It has been some time since I began sharing my work on this website, and I believe it is now time to discuss my current meme-related blog project. I am about to unveil something that has never been shown to others before, since it remained in the planning phase for a long time until I eventually started working on it again. Ladies and gentlemen, I introduce “Weegee's Journey,” my upcoming blog series about the internet meme known as “Weegee” and related characters (including several others as well).

Are you familiar with Weegee? To begin with, Weegee is an internet meme that became popular through various edits and parodies colloquially known as “YouTube Poops” (or YTPs for short), which grew popular in the late 2000s and early 2010s. The character eventually developed its own dedicated community, known as the “Weegee Fad,” that made similar derivative characters inspired by him. But still, it remained fairly small compared to the broader YTP Fandom of that time. This Fad grew side-by-side with YTP meme communities, inspiring people to create things similar to what YTP creators did with video and audio remixes, but instead using multicoloured Weegee images. Before long, completely new characters such as “Malleo” (a distorted, Weegee-like Mario) began to appear. Instead of relying on pre-existing character's templates like it was the case with most recolors, these others traced their main inspirations from obscure media like bootleg games, weird box arts, and 2D images. They were then given names and designs based on the humorous naming conventions and visual styles commonly linked to the Fad as a way to populate imaginary meme universes, while others simply went from being recolors to become their own distinct characters instead. People often used image-editing programs such as Paint, GIMP, Krita, Inkscape, Illustrator, and Photoshop to make their own customized Weegee images, allowing them to turn him into almost any character they wanted.

Without a doubt, Weegee was the most popular character, followed by Malleo. Of course, there are many others, but for now we'll focus on a few I think are important to my own meme universe. Including the ones I've chosen (I only add characters who are relevant to the plot or whom I've drawn myself).

Weegee's Journey, my upcoming textual blog series, originally began as an undeveloped Flash YTP project (a YTP-related subgenre with all sorts of special effects and 2D animations) intended for online episodic video release. Each episode was supposed to be centered around various "Weegee-related" characters interacting with each other (including Weegee himself, the basis of all these meme characters) and doing things in my story as I would imagine them. The word "undeveloped" here doesn't mean the project has been completely canceled or that nothing will ever be done with it; rather, it means no tool currently available on the web was enough to satisfy my requirements for finishing it. Great ideas require great tools, and I'm still waiting for those tools to become viable so all conditions for creating my future video project will be met. I was thinking about using open-source video editing tools to finish my work with the video version of Weegee's Journey, but I have yet to find a good, freely available editor capable of making this parody project a reality. I also thought about using AI tools to improve productivity and speed up my workflow, but I still haven't found an effective way to make good use of them aside from a few limited tasks like special FX, prop, and environment generation; which don't require as much precision compared to other manual video-related tasks like sprite animation.

All the custom meme lore I made for the drawings I posted on MediBang was intended to be an important part of the large universe where this series was supposed to take place. I personally wanted all spoken dialogues of each character in the text version to be exactly the same as they would appear in the animated video version of this project, with some tweaks to make it flow better under my own personal standards of what constitutes a good story (we all have our own, of course). As for myself, I have always wanted to turn all the ideas I found online into something more coherent (at least to me). I never felt these characters were used in a compelling way despite the potential for telling “cool” stories with them. Before I can even think about video editing, I'll keep using this version as a writing exercise to see how much I can experiment with it (I didn't want to do this for anything but fun). This meme series was also supposed to address a few specific meme-related questions I had in mind that I felt nobody had really brought up before, like, for example...

Would anyone be interested in a third "Weegee-like" character named "Bushee" joining others like Walleo and Waweegee? Would that even the odds if they were to face off against Weegee, Malleo, and Yushee? Well, That’s for us to decide, no matter how we choose to write our stories. They may not appeal to everyone, but at least I'll give them a place to reside here in this blog.

At this point, the current situation regarding software tool availability or anything else I absolutely need to start working on the video version of my meme series right away isn't quite conducive to production by the time I was writing this article. I still have yet to find something that might help make that version of my project a reality. All work related to the video adaptation of Weegee's Journey shall be suspended in favor of the text version, which will continue exclusively as a written blog series until I find better ways to express these ideas. This current iteration of my web series will provide people the chance to read and appreciate it for what it is: a humorous meme story.