In everyday online use, “shinji crank that soulja boy” usually functions as shorthand for a specific type of clip or edit: something that overlays or pairs Soulja Boy’s “Crank That” audio with a “Shinji” reference. That “Shinji” can point to multiple possibilities in internet slang, the most common being a character reference from anime fandom rather than a single, universal person with a verified identity in this phrase.
Because the phrase spreads as text on screen, captions, and reposted thumbnails, it often stops behaving like a clear sentence and starts behaving like a tag. In other words: search intent becomes “show me the version where ‘Crank That’ is paired with Shinji imagery,” not “reporters, identify the exact origin of these words.”
This matters, because when a term acts like a tag, you can’t assume it has one fixed backstory. It may have been coined by a particular creator, then repeated by others, then remixed again, until the earliest source gets diluted.
