I Think of Myself as Above the Average Person

About

I Think of Myself as Above the Average Person is an image macro series based on a comment made by Twitch streamer Michael “mmDust” Duarte at the video game streamers convention TwitchCon 2018. The meme expresses a facetious feeling of unwarranted superiority.

Origin

On October 26th, 2018, Michael "mmDust" Duarte participated in the "The Professional Streaming Mindset: An Interactive Discussion" panel at TwitchCon.^[1] During the panel, when asked about his relationship with his viewers, he said:

"It's kind of like low-key like god complex kind of thing, I don’t feel like many of my viewers should relate themselves to me… and this is like, kinda like, super weird…I do think of myself as better than…there’s no good way to say this but I think of myself as above the average person so I don’t feel like many people could relate to me.

The following day, Twitter user @Classify published a video of the moment with the caption "? Imma be real, even fucking NINJA wouldn’t have said this lmfaoooo." The post received more than 5,600 retweets, 35,000 likes and 3.1 million views (shown below).

On October 30th, YouTuber PewDiePie included the video in a compilation from TwitchCon. The post received more than 4.6 million views in one week (shown below, left).

One week later, Redditor ^[2] morathegoat posted an image macro of the moment, captioning mmDust's comments with "When you take a shit, wipe and the toilet paper is clean." The post received more than 27,000 points (92% upvoted) and 1,200 comments in 24 hours (shown below, right).

mmDust's Apology

On October 31st, Duarte posted a response to the outrage against his comments.^[3] He said:

This past weekend I made a fool of myself and grossly misspoke during a panel I was apart of. What I said was absolutely garbage and I made a horrible example of the gaming and streaming communities. I’m sorry for not better preparing myself for the panel and for being a jackass with how I chose to respond to it prior to now.

Spread

Over the next 24 hours, the image macro was used in various subreddits including /r/reddeadredemption and /r/dankmemes (examples below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References