There's Nothing Stronger Than Family (and This Vin Diesel Meme)

All of a sudden, people are inserting Vin Diesel's character from The Fast and The Furious franchise into other movies, where he defeats villains with the power of family. While these jokes aren't exactly new, the meme exploded over the holiday weekend to the point of maddening ubiquity.

The trend is so explosive that people not familiar with the Fast and Furious franchise suspect the meme itself may be a secret marketing campaign, with one reddit user saying that the sudden rise of the meme "has shown me without a shadow of a doubt that marketers are using memes to keep advertising to people without them realizing they’re being advertised to."

Almost overnight, it feels like people are riffing anew on the relationship that the Fast and the Furious series, nominally a franchise about cars, has with the idea of a found family. In this movie series, the power of family enables the characters to do pretty much anything the plot demands, and they talk about it constantly.

The round of memes that are popular right now is just a new expression of a really old joke within the Fast and the Furious  fandom. If you search "Vin Diesel family" on twitter, the results are near infinite, and many of them riff on the same themes. Discovering the origins of this general idea is an exercise in futility. People have made fun of, both affectionately and not, the way that "family" has become a superpower in the Fast and Furious franchise since at least the last movie, if not since the inception of the franchise. In fact, a viral post from April pitted Vin Diesel against Thanos from the Marvel franchise. No guesses for who people thought would win.

What makes this new iteration different from people just making the same kind of joke over and over is the physical insertion of Vin Diesel in another movie franchise. A tweet from twitter user _GameGod_ made it into a round up of fan reactions to the ninth movie in the franchise on Buzzfeed on June 29. It's the same image that Know Your Meme cites as the first version of the meme where Vin Diesel brings the power of family to other movies—in this case, Star Wars.

This version of the meme didn't reach a point of saturation until the July 4 weekend, where it exploded on Twitter. It's likely that memes like this have appeared much, much earlier than the 4th, but that weekend was when they became inescapable.

So many people found this joke so funny—or had recently seen the new Fast and Furious movie, which came out June 25—that its popularity has skyrocketed. On the Fast and Furious subreddit, the meme has been iterated on so many times that it is now in the realm of the absurd. You no longer have to present a joke in order for the meme to be recognizable; Vin Diesel and the idea of family is now its own potent language.