About

Perfection refers to an exploitable image macro in which the character Erik Magnus Lehnsherr (Michael Fassbender), aka Magneto, in X-Men: First Class asks to be shown "the real X." He asks twice, and upon seeing what he is looking for, he says, "Perfection." What he is looking for is generally the punchline of the joke.

Origin

The scene comes from 2011's X Men: First Class. Raven Darkhölme (Jennifer Lawrence), aka Mystique, a mutant with shapeshifting powers, attempts to seduce Erik by showing herself to him as a beautiful blonde woman (Rebecca Romijn). Erik responds by saying "I prefer the real Raven." Raven then shifts into the human form she usually presents to others. Erik presses, "I said the real Raven." Raven then turns into her natural blue form, to which Erik replies "Perfection."

On October 14th of that year, user jstupack uploaded the first variation of the exploitable to /r/funny.^[1] In the post, Raven turns into actress Raven Symone before Erik says, "Perfection." The post gained 645 points (shown below).

Spread

In the following years, the format would prove a durable template for various jokes. After various plays on the word "Raven," the joke expanded to include various other "real" objects. For example, on May 13th, 2015, FunnyJunk user gwlk^[2] uploaded a variation with Pepe the Frog that gained 1,111 points on the site (shown below).

The format grew popular again in 2017 when it was adopted by the Star Wars fandom on Reddit as a means to compare various iterations of the franchise's characters. On April 16th, user TehFlygon^[3] posted a question to /r/OutOfTheLoop^[3] asking about the origin of the template.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References