I have seen at least 1 meme or other joke somewhere on the platform where one also mentioned a “twink” and where that word appeared to be the punchline somehow. I’ve scrolled through Urban Dictionary a bit (haha) and the meanings mentioned there are either literal, using burger as a metaphor for the kind of person who looks like they consume burgers regularly, as a random surrogate for things that are kind of round (haha) or even that aren’t, or 1 Instance of fandom ship name for piece of media where the name of a character sounds like the word for onions in Japanese. That didn’t really get me anywhere. Did I correctly pick up that I don’t get it, or is there nothing more to this word?
If this is the context, I believe it has nothing to do with gays or twinks.
Just a sad anime image meant to convey an emotional response, according to Tineye, first seen around 2016, on pages no longer reachable.
First memetized around 2017, with the following image :
Translated labels from left to right : “The new waifu of the season”, “you”, “Your waifu, to whom you’d vowed eternal love”. At this stage, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree: The meme is still aimed at the weeb community that saw its birth, and still makes use of the context implyed by the image.
But to interpret what comes next, you must take into account the rise of “cringe” culture in the early 2020s. Former memes, deemed “cringe”, saw a new birth under several layers of irony to highlight their absurd nature. Here is another meme that underwent the same fate : https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/im-fine
This era also saw the appearance of the words “pog”, “poggers” and “pogchamp”, all of which quickly became cringe. The above meme can therefore be interpreted as a pile of cringe meant to be absurd.
What about burgers? The burger also has a place in meme culture.
Declaring one’s taste for a trash food or another belongs to another memetic trop, that of appearing relatable and whimsical. Most old memes using this trope appear cringe by today’s standard. The image may be a meta-meme about itself, describing the memer’s transition from pre-cringe to post-cringe culture, from “burgers” to “poggers”, and burying the image macros under countless layers of irony.