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  • I accidentally became a meme and this is that story.

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

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

  • So this all started in the year 2011.

  • 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.

  • Why are you talking about this game?

  • 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.

I accidentally became a meme and this is that story.

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