Ascended Meme / Web Original

• On the adoptable pet website/game Chicken Smoothie, the baby stage of one of the pony adoptables was nicknamed "roadkill pony" by forum members as it looked as though it had been hit by a car. Come Halloween a special variation of the pony was released by the artist that had the pony covered in tire tracks. It came in three forms; one that stayed in that pose, and two that grew up into zombies.
• When Critical Role did a Deadlands game^note which is no longer available on YouTube, with Matthew Mercer as a player, one of the players decided to ask for the in-game time. The Marshall declared that it was around midday, which promptly led to all the players (including Matt) proclaiming that "it's high noon." They then acknowledged that, in the Weird West campaign, this was inevitable.
• David Dobrik acknowledged that he looks like Caillou's dad
• DeviantArt is infamous as a breeding ground for Sonic the Hedgehog OCs of... variable quality. When it was announced that the upcoming game Sonic Forces allowed the player to design their own character, DA acknowledged it on their Twitter feed in the most self-aware way possible.
• In one of Door Monster's videos, Ian requests that Kyle says "What?" a little bit purpler. Fans caught on, and whenever someone says "What?" in their videos, someone will inevitably comment that it was the exact right amount of purple. The meme ascended with Door Monster offering t-shirts with the word "What?" written in purple.
• Everyman HYBRID spawned a meme involving one of the characters, Jeff, being Batman after he tackled a security guard in "Damsel". Jeff later jokingly admitted to being Batman on Twitter and in "One step forward, two steps back", he wore a Batman shirt.
• Extra Credits has a few in one of its offshoot series, Extra History. The most famous one, however, stems from their series on the South Sea Bubble in 1700s England. In it, a member of the Whigs, Sir Robert Walpole, was manipulating virtually every event of the aftermath of the bubble bursting — mainly involving a ledger of bribes made by the South Sea Company, which would have led to the Whig Party's leaders almost certainly being imprisoned, to ensure he could become the leader of the government. His manipulation happened so much that Daniel eventually wonders aloud, "Who knows where (Robert Knight's ledger) went...it was Walpole." In most series since, Walpole has either made a cameo appearance, or James ^note  The show's writer will link Walpole to whatever topic they are discussing, like the First Crusade, the tales of Admiral Yi, or the reign of Justinian. It's now to the point where, during their Early Christian Schisms series, they end the second video by asking the viewer to "Take a wild guess how it (the Council of Nicea) ends." Cue a person at a computer saying "It was Walpole..."
  • Another one was born out of their series on the Crusades. A Running Gag is that none of the major players get along, for various reasons, but "Why let (insert disagreement here) get in the way of a good Crusade?" This line was quickly picked up by fans, and gets repeated in other series.
• Ian McCollum of Forgotten Weapons has the fan nickname "Gun Jesus" because of his long hair and beard. In May 2019, the multinational firearms company Heckler & Koch posted an image of Ian as Gun Jesus, with an HK rifle in one hand and his book on French rifles in the other. Ian's publishing partners insisted that posters be made.
• The Futaba Channel in Japan started the OS-tan meme, where each version of Windows received a Moe Anthropomorphism whose characteristics where what the particular operating system was best known for. When Windows 7 hit the market, Microsoft decided to create one, Nanami Madobe, for their Japanese marketing campaign.
• One of Gaia Online's members made a fan-character called GCD McSourface, parodying the GCD forum's attitude towards nearly everything about the website, with the catchphrase "GCD McSourface does not like that feature". The Fremere's Guard evolving item finished with a pose called "Fremere's Copyright Infringement", which is McSourface's head replacing the avatar's.
  • Fremere's Guard also contains a pose homaging the Air Shark, which began as a fan elaboration on an April Fool's event in zOMG!. A differently-designed Air Shark now appears in-game, making this a meme that ascended twice.
  • A Gaia fan on DeviantArt pointed out that Gino Gambino's Big Ol' Eyebrows looked like Twinkies, spawning the "Twinkie Brows" meme. One of the collectible SD Plus dolls of Gino has equippable "Twinkie Brows" as a bonus pose.
  • One fan in the GCD made an anniversary thread dedicated to the Case of Pietro evolving item, and even baked a red velvet cake to show her appreciation. The night of its anniversary, a "Cake of Pietro" pose appeared in the item itself — a red velvet cake, with a chibi Thief stealing the first slice.
• The board for the GameFAQs Character Contests referred to the nine strongest characters (in the first edition, anyway; a few suffered upsets ever since) as Noble Nine. For the 9th edition, the bracket had nine divisions, with those 9 as the one seeds.
  • A further manipulation of the seedings had all of the 8-seeds in the ninth edition being characters that had been heavily rallied on the contest board, which is officially called "GameFAQs Contests" but generally identifies itself as "Board 8" after its index number.
• The video The American WoodEch has an american woodcock with its call substituted by gutural sounds of JonTron. Not only has Jon himself commented in said video, but in his "Johnny New English" video, while he shows the disturbing pictures in the house they are staying at, he points at one of a dying woodcock and mentions it's the bird from the meme and says he loves that video.
• KateModern: The Last Work featured the suggestion that Meryl should have her own show, which was already a fan in-joke. Similarly, "Orivwa" featured the use of the fan nickname for the main characters, "the K-Team".
• "Jennie is a plantcake" was a common lonelygirl15 fan meme ("plantcake" meaning plant; it's a long story), which resulted in Jennie attempting to prove that she isn't a plantcake in "Casting Couch".
• BillyMC played McDonald's Treasure Land Adventure after a joke from Retsupurae associated him with McDonald's.^note One of Billy's videos on Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels had him mention his mother asking if he wanted anything from McDonald's while she was Christmas shopping. This lead to slowbeef and Diabeetus to burst out into laughter and lead them to kick off the idea he gets McDonald's for Christmas.
  • Another RP joke, BayouBillyMC, led him to play The Adventures of Bayou Billy.
• The Minecraft meme "That's a very nice everything you have there...shame if something were to happen..." associated with Creepers got some references in the descriptions of official Minecraft merchandise, and even nearly directly quoted on one shirt!
  • Minecraft has its own Urban Legend of Zelda in the form of Herobrine, a mysterious and elusive entity responsible for obviously-man-made block placements and deformities appearing in single-player worlds, notable for its glowing eyes and its increasingly hostile responses to being seen. In addition to Notch occasionally writing "Removed Herobrine" in patch notes, the 1.8 Adventure Update introduces Endermen, glow-eyed monsters that randomly move blocks around the landscape (creating unnatural formations) and, on being seen, will stop and stare at the player, running (and teleporting) in to attack once eye contact is broken.
  • The tutorial level of the Xbox 360 Edition has a Tower of Pimps in it.
• Episode 14 of The Most Popular Girls in School had its name, in August 2017, changed from "Pregnant" to "Pregnant Meme" to reflect on said meme boom.
• Due to Kidnapper-kun from Neko Sugar Girls having no known name for most of the series fans began calling him "Geoff". In the finale it's revealed that his name is Bokutachi. Koneko then states she thought his name was Geoff. After a Beat she gets mocked for thinking so.
• JohnnyUtah's Tankmen short resonated with the early Newgrounds community so much that they're now the site's mascots.
• The OMORIBOY Chronicles: MESSENGER!!! acknowledges that the song "Redditor Too" from the previous video became a YTPMV fad, and releases the raw vocals to aid in further remixes.
• Party Crashers: This fan-made trap song remix based on Vernias' "Perfect Rotation" mantra has been used in the group's videos with the original creator's permission.
• Red vs. Blue:
  • The first alien character, revealed crouching and sneaking up on a character at the very end of Season 3, was unnamed for a long time. On the Season 3 DVD commentary, the Rooster Teeth staffed shared a story about a young fan e-mailing them after the finale's release inquiring about the "Crouchasaurus", a nickname which caught on amongst fans. In a Season 4 scene where the characters attempt to name the creature, "Crouchasaurus" gets an inevitable mention.
  • Early in the series, many fans asked the staff why the Red team had one member, Grif, wearing yellow armor. Though Rooster Teeth had actually given him orange armor, fans often claimed they couldn't tell it was orange at all. Rooster Teeth eventually included a Yellow Grif in a scene showing how the stupidest character in the series viewed the other characters, and later introduced Grif's sister, actually in yellow armor, and assigned her to the opposing Blue team.
  • Similarly, many fans asked why Tucker, usually in teal armor, seemed to be wearing green armor in one scene. The staff responded that the scene was shot in the shadows, which made teal look green within the game engine. In that season's blooper reel on the DVD, the scene is restaged with one character asking Tucker why his armor is green.
• Episode 21 of "Retarded Animal Babies" threw a WHARRGARBL in the captions in a...rather appropriate spot.
• A minor meme in The Runaway Guys is people posting one line from the video out of context, usually the ones with sexual implications. Episode 22 of TRG's Super Mario 3D World LP has one of these in the description, to save viewers the trouble of doing it.^note Also, considering Chugga wrote the description, it's also a case of Self-Deprecation.
• In RWBY, another Rooster Teeth production:
  • The Idiosyncratic Ship Names of the main characters are recycled into signals for combination attacks during the girls' clash with Roman's Humongous Mecha. For reference.
  • Some weird Internet silliness on Reddit made it a meme for Epileptic Trees being called "potatoes". When the RWBY: Grimm Eclipse video game was released, the lowest graphical setting was labelled "potato".
  • After the end of Volume 3, many fans had began trying to figure out what to name the new team of Ruby, Jaune, Nora and Ren. Many team names included "RNJR" ("Ranger"), "RRNJ" ("Orange"), and "JNRR" ("Junior"). The first episode of Volume 4 has Ren and Nora arguing over what they should call themselves with Nora supporting "JNRR"^note The idea being that there were more members of the former JNPR than they were of RWBY and Ren supporting "RNJR"^note The idea being that this is Ruby's adventure and they were just helping her out.
  • Reactor MurderOfBirds published a video of himself and his friends mocking the fact that Corrupt Corporate Executive Jacques Schnee appears to be wearing a clip-on tie. When asked on Twitter, two of the writers laughingly confirmed it.
• Sabaton History: The video for "The Last Stand" opens with an extended gag about the Sabaton Fandom-Enraging Misconception that the song is about The Crusades (it's about the 1527 Stand of the Swiss Guard).
• Sips has a meme where "Stop Having Fun" Guys claim that him, Hat Films and Turpster messing around causes them to "rip [their] dick off", which naturally ended up with people using it to mock those taking it seriously. Guess how Ross and Trott of Hat Films chose to disrupt a livestream that InTheLittleWood, Strippin and Sparkles* were doing? No, they didn't rip their actual penises off. They had fake penises attached to Velcro and ripped them off.
• Among the users of quiz website Sporcle, the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan became a meme for being obscenely difficult to spell. The website embraced it, to the point that there is a Kyrgyzstan category, and you win a badge for playing 25 games! (not to mention a contest to win Kyrgyzstan's flag... and a moderator studying there — "Only a Sporcler could be this excited")
• Supermarioglitchy4's Super Mario 64 Bloopers: Due to the numerical naming of series protagonist SMG4 and his nemesis SMG3, it's common for fans to question where SMG1 and SMG2 are. The Ten Year Anniversary Special reveals that the crazy hobos who have been following the cast around since "The Pursuit of Happiness" are named exactly that.
• Survival of the Fittest: Being a site with multiple writers, it's not surprising that there are in-joke references at times. One has to do with the "Inactivity Bear", which handlers often joke kills and eats inactive characters. When Megan Nelson went inactive, her death is that she woke up a bear in a cave, which...well, killed and ate her, much to the amusement of the handlers.
• Tumblr: One meme from the site's userbase dating back to 2012 involves a code phrase ("I like your shoelaces") and response ("Thanks, I stole them from the president") for identifying Tumblr users. When the official Tumblr store opened in 2022, one type of product offered was shoelaces, with one of the color options being "Presidential Purple". The front page of the store declares: "Where else would the president get his shoelaces?"
• Among the TVTropes merch is a shirt with Vigilante Taxonomist, a meme from the forum.
• Twitch Plays Pokémon :
  • Many of the channel emotes are based on memes derived from the stream:
    • "tppHelix", "tppPraise", "tppDome" and "tppCult" are references to the divine status attributed to the Helix and Dome Fossils due to their repeated accidental use during the original run, causing them to be referred to as "Lord Helix" and "Lord Dome" by players.
    • "tppPray" directly references "Bird Jesus", the Pidgeot from Twitch Plays Pokémon Red that was considered a "prophet" of Lord Helix.
    • "FogChamp" is a variation of the "PogChamp" emote used when the Courtyard Colosseum, infamous for being covered in thick accuracy-lowering fog, appears during Battle Revolution betting.
    • "tppTeiHard" is derived from the "TriHard" emote, which has been associated with Entei due the latter's disastrous performance during Stadium 2 and Battle Revolution matches.
    • "tppRoyal", which represents an Azumarill in royal clothing, alludes to the frequent joking accusations of "power abuse" directed towards m4_used_rollout, long-time host and developer for the stream, whose signature Pokémon is Azumarill.
    • "tppCursor" is a reference to the excessively enthusiastic reactions of the chat whenever the Streamer's cursor is visible on-screen.
  • Some of the lines that appear on the overlay's DexNav when players black out are also references to memes from the stream:
    • "BETTER CALL JOEY" was a recurring phrase thrown around during Crystal, due to the infamous tendency of said NPC to call the player at inopportune times to talk about his Rattata.
    • "BORN TO LOSE" refers to the song of the same name that is often played by the Streamer to mock players after particularly notable series of failures.
    • "PBR NEVER" is a phrase generally used by players who prefer PBR betting to regular runs, and as such lament any event that causes the end of the run, and thus the next PBR session, to be delayed further.
  • The "Dewfon" copypasta that became extremely popular during the Sirius run, based on the message of a confused user that other players had managed to convince they had achieved a softlock^note "Hello, we got a problem, we can't finish the game because the boat is stuck at Dewfon and we don't have the second badge, is it possible to make something for putting us back please ? Like the last save state ? Thanks for your reading.", became officially integrated into the stream via the "!dewfon" command.
  • "PBR when" is a question often asked by players who prefer PBR betting to regular runs whenever any other game is currently running; as a result, a "!pbrwhen" command was created, providing an answer usually along the lines of "After the run", "Sometime later this month", or even "Now".
    • Eventually, the joke was taken further by having more commands added, specifically "!pbrwhat" (which responds with a link to the Bulbapedia page on PBR), "!pbrwho" (which responds with the PRChase emote that's memetically associated with the PBR announcer), "!pbrhow" ("Very carefully"), "!pbrwhy" ("Because TPP chat is addicted to gambling"), and "!pbrwhere" ("Here").
  • During the Inverse White and Inverse White 2 runs, the "!goaIs" command responded with the joke objective "Respawn Victini", referencing how players throughout the Volt White 2 Redux run were constantly suggesting checking if Victini had respawned yet after accidentally failing to catch it.
• Viner Meghan McCarthy is well-known for her Timmy Turner impressions. In one Vine, she encounters Tara Strong, his actual voice actress, who proclaims that she is Timmy Turner. (McCarthy is a writer on My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic which Strong also stars on).
• X-Ray & Vav is essentially "Achievement Hunter memes: The Animated Series". The main heroes are named after gaffes Gavin made in one video and the main villains are based off characters created during various Let's Play videos.

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