The Weekly Meme Roundup: A VP Debate, Trends In Media Discourse And Earth Gets A Second Moon

Before we get started with this week's Memes of the Week list, everyone should watch Pete Alonso's 9th inning, go-ahead home run in Game 3 of the Mets' Wild Card win in Milwaukee set to Moneyball music because Let's go Mets baby, aw yeah, love da Mets.

Now that that's out of the way, the memes this week were slightly less intense than last week's but no less weird, as Minecraft YouTube has unearthed a new wild series, Republican VP Candidate J.D. Vance had himself quite a VP debate, and the planet got a second moon. Let's get into it.

Parkour Civilization

The first thing you need to know about Parkour Civilization is that no one jumps for the beef.

"Parkour Civilization" is an original web series made in Minecraft by YouTuber Evbo. It's been running for a year and finally broke into memedom this week thanks to its premise, which is helpfully laid out in the series' viral first 90 seconds.

Basically, the series takes place in a dystopia where everything is determined by parkour. Our hero is in the lower class of this Parkour civilization, meaning one false parkour step and he falls into "the void." That's why he jumps for the chicken at the beginning of the video, because no one would risk the trickier jump for the rewards offered by the beef.

Furthermore, our hero dreams of ascending to the upper layer where the parkour pros dwell, but to reach there, he must traverse the Temple of Parkour. No Parkour noob has ever done that successfully.

The brilliant, Snowpiercer-esque dystopia in Parkour Civilization hooked viewers thanks to its surreal premise and quotable one-liners, making for an original new meme.

Examples

Trends In Recent Media

Elsewhere on Twitter, users could not stop arguing about tropes in media. This was largely the fault of user @PaintraSeaPea, who apparently has a gift for baiting users with inflammatory parodies about tropes in media. Their secret is outlining extremely common tropes but claiming they were a "recent" trend they hated.

They got users twice in the last week with bait, including an exceptionally silly parody about The Hero's Journey that a shocking amount of Twitter didn't realize was a joke.

Examples

J.D. Vance "You Said You Guys Weren't Going To Fact Check"

You'd be forgiven for forgetting, with the Minecraft brainrot and "recent media" parodies flying around social media this week, but there was a Vice Presidential debate this week. While it seems unlikely that anything substantial came from it in terms of swaying the 2024 election one way or the other, it was certainly a night where J.D. Vance got attention, for better or worse.

While there was no mention of couches at the debate, Vance did earn a meme by scolding the debate's moderators with, "The rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check."

Vance was fact-checked after pushing more anti-Haitian immigrant rhetoric, which had become a contentious point of the campaign over the past few weeks.

Vance's bemoaning of being "fact-checked" confirmed his critics' priors, and it turned into a meme for much of the left-leaning side of social media, among others.

Examples

Earth's Mini Moon

Almost lost in all the chatter is the fact that Earth temporarily has a second moon.

"2024 PT5" is an asteroid that's passing through Earth's orbit and will get caught in it for two months. So while another space rock orbiting around Earth won't have any tangible effects on the planet, it's certainly noteworthy enough to garner some memes, and social media was happy to oblige.

Examples

Larry David's Zoom Call

Finally, we get to the lowest-stakes meme of the week, we have Larry David being his Larry David-est and not really doing the whole 'Zoom' thing correctly.

During a phone call with the cast of Veep, David placed the camera a relative mile away from his face, and considering how many viewers were all too familiar with Zoom calls, the images led to mass amusement from social media.

Examples

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We'll be back next Friday with another edition of our Weekly Meme Roundup series, so stay tuned!