Brendan's Opinion: Morbius

I have not seen the movie, and I never will. I rather would like to use its public image to examine a phenomenon I have come to notice. I call it the Hyper-Meme.

First, what is this phenomenon? Essentially it is a meme that has become baked into the online culture that it has lost all original meaning, and rather is a parody of itself. A prime example of this is Among Us, a meme that started out as just lighthearted jokes about the game, and now is inseparable from many other aspects of internet culture.

So how does something become a Hyper-Meme? Essentially a Hyper-meme comes into existence at some pivotal moment, when the original meme has become so widespread and reused that it becomes used ironically. This can take a varying amount of time. See the Big Chungus meme, in which the entire original meme was the image, and it got spread and used up extremely fast. And summarily it hit the critical Hyper-Meme point and became the ironic cynical concept it is today.

Morbius started as just a bad movie, then people made jokes about how they actually liked the movie. Then everyone was talking about how they jokingly liked Morbius. It became used up and tired, but then it hit the Hypermeme point. I think that it is actually traceable to a single pivotal moment when it ascended into the zeitgeist. A simple tweet about Morbing time.

The moment that history was made. We are now stuck with Morbius in the pantheons of the Hyper-meme