cassette. This can be seen in the example posted by a Halsey fan on June 9th, 2022, in which Twitter user @Halseysvh^[3] tweeted out the meme utilizing the newest single by the singer, called "So Good," earning over 2,200 likes in eight days (shown below).

Music selections weren't the only elements edited into the meme template, as other fandom communities started to create humorous variants using non-music choices as the format spread. This can be seen in the meme posted to the Lord of the Rings subreddit on June 9th, 2022, by Redditor^[4] Saberlily9 in which Max is seen getting saved by the complete recording of The Fellowship of the Ring, earning over 1,100 upvotes in eight days (shown below).

Various Examples

Template

Search Interest

External References