You never know when something will pop up on the internet. That’s what I thought when I saw a photo of a lone Taco Bell in front of a sprawling Midwest landscape. It was shared by a person with two toilet emojis in their Twitter name. I have just knew that went far.
the joke read“Anyone want some of the Tacobell jrpg world map?” It blew up because it was believable, garnered over 60,000 likes, and inspired a slew of memes with people photoshopping images of jrpg landscapes onto the Taco Bell photo.
Twitter user A Jay Holmgren shared this Original picture in the summer of 2021 with the caption, “I love it when hotels have great views.” He and fiancé Carlyn Haffey were staying at a hotel outside of Rapid City, South Dakota, when she decided to snap a photo of the view , and told him to post it with the joke. Holmgren, a professor of medicine and health policy at UC San Francisco, told Polygon via Twitter, “Years of posting my research and my Twitter legacy will forever be the aesthetic Taco Bell.”
The image took off on January 8, years later, when user Joj chastised shared the image and compared it to a JRPG landscape. It fit a bit to Well, and now a lot of people online are talking about the “JRPG Taco Bell”. Here’s a picture of Shulk out Xenoblade Chronicles walking across the wide plains of South Dakota, I mean Gaur plain.
As with any good internet joke, everyone has to participate. People took their own pictures and edited different landscapes from other JRPGs into the scene. people have edited Final Fantasy 7 Remake, Final Fantasy 14and Monster Hunter Generationsbut I like Xenoblade the most.
You know, you can spend your whole life looking for adventures only to find them in your backyard. As a Midwestern colleague who doesn’t live too far from South Dakota, I get paid a lot of shit for living somewhere that isn’t a coast or a big city. The next time I’m faced with that attitude, I can look someone straight in the eye and say, But we have the JRPG Taco Bell.
