The Lord of the Memes

          This first meme depicts a raccon hanging onto the edge for dear life with the caption, “Fly you fools!” This is, of course, mimicking the scene from The Fellowship of the Ring where Gandalf is about to fall into shadow. The knowledge people would need to understand this meme would be to have seen the movie, or at least this specific scene of it. I suppose, besides making people laugh, the purpose of this meme would be to make a connection. The creator probably saw this picture of the racoon and it reminded him of the scene in the movie.

          The next meme is a ‘what people think’ meme. It uses pictures from The Lord of the Rings trilogy along with the 1977 version of The Hobbit and other photos. One doesn’t need a lot of information to ‘get’ this meme. You can get the joke by the visual hints each picture gives: the cute and comical hobbit in the ‘parents’ section, the lordly and powerful Aragorn in the ‘I think’ section, and the nerdy fans in the ‘society’ section. I suppose one of the purposes for the creation of this meme would be to share the differing images and ideas of J.R.R. Tolkein’s books. It compares not only different movies, but the fan culture as well.

          In this piece of fan art, the scene where the ring slips onto Frodo’s finger is depicted. However, instead of the ring, a ring pop is shown. I suppose the creator of this meme would have to have some knowledge of photoshop to create this meme. They would need to compose two images, the ring pop and frodo, into one meme. The purpose of this meme (besides humor) could be, once again, a combining of cultures: imputing candy into Middle Earth.