Hi! my name is Andrew Riley and i graduated from Goodrich High School and I plan to major in Environmental Science.

                                                                   http://www.quickmeme.com/p/3oi209               

         Introduction

Almost everyone and their monkey’s uncle has seen a meme in today’s modern world. Everywhere you turn on the internet it seems there is some meme trying to make you laugh. Some of you might be asking, “What is this ‘meme’ of which you speak?” and that is what I’m going to answer by analyzing the “one does not simply” meme. This meme is often used as a parody of Boromir’s famous line “One does not simply walk into Mordor” (from Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring) to describe difficult tasks’ that people think is simple or easy, when it is in fact, much harder than they make it sound. Analyzing this one meme I will be able to explain what the prerequisites are to qualify it to be part of a specific meme series, what qualifies a meme to be part of a sub-genre, and of course what makes a meme really a meme.

            We’ll start with what a meme is. A meme is typically a picture or a series of pictures with a set of text at the top and bottom and are often ironic and/or satirical, or sometimes just plain funny. The images are often taken out of popular movies, tv shows, comics, etc. and these pictures then have some type of text printed on them having to do with one topic or another. These memes are typically meant to do no more than make people laugh and or maybe spread awareness of various things in a humorous fashion.

            After memes are made, they can usually be sorted in to a genre based on which picture is used and what text is printed on top of it. For example, in the “one does not simply” meme, they took the image of Boromir and inserted the text “one does not simply walk in to Mordor”. Those are just the requirements for this meme though, in others it could be more or less items of varying complexity to meet the standards of that particular genre.

            Just like how movies and music are divvied up into a myriad of different sub-genre’s, so too are memes. As long as a meme meets the bare minimum standards to be part of its genre it would be considered traditional. For example, the traditional version of “one does not simply” ends with “walk into Mordor” and is associated with situations that people describe as easy but in reality are near impossible.

What happens more often though is that it will have a slight variation usually through just text, and that is really where memes get creative and funny, because most of the time they are relatable to our own lives. These are the types of memes that can be found throughout the internet because they are the most popular sub-genre of any genre.  For example, with the one does not simply meme instead of ending with “in to Mordor” it will end with something like “win an argument with a woman” or “play one round of a videogame” etc.  

     The example I used at the top is a prime example of this sub-genre. It fits relatively easily into the normal genre because it meets the requirements of having the picture of Boromir and text at the top saying “one does not simply”. It then gets sorted in to the sub-genre category of variation because at the bottom it says “write a paper without procrastinating”. As a bonus, it’s also very relatable, because everyone at some point has probably had a teacher or professor assign a paper due the following week and then waited till the last minute to write it because they procrastinated.

      There’s also one more, but rather uncommon sub-genre that I have dubbed “photoshopped”. They generally don’t go as big as traditional or the variation sub-genres in the sense of mainstream popularity, but they are still worth mentioning. An example of this uncommon sub-genre is where meme makers take the image of Boromir’s head, paste it onto another image of some random person in a scenario where they have either some sort of giant gun, military vehicle, giant animal, etc. and instead of finishing with “Walk into Mordor”, it will end with something related to the task the people in the image are preparing for.

     This is the meme I created and it demonstrates the variation sub-genre for the “one does not simply” meme pretty well. It has the picture of Boromir along with one does not simply written above his, which puts it in the overall genre. Then on the bottom it says “convince your mom to let you stay home from school” which means it’s a variation. Plus it’s relatable because everyone has tried to convince their mom to not make them go to school at some point in their life but to no avail.

     So in conclusion, “these memes of which I speak” are really not that complicated. A meme is typically a picture or a series of pictures, usually from popular shows, movies and bands with a set of text at the top and bottom that are often ironic and/or satirical, or sometimes just plain funny. Memes are mostly funny because the scenarios are relatable in some way. More than a few memes have an original meme from which sub-genres branch off of, the sub-genre’s being either being just slight variations or some sort of photoshopped.