The central joke of the Ulysses Ogre meme hinges on the Ogre holding themselves to unreasonable standards by expecting to fully grasp one of the most famously difficult works of the 20th Century after only a single reading, which just doesn't work if you substitute your favourite video game, because frankly, your favourite video game is not Ulysses – but to be fair, the overwhelming majority of books are not Ulysses either. There's probably a video game somewhere out there that's as textually challenging as Ulysses, and it's probably some random-ass RPG Maker game from 2006 with an author whose name is a dick joke and a present fandom of approximately eleven people.
for the longest time i somehow had it in my head "yeah okay finnegans wake is so impossibly dense that there's barely an academic consensus about the plot of the damn thing and that's the joke there specifically, but surely ulysses is like, something everyone's supposed to know and that i'm just uncultured for not getting, i shouldn't insult everyone's intelligence by assuming it's even close to being as difficult"
and so i took the message as more "everyone operates at their own level, and that's nothing to be ashamed of if forcing the issue will hurt" and not "stop holding yourself to impossible standards and beating yourself up for not meeting them"
once someone pointed out that "ogre finished reading ulysses at all" was part of the joke, it occurred to me that it's basically the impostor syndrome version of this XKCD strip
and realized i was, in fact, the ogre here.
or, to be more succinct:
EVERYONE CALL OGRE STUPID AND IT'S TRUE! OGRE BARELY EVEN LITERATE! OGRE FINALLY FINISHED READING "ULYSSES OGRE" BUT OGRE CAN ONLY IDENTIFY SURFACE LEVEL THEMES LIKE MEDIA LITERACY AND SELF-ESTEEM, AND CAN'T COMPREHEND DEEPER IDEAS LIKE "SOMETIMES SOMETHING ACTUALLY IS DIFFICULT AND IT'S NOT JUST A SKILL ISSUE ON YOUR PART" THAT MAKE ULYSSES OGRE A TUMBLR CLASSIC! OGRE SO DUMB, IT MAKE OGRE SAD! AT THIS RATE, OGRE WILL NEVER UNDERSTAND SILICATE CHEMISTRY!
Yeah, I've bumped into a lot of folks who think the joke is that Ogre really is barely literate and is misreading the themes of Ulysses, which is, ironically, the product of poor media literacy causing them to misread Ulysses Ogre.
