Today, the most dedicated Thanos fans are preparing for a mass ban on Reddit’s r/thanosdidnothingwrong subreddit and, after weeks of hype, are celebrating the impending loss in a variety of hilarious ways.
Some of the celebration methods are more outlandish than others, like a popular meme that’s emerged promising to get a specific Thanos tattoo if a post receives 10,000 upvotes. The most popular of these posts currently has 44,000 upvotes.
The Reddit user, “thethanossnap,” commented on the post claiming it to be an “obligatory shitpost,” but it’s a meme dedicated Reddit users will know. The thread is full of people yelling, “Bamboozle insurance,” which refers to a popular joke that started in r/me_irl back in 2016. Most of these posts are nothing more than harmless shitposting, but users who stand behind their proclamation will often include the term “no bamboozle” to prove their seriousness.
It’s extremely appropriate for r/thanosdidnothingwrong, a subreddit that was conceived and mainly existed as a place for Marvel fans to shitpost. The entire subreddit thrived on taking a joke just a little too far, and luckily finding people who were also into the idea of role-playing different shenanigans. People are partaking in discussions to decide whether those who join the subreddit after July 9, aka Ban Day, should get Hawkeye flairs (a text or image description that appears beside a username) because they missed the entire ordeal. Even the subreddit’s news making event, a mass ban of more than 350,000 people, is a shitpost based on Thanos’ belief that everything must be balanced by wiping out half of the universe’s population.
Everything about the situation is Extremely Online — a term people often use to describe a news event or trend that typically catches the attention of people clued in to internet culture — and that’s what makes other celebratory activities like terrible cosplaying so heartwarming.
Subreddit members have started uploading versions of themselves wearing homemade Infinity gauntlets or recreating a Josh Brolin video that Avengers: Infinity War co-director Joe Russo dropped into the sub on the eve of the ban. None of the costumes or recreations are particularly astounding, but that’s in-tune with the subreddit’s entire aesthetic. it’s supposed to feel amateurish and quickly thrown together. Nothing about the scenario should feel pristine because that isn’t what makes it worthwhile in the first place.
The joke works because it feels so last minute; like something a group of friends came up with one afternoon and executed a few hours later. People are buying into the silliness of it all by upping the ante with every ridiculous post. No one is mocking anyone else; no one is overly upset that people are using the subreddit for karma points. Everything is fair, just and balanced because there are no rules other than getting in as much shitposting as possible before the ban occurs.
It’s kind of charming, and it’s why people are still flocking to the subreddit that is, at the end of the day, a lot of fun. There are dozens of posts from people calling the temporary community one of the best they’ve encountered on Reddit, calling each other fellow soldiers in the fight against chance. Soon, all of this will disappear. Half the community will go, and half will remain.
And that doesn’t really matter. A community of shitposters on Reddit figured out how to make the internet really, really fun (and stupid) for a brief moment — and that’s pretty cool.