Memes Categorize Meme Formats

Today we're gonna is clearly more how esoteric they and the compass Authoritarian Economic-Left Economic-Right Libertarian things should be is kind of S A B C D in C tier, enlightened option

A bespectacled man explains a tournament bracket comparing four meme formats: the sports bracket, tier list, iceberg, and political compass. He ranks them by competition, obscurity, authoritarian structure, and personal preference. The punchline is that the brain expansion meme is ultimately presented as the most enlightened format.

Today we're gonna categorize things that categorize things based on how they categorize those things. Starting with the sports bracket, this is explicitly used to rank ideas based on how good they are at competing against other ideas. For example, since the tier list is clearly more about competition, it beats the iceberg, while the bracket obviously beats the political compass to eventually win the whole thing. I would also say because the bracket is well known from sports, it's at the top of the iceberg meme, which instead ranks ideas based on how esoteric they are. Then if you have any internet knowledge, you've probably encountered the political compass in the tier list, while I feel like the iceberg itself is at least a little more niche. The political compass was maybe the hardest to work with here, but I feel like the bracket and the compass itself are more authoritarian because they impose a more ordered version of reality. while the iceberg and the tier list allow for at least some ambiguity. Meanwhile, the memes on the right side impose more personal opinions about how things should be structured while the left side is perhaps more objective. Next we have the tier list, which is used to express objective preference. So I put the tier list itself in S tier because it's very good at expressing how you feel about things. And the bracket is kind of similar in that you can use it to convey who you think will win, but it's less rooted in feelings than the tier list so I put it in A tier. Meanwhile, the political compass in the iceberg really aren't that good at ranking preference, so I put them in C tier, but still not D because they can convey some feelings. Finally, the plot twist is the brain expansion meme which is used to show the surprising application of an idea so of course I had to put the brain expansion meme itself as the most enlightened option.

• @memstash32 / 929 2025-08-25