That's just it, I think. The meme was taken in by a crowd that itself does not practice introspection. I don't think the New York Times is too far off when they mention its spread by "attention-starved gamers": disenfranchised young men attempting their own first run at exercising a naive political opinion over the internet.
It's not a conservative meme. 4chan trolls != conservatives != The Right != Republicans != ... Almost nothing fits neatly into a bipolar spectrum of "us vs them" and 4chan culture is mostly about being where the normal people don't want to go.
On /b/ you can find posts complaining about Jews controlling the economy, trans people swapping pictures, memes about niggers cucking white bois, incest fantasies, celebrations of school shootings, people claiming their favorite anime characters as waifu/husbando, complaints about how this is all cancer and needs to stop ...
There is no unified message that would fit into mainstream politics.
Anyhow, I first heard about someone calling other people an NPC in a robert anton wilson celebration event 5 years ago by a man on acid talking about how many people in the world are NPCs when you try to talk to them about something real or important. I thought it quite funny, was a bit uneasy, sort of agreed, and sort of disagreed.
>The far right can be profoundly intuitive creatures, who feel more deeply than cursory glances suggest. The NPC meme is a response to something real, something that snarky liberals, and even leftists, increasingly fail to notice. In short, it is a tragicomic acknowledgment that things are not OK, that we are all NPCs (to one degree or another) because we are all in bondage.
I think the idea that people repeat samey platitudes they hear on TV or read online without much further thought is certainly a legitimate concern. The meme brought up a good point about mass consumer culture, but from there, it attained its own populism: a thousand voices telling a thousand other voices that they're following a script.
As someone who admittedly spends a lot of time on 4chan (an online addiction I have sustained for ten years), I was present to witness its snowballing on the imageboard. What I found interesting then was that the crux of the discussion around the meme focused on the idea that few people have an inner monologue [1].
[0] https://jacobitemag.com/2018/10/02/empty-realm/ [1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/pristine-inner-exper...