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This first meme shows the difference between when there is a card in the UFC that someone is watching per se, at home alone vs watching with friends new to the sport. From a Discursive standpoint in the UFC, you never know what type of fight you are going to get from the fighters. The focus is to explore the flexibility of this meme and isn't meant to send anything persuasive to the audience of the meme. For example, the first fight I ever watched was one of the biggest fights for women's strawweight. It was UFC 274 and I had just started Muay Thai. I was invited by my gym to go watch it. That fight between Rose and Carla was deemed one of the worst fights to date. In the first picture, you see two fighters at the top. The bottom picture shows Yoel Romero and Israel Adesanya at UFC 248. This fight was deemed one of the most boring fights on PPV. Adesanya is now at the moment was one of the best pound-for-pound fighters and for him to pull out a boring fight was brutal. This meme is a narrative strategy, even if you do not have knowledge of UFC you are still able to understand this meme by observing the body language and using the words to fill on the rest. The textbook also explains the idea of Connotation, here you can use this meme for different things like showing friends your favorite show or when you try to show someone an experiment you've tried and it fails when showing them.
Like the first meme, this meme is meant to be somewhat comical but also play true to relatable issues. This meme is of Connor Mcgregors's leg breaking from being kicked so hard at a UFC fight. The meme states “How it feels when the scooter hits your ankle”. Everyone can relate to this meme on some level. In recent years, the pain of hitting your leg when you were younger has been circling the internet and in-person discussions as a topic of conversation or comedic add-ins in conversations. A semiotic approach is using signs and symbols to get the message across to the audience. This meme is a great example of semiotic text because it characterizes a specific sociocultural meaning. In a narrative response, we are seeing a meme that is influencing the audience beyond what the even realize. Another semiotic point is the fact that this meme is showing Connor McGreggor. Almost everyone in the world or at least in America knows this name. McGreggor is known as a cultural symbol that affects how and why people read this meme and what the audience takes from it. This meme has a persuasive aspect to it because the meme is using a big name and face, McGreggor, and the largest known topic of hitting your ankle, to get the point across.
This third meme gives us another Smeitoic view with different aspects of relating to the audience. This meme is two photos of UFC fighter Joanna Jedrzejczyk. This photo of her was actually circling the internet for a while with different memes attached to it. As you can see in the first picture we see Jedrzejczyk smiling for weigh-ins and in the second picture we see her head very large and bloody. The second picture was from UFC 248 where she developed one of the biggest hematomas to date. I have watched this fight multiple times and I do know this was one of the most entertaining and technical women's strawweight fights to date. When reading the text it states “profile pic” and “tagged photo” this meme is not solely a UFC meme but a meme in regards to social media, perhaps Instagram where you are able to tag others in your photos and it shows up on your personal feed as well. There is this media-centered approach to this meme and it allows the audience to be able to relate to the aspect of getting tagged in photos on social media. As well as using a popular social meme that was circling media as well. This meme is set to be relatable in a broader worldview that everyone can understand.
Conclusion
Overall as a woman in a sport that is male-dominated I wanted to sway from the feminist standpoint of this because I think that there is no reason to analyze something that has been over-talked about. I decided to focus more on the culture of media and UFC. Overall there is a bigger semiotic approach to these memes in that they are relatable and fun, but discuss social topics everyone can relate to.
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