Conflict in Literature

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About

Conflict in Literature refers to a series of exploitable images based on a webcomic explaining the various types of challenges of protagonists face in literature. The meme replaces the images of the comic with something in popular culture.

Origin

On May 22nd, 2014, Grant Snider of Incidental Comics^[1] published a comic entitled "Conflicts in Literature." In the comic, stick figures act out the classic conflict scenarios present in narrative art, such as "man vs. nature" and "man vs. technology," as well as the movement in literature ("modernism," "post-modernism," etc.)

Spread

Three years later, on October 19th, 2017, two variations of Snider's work appeared on Twitter and Instagram, respectively. That day, Twitter^[2] user @PTSDGuts posted the nine panels with each of Snider's images replaced with anime characters (shown below, right), received more than 1,800 retweets and 2,800 likes in five days. When posted to FunnyJunk, ^[8] the meme received more than 1,600 upvotes and 66,000 views. Additionally, Instagram^[3] user @rad_shiba posted a variant with the cartoon character Daffy Duck replacing the images, receiving more than 300 likes in five days.

Over the next week, the template was shared three times on the /r/MemeEconomy subreddit] On October 24th, Redditor^[9] Proxylazurs shared a version featuring Half-Life characters in the /r/HalfLife subreddit, garnering more than 1,400 points (95% upvoted) in one day.