Monday, March 8, 2010

Know Your Meme: An Hero

Mitchell Henderson was a seventh grader from Rochester, Minnesota. In 2006, for reasons not entirely known, Mitchell shot himself in the head with a .22-caliber rifle from his parents’ bedroom. Following Mitchell’s suicide, his friends and classmates created a Myspace memorial to him. This is where the meme begins. Classmate's made a memorial page for Mitchell.
One of his classmates wrote this comment on Mitchell.

“He was such an hero, to take it all away. We miss him so, That you should know, And we honor him this day. He was an hero, to take that shot, to leave us all behind. God do we wish we could take it back, And now he’s on our minds. Mitchell was an hero, to leave us feeling like this, Our minds are rubber, our joints don’t work, Our tears fall into abyss. He was an hero, to take that shot, In life it wasn’t his task, He shouldn’t have had to go that way, before an decade’d past. Now he sits there in my heart, this hero of mine, Always there to make me smile, Make me feel just fine. He had courage,that boy did, courage in his heart. To take that shot, To end his pain, To tear us all apart. But in the end, he died in courage. Lacking, nevermore, He died a hero, Mitchell did, And we’ll love him forevermore. We love you like an brother. We miss you so much. We will always love you, kid. Rest In Peace Mitch. ~Lila”
To most, the fact that Lila called Mitch a hero for killing himself is strange. We could speculate that this was a seventh grader who had a difficult time reconciling her feelings about the death of a friend but needed to voice her feelings in order to cope. But to a troll, this was exploitable. The "joke" is how someone could think it it implicitly heroic to kill yourself. The grammatical error is an essential part of the meme, but only for the sake of categorization. Any humor derived from a misspelling is secondary to the “Shock Value” hoped for by the trolls who use it.


Shortly after Mitchell’s obituary was published, a clipping was posted to MyDeathSpace.com, and eventually to /b/.

On many boards on the internet if you want someone to leave or kill themselves, you tell them to be "an hero.."





No comments:

Post a Comment