Oriental Pearl transforms into a "defense tower" and fires across the Internet? Shanghai's new rules and weird talks are coming!
Recently, a hot online meme with the "Shanghai Oriental Pearl Defense Tower" as the core quickly swept across major social platforms. From B station to Zhihu, from Weibo to WeChat, netizens have adopted the sentence "I took photos with my Android phone, and the Oriental Pearl becomes a defense tower to attack me", combined with the landmark buildings in various places, creating a large number of absurd and creative memes, pushing Shanghai, an international city to a peak of traffic again.
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The original image transformed Shanghai's landmark Oriental Pearl Tower into a defense tower through AI generation, and fired a laser light to the customer holding Mixue Bingcheng Milk Tea. The picture is both exaggerated and funny, and quickly inspires netizens' creative inspiration. Not only have various variant versions been derived, the "Oriental Pearl Defense Tower" has also become one of the most popular online memes recently.
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The origin of this meme can be traced back to netizens' jokes about Shanghai's "regional jokes". For a long time, regional memes about Shanghai have emerged one after another, such as "Huye", "Huye currency", "Starbucks Stomach", etc. Mixue Bingcheng, as an affordable tea brand, is often nicknamed the opposite of "Huye", symbolizing a down-to-earth lifestyle.
A netizen joked that once he drank Mixue Bingcheng in Shanghai, he would be "exposed from Shanghai" and the top three ID cards would be tampered with by mysterious forces. From then on, he could only live as a "country rather than a country" (Shanghai dialect, meaning "countryman"). This time, the "Defense Tower" meme further upgraded this setting, allowing the Oriental Pearl Tower to transform into the "Guardian of Shanghai" and launch an "attack" on the "invading" Mixue Ice City, as if defending the dignity of this city known for its "coffee culture".
(Memogram, not real)
What's more interesting is that this memo also triggered a "counterattack" creation from netizens. For example, someone designed the plot of "Mixue Ice City Counterattack War" and asked Mixue Ice City's mascot "Snow King" to lead the "Lemonade Army" to counterattack the Oriental Pearl.
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Afterward, more netizens joined the secondary creation and applied this model to other cities: Guangzhou Tower attacked tourists who "poured coke into rice noodles", Leifeng Tower "repaying" for Hangzhou tourists, Gundam transformed into protecting their own families... Landmarks in various places "awakened" one after another, setting off a "landmark defense war" involving the whole people.
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However, this carnival seems absurd, but in fact it implies the collision and fusion of urban culture. As an international metropolis, Shanghai has long been subject to stereotypes such as "xenophobia" and "exquisite self-interest", and the "Defense Tower" meme transforms these negative labels into humorous materials through self-deprecation and deconstruction. As netizens said: "Everyone is happy, whoever is anxious first will indicate that he is a little guilty."
Memories appreciation (generated by AI):
