ICYMI: Because I’m a moron and was too focused on my New Logo I forgot to hit send on last weeks Mean Girl Moment where I declared I’m backing the losing team in the upcoming class war. Read it here and Subscribe Now to catch up.
Tumblr
Dying In A Glue Trap
This is a fandom meme from tumblr. It started with Dobby dying in a glue trap. There’s not much to it but thought I should let you all know there’s still a little life in that dark blue website. It’s nothing special but it’s home.
Barbie Movie
Much of current American life is the remnants of the falsely remembered “utopia” of the 1950s. We live the surprise results of bad memories. Every day there is a new faulty system running the way it was never supposed to. We try and try to get back to something we never had and refuse to look to a future that could be even better than our past. Our media is peppered with artifacts of this time and the joy we feel for them is manufactured. Except for Barbie.
Barbie is the precipice of culture. Invented in 1959, at the end of the decade of sameness, she points toward a decade of change. Her angular features point away from baby dolls and mirroring your reality, and towards an imaginative future. Barbie was never about what was, but what could be. We tried to give her a feminist tear down in the early 2000s, when plastic was the enemy. The realization we made in recent years was that Barbie was never the bad guy. We were never looking at her body because most of what existed about Barbie existed in our imagination. She showed up with the uniform and the resume and we gave her the life we wanted for her. Barbie is future perfect, no matter what the future may be. Though she is a relic of a past many would like to forget, she is symbolic of a future we all want to be a part of.
Barbie, beacon of the future that she is, is perfect for memes. Not only because she adapts to her present better than anybody, but because she is both customizable and resolute. Her iconography is recognizable no matter how many mutable characteristics she has. Barbie is the canvas and we are the painters.
The promotional materials for the film perfectly reflect this and therefore easy to meme. They gave each character an individual poster, with the same mold. Giving us the freedom not only to fill the mold, but to change and adjust it as we saw fit. They did the same thing with the language. Now this is of course good marketing, but it is also true to the ethos of Barbie. They created these posters with customizable repetition in mind. “This Barbie is President” works for conveying information about the movie but can easily be retooled for our own personal use.
Though we all swear up and down we hate being pandered to with meme speak by companies, we’re happy to do the work of meme advertising for free if it can feel personal, and if it’s a brand we have actual genuine nostalgia for. Barbie was always going to get a personalized meme treatment, but I’m glad they made it easy for us.
Gwynnicent
In other news in the world of Tall White Women, Gwyneth Paltrow won her trial. Court is adjourned but the memes live on. We needed this. If for no other reason than finally giving the library of reaction images a little class. Anyone who spends a considerable amount of time online will find themselves overcome with the urge to use a reaction image. We may say it’s a millennial thing but a well placed image, video, or even gif can really make a post pop, in a way that text alone never would. Most reaction media is vulgar or vile. Gwyneth gave us something to punctuate our posts with a little pomp and circumstance. The trial may be over but the images live on. Thank god for that!
Trump Indictment Day
We all have to get on the same page about the Trump thing. This process is going to be long and annoying. We all keep waiting for it to feel the same as when Trump got Covid or when Biden got elected. It’s not going to be like that. It lacks the adrenaline of a medical emergency or the pay off of an election. It is slow and boring and post-vaccine. We all wanted it to feel like that but this is going to have a thousand steps and there will be no moment of release. It’s not going to be as fun as we wanted it to be and we need to admit that to ourselves now. Once we acknowledge the reality of what this will feel like it will be easier to enjoy it for what it is. We’re following a stream and hoping for a river, but we have to know it might just as well dry up. I hope for all of our sakes that the #resist democrats get something good out of this and also stop sending me emails.
TikTok
It’s College Acceptance Season
Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
This one is less a meme, and more a harbinger of memes to come. It is college acceptance season, which means all the southern girls are going to decorate their skirts and tell us which SEC school they matriculated to. They’ll yell with excitement in their thick accents as they chant their school's slogan. In the rest of the country, we’ll pretend to be scandalized and act like we don’t know what they're talking about. We’ll get videos copying them where people do the same thing but without the fanfare of the decorated skirts or excitement or slogans. The videos that copy these girls miss out on the magic. They’re less dynamic. They don’t capture the joy of senior spring or tell a story about place and time. It is not interesting to watch people mumble that they go into Yale or Williams, and act like they’ve achieved the same kind of video because the general idea is the same. If there’s no Boomer Sooner or Roll Tide, I simply don’t want to see it.
Ludicrously Capacious Bag
This one is for the Succession girlies who love a tote bag and Tom Wambsgans. I’m no Trend Forecaster but if you know someone with an HBO subscription and disposable income they’re going to be walking around with a tote bag with said buzzwords in about 2 weeks if TikTok is to be believed. This meme is the result of the need to latch onto something from the season premiere of Succession. It was good but there was nothing really relatable or fun to post about, except this. We needed an inside joke and this is what we got. We’re screaming the phrase Ludicrously Capacious everywhere we can to let everyone we watched the episode and we’re in on the joke. If it weren’t in the premiere it would probably fade into the background but we’ll be forced to live on with this phrase because of the memorabilia.
It’s Just A Poem
Well It’s national poetry month so it makes sense that TikTok is about to be flooded with poems. I hope we all get to learn some new good poems from this. I hope I only have to see Wild Geese once or twice. I also pray that this does not lead to a slam poetry revival. The last thing TikTok needs is slam poetry and every day we come dangerously closer to getting one. This is far enough away from performance to be safe but it starts to lead us down a dangerous path. As long as nobody starts reading anything out loud we’re good
Side Note: Huge Win for The Memeforum Community that I can now embed TikToks that slide shows. Now you can all see what I’m talking about! Ignore the fact that they take up so much space and look ugly when embedded!
I Know You Have $20
Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
There’s a new boygenius album! It’s is fine! Phoebe Bridgers has spent the whole press cycle yelling at her fans to be normal and from my side of the internet it feels like they’re listening is being normal enough. Or at least as normal as they can be. Fortunately that means a limit to generic memes about being sad and leaves room to be mildly funny. We have this meme about someone screaming for $20. Honestly not bad from the usually humorless and depressed fanbase. Keep up the good work.