Forums / Discussion / Serious Debate

As a newbie in relative speaking on here, I feel a nagging suspicion on my back about the nature of memes. Whenever I see a meme, especially if it involves some random celebrity of the day being a part of a gate or a tumblr image post on here, I ponder why it's a meme here. It's something that I think should be more exclusive because, to quote Syndrome: "When everyone's a super, no one will be." And here's what I would say is enough to warrant the birth of a meme.
Whenever a meme is created, there's something that at least gives it relevancy without having sole reliance on secondary sources. More often than not, memes would be born as a repetition of a phrase or a particularly noteworthy piece from within the work. My main example would be the old "This is Sparta!" meme, stemming from when King Leonidas kicks the Persian Messenger into a pit, followed by his fellow men slicing the guards into the same pit. It's a meme born from a a scene in the movie where it was legendary for its overly hammy delivery from the king and being a short burst of action sandwiched between idle scenes. Another example that works well is "Carlos!", since it's able to stand its own ground by Carlos being a pun master, where the meme relies on people understanding and being funny with their puns. One meme I'd argue is not a meme is "He protec but he also attac", since this basically requires an strap-on from other media and it cannot stand up by its own merit. Memes similar to the previously mentioned also has this principal problem and it's flat-out insulting if a joke can't stand up for itself and has to rely on a strap-on just to even complete the joke. As a fellow shitlord of memes, I want to see memes like the old days, but it's getting replaced by more memes that don't make sense by their own accord. I miss the likes of GlaDOS and Gaston and I hope to see more memes like this because they have personality to their joke and they can hold themselves up by their bootstraps.

Just like music, movies and just about everything else, memes evolve. If you like the old memes that is fine but criticizing the new ones because they are not like the old one is bit childish, don't you agree?
Though calling whatever a meme is pretty subjective in itself too.

I criticize newer memes because they are simply lazy attempts to elicit humor or laughter from us. Yes, I know taking comedy seriously is a logic bomb in of itself, but I just fear these memes are just what I describe, without any real effort or backing to allow us to look back and laugh at it. Hell, I'll actually give loss.jpg credit that it's actually a joke that is derived from the comic's style and how the original can stand up and be, in itself, a joke. It's when someone just lazily posts a meme that can't stand up by itself is when I want to question "why." And truth be told, it would be impossible to enforce such a rule on a grand scale, even with the right tools and the right mods. But I digress. I want to see more memes come in with the material being funny in its own right without just being like buying a game that only has 10% of the original content and requires more games to gradually raise the content up to 100%.