Here they come now, the Brazilians, lighting up this World Cup, making it theirs again. They’re so inventive. They make you laugh, and they make you cry, often at the same time. It wouldn’t be a major tournament without them.Vinicius Junior? Matheus Cunha? Sure, they’re welcome as well, but we’re talking about something else: the online jokers, the memeweavers, the bedroom satirists who have, in the last two weeks, taken a fairly prosaic selection issue and turned it planetary, creating what we can surely, even at this point, declare the viral sensation of this entire tournament.If you’ve got functioning eyes and an internet connection, you will have seen them: the visual gags, the AI monstrosities, the reskinned old videos. There are too many to count; more appear every minute. They all poke fun at Brazil’s coach, Carlo Ancelotti. The reason? His perceived reticence towards playing Endrick, the 19-year-old forward who has emerged as the Brazilian public’s great World Cup hope, the player who — the argument goes — simply must be dropped into a middling team to make it all golden.We’ll get to the logic of that position in a moment. First, it is worth just luxuriating in the chaos, taking the temperature of the, well, ‘discourse’ might be a bit generous, but you get the idea.Sights, sounds from Week 1 of World CupThe background noise dates back to March, when Endrick — at that point considered an outsider for the World Cup squad, let alone Ancelotti’s starting XI — came on in a friendly against Croatia. In 14 minutes on the pitch, he won a penalty and set up a goal for Gabriel Martinelli.The cameo pushed him into Ancelotti’s plans for this summer. It also reminded Brazil of his quality. When the Selecao were flattering to deceive in the pre-World Cup warm-up games against Panama and Egypt, the crowd chanted Endrick’s name. The same happened in their Group C opener against Morocco. But while Ancelotti had thrown him on against Egypt (and been repaid with a goal), the youngster remained on the bench for 90 minutes in New Jersey.Endrick celebrating his goal in a friendly against Egypt (Kirk Irwin/Getty Images)When asked about it after the game, Ancelotti played a straight bat. “I’m not here to speak about individual players,” he said in his press conference. The death stare he delivered to a YouTuber who asked about Endrick’s non-appearance told you exactly how much time he had for the debate.And so it began, the memepocalypse.Brazilian fandom is a funny thing, both in its complexity — Brazil, as one of its great cultural figures once said, is not for beginners — and in the ha-ha sense. With a population of over 200 million, any news story generates a tidal wave of jokes, many of them very sharp.So it was here. Ancelotti was painted, in about 50,000 different ways, as an arch curmudgeon, a villain who would stop at nothing to thwart every life plan Endrick ever dreamed up.