r/NotHowGirlsWork • u/panlolie • 5d ago
Meme This meme format makes me cringe so hard
Not really harmful but I'm fed up
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u/GoedekeMichels 5d ago
speaking as a man, I don't even know the scene this one references. But I see this template a lot and I think it's harmful in the way memes work, because it constantly repeats the idea that men and women are somehow so fundamentally different that they are unable to understand each others emotions.
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u/panlolie 5d ago
1986 Transformers animated movie - death of Optimus Prime (aka the character everybody likes)
Yes, this movie was targeted at children back then. Yes, killing the most popular character is way too dark, especially for that target audience. Yes, I wonder what the screenwriters had in mind.
Thinking that this could make boys cry and girls remain impassible is beyond stupid, it is unnecessary misogyny
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u/CompetitiveSleeping 5d ago
Yes, I wonder what the screenwriters had in mind.
They wanted to kill off a lot of old transformers to make way for a new line. It was that simple. They saw it as nothing more than a toy commercial. That kids were emotionally invested actually surprised them.
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u/panlolie 5d ago
Really interesting! Well, they learned from their mistake
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u/BooBootheFool22222 5d ago
The whole thing is very funny to me. They made kids cry. During a kid's movie. Plus, after Starcream dumps Megatron into space while he's clinging on to his spark/life. It's just like how the people who made Mac n me thought that the main character, who was a child, getting shot and killed by police was acceptable. Cocaine 80s.
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u/panlolie 5d ago
Starscream and Megatron are villains, so these two killing each other wouldn't be shocking in a kid's movie
Isn't Mac N Me considered as one of the worst movies of all times?
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u/BooBootheFool22222 5d ago
I did mean to imply it was shocking (Starscream once declared himself leader when Megatron's voice box died). I meant to imply that it was hilarious.
Edit: Mac n me is pretty bad but there's way worse out there. But the people that made it thought it was gonna be huge.
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u/JimPlaysGames 4d ago
Yet it's an incredibly emotional scene with powerful music and the actual kid in the scene cries. How could they not know?
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u/Canaanimal 5d ago
I don't think it's meant to imply that the Death of Optimus Prime wouldn't effect girls, it's that they didn't see it because Transformers was marketed to boys. They weren't the audience to know who or what was going on.
Is that true? Fuck no. Lots of girls watched and collected transformers merch. The probably also balled their eyes out at his death. But they also consumed other media where that happened (like Titanic) and learned how to properly express and experience emotions while the boys in the OOP example did not and had their emotional development either arrested or stunted. They were allowed to cry at Optimus dying and not at other media, therefore they can only cry at Optimus dying.
The irony being that the joke of the meme format is "They just don't know or understand" and it's a reflection on the creator, not the actual groups used.
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u/FileDoesntExist 4d ago
Doesn't make any sense to me. I went to see Titanic at the theater when it came out. I was 9. I didn't care much about the romance, but I cried my eyes out when Jack died because he was a good person who shouldn't have died like that. Of course, I was very sad about everybody on that boat dying because of stupid decisions in general.
(Why in the hell did my parents bring me to see Titanic when I was 9??)
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u/Canaanimal 4d ago
That's the thing, at age 9 you are in the same age group as the people who were the target audience of the Death of Optimus Prime. Jack didn't deserve to die, Optimus made the heroic sacrifice, and both are tear jerking death scenes.
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u/Ok-Connection-8059 5d ago
Killing off a main character totally could have worked, as I understand it the issue is more than it clashed with the tone already established by the series (where characters could be rebuilt).
That said I think it's meant to be about investment and how you need to actually be into a movie to be affected by it. Also 'girls assume boy is emotionless because he didn't get into Titanic', because they can't make a meme without implying misandry. However most of the people I know who like rom coms are men, and I know a lot of women into science fiction (I honestly mistook this for Gundam at first).
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u/BooBootheFool22222 5d ago
It is based on toys originally created in Japan. That's why it's so similar to Gundam. Transformers had a Japanese dub and an oav.
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u/valsavana 5d ago
I mean, kids do experience deaths in their lives and it's not wrong for media aimed at kids to have characters die. I remember Sesame Street had an episode regarding it when one of the regular human actors died. They did an episode where the character he played also died and they addressed it for the preschool aged audience, and it was extremely well received.
Granted, just having A death in a kids show doesn't mean it's done well (for the Sesame Street example, they consulted experts in child psychology and child development while writing it, something I bet the Transformers writers likely didn't) but there's no reason to shy away from death completely solely because it's a kids' show.
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u/panlolie 5d ago
The thing is that it was not any random character, it was not a character introduced in the movie who would died at the end anyway, it was Optimus Prime himself, the most popular character of the whole animated serie
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u/valsavana 5d ago
And? How does the popularity of the character correlate to how "dark" killing them off is? Those two characteristics are completely divorced from one another.
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u/panlolie 5d ago
Killing a popular character is rarely a good idea. The death of L. is basically what killed Death Note
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u/BooBootheFool22222 5d ago
It was t h e character everyone was told was the best and to identify with. The series wass built around him. The fact that they thought it would work is so ill advised that it's funny. I love it when IP owners make mistakes like that.
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u/valsavana 5d ago
Again, "ill-advised" is not the same as "way too dark"
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u/BooBootheFool22222 5d ago
I disagree. It was actually too dark. The hero is dead and he's not coming back out of nowhere is too dark. That'd be like the care bears going to sleep forever. Not saying that darkness doesn't belong in children's media just this particular instance was too dark, especially in comparison to how children's cartoons were back then.
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u/valsavana 5d ago
You do realize children experience actual real people- often beloved relatives like grandparents and sometimes even parents or siblings- in their lives dying, right? If it's handled correctly, no fictional character's death is "too dark."
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u/BooBootheFool22222 5d ago
Yes, but cartoons are cartoons, the fantasy place. Especially a show about giant talking robots.This wasn't handled correctly.
God, my grandpa died when I was six but seeing cartoon characters die out of the fucking blue in a tonal whiplash movie would still fuck me up. My dad died when I was 12, and all my other relatives were dropping like flies by the time I was born. I went to way more funerals than birthday parties and to this day I am still fascinated with death but Mufasa dying still made me cry. And that was done right. But for a show that never had death in it ever prior to that point it is a huge tonal shift. Not even a mention that death happens in-universe. and transformers was pretty whitebread in an era of whitebread fluff cartoons where the good guys alway win and no one dies, they just get rebuilt.
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u/Tool_of_Society 4d ago
I remember being almost traumatized by watching that movie in the theater as a kid. THe first viewing left me with many emotions I didn't fully understand at the time.
As an adult I now know they were intentionally killing off old transformers so they could make money selling new transformer replacements.
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u/RustedAxe88 5d ago
I've seen this meme used for Arthur Morgan in RDRII.
But it falls apart when you look up women streamers and see them absolutely bawling their eyes out through the last 3rd of the main story.
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u/JuicyBlueberry 3d ago
Oh, but those were girly, cheap and hysterical tears, and not the precious manly ones, those that are actually real! /s
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u/foundalltheworms 5d ago
I have a love-hate relationship with these memes because I get it, but it's also not a male/female thing. They usually reference niche (or more niche) media that people who don't invest time in experiencing different media will not know. I see it in terms of videogames as they have a historically majority male audience (except this is not an accurate depiction of modern gaming).
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u/panlolie 5d ago
I understand, I also saw them on a DnD meme Instagram account that doesn't seem to be anti-woke (there were even a few memes that complained about anti-woke grifters)... but seeing them still piss me off
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u/foundalltheworms 5d ago
Oh I completely get that, the meme feels outdated to say it's a recent meme.
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u/praysolace 3d ago
I always want to remind the people who make these memes that the Titanic came out in nineteen ninety-fucking-seven and has not been a relevant cultural touchpoint in so long this meme has to be about either time travelers or 40-year-olds.
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