Gotta Meme 'em All: Spiraling Out of Control!: Difference between revisions

[http://www.merriam-webster.com Merriam-Webster] defines ''apophenia'' as “the tendency to perceive a connection or meaningful pattern between unrelated or random things”. The chaos of the chatroom of thousands typing in commands to control a video game on a streaming service that features a stream delay made it difficult to predict and make sense of the world on a small scale. While on the larger scale things made sense and progress could be seen, it is on the smaller scale that the human brain tries to make sense of the world, and in this case it did so by creating a narrative. People made a lore that the constant checking of the Helix Fossil in the inventory was because the {{bp|player character}} was seeking guidance from it, and not because thousands of people (or “the voices” as the narrative called them) were giving conflicting commands to the game. From here the lore spread to people who were discussing the stream, especially on game forums and on [http://www.reddit.com Reddit].

Thus, Lord Omanyte is a meme centered around the Omanyte line and its respective fossil as part of a narrative that was adopted by the community trying to make sense of the seeming chaos and randomness that was at play during the first playthrough of Twitch Plays Pokémon.

The full impact of this narrative went beyond the stream and surrounding community. It was picked up by webcomics such as [http://xkcd.com xkcd], and even made its way into {{bp|Pokémon Omega Ruby and Pokémon Alpha Sapphire}} as {{bp|Brawly}} makes a comment about the Helix Fossil in the French translation which steers heavily toward worship. Much of the art and music about Twitch Plays Pokémon focuses on Lord Helix himself or the narrative surrounding him. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YONaicpAwQc In the end], we just have to take a step back and admire how quickly things spiraled out of control and resulted in Lord Helix becoming a fixture of the Pokémon fandom.

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