The sneaky grin when you've realized you got away with something absolutely dodgy — Kelsey has got the goss behind that Homelander meme from The Boys that has dominated Twitter for weeks. Plus the insider drama on a Christian meme war, and Ade quizzes Stassie Baby on where the hell the mint in her martini recipe goes. —Amber |
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You've seen the video. A look of apprehension blossoms into toothy delight on the face of a superhero with a grown-out dye job, who laughs mechanically and declares, "All right!" The meme of Homelander, a character from Amazon Prime's The Boys, has been all over Twitter for weeks, racking up more than 60 million views across thousands of tweets that typically express the shock of receiving good news — or the moment you realize you've gotten away with something. "When I tweet something out of pocket and nobody unfollows," one take on the meme said. "When Radiohead play the wrong chord but the crowd just thinks they're being experimental," read another. People have used the clip to talk about sports, pop culture, life's mundane little surprises,and so on. "For something to be as popular as this meme, it has to happen naturally," Darick Robertson, who cocreated Homelander and the comic book The Boys in 2006 with Garth Ennis, told me. "They have to actually really appreciate it." Robertson is one of the show's executive producers but said he prefers to let the writers and actors do their thing without him on set so he can be surprised along with all the other fans when he watches the final product. "Never in a million years did I expect The Boys to blow up the way that it did, much less this meme," he said. "It's exciting and it's weird." The Boys satirizes the superhero genre. The supernaturally gifted have been monetized and marketed by a powerful corporation, and a vigilante group (the titular Boys) is working to end their corruption. One of the most corrupt heroes is Homelander, played by actor Antony Starr, a Supermanlike character with an intense desire to be adored, who appears on a broadcast news program to rail against the mainstream media. The meme comes from a brutal scene: Attendees in a rally, clothed in American flags to match Homelander's costume and carrying on-the-nose anti-snowflake and "America first" signage. A counterprotester hits Homelander's young son in the head with a can after calling the superhero a "fascist." Homelander immediately zaps him with laser vision, killing him. One man claps, and the rest of the crowd follows with applause. Then we see the face from the meme — shock over the murder he has just committed followed by delight when he realizes his fans endorse his elimination of an opposing party.
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Twitter user @callouswayne posted the first viral instance of the clip from The Boys on July 12, four days after it appeared in the finale of the third season. She told BuzzFeed News she was thrilled that it became "one of the biggest bangers on Film Twitter" and said the she's seen numerous people tweet that the meme's ubiquity convinced them to watch the show. We don't get the full context of the character's shortcomings as a milk-drinking murderer through the meme, though. To those who haven't seen the show, it's just a highly expressive range of emotions, similar to that of the "Kombucha girl" and "white guy blinking" memes of yesteryear. Robertson didn't write the memed Homelander scene but said it reflects his original intention for the character, that "if superheroes existed in our real world now, they would be as corrupt as anyone else because of money and politics and celebrity." When he and Ennis started brainstorming the character back in 2004, they didn't plan on making him a politically polarizing figure — just a sardonic take on the superhero craze. Robertson has seen people praising Homelander, even dressing as him at rallies, and he wonders whether they understand he's supposed to be the bad guy. That's a discussion that has, for the past two months, torn the subreddit for The Boys asunder. After the show's third season premiered in June, some fans began complaining about how it satirizes right-wing politics, which devolved into such intense fights that moderators began locking threads, and then were criticized for doing so. Users deleted their accounts in protest. Showrunner Eric Kripke told Rolling Stone that Homelander "has always been a Trump analogue" to him, it's just becoming more obvious now. But to him, it's bigger than that. Homelander is a reflection of "white-male victimization and unchecked ambition" meant to show the audience how easily public figures can amass fans even when behaving badly. "Antony [Starr] is brilliant in the way he captures how Homelander desperately wants to be loved and accepted despite being terrible," Robertson told BuzzFeed News. "He's got this beaming smile and these adoring fans and he's so awful." Homelander is by far the most memeable character on The Boys through clips of him pushing a kid off a roof, drinking milk, and looking around nervously, though the reaction memes don't have the full context of his character's depravity. But it's getting people to watch the show so they have the opportunity to absorb its complete message. But the memes are driving people to watch the show and absorb its message.
And maybe that's the perfect way to thoughtfully consume political satire in the social media era. Until next time, Kelsey Weekman |
I decided to try out the cucumber and lime martini recipe by Anastasia Karanikolaou, more commonly known as Stassie Baby. Cucumber, vodka, and lime juice, shaken together and served in a martini glass. How hard could it be? And with the help of Stassie's TikTok, which has been viewed over 1.5 million times, I felt assured that I was in safe hands. This feeling disappeared after watching the clip five or six times and finding discrepancies. From the start, the recipe offered no specific measurements, so I freestyled everything and hoped that the cocktail saints would guide me. Acquiring ingredients was relatively simple thanks to the trusty and well-stocked Tasty kitchen. We had lime juice, cucumbers, mint, vodka, but not the final ingredient, sugar syrup, although a trusty hack (hot water mixed with sugar) meant we were able to make our own from scratch in 60 seconds. For whatever reason, we didn't have a measuring jug but in true British fashion, we had a teapot which we used as a substitute to hold our lime juice. Because I'm committed to my journalism, I also risked my fingers by slicing my cucumber backwards, a nod to Kendell Jenner's culinary skills teased by Stassie in her recipe. |
Ikran Dahir/BuzzFeed News |
Everything appeared to be falling into place, but then came to the confusion about where the mint leaves featured in the recipe. For clarity, Stassie presents the mint as part of the ingredients but missed it completely in her demonstration. Well, according to her team (yes, I asked them for comment), the mint does feature in the recipe and is meant to be muddled up with the cucumber. I just dropped it on top for garnish since they didn't reply in time. Final verdict? The cocktail was a refreshing delight on a muggy summer's day in London where it had rained all morning. The tartness of the lime was offset by the cucumber and homemade sugar syrup. Did I write this a little buzzed? Potentially. If you want to consider giving it a try, this recipe from Tasty is pretty much close enough. —Ade
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Welcome to where we discuss online community micro dramas — thoughts, feelings, suggestions for us? Email pleaselikeme@buzzfeed.com |
When the administrators of a 10-year-old Christian meme Instagram page, @memesforjesus, stepped down abruptly but the page continued to be updated, hyper-online Christians ignited a meme war in anger. The announcement came in the form of a cryptic video saying that the men behind the account were leaving for a "new direction" — but the post was deleted from Instagram just two weeks later. Critics said that since the Aug. 1 announcement, they noticed a decline in original, relatable content that demonstrated an understanding of Christian culture, and the page's nine most recent posts are reshared from other accounts. In months past, almost all of the content had been original. "This page is only reposting TikToks now," one commenter said. "Does your channel still create original memes? I always enjoy those," another asked. When other Christian meme pages queried who was now running the account, they found themselves blocked. Tim Whitaker, the creator and facilitator of a religious nonprofit called The New Evangelicals, challenged his Instagram followers to unfollow the "total sham corporate greed nonsense account," also calling on people to spam @memesforjesus' comments with "respectful and non-dehumanizing" questions and follow the former admins' personal pages. Whitaker and the owners of other influential pages like @epicchristianmemes and @pettychristianmemes made memes questioning the new @memesforjesus. Whitaker told BuzzFeed News he sensed the "megachurch branding machine" mentality seemed to be at play here, and as a former evangelical (or exvangelical), he said he has a lot of experience sniffing out disingenuous actors. One of his main concerns was that the @memesforjesus account no longer seems to be trying to make personal connections with its followers, so it seemed like it might have been taken over by a corporation hoping to make money off the audience. But monetizing content is not an unusual thing for meme pages to do. The men behind the account declined to go into detail of exactly what happened when they left. Michael Schaffer, who created @memesforjesus when he was 18 years old, told BuzzFeed News that running the account has been fun, but it was "time to move on" and focus on his personal projects. Matt Matias, who joined the admin team in 2017, told BuzzFeed News he was grateful to his audience and the members of a "Christian meme illuminati group chat" who supported them through the transition. |
And the person who took it over, Ramzey Nassar, said he's not just a corporation. He told BuzzFeed News he started working with Schaffer to develop @memesforjesus into a brand in 2015, helping him create a website and sell branded T-shirts. He, and the company he works for, Phantom Management, has maintained a partnership with Schaffer and Matias for years. Nassar helped monetize the brand, but never created memes. He claimed that the original account administrators are still creating content for the page until the end of the month. "There is no corporate takeover," Nassar said. "We've been here for years. We support creators and want them to continue creating. People just didn't know we existed behind the scenes. That's what started the meme war." Whitaker said that the monetization of a page once dedicated to fostering community among devout Christians is exactly the kind of unsettling behavior that drives a lot of people away from the faith in the first place. "Our antennas just go up when we notice something has been corporatized, and we sense people trying to make money off of us," he told BuzzFeed News. "But the meme war has been quite the unifier for Christian accounts that don't always agree with each other's ideology." — Kelsey | The girlies from the social news team share what's been living in our heads. |
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