Culture

Head to Head: Internet memes

Dolan_original

This week, we at Head To Head considered: What’s your least favorite internet meme?

Dominick Mayer

I hate Dolan. And yet I love it. Kind of. But mostly I hate it. For the uninitiated, Dolan is a meme comic series centered around crudely drawn renderings of Donald Duck and other Disney characters. Know Your Meme says that this began in summer 2010 by an artist on a Finnish image board, and I have no reason to disbelieve this. Dolan is primarily characterized (especially since its explosion on Reddit earlier this year) by a four-panel sequence involving Dolan doing horrifying things, whether of a violent or sexual nature, and often both. Occasionally there’s a joke in there, as with this one, which is still my favorite of them:

Otherwise, they’re pretty mortifying. Half the time Dolan is actually a penis, or is shoving a finger up his ass, or something equally unsettling. The other half he’s a murderer. There’s also pedophilia, incest, rape and pretty much anything else you can think of, to a point where this meme’s ostensible purpose as a joke is lost amidst the arms race to disgust one’s peers with the most horrifying shit you could possibly imagine a crudely rendered Donald Duck doing. There’s also a lot of hatred and contempt in Dolan artist circles, even by internet standards; I made the mistake of liking a couple of Dolan-themed Facebook pages a few weeks back, only to rapidly change my mind when pretty NSFW things were being splayed across my news feed. Dolan could be funny, but mostly it’s terrifying.

Tl;dr Dolan is the meme version of A Serbian Film. Tread carefully.

Amy Dittmeier

I despise a lot of memes. But Doubles Guy is my least favorite, because it takes something I love and brutalizes it. Doubles Guy is from the sinkhole that is 4chan that uses an image of Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman in American Psycho pointing as his CD collection to show how, like, totally fucking awesome it is that they got double digits in their post number. It can also be used to show that you got triple digits, or whatever insignificant numerical accomplishment the poster has achieved. Bale’s face in the screen cap is comical, but utilizing it for the forces of 4chan makes me really sad.

You are literally celebrating a number. Of your post. And you had to find an image that could perfectly capture your feeling of feeling like hot shit. Since this is a “newer” meme on 4chan too, you’ll see older posters reprimand new members for using it. And by reprimand I mean they call each other stupid names that one could only hear in the douchiest of bars….God, I hate 4chan….

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