Memeforum Presents: The Mimis!
An Awards Show Inspired Blog Post
Picture this…..
Whatever appiration you have in your head of “Kathryn Winn from Memeforum” (6’3, redhead, 150 pounds) descends a glass staircase in a gorgeous gown. I cross stage left to a White piano that would make Liberace jealous. Who’s at the piano? Zohran Mamdani (huuuge get) I start to sing, somberly.
Moonbeam…. Ice cream….. taking off your blue jeans…. dancing at the movies…. It will feel so…. Mystical….. magical….. Ladies and gentlemen Welcome to the Mimis. Where we celebrate the best of Internet, Culture, and Internet Culture in the past year.
Zohran plays a trill on the piano. I exit off stage, and Eight Tap Dancing Labubus enter, they are holding matchas and Dubai chocolate. In the middle of their dancing, we cut to our friends, Shane and Ilya, as the Coldplay couple, they start making out. Hard. Back to the labubus, who are now encircling an on-fire Waymo. The waymo drives itself ofstage and the labubus arrange themselves to form an M and another M, which they then invert into a W and another W. We hear Michelle Yeoh’s disembodied voice say “Madame Morrible, flip it around, wicked witch.”
I return to the stage in a new, gorgeous gown.
Our first award of the evening has been a tough competition. Every year, our culture spends about 4 weeks obsessed with a white boy who is beloved for both his good looks and his talent. The debate persists: do we just like him because he’s cute, or is he actually worth the hype?
Here are the nominees for White Boy of the Month of the Year
Celebrity and Culture
White Boy of the Month of The Year
Cameron Winter
🏆 Timothée Chalamet
Josh O’Connor
Nathan Fielder
Conrad
Cameron Winter is our late entry this year with a surge at the end of 2025 for both his band Geese and 2024’s solo album. He’s got unwashed hair, an expensive Quaker education, a deep voice, and the kind of music that makes girls wish he were their boyfriend. It’s his year, but he lacks some appeal outside of brooklyn and it’s satellite campuses all over the world. Josh O’Connor is the thinking woman’s Timothee Chalamet. He’s a little bit older and a little bit less flashy. He’s also British, which is the one thing Timothee doesn’t have. He’s nice if you’re into that sort of thing, but the white boy of the year shouldn’t even be in the same breath as his competitors. Nathan Fielder is the “weird crush” option. He’s older, and his comedy is a little out there. Everyone who knows who he is loves him and admits that he’s a little hot. It’s not that weird, ladies. Conrad here refers to the fictional character from The Summer I Turned Pretty, not Christopher Briney, the actor who plays him. Chris is nice, but he lacks the perfect construction of Conrad. Jenny Han knew what she was doing with Doctor/Older Brother as the building blocks for her romantic hero. As much as I love Conrad, and I really do, I refuse to ultimately give credit to a woman for White Boy of the Month of the Year. This year’s winner is, as it will be in perpetuity, Timothee Chalamet. The Pursuit of Greatness Speech was this year. He followed up his Oscar loss with a standing courtside reservation at Knicks games during their playoff run. He’s got heart and passion and brings that to everything. He’s the perfect workhorse and pretty face to get Josh Safdie’s movie worldwide attention. He’s a true artist because once you lose the Oscar for a biopic, the next move is to invest in your roots and use your status as Prince of Hollywood to get the more talented Safdie a box office hit now that he’s dropped the dead weight of his less talented brother. I don’t see the Timmy Wannabes putting in that kind of work.
Mother of the Year
Rachel Reid
Parker Posey
Katy Perry
Huda from Love Island
🏆Lena Dunham
When we say mother in the gay guy stan twitter way, we mean like a spiritual figurehead. In the same way necessity is the mother of invention. Mothers this year looked many different ways, all of them flawed and all of them perfect. Rachel Reid is the author who brought us Heated Rivalry. From her mind, Shane and Ilya sprang forth. Her story is just beginning, and I can’t wait to see what the next year brings from her. Parker Posey is one of my favorite actresses and was the best part of White Lotus this year. Every time she shows up in anything, I remember that there is still true talent in the world and all we need to do is point a camera at her and let her talk. Happy to see her and want her to do more, even though she’s already done so much for me. Katy Perry, for the life of her, cannot get it right, which begs the question, what would make you people happy? The answer wasn’t going to space, but it’s funny that she tried. Once you go to space, you realize you can’t make other people happy, so you just do whatever, like date Justin Trudeau post-divorce. Life is so long. Huda from Love Island did her best to brand herself as a mother, which is always what you want, but I can’t in good conscience award her behavior. Mother of the Year goes to Lena Dunham for doing a perfect you-owe-me-an-apology press tour. I’ve been here since day 1, and I never waivered nor faltered in defending her genius status. I watched every episode of Camping and the pilot of Industry when it came out for her. I stood by Mother, and she gets a pass forever because she made Girls, and if you think that was by some kind of cosmic accident, you’re an idiot. That’s mother.
Cousin of the year
Audrey Hobert
Addison Rae
Sydney Sweeney
Belly
🏆Owen Thiel
Cousin of the Year comes from a tweet saying that Addison Rae was too young and not accomplished enough to be mother, she’s cousin instead. I think it’s important to honor people in culture whose effort is obvious. People who are trying so hard because they want to be here. Audrey Hobert is your classic weird girl who we can’t help but root for. It’s been a good year for me to see the outpouring of love for her because, as a fellow tall girl with orange-tinted hair who’s a little bit off but in a kind of normal and endearing way, it’s nice to see how people feel about us. Addison Rae is the originator of cousin, and she’s having such a good year that she has graduated from cousin status. In a way, it’s category fraud to still have her here. Sydney Sweeney is someone who, through a series of poor decisions, is back to cousin status. This year, we all learned with and for Sydney Sweeney that you can have a PR strategy and also that the strategy can be bad. She’s certainly trying and going after it, but not in the way that anyone wants her to, and I fear her ship might be sailing. She’s cousin in a bad way, the way Addison Rae used to be. Belly from The Summer I Turned Pretty is cousin in that we were rooting for her and her eventual boyfriend to get together, but don’t really have an appreciation for her as a person. We like her, sure, but do we want to be friends with her? In a better show, she might actually be cousin, someone we have an appreciation and fondness for, but with the material we’re working with, she’s more girl-you-still-follow-on-Instagram. She’s mostly in this category because of the name of the town where her trials and tribulations take place, Cousins. Owen Thiel is far and away the hardest-working and most dynamic Gay Guy on the scene. Our culture is saturated with Gay Guys at the moment. A less discerning and more accepting general public has made it easier to be the Public Universal Gay Guy than ever before. We used to have one or two at a time, and now everyone has their personal favorite, but Owen Thiel seems to be everyone’s favorite. Owen Thiel glides from project to project, bringing a unique charm and good eye. He is equally at home on his podcast, his new web series, many guest star roles, and a series regular position on a tv show. He’s not too famous to do anything, but in a way that I find endearing. He’s someone I’m seeing a lot of, yet I can’t help but say I want to see more of.
Diva of the year
Emilia Perez
Lily Allen
🏆Jordan Hudson
Erika Kirk
Olivia Nuzzi
Dive time! These women have a fearlessness that prevents them from being normal and behaving how a regular person would. A part of us can’t help but admire their brazenness, and another can’t help but feel a little disgusted, in proportion to their social faux pas, of course. Emilia Perez may have lost most of her awards earlier this year for last year’s movie, but she remains in the public consciousness, and her diva status only grows by the year. We’re not done with her, and it will be funny to reference her for years to come. Lily Allen wrote an album all about her divorce in the span of only a couple of months, and while I love a tell-all, let’s not pretend this is as good as The Fear. If Erika Kirk were 10% more human and 50% less evil, she could be recognized as Diva of the Year by this newsletter, but I simply won’t give her the satisfaction. Olivia Nuzzi wants to be a Diva so bad and does succeed somewhat, but she doesn’t have a voice for broadcasting, and it’s clear that if she did, her Diva antics would stop, and I just don’t think a real Diva is that transparent. She should be complicated and unknowable. Her moves should baffle and astound. Olivis Nuzzi is who she’s always been, and to me, it’s a little boring. Jordan Hudson is the Diva of the Year. It’s been like watching a plane crash in slow motion. She both wants and is afraid of the press. She is manipulating Bill to get power, and now that she has it, she doesn’t know what to do with it. I hang on her every move. I love her and fear her in equal measure. Unquestioned Diva of the Year.
Best Entity
🏆Labubu
Etsy witch
The Gen Z stare
Sally…. When the wine runs out
Jennifer Hudson Spirit Tunnel
The Lion
The internet is constantly creating new things that we are then forced to categorize them so they make sense in our world. These are the phenomena that we had to contend with this year. One of my favorite New York City Influencers is Jazz, who this year paid an Etsy witch so it wouldn’t rain in New York on her wedding day, and it worked. I love the Etsy witch, but I think she became a punch line too fast. The Gen Z stare is a result of children not understanding that it’s their turn to talk and never learning that the average person is a normal amount of social. No one is asking you to be charming. They’re asking you to engage in regular conversation; it doesn’t have to be good. I’m not choosing it as the entity because Generation Wars are too political, and the academy tends to avoid that kind of unnecessary controversy. Sally kept Role Model in the news for a song that isn’t very good, even though you can tell he wants it to be so bad. I need more from Sally. The Jennifer Hudson Spirit Tunnel is the gift that keeps on giving, and as long as J Hud is on the air, its power will remain. It is not limited to one year of relevancy, and I can’t wait to see what it produces in the new year. The Lioness does not concern herself with manosphere adjacent DIY aphorisms. There really is only one winner. The Labubu remains supreme because in the world of the digital, nothing captures our attention like something physical you can hold. No online joke will ever be as culturally relevant as a descendant of Tickle Me Elmo. Never forget that.
Best Meme Picture
Ella McKay
Weapons
🏆Sinners
Eddington
Materialists
I would like to take a moment to honor The Testament of Ann Lee. It is always funny to me, every year, when the seasoned film Twitter people treat the underseen movie that is mostly just for us, like it is our Weapons. That is the pleasure of memes. To share in the experience of something. To take the internet and talk about the arthouse movie, only our community cares about the same way we talk about everything. #AnnLeeismyMartySupreme
Eddington is only included because it was the only movie I’ve ever seen to meaningfully incorporate memes into the story without making me want to stab myself in the eye. It’s a good movie about how the internet is making us all crazy in our own special way, and was able to create dramatic tension about a person looking at Facebook. That said, the online chatter was not compelling to me personally. I hated Materialists, but not because of the salary thing or the coke and beer thing, but because I think Celine Song has contempt for the romantic comedy as a genre, and you can feel it through the screen. Weapons and Ella McKay are two sides of the same coin. Both exist online as a series of symbols mostly divorced from their content. For Ella McKay, this was an accident, a total misread of the culture, and for Weapons it almost feels on purpose. Naruto runs! An old woman with funky makeup who... kinda slays? A bunch of hot dogs. In both cases, the people ate it right up. I haven’t seen Ella McKay, so I can’t give it the award. I’ve seen Weapons, but I can’t respond to pandering. The winner is Sinners. I’m choosing Sinners because it was SO popular and I think it’s one of the only times a movie’s popularity online directly correlated to how big it was in real life. I may be a spoil sport who thought the movie itself was fine, but even I know how to celebrate a good thing when it arrives. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, and I’d rather see 10 attempts to replicate the success of sinners from the industry than 10 attempts to replicate Aunt Gladys or the Ella McKay challenge.
Word Play
Most of the internet is just reading, so I would like to take the time to honor our achievements in language over the year.
Best Metaphor/Simile
🏆Like thinking the stripper is in love with you
Like a good day for a dog before it gets put down
Papas Orchard
Reheated Nachos
Reheated Nachos burned too bright, too quickly. We were all a little too pleased with ourselves for something that is not that clever. Papas Orchard was really funny when it first debuted because it is exactly how I feel about Timothee Chalamet. There are no urges, but I do have a fondness for that man. However, most people I see using the Papas orchard phrasing, I think, do have sexual urges for the people they are talking about and want the metaphor to mean more than it does. They want it to encompass all possible feelings about all the boys of Hollywood. It only really works for one feeling. “A dog the day before it gets put down” is so evocative and so sad that the uses I’ve seen of it have been well executed, but I worry it’s too catchy and is leaning into overuse. “Thinking the stripper is in love with you” gets at the heart of so many issues. Every time it is deployed, it is a cutting blow to the ego, especially in the attention economy. Most people would do well to consider whether the person or thing they are enamoured with is getting paid to be there. Have they confused an exchange of services for a genuine connection? On the internet... It’s more likely than you think.
Best New Words
Chopped
Unc
Goon
Media literacy
Woke 2
🏆Slop
Brain Rot
The language of the internet is a perpetual stew of white teenagers stealing from AAVE and then getting bored with it. It is also armchair cultural critics trying to diagnose the next phenomenon by coining the perfect word for the situation. It also has people guessing at the definitions of concepts with specific meaning, and the new guessed-at meaning becomes commonplace. “Chopped” and “Unc” come from the first category and never really became a necessity. They were always too jokey, and everyone was a little too pleased with themselves. “Goon” got an article, so that’s the award in and of itself. When we achieve “Woke 2,” it will be the word of the year, but until then, we wait. “Media Literacy” makes me so mad because most of the time, people are just talking about regular literacy. “Media Literacy” refers to one’s ability to read “the Media,” not one’s ability to read media like the plural for medium. No one has either, so no award. It comes down to “slop” versus “brain rot”. “Brain Rot” places the onus on the viewer, as in “it’s rotting my brain,” and I watch “brain rot”. It requires the audience member to take accountability for the content they consume, which would all be well and good if they weren’t consuming it so willingly. “Brain Rot” is winking where “Slop” is damning. “Slop” is a judgment with no forgiveness. The onus is on the creator for making something bad, where it should be.
This is midpoint of the Mimis and I want to thank all of our free subscribers for reading this far. I’ve enjoyed having you here and you guys are the real stars. I couldn’t do it without you. The rest of the award show themed blog post is behind the paywall.
Coming up, we have Best Pop Star (it’s not who you think), The Best Edit I saw last year, Best Tweet, Best TikTok, and of course, Best Meme.