Most memes carry the tone of where they first started out before morphing into something else. This time travel meme started on Reddit, according to Know Your Meme, when in early July user Korina-chan posted a photo of a running Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is going to save Harambe the gorilla before he gets euthanized. He represents “boys,” who would heroically use time travel to stop tragic gorilla murder from occurring. The meme’s creator also shared what “girls” would be doing: reliving the best moments with my ex.
There is obviously something a little sexist about this binary notion of boys and girls and the implication that a girl would waste time travel, but it’s also so ridiculous I find it hard to be offended. Plus, it’s funny to imagine that there are guys out there who think all a gal wants is to relive moments with their ex. More likely she’d go back in time and warn her past self never to start dating that dude in the first place.
But Reddit can be a pretty misogynistic place, especially in the dankest meme corners. There were a number of iterations that sort of show boys having a blast, going on adventures, and rocking out with the invention of time travel and girls being boring, incorporating the Doomer Girl and Chad characters:
But then things took a fun turn as the meme reached Twitter and people started giving girls fun stuff to do, like murdering Henry Ford before he turned humanity into cogs on an assembly line. Meanwhile, boys are getting some of that sweet, sweet dussy:
The more surreal the memes get the better they are, in my opinion. It’s a shame the “woman with a time machine” meme that exists is along gender lines, because the 12-year-old boys on Reddit might find out that girls are actually as weird and perverse as they are and band together to make even more powerful memes for us all to enjoy. If I could go back in time, I would tell that to Korina-chan and ask that they seriously reconsider their framing of the Arnold Schwarzenegger running photo. We could change the world.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
