The Memes in eSports — League of Legends edition
Hello guys how’s it going? Welcome to my eSports blog, if you have read all my posts, I appreciated it.
So uh, there is something new every day, and it also applies on eSports too. I have to say the eSports community is creative.
Well, I think everyone has encountered something like this (or maybe its just me, who knows?) you met your friend one day and had a casual conversation, and your friend said something that sounds weird. You stared at him/her with confusion all over your face, and he/she puts up a face of disapproval.
They are talking about something that is trendy, catchy and funny (at least to them). And if you don’t understand, you are out of the loop.
Then you wondered about what the heck are people talking about, and you will just look it up on google. (I would just go to Reddit’s /r/outoftheloop subreddit or look at the knowyourmeme website.)
That’s how I think about memes. There are different definition, but most of the time, a meme should be funny.
And of course, in the world of eSports, there are loads of memes. But I didn’t follow all the competitive scene of different games so that I will focus on memes about League of Legends because I am really into the competitive scene.
- Same
It is started by Cloud 9 (C9) LoL team’s AD Carry player, Zachery “Sneaky” Scuderi. Sneaky was playing with his teammate, William “Meteos” Hartman, as a duo. Viewers found their conversation in-game interesting and there is a part that, Meteos was talking to Sneaky about his champion (the character that Meteos chose), then Sneaky said: “me too.”
And Meteos began to argue with Sneaky that the statement isn’t right because they are on different champions and there’s no way that they are doing the same thing, so Sneaky should not say “me too.” since there’s a difference. Then Sneaky replied with “Same.”, trying to end the conversation.
Later on, this phrase is for situations that are very awkward or annoying.
For example, the donation messages. On Twitch.tv, viewers are allowed to make donations and leave a message to streamers. In Sneaky’s channel, if anyone donated at least 4 dollars, then there is a text-to-voice bot to read it out loud.
There are different types of donation message; they can be encouraging, funny, questions…etc. And there is no restriction on those messages. (i.e. people who donated can write whatever they want on it).
So, whenever Sneaky is asked for something that crossed the borderline (in most of the cases, sexual content.), Sneaky will reply with “same.” to avoid those questions. Therefore, the usage of “same” has become a way to express the feeling of ignoring uninterested topics.
2. Clapped
In League, Clapped means “beaten convincingly.” It originates from C9’s mid lane player Nicolaj “Jensen” Jensen. During 2016 World Championship Series, C9 is in the same group (Group B) with the defending champion, SK Telecom T1 (SKT), from South Korea.
The star player in SKT, Lee “Faker” Sang-hyeok, is regarded as the GOAT (Greatest Of All Time) player in League of Legends. Teams can feel the pressure to play against them, but Jensen tweeted the line:
And this is a very ambitious call. However, the two matches between C9 and SKT did not end well for Jensen. During these games, Jensen is constantly outplayed by Faker, and C9 lost both games in a pretty stomped fashion. Therefore, people said Jensen is clapped by Faker.
The whole situation is a very classic “Talk shit, get hit, ” and the term is used whenever Jensen get a kill or get killed in the game, the viewers will spam “Clapped” in the chatroom.
3. FreeSM and FreeLG
This meme is a reference to the rivalry between two teams in the NA LCS, which are Team SoloMid (TSM) and Counter Logic Gaming (CLG). There are the very first professional teams in LoL.
Considered that the owner of TSM, Andy Dinh, set up TSM just to beat CLG, this has formed the rivalry between these teams. (Their rivalry status is similar with Chicago Bulls vs. New York Knicks or Utah Jazz in NBA playoffs back then.)
If TSM lost, then they are called FreeSM; CLG will be FreeLG if they lost. I think this is a good friendly banter to hype up these games, so most of the community take these nicknames as a joke/meme.
4. Team Liquid (TL)’s ranking
This is a meme about Team Liquid’s LoL team. Team Liquid acquired Team Curse before Season 2015 starts, so they changed the name afterward.
So, the meme is mocking TL’s ability to be the top teams. Ever since Team Curse become Team Liquid, their standing in the NA LCS is being constant for a very long time, no matter what the management do.
Overtime, TL has created much hype around them. They acquired former World Champion player, found another head coach that is more knowledgeable and experienced, offer local talents from the ladder in NA server a position in the team…etc. TL’s decisions are always impressive to the community, however, they cannot deliver better results.
At some point, they were the 1st place team in LCS, and for some reason, they cannot hold the lead and dropped afterward.
Most of the time TL will be ended up being the 4th place (Except 2015 Summer split, they are the 3rd).
Therefore it became a meme to the community, sometimes TL is regarded as “Arsenal in LCS” because their status is very similar to Arsenal, the soccer team in Barclays Premier League.
(I hope you guys realized what I did there xD)
5. D2
D2 is a shortened form of “Diamond II”, which means Diamond 2, a rank indicator in LoL. This meme is a reference to C9’s top lane player, An “Balls” Le. (Another C9 player! I mentioned them many times that you guys may get bored. Well, they are my favorite team, and they created a good amount of memes around them.)
Before getting into the details, let’s take a look at how LoL’s ranking system works:
Most of the professional players are in Master or Challenger tier, and some of them even have multiple accounts in those tiers. Therefore, the rank of a player means a lot. Most of the professional teams only acquire players that are at least Master tier, and for any pro, being high ranked is almost a must.
So, the origin of this meme started by Riot Games’ NA LCS Caster, Joshua “Jatt” Leesman before the 2015 World Championship Series. Jatt has tweeted the following statement:
With this tweet, Jatt means Balls has played a huge amount of games but failed to achieve a higher ranking in the ladder. Jatt compared Balls with Seo “Huni” Heong-Hoon, who is the top laner of European team Fnatic (FNC), who is undefeated in the EU LCS with an 18–0 score.
There are two sides of the argument; one group said rank is not the only standard to measure a player’s ability, and the other group said that Jatt only points out the fact and Balls’ situation is a problem.
This tweet has started a large scale argument between pro players and the community, and it ended with Jatt’s apologize.
However, the performance of Balls in the first week of the World Championship has surprised everyone. He held himself very well and even scored a Pentakill (5 kills by the same person in a short period) against Fnatic. Yes, that’s an “interesting” coincidence. The chatting room spammed D2 rapidly, or “losing to a D2 player” to mock FNC and praised C9 for their performance.
Even though C9 ended with 3–4 and cannot advance to quarterfinals, Balls proofed that having a relatively low rank doesn’t mean you are worse than the others, and people will say D2 in the chat whenever Balls plays in the league.
6. The gap is closing
I find it very hard to locate the origin of this meme, but I believed it started with the tweet by the owner of CLG, George “HotshotGG” Georgallidis.
The message is straightforward; If South Korea, the dominating region continues to play poorly, NA teams may have a chance to beat them and become a World Champion.
And of course, HotshotGG was heavily criticized for being arrogant since Korea teams still look superb and they are ready to beat everyone in the World.
At the group stage of Worlds 2016, with a convincing victory of TSM over Samsung Galaxy (SSG), the community saw the hope, and some of the members said that “the gap(i.e. the skill cap of KR and rest of the world) is really closing”.
But in the end, NA teams fail to deliver once again. Only C9 made it to quarterfinals when TSM and CLG are knocked out in the group stage. And the opponent of C9 in the quarterfinal, coincidentally, is SSG. (I mean, if that’s not scripted, then what is scripted?) and C9 lost the series 0–3.
The semifinal ended up with 3 Korean teams and 1 European team. The situation is awkward for people who thinks that Korea teams are weaker. Therefore people said: “gap is closing my a** .” The final is a battle between two Korean teams (SKT vs. SSG), so no matter what, Korean teams will win the title.
“The gap is closing” remained on the scene as a sarcastic phrase. It is often used in international competitions like Intel Extreme Masters, All-star event, Mid-Season Invitational and World Championship Series whenever there is a Korean team in it.
To be fair, there are loads of memes in LoL that are amusing, but I cannot include them all. For the next time, we can discuss different topics. We can continue to be an epic memer, to talk about CSGO memes or more LoL memes, or we can speak of some famous figures in eSports, or if you are concerned about social issues about eSports, we can do some research on gambling on CS: GO either! There are still lots of topics we can cover on, and I will see you guys next week!
