"Tendies" started as an /r9k/ story about a childish adult man living with his mother who performed basic tasks we'd expect well-functioning humans to do without being asked, then was rewarded with "good boy points" he'd spend on kids meal food like chicken tenders ("tendies")
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This became wildly popular and eventually other aspects to the character emerged: he is autistic, he wears adult diapers, he flings his poop at his mom, who he terrorizes daily.
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In my view the best version of this story was compiled into this internet video here, which is a narration of a tendies post from 4chan written in poetic versehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbvXwJU6BbE …
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The transcript is in the description of the video. I want to bring your attention to a few aspects of this poem. First: it is in trochaic tetrameter, typical of nursery rhymes (c.f. Mary Had a Little Lamb). In addition it uses a simple AABB rhyme pattern.
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Moreover, at least initially, it strictly adheres to the meter and rhyme pattern, as nursery rhymes also tend to do.
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The diction is extremely simplistic. The Flesch-Kincaid grade level of the first stanza is 2.6, meaning someone who reads at a 2nd grade level could understand it. Note the emphasis on tokens of childhood like the booster seat and taking naps.
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But things change in the final stanza. The diction becomes much more advanced: "yearned," "sluggish." "is she who remembers, never forget" might be a Quran reference, not sure. The meter and rhyme structure become more complex, as in poetry meant for adults
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At the same time the content becomes more mature and much darker: the protagonist becomes violent toward his mother. All of this together represents a man who acts like a child, but at frightening moments displays the strength and rage of an adult male.
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This dual nature of the tendies guy, who flits between adultlike and childlike behaviors, is represented in the poem by the meter, the complexity of word choice, the rhyme scheme, and the delivery by the narrator, in addition to the actual semantics of the poem.
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To summarize: a meme developed in a similar manner to an oral tradition on a fast-moving imageboard, eventually being codified into a surprisingly adept poem on a video streaming site, combining all of the most popular aspects of the various mutations into a single narrative.
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