"Hi, I'm Kara, and I inadvertently helped make a meme."

May 13, 2018 8:33 AM

Some meme doing the rounds. Me: is this the best of the web?
posted by MartinWisse (24 comments total)

But see, now she's just making me wonder what about the Japanese title would lead to the English translation FighBird?
posted by straight at 8:40 AM on May 13, 2018 [2 favorites]

I don't know japanese at *all* but a little use of online tools tells me that the subtitle is transliterated as "FaiBaado", and Baado means "bird", while Fai maybe means phi (Φ), so technically a better translation would be PhiBird or Φ-bird.
posted by dis_integration at 8:50 AM on May 13, 2018 [2 favorites]

(obligatory:

me: Looking at PhiBird, "Is this a translation of FaiBaado?")
posted by dis_integration at 9:19 AM on May 13, 2018 [12 favorites]

My favorite version.
posted by Grandysaur at 9:38 AM on May 13, 2018 [22 favorites]

I would take a wild guess that the original Japanese title was a backwards coinage from English, since the "FighBird" part is rendered in Katakana characters (used almost exclusively for borrowed words). Like they wanted to call it "FightBird" but felt that "FaitoBaado" was too awkward, so they just dropped the second syllable to make it flow better. And then the English fansubber is in the even more awkward position of deciding whether to go with the intent ("FightBird") or doing a literal transcription ("FaiBaado"); the consensus reached by the fansub community apparently involved splitting the difference on "FighBird".
posted by tobascodagama at 9:53 AM on May 13, 2018 [1 favorite]

“Is this a pigeon?” sounds like a really slow day in AskMe.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 10:04 AM on May 13, 2018 [36 favorites]

Of course, I saw a few dozen of these before I learned that the word being scribbled out was "pigeon"
posted by ckape at 10:55 AM on May 13, 2018 [3 favorites]

“Is this a pigeon?” sounds like a really slow day in AskMe.

Can I eat this pigeon?
posted by overeducated_alligator at 11:10 AM on May 13, 2018 [15 favorites]

Ask MetaFilter: Is this a pigeon? Ok, but is this a pigeon?

And yes, the inevitable Can I eat pigeons?
posted by oulipian at 11:11 AM on May 13, 2018 [9 favorites]

Φ-bird !!!

holds up lighter
posted by Xyanthilous P. Harrierstick at 12:22 PM on May 13, 2018 [12 favorites]

The origins are a lot less mean spirited than almost all of the meme variations I've seen.
posted by GenderNullPointerException at 12:35 PM on May 13, 2018

> "Of course, I saw a few dozen of these before I learned that the word being scribbled out was 'pigeon'"

I learned that, um ... today. Just now. In this thread.
posted by kyrademon at 12:38 PM on May 13, 2018 [5 favorites]

Thanks for posting this, I wondered what the source was.

This is probably my favorite version so far.
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 12:47 PM on May 13, 2018 [3 favorites]

Does anyone have any idea why this thing suddenly re-exploded? I remember it from a few years back (KYM gives a 2015 origin), but why did it become the Official May 2018 Meme?
posted by Etrigan at 1:08 PM on May 13, 2018

I've seen a lot of variations of it. Didn't have a clue "Pigeon" was the original, which made every meme instantly less funny.
posted by lmfsilva at 2:04 PM on May 13, 2018 [1 favorite]

Does anyone have any idea why this thing suddenly re-exploded?

I guess people just got tired of good memes
posted by thelonius at 2:19 PM on May 13, 2018 [2 favorites]

the biggest thing I got from this is that fansubbers became employed by streaming services. That's a nice thing to know, glad their charitable work actually lead to employment.
posted by Ferreous at 2:20 PM on May 13, 2018 [10 favorites]

My brain has picked this meme up as one of our jokey shorthands for funny misunderstanding. For example I was eating in a new cafe and the view out the window made me think of my hometown. Then awhile later I realized I had no idea why I thought that. Then I was like “Is this my hometown?” And I made myself laugh.
The memes that catch on tend to be ones that are very expressive of a very particular, recognizable feeling but are also endlessly versatile. It turns out that a lot of the things we notice or want to say fall into patterns and the meme emerges that represents one of those patterns and then people match up the thing we notice with the appropriate pattern.
posted by bleep at 3:29 PM on May 13, 2018 [4 favorites]

> the biggest thing I got from this is that fansubbers became employed by streaming services. That's a nice thing to know, glad their charitable work actually lead to employment.

There's long been a mixed relationship between the publishers and fan community in this regard, dating back to the days of photocopied zines and video tape duplication.
posted by ardgedee at 4:30 PM on May 13, 2018

Aww, I love this meme and I'm glad to know it has such wholesome origins. I haven't seen any particularly mean-spirited versions of it, because I scrubbed my twitter feed of meanies a while back (I really recommend this). Just lots of good feminist humor, mostly.

I can't find my favorite one, but it had the robot/man labeled as a guy in a meeting saying "is this an original idea?" and the butterfly was "something a woman said 10 minutes ago."
posted by lunasol at 4:32 PM on May 13, 2018 [9 favorites]

(whoops, clicked "post" too early)
On the publishers vs. fan groups love/hate relationship: On the one hand, the rightsholders want to put a lid on what they consider piracy; on the other, the fans who develop their translation skills on manga and anime are often a vital source of talent to recruit from, since they arrive already familiar with the tropes, jargon and editing processes for the media they'll be working on.
posted by ardgedee at 4:34 PM on May 13, 2018

HOW TO KNOW YOU ARE OLD, INTERNET EDITION, 2018:

I just realized that the last three times I was introduced to memes, it was by reading a "The origins of the X meme" thread on Metafilter. I had never heard of them before that...
posted by mmoncur at 9:05 PM on May 13, 2018 [2 favorites]

Before it became so meme-ified, this was my introduction to the cap: Are there no fucking butterflies in Japan?

So now I have context for one, but not the other two.
posted by Gordafarin at 1:51 AM on May 14, 2018 [1 favorite]

> I guess people just got tired of good memes

Remember the American-Chopper-yelling-at-each-other meme? Those were the good old days. Can we go back to that?
posted by gkhan at 7:03 AM on May 14, 2018 [1 favorite]