"R U TRIGGERED" and all its subvariants were radioactive toxic waste and turned a valid and important psychological concept into bullying vector that for a time had nearly universal acceptance.
I still see vestiges of "le epic bacon" out there but it's mostly confined to aging :grillman: types and some :up-yours-woke-moralists: cultists and a few contrarian carninist edgelords that want to "trigger the vegans." Yes I know all of the above have a lot of overlap.
Not really. It's a valid point.
There's a difference between memes and propaganda. virgin/chad, and the "yes" guy are literally explicit propaganda. Even when they're stuff I agree with it, they're not funny. They can make you feel good, but they are objectively not funny.
Prior to 2015 or so, memes were not usually this explicitly propagandistic and were made to be legitimately funny.
If you're used to this era of memes, then some of the "memes" of the late 2010s era will seem annoying and dumb.
Basically, chuds have combined elements of meme culture into propaganda, and zoomers as well as undiscriminating millennials, still call these things "memes" because they resemble them on the surface.
No that's exactly what they are. Memes. They're also propaganda.
Don't mistake the form of a communication with the message it carries.
well at that point you can call anything a meme (which it technically would be)
Fine, these are "propaganda memes", and the ones before were not, or at least were much less so. Explicit propaganda isn't that funny to me, nor to many others. The question was "what meme do you not like" and they answered it
In the Dawkins sense, yes, correct, they're all memes, and as morally and politically neutral as an empty cup. They carry a message. It could be some racist bullshit, or it can be :wojak-nooo: CONTROLLERCELS MALDING OVER ALPHA CHAD KEYBOARD AND MOUSE USERS :gigachad:
Not that some messages don't have a preferred means of delivery. Like, the empty cup can still have a swastika on it. But I don't feel that the virgin/chad is that. It's just so inherently silly that nobody but a fucking moron could use it completely unironically.
(Also just to be obnoxiously pedantic "propaganda" technically refers to anything created with the purpose of dissemination so yes memes are propaganda and propaganda is memes :very-smart: )