Red carpet, August 2018
The photographs were taken on the red carpet of the MTV Video Music Awards in New York on August 20, 2018. Noah Cyrus stands closer to the camera and poses, while Lil Xan, in a black cap, leans toward her cheek; the close-up emphasizes the distance between their faces. This is not a separate July photo in which he kisses her on the cheek — the two photographs belong to different events and should not be merged into one story. The bright backdrop of the ceremony preserves the feeling of a public appearance, while the tight close-up makes Lil Xan’s movement the main element of the picture. The noticeable details of the template are the black cap with a white NY sign, the tattoos on Lil Xan’s neck, and the pink-and-blue background.
From event to caption template
On the day of the ceremony, Twitter user @Raeequaza posted a series of shots, and other users quickly began to remake the picture. A few hours later, @FidelsDead added a caption to it; two days later, @sixteenburritos labeled the figures as an ocean floor and a stingray, and two days after that, @grapejuiceboys placed a Nintendo Entertainment System cartridge beside Lil Xan’s face. These are early recorded variants, not proof of absolute priority. It is visible how the format quickly moved from captions to labeling objects and photo montage: one and the same close gesture supported different jokes.
What labels and montage change
The caption from @FidelsDead turned the gesture into exaggerated closeness, the version by @sixteenburritos distributed the roles of ocean floor and stingray between the people, and @grapejuiceboys added an NES cartridge. In each case, what changed was where the lean is directed. The sea joke ties the bodies’ positions to an entirely different space: one figure becomes a surface, the other approaches it. The cartridge uses the familiar gesture of blowing into a cartridge before launching an old game, so the position of the mouth gets a new function. For this kind of montage, what matters is precisely this recognizable pose, not a continuation of the red-carpet story. The colorful ceremony backdrop stays in place and makes the appearance of an outside object all the more unexpected.
Invented captions
If we transfer this gesture to an invented scene about repairing equipment, we can imagine one person holding an old game cartridge while the other leans in and blows on the contacts before inserting it into the console — much like the NES-cartridge version of the meme. Another invented version turns the composition into an underwater scene: one silhouette becomes the sandy bottom and the other a stingray gliding above it, like the markup users once drew on this very frame. We can also imagine a calmer variant — a business photo shoot where a colleague leans in at the last moment to whisper the name of the next agenda item, with no sea or game imagery. These invented situations show how a caption can repeat familiar moves — the cartridge, the stingray — or offer a new one, without referring to any specific real posts.
