- A joke about
Genshin Impact characters being obsessed with theNew York Mets has exploded onTikTok . - The Mets meme already existed online, but recently crossed over to Genshin Impact fans on TikTok.
Genshin Impact fans on TikTok cannot stop posting about how much their favorite characters "love the Mets baby, get a home run, love the Mets, love the Mets, let's go Mets."
The trend, which ballooned on TikTok on Wednesday and Thursday, has brought a $4 to the video game fandom.
Genshin Impact is a popular video game that features open-world gameplay and a gambling mechanic in which players can spend real money for the chance at obtaining rare characters or weapons. Launched in late 2020, the game is still expanding, unlocking new regions for players to explore in a quest to find the protagonist's lost sibling.
The game is also incredibly popular on TikTok, where the $4 has a total of 33.1 billion views.
In the new trend, fans impersonate the voices of their favorite characters to profess how much they love the Major League Baseball (MLB) team. The game has four voice-over languages - Chinese, English, Korean, and Japanese - but players participating in the trend are mimicking the characters' English dubbed voices.
It began on September 24 when TikToker and aspiring voice actor @souleaterwill, who has 166,900 followers on the platform, posted a video imitating the English dubbed voice of Childe, a playable antagonist character.
"It was never about the mora, traveler," says the user @souleaterwill in character as Childe, referencing the in-game currency. "It was about the Mets, love the Mets baby, get a home run, love the Mets, love the Mets, let's go Mets."
The video, which has approximately 780,000 views, cuts from a clip of Childe in the game to an edited version of the character and his younger brother at Citi Field, the Mets' home stadium, wearing a Mets cap $4
@souleaterwill ##childe would be into baseball change my mind ##tartaglia ##genshinimpact ##teucer ##mets ##fyp ##foryoupage
♬ original sound - souleaterwill
The video draws on a longstanding Mets meme that has existed online since at least 2015, $4. Typically following the "it was never about the money, it was about the Mets" format, the meme has since morphed into a copypasta - a repeated, memetic phrase - on Twitter. It has also been applied to other fictional characters like $4
-Gehrig, The Gabaghoul (@skurletonVA) $4
Though the @souleaterwill video riffed on a familiar format, it was responsible for bringing the meme to Genshin Impact fans on TikTok - and then utterly destroying fans' For You Pages with Mets meme, after Mets meme, after Mets meme. While it's difficult to track the full scope of the trend, given that it's not concentrated under a single sound or specific hashtag, users have compiled videos showcasing the flood of Mets content on their Genshin Impact-heavy feeds.
@raythechildesimp IM DONE I CANT NOT STAND HEREJNG THE WORD METS AGAIN, blaming this on @souleaterwill
♬ LETS GO METS - Ray (he/they)
While the original video was posted in September, the trend didn't explode on TikTok until late October, when infinite variations on the meme featuring almost any single Genshin Impact character from $4 to $4 to $4 abounded on fans' For You Pages. It's unclear exactly why the trend picked up weeks after the original post. The videos all fall into the recognizable format of @souleaterwill's video, with small, character-specific tweaks, and feature users themselves doing impressions of the characters' English voices.
@tomatova ⚾️ It’s about the Mets! #genshinimpact #albedo #kreideprinz #mets #impression #voiceacting #meme #skit #audio #baseball #TomatoVA
♬ original sound - TomatoVA
The meme has become so pervasive within the fandom that users have started to make versions of it featuring $4 and inanimate objects from the game, like treasure chests.
@scoromouche love the mets ##genshin ##kaeyasmassivehonkers ##scaramousheplssteponme ##genshinimpact
♬ original sound - stop banning me
While the trend previously existed online, the recent Genshin Impact wave seems to have brought the Mets meme to other fandoms on TikTok as well. TikTok videos featuring characters like $4 and $4 from the anime series "Hunter x Hunter" have also started to circulate.
Fans are also jokingly posting about being exasperated by the meme's sudden proliferation. TikTok users have pointed out that $4 One creator said in a video that they had seen $4while another said $4 A comment with 2,000 likes on $4 "this trend is holding me hostage."
Even the trend's creator, @souleaterwill, $4, "I'm literally watching the Genshin fandom burn."