fhylie, the aeolist

Back in 2020, a reddit user named AlmWaffle made two memes, one about the Blackbeard, and one about the Pegasus.

Now, something you may not immediately notice about these memes is that their format is actually very restrictive. The only text that the Blackbeard and Pegasus memes use is text from that mech's section of the book. I think this actually makes these early memes much more impressive given that they're able to (re)assemble something mostly coherent out of a very limited text set.

I encountered these memes, and while I was bored during early 2021, I thought "wait, nobody's done one for the Raleigh." So following the exact same meme structure - using only text from the mech's section of the book, using the glaring red eye and the intense sexual humor - I did it myself.

I posted it on reddit to furious applause. I was initially hesitant at showing it to PilotNET because I worried it was too provocative and sexually explicit. However, I eventually did, and everyone loved it, so I made another one - this time, about my favourite mech.

This one was even better received than the first one, but I immediately started to hate it. I felt like I could've done better, and that I owed it to my favourite mech to do better.

My mood picked up a little with this one. I managed to throw in a lot of humour that was very specific to me (the bit about the Ao3 orbital laser), and the sexual element was so blatant that it no longer felt like creepy subtext because it had moved into absurdist text. I'm still proud of this meme. I still think it's funny.

The absolute nadir of my creativity with these memes was hit with the Minotaur.

This shit? Not funny. I hate this meme. This is the worst meme I've ever made. It's like more than 50% sexual humour by volume. The actual funny stuff - the mech delusionally obsessed with people not moving - gets tossed out in favour of ass jokes. Dogshit meme. I know some people liked it but I hate it and no longer consider it canon to my collection of Lancer memes. I will make a better Minotaur meme one day, I swear it.

My mood picked up significantly when I made the Monarch meme. It was the one where I liberated myself from the first mind prison I'd created for myself when I started making these memes: I just... stopped forcing sex jokes. To this day, I don't consciously try to avoid sex jokes, but I only put them in if they're the funniest possible thing I could say in a given sequence.

The Zheng meme represented liberation from the second mind prison: why was I forcing myself to use only text from the mech's section of the book? Whose rule was that? Who had imposed it upon me? Most importantly - who was going to judge me for abandoning it, and what right did they have to do so?

Freeing my mind this way let me make memes that were so much funnier and so much more creatively satisfying.

The Iskander meme is the first time I actually signed my meme and talked about what was going on with my life. I took a break from making memes for a while after this, because I wanted to lock in on In Golden Flame. That lasted until I got writer's blocked for a long while and got depressed about it, and then realized that actually, denying myself something I and other people enjoyed just because I had to have "work ethic" wasn't doing much for my work ethic.

What followed is what I would describe as the Golden Age of Vexposting. My memes started to get widespread recognition, and I was making at least one a month.

The Manticore meme is when I started consistently signing my work. All of the memes after that one had my signature on them. I assure you that it wasn't fully an ego thing - by this point, other people were making memes, and both their memes and the original two memes made by AlmWaffle were being falsely attributed to me, so I wanted to make sure that I was only getting credit for memes I'd actually made.

The Sunzi meme is special in that it has a co-writing credit - a guy called BRCR (who also helped playtest In Golden Flame) actually made a Sunzi meme so funny I asked him if I could make my own including some of its jokes because I couldn't think of ones that were funnier.

The Atlas and Calendula memes are notable as the point at which I stopped putting text on top of the images. I felt it was visually more appealing (and more easily readable) to have the text surrounding the mech instead of superimposed on top of it. I also signed memes with my Twitter handle for a while? Not sure why I did that.

The Balor meme isn't my finest work. You can see I kind of ran out of steam halfway through and decided to turn it into a tone poem. Might revisit the Balor at some point.

With the new widescreen format, I was on a tear for a while. And I started signing my memes with rearranged characters again, as Metat Aun intended.

I got to revisit one of my greatest shames and salvage all the good jokes from it, and repackage it into the new meme format!

I got to meme on God's Edgiest Boy.

I even made a meme for a completely different system, and the dndmemes subreddit didn't really give a shit!

After that, I was getting close to the release of my book, so I actually made a shitpost to advertise the Kickstarter: