Name: I Accidentally Became a Meme: Disappointed Black Guy
Uploaded: 2022-07-16T21:01:30.000Z
Duration: 4 min 41 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Past simple

I accidentally became a meme and this is that story.

My name is Ted Dorfeuille, but you may know me as Disappointed Black Guy.

The comparative

This was a really crazy experience that definitely showed me a darker side of the internet.

Growing up my main interests were video games.

My dad had a PS 1 that he got for himself basically to play Madden and eventually I talked him into letting me play on the system sometimes when he's not playing video games,

Final Fantasy is a series of role playing games from Japan.

There are a lot of them Final Fantasies like 1 through 13.

Each of them has a different protagonist.

In Final Fantasy Duodecim, these heroes and villains from all these Final Fantasy Universes face off for the fate of everything.

So me and my friend Jonah, we're playing, I don't want to say competitively because we were like sophomore in high school but we were getting pretty serious and he would beat me almost consistently at one point.

This one character I didn't like, her name is Prishe, I thought she was broken, she was unfun to play against.

I had an internet blog at the time and I felt like writing a tier list of all the characters based off of how fun these characters were to play against.

No surprise my friends' favorite character was at the top and I kind of just made this post and this post didn't get any interactions at all.

But I think the day after I got an anonymous message from someone.

Initially, I was excited because I wasn't really popular on the internet.

So the few times I would get a message, I would be excited, but then I was like surprised by the actual content.

You don't know anything about these characters, You're not playing it right.

What would a stupid know about doing these combos and stuff.

And I was like, why is this dude so mad about my tier list on a handheld fighting game.

So I thought it would be funny to play off my emotional rollercoaster of me getting this message and then being upset about it.

It was a big day because I think I got like maybe like 12 interactions by the end of the day,

I got big on Twitter and Facebook and then thousands and then like hundreds of thousands within like a week or two.

I think in the first few weeks going viral was kind of exciting.

But then after like a month I was like, you know, what is internet playing?

I think the internet is like fake, it's not, not even a real place.

Everyone at my high school knows me, but they don't know me for like any good reason like my character or like my abilities.

Once high school was over and I started going to college, I was distanced enough from the meme,

People would like ask if the meme was me and I would say no, obviously not and it would work.

I would get away with it a lot of the time, but sometime down the line, I realized that pretending like this person is not me was affecting other people negatively.

There was this Brazilian actor that would get mistaken for me all the time.

He would have to explain every year how this person in the meme is not him.

He inspired me to own up to it because there were lots of videos of him like having to reject it.

And I think after a certain point I was like, you know, it it would make more sense to just say it's me because if I truly don't care about it, I have to also not care that it's me.

I think the only reason I made the meme in the first place was because of internet racism that was pointed at me.

And then I think even like the mean name itself disappointed black guy is like another factor in it because there's like, there's no disappointed like white guy, there's no disappointed guy.

There's only the one disappointed guy and I happened to be black.

And it kind of changed how I approached the internet, like from then on.

On some levels, I do regret becoming a meme because a lot of unwanted attention and stuff happened in my life,

but I did make a lot of friends along the way that I don't regret getting,

I do have a lot of friends that I met on the Internet because of the meme that I've never met in real life that I wouldn't have without it.

So if I had to do it all over again, I guess I would because I think more good stuff came out of it than bad stuff.