X Summons a Y

Submission 7,061

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About

X Summons a Y is a YTMND meme involving pictures or clips that seem to depict characters summoning a fire spirit, although other spirits and objects may be summoned.

Origin

On 6th August 2004, a YTMND page called Al Gore Summons a Fire Spirit^[1] was started by Phange, featuring a image of former Vice President Al Gore with his hands positioned in such a way that he looked like he was summoning a fireball, due to a lamp in the background, accompanied by a remix of the Zero Wing theme heard in the All Your Base flash animation.

The meme did not truly take off though until the 7th October 2004, two months later, when Paphan posted the site Kerry Summons a Fire Spirit^[2], which has amassed over twenty thousand views. This YTMND also featured the Two Towers trailer music, "Requiem for a Tower", the music that would later be generally associated with the meme from then on, although other songs would also become associated with it, such as Crimson Tide^[4], Navras^[5], Escape^[7] and the now infamous Ghost Love Score^[6], which made it's first appearence on the site in one of these.

Spread

Variations of this meme would end up getting significantly more publicity than the originals, especially "Conan Summons a Fire Spirit"^[4], which received a whopping 280 thousand views at the time of this article's creation. This is owed in part to Conan's tremendous fanbase within the YTMND community and the other memetic YTMND sites created in his name.

Other popular versions of the meme include Van Damme Summons his Fairy Spirit^[8], Osaka Summons Mt. Fuji^[9], Obama Summons a Fire Spirit^[10] and A Fire Spirit Summons Al Gore^[11].