Meme Review #1: Shoeske

Hello all. Welcome to my first meme review on the topic of Shoeske. This midget was one of the many horrid memes conceived in 2019 by the popular subreddit r/sh*tpostcrusaders. It was quickly overused, with unoriginal redditers soon remixing the image into other twisted abominations such as Okuyashoe, Shoetaro, and many others. These all depended solely on the seeming humor of twisting popular manga characters into caricatures of themselves by removing appendages and forming shoe-and-torso versions of their formar selves. Once this meme concept was drained of all life on the good old reddit, meme enthusiasts moved to discord, where this png

was quickly spread and used to high results within the discord community. Of course, since this is Shoeske we are talking about, it quickly became a hated meme on discord as well due to it's dry nature and similarity to other annoying discord memes accusing other users of various offenses. With all this slander surrounding this meme, you may expect me to despise this meme with all my heart. However, I feel that it may be mildly creditable, as people have made good content with it (see the Shoeske gif on google). However, due to the scarcity of these original posts, I believe that it was a small-scale meme that got blown out of proportion, leading to a drought of original content and an unfunny legacy for the original joke.

In terms of the diversity of this meme, it takes a few hits simply for the fact that it is one of the many funny internet images out there that cannot be applied as a mainstream meme template. The only joke here is the reality of a Josuke Higashikata image with legs removed. As you may guess, this on its own would never fit into mainstream meme culture, which favors reaction images and universally applicable, remixable templates. As a result, Shoeske has faded into anonymity after it's original popularity on reddit, with the few google search results it turns up only mentioning the meme on sh*tpostcrusaders or on comprehensive JoJo meme indexes.

In conclusion, the subject of this meme review, Shoeske, is a niche meme taken to the mainstream, blown out of proportion, and shoved into hypothetical roles it was never meant to fit, giving it an overall rating of a 4/10 meme. Funny as an image, but not as a true blue meme.

-Great Beaver

1/11/23