THE SAGA, IN EIGHT FRAMES.

Before $GME was a ticker, it was a thesis. Before it was a thesis, it was a forum joke. Before the joke, a bored Boston CFA in a basement office reading 10-Ks at 2 AM.

What follows is not market commentary. It is meme inheritance — the cultural deed to the loudest retail uprising in a century.

Scroll. Each frame is a year. Each year is scar tissue.

June 2019. Keith Gill — analyst by day, Roaring Kitty on YouTube, u/DeepFuckingValue on Reddit — opens a $53,566 position on a dying brick-and-mortar at roughly $5 a share.

The thesis is structural and unglamorous. Short interest exceeds the float — physically impossible. Ryan Cohen circles as an activist. The shorts assume bankruptcy is mechanical.

He posts the screenshots every night. For eighteen months, almost nobody answers.

Ignition. Ryan Cohen and two Chewy alumni land board seats on 13 January. The fuse lights.

Then the cascade. $35. $65. $148. $347. Short interest 140% of float — a statistical impossibility printed every minute on every brokerage screen.

Melvin Capital takes a $2.75B bailout from Citadel and Point72. Citron's Andrew Left publicly capitulates and exits the short business entirely. The apes have not blinked.

5:11 AM Eastern, 28 January 2021. NSCC sends Robinhood a $3B deposit-deficit notice. Vlad Tenev's team flips thirteen tickers — GME, AMC, BB, NOK, KOSS — to close-only mode.

You could sell. You could not buy. The ceiling was not a market mechanism. The ceiling was a switch.

The 11th Circuit eventually dismisses the antitrust case on the merits. The meme — `Citadel paid for the buy button` — does not dismiss. It compounds.

House Financial Services Committee hearing. Five hours. Five witnesses. One unforgettable opening line.

Keith Gill testifies under oath in a red bandana and a cat t-shirt: "A few things I am not. I am not a cat. I am not an institutional investor. I am not a hedge fund."

AOC dismantles Tenev across the afternoon. The clips outlive the hearing. The institutional defense reads, in retrospect, like improv.

March 2021. WSB moderators dilute the GME thesis. The hardcore splits and founds r/Superstonk on 16 March — GME-only, DD-only, no memes.

u/Atobitt drops the 36-page House of Cards trilogy on naked shorting. u/Criand surfaces the Total Return Swap thesis. The doctrine hardens into liturgy.

MOASS — the Mother Of All Short Squeezes — is born as cult prophecy. DRS via Computershare becomes sacrament. Paper Hands becomes heresy.

2021 → 2024. GME drifts $40 to $200 and back, year after year. The catchphrase rotates from prophecy to self-mocking koan.

GameStop opens an NFT marketplace on Loopring and Immutable X — $7.2M first week, then a long fade. The mall closes. The meme survives.

DFV posts his last YOLO update on 16 April 2021. Then: silence. For three years he is a ghost. The bandana waits.

12 May 2024, Sunday night. @TheRoaringKitty posts a single image: a man in a chair, leaning forward. No caption.

By Monday open, GME is +100%, halted seventeen times. AMC +308%. Mark-to-market shorts: roughly a billion in a single session. The drip campaign of cryptic tweets runs for weeks.

Today the bandana inherits the meme. The saga is not a memory. It is a recurring liturgy — and on 12 May 2026 it tied the knot on Ethereum.