- A joke about Genshin Impact characters being obsessed with the New York Mets has exploded on TikTok.
- 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 preexisting meme about loving the Mets 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 #genshinimpact hashtag 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 as the Mets' theme song plays in the background.
The video draws on a longstanding Mets meme that has existed online since at least 2015, according to Know Your Meme. 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 Kingpin from "Spider-man: Into the Spider-Verse."
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.
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 Venti to Xiao to Albedo 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.
The meme has become so pervasive within the fandom that users have started to make versions of it featuring enemies and inanimate objects from the game, like treasure chests.
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 Gon and Killua 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 the meme "won't leave [them] alone." One creator said in a video that they had seen seven videos tied to the trend in a row on their For You Page, while another said that they "can't take it anymore." A comment with 2,000 likes on a video featuring the character Bennett reads, "this trend is holding me hostage."
Even the trend's creator, @souleaterwill, said in a post on his backup account, "I'm literally watching the Genshin fandom burn."
Read more stories from Insider's Digital Culture desk.
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