Our assignment this week was focused on creating a meme. I chose to create one about untrue popular history. While it’s not difficult to find pretty accurate descriptions of what actually happened at the battle of Thermopylae, a lot of people were not even aware that this battle took place until the movie “300” came out. The movie leads viewers to believe it was basically just King Leonidas and 300 Spartans and I think it shows a few hundred others according to 300: Movie Vs Reality which explains some of the differences between history and the movie. It also explains that the movie was never truly intended to be historically accurate, but it still had the affect of leading a lot of people to believe that King Leonidas stood up to hundreds of thousands of Persians with only 300 Spartans. What actually happened was equally impressive but with different numbers. The numbers are still estimated but there should have initially been around 7000 men who joined him to fight who were not Spartans and around 2000 that would have stayed. This is not intended to be a history paper on the battle of Thermopylae here, but I felt it was necessary to explain the background a little for the meme to make sense. I found it difficult to create the meme, it was challenging to figure out what words to put and what picture to use since you only have a few words that can fit. I was hoping the meme would come out a little thought provoking and maybe a little humorous to people who were familiar with the story.
This was an interesting project, I was struck by how easy it is to make memes. Not that I thought it was hard but I had just never created one before. The only part I found difficult was just figuring out what to write.
Meme generator: https://imgflip.com/memegenerator
Works cited:
dev, Super User -. “300: Movie vs. Reality.” Athens Tours by Local Experts & Greece Trips. Accessed March 22, 2023. https://greektraveltellers.com/blog/300-beyond-the-movie.
