Fun fact! Macho Man Randy Savage once punched a dude for knocking me over as a kid and proceeded to buy me a bunch of stuff and give me merch and tickets. The dude yelled at me for just wanting a 3 musketeers bar when he wanted to buy up half the store. 🤣
It’s a vestigial structure from when the meme format was first introduced. It was meant to show doing something despite no one requesting it. It could work without it, but then it’s considered a different meme format.
Some formats get abused when people don’t recognize them as formats. “Demotivational posters” were the done thing for a while. Then advice animals. Then rage comics. The people doing it genuinely don’t understand they can just not do it, because they’ve never thought about it for one second. They view this as the baseline.
This can happen across entire commercial mediums. Giant robots started as a specific narrative power fantasy and became the setting where animes happen. Same deal for magical high schools, rigid-but-shallow dystopian societies, and isekais. Holy shit, do isekais make the issue crystal clear. The instant utility of shoving a like-you-but protagonist into a different world is shamelessly direct. But it keeps showing up in stories where there’s no reason the main character has to be from somewhere else. These authors think that getting Wizard Of Oz’d is just the paper you write the story on.
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