with this blade

Jason Reed/The Daily Dot

With this blade, I protect this meme

Respect the blade.

 

David Britton

Internet Culture

Posted on Mar 18, 2019   Updated on May 20, 2021, 4:50 pm CDT

Who needs emoticons (pictures made using punctuation marks and characters) when you have emojis? Sure they were useful in the late ’90s/early 2000s, but aside from an occasional sideways smiley face, who’s really using them now? Half of the time, an application or social site suggests an emoji as you type.

But now a mighty new emoticon has risen from the ashes. A blade forged from the strongest Unicode block elements. A weapon powerful enough to defend… well anything you want it to. Meet the “with this blade” meme. Don’t worry, it’s here to protect you.

It’s been blowing up on Twitter all March.

https://twitter.com/sparklingpiece/status/1107393040367403013

The meme has actually been around for quite some time. The earliest reference we could find was a tweet from March 1, 2017. On that date, Twitter user @hydnfrnd posted the emoticon blade along with the text, “With this blade [I] cut those who don’t fw [fuck with] the vision”.

https://twitter.com/hydnfrnd/status/837119710768549889

The meme has seen a lot of use since and at some point people switched “with this blade I cut those…” to “with the blade I protect…”.

It’s really taken off this month, with people mainly using it to support some celebrity or bit of pop culture they care about.

https://twitter.com/333333333433333/status/1106986298110291968

https://twitter.com/kinnoying/status/1106633562768506880

Although a lot of people have started using to “protect” bigger causes or groups.

And naturally, people started using it to “poke” a little fun at either themselves or the meme itself.

https://twitter.com/TigerStyleGG/status/1107084741080027137

https://twitter.com/Keegxan/status/1101156029440708614

Some users are even forgoing the emoticon blade and just going with pictures of someone holding a sword.

https://twitter.com/senic_sez/status/1107184865848500225

It kind of seems like an aggressive way to say you like some cartoon or whatever, but hey we’ll probably all be okay as long as it’s just an emoticon and not a real metal blade we’re being threatened with, or even worse, a psycho vampire killer from the ’90s.

Unrecorded

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*First Published: Mar 18, 2019, 12:48 pm CDT