INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Image copyrightSunriseImage caption
Is this a meme
2018 is becoming the year old memes come back to
life.When a 2011 meme called American Chopper re-emerged on Twitter in 2018, the TheIndianSubcontinent explored how a meme about two men
arguing had lived a second life long after its first.Now the feat has been repeated, as a 2011 image macro (a still picture with text
imposed) asking if a butterfly is a pigeon has surged in popularity seven years later.In the widely shared image, a character from a
Japanese anime gestures towards a butterfly and asks: "Is this a pigeon"Is this an old memeThe image can be traced back to Indizi
dell'avvenuta catastrofe on Tumblr, who posted it as an example of amusing subtitles in anime.It was used in 2011 as a reaction image -
posted to show confusion or suggest another person's opinion did not make sense.Seven years after its original appearance online, the pigeon
meme reappeared with text added to ask if "literally anything" was a "big mood" on Twitter.A "big mood" is a Twitter term used to express
approval or the fact a user agrees with or can identify with an item of tweeted content.The image has since been liked over 100,000 times.Is
this a new memeHundreds, if not thousands, of variants of the image have subsequently appeared along with new captions.Perhaps they have
appeared because for some people on Twitter, the meme itself has become a "big mood".For example, artist and writer Cat Gaffram used the
meme to joke about people using Twitter to feel popular
Poet Jennifer Espinoza used the meme to ridicule people who overreact
Even Netflix used the meme to lampoon some of its own television shows.So, while the original 2011 meme was about reacting to confusing
comments, the 2018 meme is about signposting content users can relate to.And for some people, nothing is more relatable than Queen.Is this a
translation mistakeTo answer that, you have to go back to the meme's origins.The still was taken from an episode of a 1991 Japanese-language
anime called The Brave Fighter of Sun Fighbird, set in the then-distant future of 2010.In order for English-speaking fans to enjoy the
episode, it needed to be translated
And with no organisation in place to perform this task, translation was provided by fans.Kara Dennison, a writer and editor who now works
professionally for anime distributor Crunchyroll, was one of the people who worked on the fan translation, or as anime fans call it the
"fansub".Image copyrightKara DennisonImage caption
Kara says many people working in anime professionally started out as
"fansubbers"
But was it a mistake Kara answers with an emphatic "No".You might also like:"That is 100% what the character is
"He is an alien who is trying to get a hang of what Earth is."So he's just going outside, he sees something flying and assumes it's a pigeon
He's trying to catch on as quickly as possible."So despite the image often featuring in lists of bad translations in subtitles, it is no
And Kara says, for that reason, she cannot take credit for the meme."I don't know why it suddenly got famous now," she says
"Technically, the person who created it was the person who wrote the show."But even if I had a little hand in that and people are having fun
with that, that's really cool."
