Think Mark Think! Why is this meme format so repeatable? What makes this image of two characters fighting significant? To start, the meme is based in a still frame from the cartoon Invincible, it depict Omni-Man beating and berating his son Mark. What’s clear though is that the image’s context is not nearly as important as the imagery itself. Why is that?
A man standing over a wounded man. Who are they? The format itself shows this is nearly an infinite number of characters.
We see that a nearly identical format exists in the Abby being choked meme.
To dig deeper into why these formats exist, let’s use some basic meme analysis!
So before we get into all the arcane terms and ideas, we have to start simple. What is the content of this image? We have two people. Perfect. Are these two people allied or against one another? Against.
Alright, so we have a meme depicting two figures against one another. This could describe something like a million different memes! And that’s exactly the point. This is an archetypal dynamic.
So what’s the archetype? Two people against one another. To find that, let’s look at a good source for the many archetypes, the Tarot. Which cards depict two figures against each other? Just one of them! The Lovers.
Wait a second, these two figures aren’t Lovers, they’re trying to kill each other? Yes! Stick with me. Aleister Crowley says of this card: “it ought not to be called The Lovers, but The Brothers.”
Which brothers is he referring to? Here we have it, the very first conflict between two humans. Cain and Abel.
Two forces opposed to one another, that is the key to countless meme formats. How many iterations of this Duel are there? Just off the top of my head we have “You vs the guy she told you not to worry about” Yes Chad, who would win, and a million others. The archetypal conflict.
But that’s not all. What about, the other two? What about the Lovers? Crowley writes: “The subject of this card is Analysis, followed by Synthesis. The first question asked by science is: "Of what are things composed? "This having been answered, the next question is: "How shall we recombine them to our greater advantage?" This resumes the whole policy of the Tarot. “
So after we tear things apart, after the conflict, how do we reunite? In Love! And as such, the other type of memes that contain two figures, are ones in which they are allied. The Duel and the Dual.
A good example of a loving memes is the Predator handshake.
So when we look at memes, think about what exactly the figures in it are doing, that alone can offer a huge wealth of symbolic depth to an otherwise very simple meme. Remember, Memes Matter!
Also just a brief aside as the video ends, in the chapter on the Lovers Crowley describes myths wherein Cain is a child not of Adam and Eve, but the Serpent and Eve. I thought this related in a kind of far out way to the plot of Invincible, where Omni-Man is an alien, and Mark is a human-alien hybrid.