I am hesitant to say to the Internet, "tell me what I should know about these anime franchises to better contextualize these memes" — I can already see the lore-dumps in my mind's eye — but as someone quite out of those loops, if there are interesting observations to be made about the specific juxtapositions, I am all ears... :-)
Mostly, as I said over on Bluesky, it's because you featured some big franchises.
The only specific observation I'd make is Anya Forger (3rd image), who is a spy in a family of spies... and who I can easily see as mucking with something like the Demon Core. But as it's a pretty lightweight show she'd never come to any harm. <snips lore dump> :)
I will say the one I found funniest was a cutaway diagram of an M2(Probably? Every piece of equipment in the US arsenal is M1 or M2) grenade but with the demon core juxtaposed over where the explosive internals would be, with the pin being mechanically attached to the screwdriver. The implication being that one would pull the pin and promptly irradiate whoever you were looking to blow up.
Its somewhat interesting where the humor derives. I tend to take the old school approach of seeing memes as viral bits of information, a kind of cultural shorthand for more advanced concepts, and humor being the impetus for making most of them. I expect there are two kinds of humor at work here. One is a simple placement sort of humor. In a place you expected one thing, you see another. Your expectation is subverted. Hence in the case of the M2 grenade, Kinder Surprise, and I would be shocked if there weren't memes about looking through children's halloween candy to find Demon Cores in subversion over the old drugs/razor blades in candy panic. Kind of similar to the trend of overlaying the diagram of Osama Bin Laden's hiding place over similar images.
The other bit of humor is probably as you said, a juxtaposition between the scientist and the demon core, with the scientist being replaced by people who are emphatically not scientists, or even not human like cats or what have you. In addition to what you pointed out, I expect there is an element of in-joke here. Where unlike most jokes, the dark humor of this one makes it funnier by being explained. You have a seemingly innocuous activity, messing around with metal spheres, and someone viewing doesn't get the joke. It is funny because they only see the innocuous part, and the choice of participant is likely to enhance that feeling. The meme looks cutesy and nice. And then someone explains in the comments the really dark history of it, which has a degree of humor, but I think also is perversely a fascinating teaching moment. I think people have a somewhat counterintuitive love of learning what are perceived to be dark secrets, and learning about Slotin's history through a meme I think would trigger that, and probably encourage them to share it.
There are a few memes out there that reference SL-1. One made use of an image of an individual being impaled on a long rod(much like the tech that met the same fate at SL-1) and another that was a little more obscure which made use of a panoramic shot of the fenced in area of the site of the accident after it had been buried under rubble. There was yet another that used an image of the damaged reactor after debris had been removed but I'd have to say that none have that 'cute' quality about them that was mentioned above.
Sure, I'm not saying there couldn't be memes — there are memes for anything and everything — just that they aren't going to be viral in the way that the "Demon Core" memes can be. SL-1 is just much more obscure.
That Slotin was careless to the border (or beyond!) of negligence also adds a hubristic element that will make it "funnier" for a pretty large chunk of the internet.
SL-1 in addition to being much more obscure, doesn't have that same hook (unless one takes the love triangle rumor seriously), so it's harder to meme.
It also depends on how much blacker you like your humor. There were some jokes that were extremly common among the rank and file like me that I heard when fighting in the South African Border War that were hilarious in that situation and I could laugh at them then: but I doubt that I could now unless it was at a Vets gathering and I certainly wouldn't mention them in public. It also seems to me that Japanese culture(which originated most of the memes above) has a special apreciation for that sort of thing both in military and civilian life. Not that long ago I was given a book that was translated into English from Japanese and it dealt with servicemen who were stranded on small island outposts in the Solomans after the Allies had bypassed their positions early on in the War in the Pacific. The poor buggers were of course were no longer getting supplies and were left to fend for themselves. Many turned cannibal early on and some went to the extreme of eating their own people near the end of the War. Early on in the book there were frequent references to eating 'white pig' amd 'black pig' and it wasn't until about the middle of the book that it was explained that the terms were black humor code words for eating natives and Europians('black pig') and their own('white pig'). That's an extreme example of really black humor of course but but compared to say a group like the Donner party, who were unwilling to even mention the subject most of the time, the Japanese servicemen who went through that were strangely willing to talk about their own cannibalism, even if it was in gaurded terms like the ones I mentioned.
I find it disturbing that many of these memes are female. The idea you can play with death and overcome it is evident in these drawings. The lust to render females to be equal to or to be better than the male species is evident everywhere in culture. However, pride and recklessness is an equal opportunity attribute.
The anime pictures struck me as bizarre juxtaposition, but the Kinder Surprise and Godzilla images actually made me laugh out loud. The Kinder Surprise picture is certainly tasteless, but it doesn't represent something that would be funny in real life, and it does hint at the way people, even children, have been exposed to toxins unknowingly.
As an anime fan, the pictures you chose are pretty interesting with the franchises they come from.
But yeah, the whole phenomena is very weird and kind of disturbing.
I am hesitant to say to the Internet, "tell me what I should know about these anime franchises to better contextualize these memes" — I can already see the lore-dumps in my mind's eye — but as someone quite out of those loops, if there are interesting observations to be made about the specific juxtapositions, I am all ears... :-)
Mostly, as I said over on Bluesky, it's because you featured some big franchises.
The only specific observation I'd make is Anya Forger (3rd image), who is a spy in a family of spies... and who I can easily see as mucking with something like the Demon Core. But as it's a pretty lightweight show she'd never come to any harm. <snips lore dump> :)
I will say the one I found funniest was a cutaway diagram of an M2(Probably? Every piece of equipment in the US arsenal is M1 or M2) grenade but with the demon core juxtaposed over where the explosive internals would be, with the pin being mechanically attached to the screwdriver. The implication being that one would pull the pin and promptly irradiate whoever you were looking to blow up.
Its somewhat interesting where the humor derives. I tend to take the old school approach of seeing memes as viral bits of information, a kind of cultural shorthand for more advanced concepts, and humor being the impetus for making most of them. I expect there are two kinds of humor at work here. One is a simple placement sort of humor. In a place you expected one thing, you see another. Your expectation is subverted. Hence in the case of the M2 grenade, Kinder Surprise, and I would be shocked if there weren't memes about looking through children's halloween candy to find Demon Cores in subversion over the old drugs/razor blades in candy panic. Kind of similar to the trend of overlaying the diagram of Osama Bin Laden's hiding place over similar images.
The other bit of humor is probably as you said, a juxtaposition between the scientist and the demon core, with the scientist being replaced by people who are emphatically not scientists, or even not human like cats or what have you. In addition to what you pointed out, I expect there is an element of in-joke here. Where unlike most jokes, the dark humor of this one makes it funnier by being explained. You have a seemingly innocuous activity, messing around with metal spheres, and someone viewing doesn't get the joke. It is funny because they only see the innocuous part, and the choice of participant is likely to enhance that feeling. The meme looks cutesy and nice. And then someone explains in the comments the really dark history of it, which has a degree of humor, but I think also is perversely a fascinating teaching moment. I think people have a somewhat counterintuitive love of learning what are perceived to be dark secrets, and learning about Slotin's history through a meme I think would trigger that, and probably encourage them to share it.
Daemon Core began to catch on in Japan when a news site published an article on April 3, 2011.
https://gigazine.net/news/20110403_demon_core/
This article exploded into a hit over and over again for more than a decade, and it became an internet meme known to everyone in Japan.
Please note that I am the one who wrote this article. I feel very responsible.
There are a few memes out there that reference SL-1. One made use of an image of an individual being impaled on a long rod(much like the tech that met the same fate at SL-1) and another that was a little more obscure which made use of a panoramic shot of the fenced in area of the site of the accident after it had been buried under rubble. There was yet another that used an image of the damaged reactor after debris had been removed but I'd have to say that none have that 'cute' quality about them that was mentioned above.
Sure, I'm not saying there couldn't be memes — there are memes for anything and everything — just that they aren't going to be viral in the way that the "Demon Core" memes can be. SL-1 is just much more obscure.
That Slotin was careless to the border (or beyond!) of negligence also adds a hubristic element that will make it "funnier" for a pretty large chunk of the internet.
SL-1 in addition to being much more obscure, doesn't have that same hook (unless one takes the love triangle rumor seriously), so it's harder to meme.
It also depends on how much blacker you like your humor. There were some jokes that were extremly common among the rank and file like me that I heard when fighting in the South African Border War that were hilarious in that situation and I could laugh at them then: but I doubt that I could now unless it was at a Vets gathering and I certainly wouldn't mention them in public. It also seems to me that Japanese culture(which originated most of the memes above) has a special apreciation for that sort of thing both in military and civilian life. Not that long ago I was given a book that was translated into English from Japanese and it dealt with servicemen who were stranded on small island outposts in the Solomans after the Allies had bypassed their positions early on in the War in the Pacific. The poor buggers were of course were no longer getting supplies and were left to fend for themselves. Many turned cannibal early on and some went to the extreme of eating their own people near the end of the War. Early on in the book there were frequent references to eating 'white pig' amd 'black pig' and it wasn't until about the middle of the book that it was explained that the terms were black humor code words for eating natives and Europians('black pig') and their own('white pig'). That's an extreme example of really black humor of course but but compared to say a group like the Donner party, who were unwilling to even mention the subject most of the time, the Japanese servicemen who went through that were strangely willing to talk about their own cannibalism, even if it was in gaurded terms like the ones I mentioned.
I find it disturbing that many of these memes are female. The idea you can play with death and overcome it is evident in these drawings. The lust to render females to be equal to or to be better than the male species is evident everywhere in culture. However, pride and recklessness is an equal opportunity attribute.
The anime pictures struck me as bizarre juxtaposition, but the Kinder Surprise and Godzilla images actually made me laugh out loud. The Kinder Surprise picture is certainly tasteless, but it doesn't represent something that would be funny in real life, and it does hint at the way people, even children, have been exposed to toxins unknowingly.