Late one night, Phil “DSP” Burnell was crouched behind a virtual thicket in Metal Gear Solid 3, eyes glued to the screen as The End’s sniper rifle glinted in the distance. Sweat beaded on his brow. “Where’s my shotgun?” he demanded in a tone that trembled between genuine confusion and pure outrage. The chat exploded:
Phil slammed his keyboard. Donations jingled merrily in the corner of the stream, but he wouldn’t look at them. Not now. He had a rifle to find, goddamnit.
Across the internet, a ragtag team of meme smiths huddled over their webcams. EvilAJ2010, founder of the “TIHYDP” montage channel, casually sipped Mountain Dew while clipping Phil’s meltdown for the umpteenth time. Beside him, Riley—an ex-speedrunner turned community moderator—edited the audio so that every “SHOTGUN!” reverberated like a rallying cry. They called LowTierGod on Discord:
And just like that, Phil’s dumbfounded rant was transmogrified into a bombastic meme anthem that would echo through raid channels and Reddit threads for years. It was the first step: the moment when “Where’s my shotgun?” vaulted from one man’s confusion into the collective memory of gaming’s lolcow hall of fame.
Two years later, in a pastel-lit office in Tokyo, Phase Connect staff were scrolling through YouTube. Kaori, the producer, paused at the TIHYDP link. “Listen to this,” she said, headphones on. The team erupted with laughter at the remix of Phil’s rage track. “Perfect,” whispered Mio, the VTuber coordinator. “Imagine if our next talent had that kind of… chaotic potential.”
Enter Himemiya Rie, a princess from the “Regalia Kingdom” who claimed to have never seen the outside world. On her debut stream, she streamed a cup of lemon tea, whispered to her imaginary cat, and then casually admitted, “I once ate a salt lamp because I thought it was fancy candy.” The chat froze. Then:
Overnight, Rie’s salt-lamp confession slithered through the same pipelines that carried Phil’s shot-gun saga. Someone—or several someones—clipped the moment, looped it with Phil’s “Shotgun!” drops, and slapped a neon crown on Rie’s head. Thus was born the Hime-Shotgun Mashup, a 30-second fever dream of a princess demanding household appliances.
On a windy Sunday, Rie sat in her stubby throne—really just a pink beanbag—staring at the meme compilation. She tilted her head and giggled. “Are people making fun of me?” she asked Kaori, who shrugged and handed her a donut. “It’s good publicity,” Kaori said. “Look how many new viewers you have.” Rie took a bite, sugar on her lips. “Then let’s give them more.”
And so Rie leaned into the absurdity. During a song cover, she paused midsentence to wonder aloud, “Can I breathe underwater if I sing loud enough?” Chat spiked. Another clip was born. Then came the Great Translator Glitch: her subtitles rendered “brother” as “murderer,” leading to a ten-minute existential crisis that she narrated with dramatic gasps. The memes multiplied: Hime’s “murderer brother” meltdown, the underwater serenade theory, the triumphant salt-lamp crunch.
Meanwhile, EvilAJ2010 and Riley spotted these new clips on a VTuber subreddit. They summoned LTG again:
They wove Phil’s shotgun chorus with Rie’s “I ate a salt lamp” vocals and sprinkled in audio from her “murderer brother” moment. The final result was a demonic pop-punk track called “Queen of the Crazies”. It topped niche SoundCloud charts and earned a featured spot in a crowdfunded documentary on internet cringedom.
On a breezy spring evening, Phil caught wind of this. Browsing a VTuber fan forum, he squinted at the mashup graphic: a shotgun and a salt lamp crossed like swords behind a cartoon princess. “Is this me again?” he muttered. He clicked play, braced himself—and then he laughed. A genuine belly laugh so loud it rattled his microphone. “Okay, that’s actually hilarious.”
Across the ocean, Rie held her pink controller to her chin, listening to the track. “This is my anthem now,” she declared. She queued it as her next intro music, crown and all.
And so the circuit completed itself: the compilations of him playing MGS3 were the first step on the road to Hime becoming a lolcow. From Phil’s shotgun quest to Rie’s salt-lamp saga, internet culture had found two perfect specimens of unintentional comedy. LowTierGod nodded approvingly in chat, Phil subscribed to Hime’s channel, and Phase Connect beamed at their newest star—proof that in the age of memes, every awkward moment is a stepping-stone on the path to endless, echoing laughter.