Comment by Teffy (teffy) on SolidGoldMagikarp III: Glitch token archaeology · 2023-05-21T09:45:41.026Z · LW · GW

I did a bit of investigation into the source of the 'ーン' token. This comment seems to explain the reason for it to appear as a token, but I think I've found the context for its original use.

I'm not an expert on Japanese nor a fan of Uma Musume but after reading a few articles and posts from Japanese Uma Musume communities, I've figured out that it's based on a community joke.

For context, Uma Musume is a multimedia franchise, one of its ventures being a popular mobile game where you collect and race the horse girl characters seen in the sister media. The characters each have goals that can be achieved, and the goals can also have deadlines. They also have a "rank" which is displayed as a letter grade, which I believe corresponds to their overall performance, which can change over time.

The character Mejiro McQueen has a certain goal that can seemingly only be achieved in one fairly trivial race, and though through a series of unlikely and unfortunate events, it can be failed, resulting in a rank of E. Since getting an E ranked McQueen is a rare occurrence, it became a common joke among the fans of the series, with them giving the character the nickname "マックEーン" (replacing the イ in the Japanese spelling of McQueen (マックイーン) with the identically pronounced Latin E) in reference. This would be why the majority of the images that appear when searching "ーン" on Google Images feature the character posed next to an E rank emblem (as below).

I suppose it was posted about frequently enough that the bit following the E got picked up as a token, as the comment I linked earlier hypothesizes.