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Cake day: January 21st, 2026

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  • I mean, it’s probably just up to whoever first started doing it. They chose that song, so it’s that song. Other songs may have also worked.

    But there is one thing that I think gave Rick Astley an advantage over specific other groups like A-ha. And that’s his name. If you look up the history of Rickrolling on Wikipedia, it says it replaced a meme called “duckrolling”, which was used the same way as Rickrolling, but it was just a picture of a duck with wheels. So the advantage is that “Rick” is his name and it’s an easy drop-in replacement for the word “duck”.

    There’s other artists who have names that would work. Who knows? In another universe, they might have “Beckrolling” or something.

    Edit: I was just reading farther into the Wikipedia article, and the guy who made the first Rickroll said he chose it because it came out in his birth year of 1987.


  • It is a great song. I think that is one reason it works so well for the meme.

    Great song

    Very distinctive and ear catching drums to start the song

    The first time you see the video, you’re probably surprised that he’s a smallish white guy

    His dancing in the video is… extremely white?

    I think if it was actually a bad song, it would never have caught on as a meme, and that the people who hate the song are either overexposed to it or their opinion of the song is heavily influenced by how it’s been presented to them. You know, like how if you tell a child that some bit of food is gross, then they often won’t like it when they taste it.




  • “-chan” is a diminutive suffix that indicates affection when used. These two factors mean it would never be used in the context of Big Brother.

    Even with little knowledge, you should at least come up with alternatives like nii-san, onii-san, onii, nii-sama, etc. Those still wouldn’t work well. I’d think that a lot of people would also think of aniki, which is getting closer. But it’s definitely the best option to just to what they actually did and just use the English “big brother” like a loan word.