Image: Nick Laham / Square Enix / Kotaku (Getty Images)
McDonald’s new Grimace milkshake has sparked a whole movement about treating the drink like the murder weapon from a Japanese horror game. Zoomer and other TikTok users pretended they died after slurping the purple goo, and now they’re pretending the Grimace Shake killed their favorite anime and gaming characters too.
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It’s hard to figure out why a particular moment in our absurd, for-profit culture becomes a lightning rod of memes and posts, but here we are at McDonald’s commemorating Grimace’s birthday. For those who don’t know, the big purple guy is literally just a humanoid taste bud, not a post-apocalyptic mutant formed from the irradiated rubble of old Big Macs. And now his milkshake is taking over even the nerdy corners of the internet.
If there’s an infamous fatality in games, anime, or elsewhere, you can bet it’s now made even better and/or, depending on your perspective, tainted by the Grimace Shake meme. They’re a perfect collision of specialized fan history and complete breakdown of context:
I’m sure the Golden Arches couldn’t be happier. Does this meme make you thirsty for what a company spokesperson confirmed was merely a concoction of sugar, water, corn syrup, and a mysterious, unnamed “natural flavor” vaguely reminiscent of berries? A review on Cleveland.com describes the Grimace milkshake as “unexciting but nice” and says, “If someone were to add a Wild Berry Pop Tart to a pretty standard vanilla milkshake and then press the pulverize button on the mixer.”
Coincidentally, that’s how I would describe most video games. Grimace, on the other hand, has to fall back into online memory and take his nasty inventions with him.