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Editor’s Note: This article is part of Know Your Meme’s annual review series looking back at some of the most memorable and popular memes, events and people that defined internet culture in 2017 as we know it.
F
andoms. How about that?
In 2017, the realm of pop culture fandom once dominated by blockbuster video games, Hollywood reboots and anime series evolved into a cosmopolitan space where both mainstream and independent media products of all types and genres shared the spotlight and appreciation alongside each other. Especially in a year when the rubbish from countless spats between Trump and mainstream news media endlessly circled the toilet like a turd too big to make it down the flush hole, some of the most exciting, innovative, and at times stupid, products of fandom in 2017 came from creators many of us have never heard of, introducing a slew of new contributors to the creative engine behind today’s ripe internet meme culture. From the creepy to the artsy to the horny, here are our top ten fandom memes of 2017 in chronological order.
The Star Wars Prequel Trilogy has been the butt of a long-running joke among the fans since its release in the early 2000s. The highly-anticipated series of films shat on the hearts of diehard Star Wars fans with a confusing plot, flat characters, static blocking, awful dialogue, senseless action, and enough nitpicky flaws to prompt five-hour long legendary reviews of the trilogy by Red Letter Media. To give you a sense about how long the internet has been joking about the prequels, the earliest known meme of the Prequel Trilogy is a YTMND from 2005 of Darth Vader’s iconic “NOOOOOOO!”
But something bizarre and amusing began bubbling in the years between 2005 and 2017, a slowly gestating, ironic appreciation for just how abysmal the films are. Facebook groups devoted to joking about the films began appearing in the early 2010s. Memes devoted to minor references to the films began developing, like Sheev Posting and Now This Is Podracing. Then on December 27th, 2016, /r/prequelmemes launched.
/r/prequelmemes became a surprisingly dominant force in the 2017 meme landscape, churning out durable and genuinely clever memes about the Star Wars prequels on what seemed like a weekly basis. Some, such as I Am The Senate and The Tragedy of Darth Plagueis The Wise, were an extension of Sheev Posting, but others grabbed from the most throwaway lines in the films grew huge as well. In addition to popular memes such as I Have the High Ground and I Don’t Like Sand, /r/prequelmemes memed inconsequential lines of dialogue such like Another Happy Landing, This Is Where The Fun Begins, and Well Whaddya Know.
While the films still suck, /r/prequelmemes merriment around the Prequel memes is almost enough to make them look good, which is certainly more of a favor to the Star Wars legacy than anything George Lucas has done in 30 years.
In the same way No Strings Attached and Friends With Benefits, two movies about friends hooking up then falling in love, were released at nearly the same time and independent of each other, Bendy and the Ink Machine had the misfortune of being released the same year as Cuphead. Bendy and the Ink Machine, a twist on classic, noodle-arm animation and a sendup of Disney. There’s even a catchy song!
Fortunately for Bendy, the game’s first chapter came out several months before Cuphead and had a major push from popular Let’s Players like Markiplier and jacksepticeye. In the story, a “Mickey Mouse-like””/memes/mickey-mouse character, the titular Bendy, hunts down the animator who abandoned him. Bendy has all the dressings of an indie-gaming darling: adorable nostalgic animation crossed with creeping psychological horror. As of December 4th, the game has released three chapters of a planned five, and all signs point to the Bendy train continuing well into 2018.
There’s a certain contract between viewers and Let’s Players. The Let’s Player, say, Markiplier or Game Grumps, play a game you perhaps haven’t heard of or are interested in and work through it, and you the viewer are invited to experience the game by proxy, as though you were in the room watching a friend play. You feel the jump scares and the tension but also have the comfort of someone guiding you through the game, ideally resulting in an entertaining, light-hearted experience.
Petscop presents like your average Let’s Play. The narrator, who fans call “Paul,” begins playing a cheap-looking game he found wherein the game’s character, a green, duck-like blob rendered in what appears to be late-90s graphics, walks around a strange pink animal hospital collecting things and solving puzzles with the hopes of capturing “pets.” Paul offers dry, confused commentary, hardly the animated comedian, through what appears to be an incredibly short, bare bones game. And then Paul ends up below.
Petscop is an incredible creepypasta for the Let’s Play age. Once the series revs up, Paul is entered into a deeply unsettling world featuring stories of dead kids, a bizarre marker, an elevator that brings you to different empty rooms, a mirror girl that may not be your reflection, and three images apparently so disturbing that Paul had to censor them. All the while, Paul continues with a dry, comforting ramble, not irritating or performative, just a straightforward, albeit understated, reaction to what’s happening in the game. It’s an incredibly well-done piece of work, but after regularly updating for a few months, it suddenly, frustratingly went dark after ten episodes, deep in the web of the Petscop world. This has led to wild fan speculation and engagement. It’s a mystery the internet is begging to know the answer to, yet all we’ve heard from “Paul” since the last episode aired is a tantalizing promise: “soon.”
Nintendo dominated the console war this year. Its innovative new console, the Switch, is the most well-received Nintendo console arguably since the Nintendo 64. The game is a hybrid handheld and stationary console, with a screen one can carry around and play on or plug into the TV. It’s a successful update to the dual-screen feature introduced on the Wii U, but hardware is not what fans have come to look for in Nintendo products. What matters is the quality of the game.
On that front, Nintendo absolutely killed it, releasing _The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey, which people have called the best Zelda and Mario games ever. That’s 30 years of legacy Nintendo one-upped twice in the same year. On top of that, a phenomenal range of titles has come to the Switch, as Nintendo has invested in bringing more indie games to its online store, as well as more mature content. It seems Nintendo is actively looking like the frontrunner of the console war for years to come. By exhibiting originality and perfectionism on their games, they are easily the most fun company of their peers who seem deeply wedded to AAA gaming companies too obsessed with microtransactions and unnoticeable graphic improvements to remember what fun is like.
Netflix certainly had a, say, up-and-down year when it came to their original programming. While the Stranger Things sequel was generally well-received, one of its monster hits, House of Cards was left in disarray when its star, Kevin Spacey, was hit with damning sexual assault allegations. But in the meme world, Netflix did nab one sleeper hit: 13 Reasons Why.
13 Reasons Why is a show about a girl who commits suicide and leaves behind 13 tapes for people who she believes contributed to death. The resulting melodrama was largely well-received by critics, but online, the show took on a different sort of reputation. The show’s premise went perfectly with the internet, and sure enough, memes about what would make posters kill themselves were made in the show’s image. Both Welcome To Your Tape and “14 Reasons Why””/memes/subcultures/13-reasons-why#14-reasons-why found people sending up the show’s premise by joking about what trivial things would lead to their suicide. Furthermore, the show bequeathed a fun exploitable in That Damn Smile, in which posters imagined the smile the troubled female protagonist saw that made all “the trouble begin.”
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While some found the jokes about the show in poor taste, it’s hard not to see how a teen melodrama about suicide would resonate with the all-too-edgy memers of the modern age. Even if 13 Reasons Why fades into obscurity, jokes about suicide will never go out of style.
With fidget spinners, Generation Z got its pet rock, its slap bracelet, its pogs. It got its useless, uncool, uninteresting toy that became popular through sheer force of memeing. The fidget spinner is a gadget one holds in the hand and as the holder pinches the center, the sides spin. It was patented to relieve stress for fidgety hands but that detail was quickly lost as the toys flooded the market, going from cheap, plastic nothings one could buy for a buck to status symbols with (figurative) bells and whistles one could purchase for obscene prices.
When the memes came, fidget spinners became 2017’s answer to Harambe, the most normie shit peddled by clickbaiting YouTubers and lazy memers. To prove this point, I just searched “Fidget Spinner 3 AM” on YouTube and sure enough, I found a precocious youth warning me of the dangers of spinning a fidget spinner at 3 in the morning.
Things got so bad, 4chan attempted to turn fidget spinners into a symbol of white supremacy, as they infamously did with “Pepe””/memes/pepe-the-frog in 2016, to make them go away. They only succeeded in getting some pearl-clutching headlines, but in the end, fidget spinners went away as fads often do, fizzling out without much fanfare after burning garishly for just a hair too long. Who knows? Maybe they’ll be a worthy part of a 2010s memorabilia collection someday.
One of two visual novel dating sims on this list, Dream Daddy is a Game Grumps joint in which you play as a single dad who moves to Maple Bay, only to find that the town is filled with hot, eligible dads. There are several dads you can choose from, including a Goth Dad, a Bear Dad, a Teacher Dad, etc.
Inside, there’s plenty of dad humor, but what critics found most appealing was the strength of the father/daughter relationship portrayed in the game. That and the homosexual representation made it a hit, particularly on Tumblr, where there grew a thriving community of fan artists. What could have been a silly quickie that banked on the strength of its premise alone turned out to be a rather touching dating sim, even if the game seemed to be over a little too quickly. With the opportunity to go a little more in-depth with the characters, Dream Daddy could have absolutely knocked it out of the park. Perhaps a sequel is necessary? With the enthusiastic response from the fans, it would seem there’s certainly a market for it.
17776 bills itself as a story about football. It really, really, really isn’t. 17776 is a multi-media science fiction story told from the perspective of three sentient satellites: Nine, the fish-out-of-water protagonist who went dormant in the mid-20th century and awoke nearly 15000 years in the future; Ten, the satellite who woke Nine and introduces him to life in the distant future; and Juice, a prankster troll satellite with a sense of humor who ribs the other two and keeps things light. The story is as follows: sometime in the mid-21st century, humanity became immortal. No living humans could die and no new humans would be born. In the future, with endless time and no existential threats, humanity creates a new, ultimate form of football to pass the time. Unlike football as we know it, which takes place on a 100-yard field, the football of 17776 takes place over entire states and can last for years on end.
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The football is the narrative thread which ties together major existential questions about the value of immortality and humanity’s future. Sportswriter and internet humorist Jon Bois developed an incredible world with rich characters that find meaning in just continuing to live as they always have, playing football and using iPhones and treasuring what little pieces of undiscovered world there are left. The story was a huge hit with glowing reviews and a solid Tumblr base of fan artists. The story even gained comparisons to Homestuck with its multimedia style of presentation. Though the story ran for a few days in the early summer, it left a lasting impact and is an important mark of just how sports and the internet can be combined to tackle some of humanity’s biggest questions.
If you’re aware of but haven’t yet played Doki Doki Literature Club, you probably know something’s up with it. After all, why would an ordinary Japanese dating simulator be one of the most talked about games of the year? Of course, I’ll never tell what’s up with it. It’s something of a fandom code to try to not let the secrets within this cheery moe dating sim slip out because that first, blind playthrough is an experience you only get once (so, just to warn you, light spoilers ahead)
In Doki Doki Literature Club, you play as a dorky, socially awkward high schooler who’s into games and anime yet somehow stumbles into a small “literature” club filled with “incredibly cute girls!” The girls are all attracted to you pretty much instantly: Sayori, your spacy but very sweet neighbor who brings you to the club; Natsuki, a fiery character with a temper and straightforward disposition who just won’t accept how darn cute she is; Yuri, a brooding, taller girl who likes books and has a surprisingly literal taste for blood; and Monika, Just Monika, the club leader and one of the most popular girls in school. The gameplay is simple: you create “poems” and whomever your poem resonates with the most becomes your path. You work through some intimate moments, awkward hijinks, and heaps of sexual tension on the way to the big school fair when something terrible happens. After that, quite literally, nothing the same.
A last word of advice: the game isn’t over until the credits roll.
Cuphead, the Moldenhauer brothers’ Little Engine That Could, finally saw release in September after seven years of development. The wait was worth it. The run-and-gun platformer with the 1930s noodle-arm art style was an incredible critical and commercial success, lauded for its appealing visual design and challenging-but-rewarding gameplay. Well, rewarding for some-- Cuphead’s intense difficulty became something of a meme in video game circles and it was applied to the It’s Just Like Dark Souls! meme, a cheeky reference to video game critics who claim a video game with a modicum of difficulty is just like the challenging RPG series. Cuphead even sparked a modicum of controversy in the gaming journalism industry after an infamous demo by GamesBeat’s Dean Takahashi demonstrated for some why journalists shouldn’t be reviewing products they can’t play.
But for the most part, Cuphead has been a joyous reminder of what hard work and artistic vision can do for a video game. The impeccable soundtrack and colorful cast of character, some of which fan artists blatantly want to boink, makes the game an unforgettable experience, even it it does make you want to grind your teeth down to nubs.
