select all

Meitu Lets Me Be Your ‘Angle’ … Or ‘Yuor Devil’

This week’s popular app is Meitu, a Chinese photo-editing app that makes users look extremely kawaii by blowing out their eyes and airbrushing them to the seventh level of Hell. The app is fun on its own, but I like it in particular because it has also resurrected one of my favorite running jokes: “I can be your devil or angle [sic].”

To hear database Know Your Meme tell it, this amazing piece of art, featuring one man in two bathroom selfies, rendered as a devil and an angel, was posted to Cringe Channel in the summer of 2013. (“Cringe,” if you are unfamiliar, concerns that internet genre of awkward human encounters that make you feel deeply uncomfortable.) The photo, with its unfortunate trigonometric misspelling, circulated on Reddit and Something Awful.

This, dare I say, art might feel familiar — it functions as a sort of Ur-meme, a predecessor to recently popular joke constructions like “Get you a man who can do both.” Somewhere along the way, the phrase was transmuted to “i can be your angle … or yuor devil.” KYM points to a popular tweet featuring pictures of YouTuber Egoraptor as the culprit.

The thing I can’t shake is an odd, unprovable feeling that the “yuor devil” meme is older than 2013. It has a distinctly “MySpace edgelord” vibe to it, like it’s the sort of photo that would feel appropriate to cover in Blingees and embed right above your Top 8. But I could not find any mention of it past three years ago. Odd.

Anyway, here we are, in 2017, and Meitu with its dastardly filters is helping to bring “yuor devil” back to the fore.

Congrats to all of the multifaceted angles and devils out there.

Meitu Lets Me Be Your ‘Angle’ … Or ‘Yuor Devil’