Japanizing Beam!

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About

Japanizing Beam! is a 3 panel image series that aims to poke fun at how Japanese media takes liberties in depicting characters or objects primarily as female anime characters. In the series, a character or object is shown in the top frame, the character Ultraman Tiga from the Ultra series shooting a laser beam with the caption "Japanizing Beam!" is shown in the middle frame, and the Japanese iteration of said character or object is shown in the bottom frame. It grew mainly popular in the KnowYourMeme community before appearing on other sites.

Precursor

The meme bears similarity to the #UpgradeChallenge, another 3-panel series in which an object is changed in the middle panel.

Origin

The first Japanizing Beam joke was posted to Twitter on January 31st, 2017 by @IsMaGuzHer.^[1] The image, shown below, shows a "Japanizing" of Aztec god Quetzalcoatl into the character Lucoa from Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid.

Spread

On February 22nd, KnowYourMeme user Adept Samuel^[2] uploaded an edit of the image using the character Ultraman shooting a "Japanizing Beam!" to the site (shown below).

This was the first of dozens of uploads KnowYourMeme users would add to the site in the following two weeks. Soon, variations using other nationalities appeared, such as "Americanizing Beam" and "Indianizing Beam." The surge of Japanizing Beam edits on KnowYourMeme soon made its way to other meme sites, such as Memecenter.^[3] On February 27th, a few examples were posted to Facebook page Tohsaka's Cave Explorers.^[6] On March 1st, 2017, a gallery of the memes was posted to Indonesian site Keepo.me^[5] and gained over 4,000 views. On March 5th, Redditor aRandomDudeOntheNet^[4] posted a variation to /r/MemeEconomy, though it did not gain much traction.