I don’t think that the criteria for what belongs in c/memes should be whether it’s still a meme if downloaded and placed somewhere that isn’t c/memes. That’s like saying “I bought this champagne from France but poured it from its original bottle into another bottle, and now that there’s no label designating it as champagne, it was never truly champagne to begin with.”
Counterpoint to your counterpoint: that image is a meme template, an image used to create memes through adding text that recontextualizes the image.
What if the contextualizing text is the title of the post? Then is the meme template considered a meme?
I would not agree. If I download a post, the title is not downloaded with it, is it?
I don’t think that the criteria for what belongs in c/memes should be whether it’s still a meme if downloaded and placed somewhere that isn’t c/memes. That’s like saying “I bought this champagne from France but poured it from its original bottle into another bottle, and now that there’s no label designating it as champagne, it was never truly champagne to begin with.”