Majora’s Memes – In Which We Get Scholarly

Welcome to this week’s Majora’s Memes! Normally, this is where you’d come for a collection of Internet memes making jokes about the Zelda series. However, as of late, there’s been something of a dry run of memes. In the meantime, I’d like to get a little experimental with this feature. Hit the jump to find out what I mean!

For the next few weeks, Majora’s Memes will temporarily become a feature about memes themselves. Each week, a particular meme will be analyzed, and Zelda examples will be provided.

To kick off this week, I thought we should begin with this topic: just what is a meme anyways?

The word meme was coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. Dawkins refers to a meme as a unit of culture, analogous to a gene being a unit of an organism’s heredity. The idea is that culture undergoes evolution in a way similar to organisms, with memes spreading cultural ideas and phenomenons. And just as genes can mutate, so can memes. Eventually, the original purposes or intents of these memes are forgotten. Dawkins mentions catchphrases or jingles as examples of memes.

Of course, we know memes as something slightly different today. An Internet meme is a unit of information from the internet, usually a picture or video, that has been repeated over and over and over again, sometimes with the original meaning or origin being lost. That is, unless you’re one of those people who document memes, of which there are many on the Internet, which makes talking about them much easier!

In any case, memes mutate just as easily on the Internet as they do in interpersonal culture. This of course gives rise to a highly bizarre Internet culture that is rife with video game humor, including The Legend of Zelda related jokes or catchphrases.

Hopefully that clears up (at least slightly) what a meme is! Next week, we’ll be looking at one of the earliest Zelda memes, but if you have one in particular you’d like to see discussed, mention it in the comments! Until then, it’s dangerous to go alone!