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#if you saw the version where i posted the prompt list from a screenshot instead of the actual thing

chaoticspacefam · 3 years

Note

🖊🖊 for Ni'kasi and an oc of your choice 👀

Thanks for the ask, Pinky! apparently my brain has decided “gush” means “throw lots of random fun facts at everyone” today so here we go! Here’s your favourite tomato gal! :3

-She and Saarai were always twins and I’d always intended for them to be close, and the bare-bones basic premise of how I wanted their relationship to work was “Saarai is the brawn and Kas is the brains”. While this is still true, it did evolve ever so slightly in that Saarai is now also the (more reliable) moral compass. Kas isn’t particularly Dark-sided, but she’s not Light-sided either, she’s inherited a lot more of mom’s “I will do what I have to to get a job done even if that means I have to kill a bitch” attitude XD

-When I first came up with the idea for the twins, Kas’s name was originally going to be “Jen” which is the High Sith word for “hidden, or in shadow” (”Saarai” is the High Sith word for “Truth”, for reference ;) ) ; so their names joined together would have meant “Hidden Truth”. I don’t remember where Ni’kasi came from because it isn’t an “actual” Sith word nor does it have particular meaning (though I might try to make one up, we’ll see :P), but the very first time I went to write down solid bios for them I ended up writing “Ni’kasi” instead of “Jen” for her and it’s stuck ever since then.

-Initially, Kas’s colour pallette was a lot lighter, which you can see in all of her screenshots up till now (cause I forgot to change her when I changed the design earlier this year oops :’D) and also in this art piece I ordered of her last year, here:

(art is by @/cerculor on deviantART)

and the twins were very darn near close to being identical, but I decided that I actually rather liked their dad’s more purple-ish skintone earlier this year and that it was a shame neither of the twins looked a bit more like him, so I changed Kas up a bit and gave her dad’s skintone, jaw spurs and eye colour. She’s got mom’s red-tinted hair and (mostly) mom’s ridge/browstalk structure though :D

-Great with her own kids and direct blood relatives (e.g. nieces, nephews, grandchildren), but kinda iffy with other, random children. She won’t hurt them but she’s very much D’leah’s child in that respect, she’s very “Sith-y”, and liable to be abrasive, unsympathetic and so on. Generally not the sort of presence you’d want around your kids... there will definitely be tears hahahaha

-The scar on her eye was originally going to be caused by D’leah in the same fight that she gets Saarai’s nose, when Ni’kasi got between them to try and break up the scuffle, but I retconned that instead when I re-thought some stuff about that so now she gets it from the Inquisitors after they figure out who killed Ty’s dad and come after them.

-This is also how Kas ends up in the slave pens, after they kill D’leah they throw Ni’kasi into slavery (which is a bit of plot armour/oversight on the Inquisitors part, I admit but shhh XD) and figure y’know “she’s never gonna get out of there again”. A lot can happen, and be forgotten, in 60 odd years tho so eventually they do throw her back into the Academy much to Kas’s surprise.

-She has a lot more scars other than the one on her eye, just that most of them are on her back, or the back of her neck, so you generally can’t see them (I haven’t drawn a scar ref for her yet, it is also on the to-do list lol)

And we random-rolled Aria for this one, so more Tiny Sith nonsense!

(art is by @/ocellifera on deviantART)

-Aria’s hairstyle and general appearance actually came about because it was based on my second-favourite “portrait” choice for the PC in KOTOR II. She wasn’t how I saw my version of the Exile looking, but I really liked the design (including the little blonde fringe streak) so I decided I wanted to do something with it! <3

-We don’t get to see it much because usually when I draw her she’s back with the Sith and fully into the “Dark side” portion of her story and therefore her eyes are amber, but here you go, a nice glimpse of Aria’s natural eye colour! As mentioned on Myla’s ask, she has heterochromia as well, though her grey is “lighter” than Myla’s as she inherited the grey from dad and the brown from mom (yes I know technically it doesn’t work like that but basically I couldn’t decide which one I liked better so instead of agonising over the choice I went “one of each, problem solved” XD)

-Aria was actually the very first SWTOR-era OC I made, very closely followed by her dad, Roan, and then Vano, then her mom when I worked on her backstory, and followed by everyone else haha. I created her for an RP on an RP site that got a couple of posts in and then died/my partner ghosted me for whatever reason (I’ve never found out nor does it matter really), I was disappointed because I really liked Aria and didn’t get to “do much” with her, so I recycled her when another RP popped up, used that to build her backstory and prompt me to start the Subterfugeverse and then threw her into the Zephyrverse AU RP with my buddy k-christine once she got back in touch and we started RPing again :D -Aria gave me the most trouble (other than maybeee Saarai) in terms of finally nailing down what her sexuality was. I had no idea what she’d be at all when I first made her, other than I knew this binch wasn’t straight hahaha. So first, I defaulted her to bi, but then that didn’t seem to fit her much (I didn’t know pansexuality was a thing at the time), then during my self-projection phase I considered leaving her as just a lesbian but she wasn’t happy with that either and eventually I figured out pan is a thing and she started jumping up and down and screaming HELLO YEAH THAT ONE!! at me. The only thing that was for sure obvious to me was that she’s demiromantic, because while she can get around and doesn’t care who with (insert “will fuck anything (humanoid) with a pulse” joke here), the romantic feelings often attached to that for other people take a long time to develop for Aria.

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kumoriyami-xiuzhen · 3 years

Text

Translation Plans

Well... my break was pretty good. was finally able to download the clean fresh live version of the cxm secret mission that i had my eye on since i ranked up, saw the 1984 wonder woman movie (it was okay and I could write an essay on what didn’t sit well with me as a fan of the comics [im kinda of a comic book purist when it comes to the way characters think and their behaviour] but I really liked Lynda Carter’s cameo).... made a lot of progress on one of the hakumyu piano arrangements i’m working on (have now probably listened to certain parts of that song over a hundred times now), watched a bunch of the original hakuoki musicals in hd.... and I finally got my dad to play Batman: Arkham Asylum. My bro and I have been trying to get that to happen for years lol... especially since it has Conroy and Hamill doing the Batman and Joker voices (the animated series is the best!). super steep learning curve tho since it’s being played on the ps3 and the last console he used was the Nintendo Gamecube.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to stock up on translations as much as I would have liked to during this time on account of my hardware seriously acting up... to the point that I needed to send my laptop in for repairs and get a new one. Aside from how unresponsive my keyboard was and how hot it got, the laptop itself had become quite slow... though that might have been because my passport [external storage drive] took a bad fall which made a lot of my files harder to access since it was barely able to handle files being accessed/copied/moved off of it (this is after diagnosing it and repairing it via command prompt chkdsk x: / r), with the latter being what I spent most of my break waiting for as i avoided using my laptop since the majority of my drama rips and game capture videos were on it... To give you an idea of how long this took (and how long it is still taking), I went from being able to transfer my 50mb of files in a few seconds... to sometimes taking more than a day (tho other times i’d be able to get 4gb moved in >24 hours, making the timing super inconsistent. also i don’t have access to a cd drive now so i can’t just re-rip things)... which is why I haven’t been able to work on any videos since my last post (I have more than 1.3TB of stuff to move, so my new laptop isn’t exactly at its best right now and won’t be for a long while since I’m not going to be using a recovery service as waiting out the transfers for everything out will definitely be cheaper... the ballpark estimate I got was being anywhere from $500-2000, which is money that i am not exactly eager to part from just for the sake of saving time)... meaning I also probably won’t get to videos for a while since subtitling requires accurate timing and im not fond of things freezing on me while working on videos... ugh. i still have to do an insane amount of grinding later in warframe once my current batch of files finishes transferring...

Anyway, below is a list of what I’ve mostly managed to schedule (anything with a “?” is something that I haven’t committed to) and a list of what I’d like to get done this year (can’t make any guarantees... however, im probably going to try and translate some things with souma this year cuz of hakumyu), while the stuff in bold text is on my shortlist of things I intend to prioritize (Saito’s Ginsei no Shou chapters and Shinsengumi Oni-tan are still being worked on though not as actively since they’re a lot longer...).

Also, aside from December, the month that CNY falls on (February this year) and March (bday) will be the only foreseeable times when I put out less translations tho I’ll probably be playing video catch-up during that time this year since i’m not sure what i’ll be able to get done as i wait for my files to get moved.

oh well. I’m still aiming towards posting stuff on a weekly basis for the rest of the year... here’s hoping that it’s less volatile.... tho i unfortunately have non-existent expectations given what made the news yesterday. just glad i don’t live there.

YAISA!

------------------------------------------

January

Yuugiroku 3 Saito Fall story today!

Chapter 7 of Saito’s route from Ginsei no Shou + 4-koma

Hakuoki Kyoka-Roku Kazama CG Character Perspective [no vid. havent beaten this game and im not sure when i’ll feel like speed running through it]

Hakuo Gakuen Q & A

February

Stellaworth Hana no Shou After Story - Harada

Chapter 1 of Saito’s route from Ginsei no Shou

Web drama 8

March

Yuugiroku 3 - Short Episode #8 (Kazama/Amagiri/Shiranui) [still need to get video and screenshots]

Yuugiroku Drama CD Thumb Sized Samurai Track 1-4 (4 is WIP)?

Char monologue?

April

2017 Otomate Hakuoki SSL April Fool’s Day

薄桜鬼遊戯録隊士達の大宴会店铺特典「教えてください山崎さん！」 (completed yesterday)

Yuugiroku 3 - Short Episode #6 “Yukimura the page’s secret”?

char perspective?

Other

Hijikata Biyori (cuz these are short)

Yuugiroku 3 Short Episodes (these are longer than the ssl cross and daily stories)

Kyoka Roku Conversation in the Rain - Okita/Toudou/Kazama

Kyoka-Roku CG perspectives

2013 Otomate Party Hakuoki drama “Ideal place for a disagreement”

Saito Ginsei no Shou Chapters

Shinsengumi Oni-tan

Stellaworth Hana no Shou After Stories - Souji, Heisuke (THIS YEAR FOR SURE DAMMIT!)

2011 Hakuoki Reimeiroku Otomate Party drama

Stellaworth Nightshade Kuroyuki CD

薄桜鬼遊戯録弐祭囃子と隊士達 A店特典「あなた好みの想いの形」

薄桜鬼真改 ~風華大全~ 特典「稽古の痛み」

2016 Otomate Party Code:Realize drama* (this is almost 30 min so i will probably translate less that month if i get to it)

2019 ????????????? Halloween SS?*

????????????? Stellaworth Vocal CD (8 tracks)*

*have to check these 3 since I don’t actively follow these fandoms/tags tho im pretty sure no one has translated anything from the fandom for the last 2 items.

also, re:patreon goal - i am currently not able to access the files for the drama i am looking to get a translation commissioned for as it is in the process of being moved off of my damaged passport. 29gb remains as part of that transfer, which is the result of me trying to move all 865 files from where i keep the majority of the hakuoki dramas i’ve saved all at once... ended up doing that because every time I access that hard drive, each time i open up a folder, and every time I highlight a file to move, the file explorer goes “not responding” for an uncertain amount of time, and have instead opted in doing something that would hopefully reduce the likelihood of something crashing.

#personal post #update post

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risthebrave · 3 years

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okay so i was going to send in an ask for the director’s cut thing, but there were too many fics i wanted to ask about 😭 i’ll send them in but PLEASE keep in mind you don’t have to do them all i feel bad dmfjsjf

move so pretty (you’re all i see), sleeping on our problems, works like a charm, just a flicker in the dark, and sweet like honey

ahhh omg thank you for sending these in! i’m so sorry for how long it took to get out - i may have forgotten about it shjkskss also i don’t mind talking about all of them but i’m definitely going to keep each one short. you can find them under the cut:

move so pretty (you’re all i see) ~

this fic was started initially when i was doing word prompts using curiouscat! people would send me words and i’d write a quick little drabble/snippet... they’re typically around 300-ish words but i got the word “owns,” and maybe got a bit carried away? i think that prompt ended up being 1k words - too long to post using cc so i had to take screenshots and post as separate tweet.

the idea that came to me was something i love to read in fics: one of them walking in on the other masturbating. i didn’t intend for it to become anything more than that snippet but i what can i say? i got intrigued. my brain helpfully provided a backstory: best friends, harry maybe having feelings for louis but not wanting to ruin their friendship...

fast-forward three days and i posted an 11k fic shjssks

this was my first attempt at writing a pwp so that was an interesting experience!!! i’m too obsessed with giving backstories and arcs to ever write just pure smut but this is the closest i’ve gotten??? 5.5k/11k being smut, that is. and for once coming up with the title wasn’t too hard because there’s one song i always think of when it comes to best friends to lovers and that’s lucky!!

i don’t really know what else to say for this one! i remember sarah and i both wrote and posted pwps in a short span of each other so that was fun... she’s actually the one who motivated me to finish and post this fic instead of just letting the idea go. and her dog ended up in the story: chica <3 my absolute favorite <3333

sleeping on our problems ~

welp. this fic was a struggle for a long time. idk if i’ve talked about it on this blog but this fic was initially an exes to lovers fic!!! where they spent harry’s rut together right before breaking up and then louis finds out he’s pregnant and angst ensues.

changing it to a one-night stand (even though it wasn’t only one night shjksks) ended up being a really good decision in the way that this new version of the story required a lot less angst and reflection of their past relationship, choices, actions!! that first fic was going to be a lot heavier i think shjsks but i really love how it turned out!!

barring the main tropes, the progression of the story and the outline itself changed so. much. in the process of writing... i found an earlier saved version of my outline and the story is almost completely unrecognizable haha. and actually the most recent saved version of the outline is also not 100% accurate to the final story because for the last 10k of the story, i was flying completely free shjsksk.

also, even after i finished the fic, i went back and added two scenes the next day so it’s safe to say i changed so much of this story -- it was never supposed to be that long either hsjsksk the goal was 48-50k and i thought i was being optimistic!

somewhat in the same vein but also really different: this fic was one of the first fics i ever wrote out of order! before this, i had switched around maybe a couple times when writing a fic but mostly stuck to chronological order. but in this one i kept getting stuck with certain scenes and decided that i’d never reach my goal of finishing unless i switched to parts of the story i had the inspiration to write in the moment instead of getting stuck on one single part i had no motivation for. it really helped the process and i’ve been switching around ever since.

another thing that really helped me actually finish this fic was the motivation and encouragement of people on twitter and i’m still so appreciative of it now :’) there’s no way i could have finished this fic without the kind words and well wishes of my mutuals!!

(also - i included an easter egg in this fic from another one of my fics... i suppose that’s sort of the type of insight that fits for these things? the ballet louis and harry saw in new york was swan lake <3)

works like a charm ~

ooo i wrote this fic for my friend’s birthday!! she loves hp aus and slytherin hl so it was just a given that i write that for her. i was on a deadline - pretty sure i made the doc on september 4th, aka nine days before i posted - and i hadn’t had my full outline done when i started which is is... let’s just say very uncommon.

this is another example of me going off outline and changing the story as i went because initially the estimation was about 12k and the basic plot was that after they’d fuck for the first time, they’d immediately talk about the past and resolve those misunderstandings. but when i got to that point, i realized it felt too rushed for how the story was progressing so i extended it a bit and added some more *tension* and *miscommunication* until they finally got their shit together!

also i feel like some would find louis’ blatant lies when interrogated about his feelings for harry to be unrealistic but as someone who has definitely done the exact same thing (lmao - without the happy ending), i find it a definite possibility. and i mean, we all say stuff we don’t mean under pressure - whether it’s to louis’ (and my) extent or not.

another thing i remember about this fic was having to work out with sarah - who was also posting a fic for this friend’s birthday - posting times and dates. we eventually agreed that she’d post first and i’d post the day after (neither were the actual day of the birthday because we were both running late!) this is a conversation we proceeded to have many other times since we both have made habits of birthday fics and we pretty much have the same friends.

all of this was also happening in sync with us writing a fic together for our other friend’s birthday which was on the 8th... yes it was exactly as chaotic and stressful as you’re thinking but also fun! and i love all three fics involved!! haha.

just a flicker in the dark ~

okay this fic is definitely my favorite thing i’ve ever written and i’ve said that before many, many times but it’s true! but it too changed so much from the initial idea to the final end product.

in fact, the original idea was a 20k somewhat-crack fic where harry was a ghost and louis was the paranormal investigator trying to get him to stop haunting this house. it was just supposed to be a quick and fun halloween fic to work on while finishing up my first blff and finally making head way on my abandoned second blff... obviously, that changed drastically.

it initially started with me getting the idea of louis and harry being partners and enemies. and then i was thinking... why not throw exes on top of it while we’re there??? that was completely self-indulgent since exes to lovers is my favorite trope of all time. but the idea was still that they were paranormal investigators trying to work a case on a haunted house and though the estimated wc had raised to 35k, i was still hoping that it’d be quick and easy because i had two other projects that needed a lot of my attention.

then came the first day of october. i woke up after having the craziest dream about louis and harry and the ghost that was not really a ghost. i ended up writing about 7k that thursday and the story really just took shape from there. the first sequence i wrote was actually the scene where louis goes into the backyard and ends up in the pocket dimension where the spirit imprints on him - i think it was a 3.5k scene and it just flew out of me sjksjsk. after that i took a small break to start my outline but it was more of a messy list of ideas and details and things i wanted to include than my usual organized format. the next scene i wrote that day was the scene where louis is in the bedroom and the demon is there but harry is not but then he is (i’m so good at describing things, right?) that’s actually one of my favorite scenes i’ve ever written and the funny thing is that i barely even knew all the details of the demon plot by this point but my hands just kept typing and my brain had the tendrils of the story forming and that amazing feeling that this is something good.

i could ramble on forever about the process of writing this fic but i’ll just say that it’s the most fun i’ve ever had writing anything ever. word-building and supernatural elements are my favorite and getting to delve into those things here was so much fun! the entire process took twenty-five days (spanning from october 1st to october 28th - with a small three day break to focus on finishing miss wedding au!!) and though i did have some small struggles and moments of writer’s block, for the most part the story just came to me. and it’s so amazing to me because i didn’t even have all the details and facets of the plot until louis did too but it ended up working out??? if anything, it showed his process of figuring things out really well because it was the process of me figuring things out!

also this was the first time i heavily featured a fic pet in a fic and i fell as much in love with venus as everyone else did :’) she has my heart, truly <3 i love this world and these characters so so much and i hope to return to it sometime in the future!

sweet like honey ~

whooo, okay, this fic... yikes. this fic was a capital s Struggle.

so basically this fic was written for the blff and though it came out first, it was the second prompt i signed up for, prompt 63: Friends to lovers AU where Harry and Louis are best friends and flatmates in Uni and they both need money, Harry for his gym membership and Louis for cute stuff like sanrio plushies, so they decide to film homemade porn videos together. Louis is shy and sweet and maybe inexperienced and Harry kinda doms him.

i remember the exact moment i saw the blff post on tumblr about it being allowed to sign up for another prompt from that point on - i was sitting at the counter at my friend’s ranch’s kitchen eating crepes and browsing on my phone. i saw the post and immediately signed up for this prompt because it had been my second choice and though i love love loved my first prompt so much, i was disappointed at not being able to write this one... but i did!

the idea and basic outline was actually completed way back in july/august but for some reason i just couldn’t make any actual progress on it for so long??? i’m pretty sure the document was stuck at 5k for over three months shsjksks to be fair, i did keep pushing it to the side in favor of other newer fics but i was just experiencing the biggest barrier when it came to this story and characters.

in fact, i actually reached out to the mods in late october about a potential extension - they informed me that all writers could use a two week extension if needed and i figured that would be fine. however, i didn’t end up using it! within the first few days of november, i managed to pull the wc up to 8k by the skin of my teeth (was still majorly struggling) - i was still sure i’d need an extension but then something really awful but in this case, helpful, happened...

election week.

basically, i’m a big stress-writer. writing is what i do when i’m upset or anxious or stressed because it truly is my happy place. i wouldn’t say writing during that week made me feel much better about everything going on but it provided a distraction. so much though that i went from 8k to 24k in the span of a few days... and i have absolutely no recollection of writing any of it.

not only did i not need any extension, i also somehow ended up finishing early by a few days. and i really liked what i had!! or what i remembered of it anyway shjskks.

one thing i remember really focusing on in terms of these characters and dynamic was having it actually just be them starting as friends and developing feelings later. i feel like a common trope in friends to lovers fics is having one or both of them with pre-existing feelings that they feel is unrequited. obviously there’s nothing wrong with that (i’ve written it myself lol) and it’s a common trope for a reason - because it’s good - but i wanted to try something a little different. them actually filming these videos is what acted as the catalyst to them beginning to view their relationship with new eyes and open the door to the eventual feelings that developed.

i also had so much fun writing harry’s pov in this one haha. i feel like this version of him was really bold and shameless and super easy for me to develop.

this is also the closest i’ve ever gotten to meeting my estimation word count... ever. my estimate was 32k and it ended up at 33k!!! and yes i’m more proud of that than i should be lol

anyways, i pretty much just rambled but if anyone sees this and gets some good insight out of it, then yay! feel free to send more director’s cut inquiries!! i love doing them (even if it takes me weeks - sorry again!)

#asks #director's cut #msp #soop #wlac #jafitd #slh

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angrylizardjacket · 5 years

Text

when i said it i thought it was true [1] {Ben Hardy}

Anon asked: could you do an imagine where ben is the reader’s ex and they are somehow working together on the set of bo rhap and they fall in love all over again ☺️ could you make it angst-y and then end with fluff? i love your writing so much!!

Anon asked: could you do an imagine where the reader is in bo rhap, maybe playing as one of roger’s gfs or something and she kind of falls in love with ben while filming the scenes with him as roger 💖 very fluffy pls :D

A/N: 3124 words. Super AU version of BoRhap being filmed in the fic. There’s gonna be another part, that will fill the prompts better. This might end up being a series. I hope you enjoy. Feedback would be nice.

When your manager rings you, telling you that you’d landed a part in the Queen Biopic Bohemian Rhapsody, you were elated. Freddie Mercury was a bit of a personal hero of yours, and to be a part of his story on the big screen, it was sort of a dream come true.

In your first meeting, you sign a nondisclosure agreement, and you’re given the latest draft of the script to start learning, as well as a character brief. The script calls your character ‘Amanda’, the girlfriend of Roger Taylor who he eventually realises he wants to settle down with. You’d seen pictures of young Roger Taylor, you wouldn’t lie, you were excited for the role. Honestly, even today he was still quite a fox.

The point is, you were excited to have a fun time on set with a pretty blonde, make some new connections, and earn some good money. Some really good money.

The other shoe drops when you’re flicking through Instagram, and one of the stan accounts you follow has posted a leaked screenshot of the proposed cast list, and there’s your name, right beside the name of the last person you wanted to pretend to be in love with. Ben Hardy; pretty blonde extraordinaire, and your ex-boyfriend.

The table read is... awkward.

The two of you are sat next to each other, and barely spoke two words to each other. You feel unprofessional the whole time, but you’d rather be anywhere else in the world, and the delivery of some of your lines falls a little flat. The director casts a concerned look between yourself and Ben as you rattle of what’s meant to be banter like you’re reading the news paper.

“They’ve got no damn chemistry; it’s like watching a celebrity divorce hearing.” When the Director vents to one of the producers in the hall outside after the reading, you manage to catch it where you’re just about to come out of the bathroom.

“They’ll be better on set, I promise, it’s just jitters.” She tries to soothe his nerves, and they’re off soon after, and you’re left with a cold, sinking sensation in your stomach.

“You’re Y/N, aren’t you? How are you finding the set?” The guy who greets you on your first day on the Eastenders set smiles with such casual ease it feels like you’ve known him for a while, instead of having just met him.

“Yeah, that’s me.” You agree with a quick nod, rocking back on your heels as you gaze around the space, trying not to look at him for too long. “It’s a bit overwhelming.” Actually, what’s overwhelming is that he’s talking to you. He’s Ben fucking Hardy, pretty-boy on the soap-opera scene, and he’s talking to you on your first day.

“Yeah, you’ll be right though; if you need any help or anything, just give us a yell, yeah?” And you realise he probably doesn’t know who you’re playing, or how you’re involved in that Season’s arc, but you certainly did.

“I didn’t know you could play drums.” You’re trying to be casual when you say it, but you see Ben tense where he’s sitting on a sofa in the rehearsal room, script and pencil in hand.

“I can now, that’s all that really matters.” He’s giving off such strong ‘please leave me alone’ vibes that it almost hurts, and you have to push through the knot in your stomach and sit down next to him.

“Ben, we need to at least be civil.” You say quietly, and he looks at you, expression a little forlorn.

“Y/N, we are civil, and we’ve done this before. Let’s just keep it professional, okay?” His tone leaves little room for argument, and you nod in agreement with a small smile, and pull out your phone, waiting for the rehearsal director.

“Hey there, baby, I don’t think I’ve seen you around here; I know I’d recognise your face.” You purr, running your hand delicately over the collar of Ben’s shirt, as his eyes widened and he spluttered to form a sentence, just as the script had told him to.

Your character was more a plot device than anything, when Ben’s character is at a low point, his main romance is on a break, and he meets you, a temptress in all black. Your job is to give his character a realisation, he starts as your cocaine dealer when his supplier can’t make the drop, and he falls for you. Depending on the audience reaction, you knew the producers were waiting to see if they kill you off or have you recover from your addiction. The point is, your fate’s uncertain at the end of the Season, and Ben’s character realises he has to get out of the drug trade.

“I’ve got something for you, from Oskar. Can we go somewhere more private?” When he speaks, it’s with surprising confidence, and he steps up from the bar stool and into your space, smiling as your face lights up. The director calls cut after a moment, and you step back, smile sliding to something genuine as an assistant comes in and straightens your loose, black silk shirt, and they reset the shot for a new take.

“Ben, could you try less flustered? You’re here to deliver drugs, you’re not a schoolboy.” The director’s voice was kind as she came up to the two of you, and Ben agreed easily before she turned to you. “Great job, Y/N, don’t be afraid to be more even more forward, if you feel it.” As soon as you nod in understanding, she absconds, and you half laugh.

“If I was any more forward I’d be in your lap.” You snickered, voice quiet as you dipped your head to hide how you were faintly flustered. Ben was quiet, just watching you for a moment, but before you noticed, the director called for everyone to standby.

“I’m after Maggie, do you know where I could find her?” Ben starts as soon as the cameras start rolling, brow furrowed as he leans across the bar to speak to the bartender, and that’s your cue to enter the scene.

“Hey there, baby, I don’t think I’ve seen you around here; I know I’d recognise your face.” And when you say it this time, he smirks back at you, a little cocky, and you can feel the way it makes your heart flutter and you know it’s not as fake as it should be.

Before filming even starts, the producers have essentially forced you and Ben into bonding sessions which, if this were several years ago, would have just been dates. Now they’re awkward and tense, and you tend to bring heavily highlighted scripts.

“I saw you in that Wes Anderson movie last year. It was a really good performance, one of your best.” He offers over coffee. The idea that he’d kept up with enough of your work to label one ‘your best’ has you a little shocked, and something in your heart warms as you thank him softly.

It’s gotten easier to hang around with him, and it’s even easier to pretend to be in love with him in rehearsals. It’s like riding a bike, how easy it is to let yourself smile and lean into him, to let the banter flow easily between the two of you, fond jabs that edge on insulting coming as easily as breathing.

Joe mentions that he thought the two of you worked together before, and when you reply that you’d dated for almost a year, he goes very quiet, eyes going wide. After a beat, he admits it explains a lot.

“X-Men did you real dirty.” You’re half paying attention to an interview with Roger Taylor that the two of you had been instructed to watch together. You’re both in his trailer, sitting on opposite ends of the sofa as you watch in almost complete silence.

“What?” He asks, after a beat, your words having taken a moment to process.

“Killing you off like that; they could have gotten so much mileage out of your character.” The way you say it is far too well thought out to be an idle thought. Ben smirked.

“You just liked the leather pants.” He muttered, but you’re silence is answer enough. You know he sees your embarrassed smile, but you can’t bring yourself to deny it.

“Hey, do you wanna grab a drink after and go through notes and blocking and stuff?” You’re shooting your third episode, and you’re far more comfortable on set by now. Agreeing easily, you let Ben drive the two of you to what he claims is the best pub in town, and you sit in one of the more secluded booths to talk.

It turns out he’s just as much a fan of you as you are of him; you’re known more for your bit-parts in long-running series, it seems like the only show you hadn’t been a part of so far had been Eastenders, it was only a matter of time. It’s an innocent night, true to his word, all you do is talk, and discuss the script. There is one part of the upcoming script that has you a bit nervous.

“Listen, honestly just go for it; it’s not meant to be sweet or anything, I’m literally taking coke from you.” You tell him, fidgeting, and he’s hums thoughtfully.

“You sure? We can talk to the director, I’m sure-” He offers, but you laugh to hide your nervousness.

“Nah, let’s knock it out of the park, the script says go for it so just go for it.” You assured him, heart rate already quickening at the mere thought of it.

The next day, before the scene, the director comes over to talk you through it, making sure that if anything becomes uncomfortable, that you can talk to her. Both you and Ben assure her that it’s fine.

“You’re far too cute for this line of work.” You say as you hold a baggie of “cocaine” up to the light, smile playing on your lips.

“Cute? Ouch, you really know how to wound a man, you know.” He says, leaning back against the sofa in the hallway of the grubby hotel your character was staying in. He’s watching you with interest, small smile playing on his lips.

“Cute’s not a bad thing, baby, but you look like you should be making coffees or playing football in the sun, not here, not with me.” And you tap out a little of the powder onto your hand, pretending to snort it before you turn to him, his expression dark and hungry, and he kisses you, aggressive, almost desperate, and you lean into it, almost forget you’re playing a role with his hand on the back of your neck. When he lets go, when he pulls away, your eyes are still closed and you chase his lips for a moment. Eyes flickering open, you see him smirking down at you where he’s standing, and you both know it wasn’t entirely acting.

“You don’t know anything about me.” He growls, and you know you have to smile like you’re into it, like it’s a challenge, but instead, you duck your gaze, giving a small laugh and wiping at the nostril you’d just “snorted cocaine” through, before looking up at him through your eyelashes.

They call cut, and the director announces, almost a little awed, that she’s pretty sure they got the the take, actually says she’s not sure if she could getting a better take if they tried again. Ben seems far too pleased with himself.

“They want us to tell the public we’re together.” You’re resting your head on Ben’s chest laying at the back of the tour-bus set, and his hand is resting on your waist, which is bare for the crop top and booty shorts they’ve put you in.

“Yeah, I heard.” He replies, voice equally quiet. “I think we’ve got a meeting about it tomorrow morning.” Gwil and Rami are actually playing scrabble at the front of the bus, and Joe is talking to Singer, the director.

“It’s a bad idea.” You’re so frank that you feel Ben freeze, and you heave a sigh. “It’s good for the movie, but Ben...” You trail off, and you feel it when he forces himself to relax. “It wouldn’t be real, it would just be weird.”

“Y/N, we’re actors.” He says very pointedly, and when you turn, resting your chin on his chest, he looks tired, a little exasperated. “It’s just a business deal.” He assured, and you let out a low, thoughtful grumble.

“We’ll discuss it tomorrow.” You allow, and he nods once, shifting to a more comfortable position, and you go back to resting your head on his chest, eyes fluttering closed as Singer called for the shot to be reset and a bunch of people came and straightened your clothes, and touched up your makeup, all without you having to move much.

You agree to the terms set forth in the meeting easily, the story being that your relationship rekindled on set, and that you were now madly in love, mirroring the relationship you were portraying on screen.

“Wait, does that mean-?” Ben leans forward in his chair, with his heart in his throat as he followed their logic, thinking through the plot of the movie. “Like engaged?” He asked.

“Seems a bit fast.” You agreed, voice level enough that someone might mistake you for calm rather than internally freaking out, and your managers shared a look.

“There will be a public proposal during or after the world premiere, that’s up to you both, and after the movie is out on DVD, you can go your separate ways.” They assured, but your mouth fell open.

“You know he left me for X-Men, right?” You splutter, and Ben’s eyes widen as he turns to you with a scoff.

“You’re the one who said the distance was too much for us while I was in Cairo.” He snapped, and you threw your hands in the air.

“I was offering to come and stay with you instead, but you said you were too busy!” That was enough to shut him up, his mouth snapping closed as he turned away sharply, huffing out a resigned sigh.

“We have a few brands and restaurants who are interested in sponsoring, and the producers are willing to increase both your salaries if you go through with it for the full duration.” Your manager informed you both carefully, and you and Ben shared a resigned look.

“Fake intend to marry me for like three months?” He asked, voice low and bitter, and after heaving a long sigh, you look to your managers,

“Fine.”

“I think I love you.” Ben’s character shows up at your character’s door, and you open it in a silk robe.

“Hello to you too.” You laughed, but he’s so serious, so sincere, and when he doesn’t flinch, doesn’t offer anything else, you step up to him, pressing your lips to his, and he wraps his arms around you, hands sliding against the silk over your hips, and you pull back.

“You’re too sweet for me, baby,” voice so low it’s barely a whisper, he’s the one who chases your lips this time, but your catch his chin, and his eyes open.

“You’re high.” He says softly, voice raw and a little desperate.

“And you’re my dealer.” You push him back gently, going to close the door and his expression turns angry.

“That doesn’t mean anything; I love you, Maggie.” His words hang heavily in the air, but before you can respond, they call for cut. You’re told to play it more like it hurts to try and turn him down, and you agree, smiling and nodding all the while. Everyone sets up for another take and you close the door.

When you kiss him this time, his hands are holding your face, and you’ve got your arms around his neck, and it’s like the world falls away from around you. It’s not acting now, hasn’t been for weeks, almost months now, not since he’d asked you out officially. Every time you kiss him you’re desperate to drown in his embrace, and he kisses you like it’s just the two of you, no cameras, no scripts.

“You’re-” and he cuts you off with another quick kiss, which has you laughing a little sadly, “Peter you’re too sweet for me.” He rests his forehead against yours, heaving a sigh.

“I know you’re high.” He says gently, and you don’t push him away this time, just lean back, your finger lifting his chin.

“And you’re my dealer.” You tell him, expression falling.

“That doesn’t mean anything, that doesn’t matter; I love you.” And you know that in that moment, the words mean so much more than the script, than these characters, than the show; he loves you. Ben loves you.

You avoid him, outside of filming, until you actually get a call from your manager telling you you’re contractually obligated to be seen in public together at least once a week. Even while filming you’re short with him, and he’s quick to get away from you the moment he doesn’t need to be around you, which was getting to be pretty bad, seeing as how you had been blocking a sex scene.

After the call, you and Ben get a drink. It’s awkward at first, though that’s unsurprising. After a long sip of his beer, he pats his thighs where he’s sitting in the armchair across from you. You make a face at him, shaking your head.

“It’ll look less suspicious than if we’re shouting at each other across the table.” He hissed, and you groaned, obliging and crossing to sit yourself in his lap. He’s warm and secure, and he wraps his arm around you like it’s second nature. “Let’s not make this weird.” He said gently, and you nod.

“As for tomorrow’s shoot,” you said softly, leaning in to make sure no-one else heard, and he nodded, humming softly, “we’re professionals, and,” after a beat you cleared your throat pointedly, “it’s not like we haven’t done it before.”

“Not in front of a camera crew we haven’t.” Ben says with a smirk, and you snicker in agreement. “It’s gonna go fine; this is all gonna go fine, I promise.” And when you raise your eyebrows at him in surprised question, he just laughs softly, and brings you in for a chaste kiss. “It’s only until the DVD’s released.” He assures you, and you let your expression fall, already weary.

“Ben, that’s over a year away.”

#ben hardy #ben hardy imagine #ben hardy x reader #bohemian rhapsody #borhap #bo rhap #queen #queen imagines #eastenders #eastenders imagines #the angry lizard writes

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travllingbunny · 5 years

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The 100: 6x10 Matryoshka

Yes, that last scene was one of the most emotional, powerful and beautiful scenes of the season and arguably the entire show. And we all have been talking about it, posting gifs and obsessing over it the whole week.

I doubt that I have anything substantial to add about it that others have not already pointed out, from the fact that this was the first time Bellamy has actually said “I need you” to Clarke (she has told him “I need you” and “We need each other” a few times, but he has never expressed his feelings through words like that), without any qualifiers like “we all need you”, but only mentioning that he and Clarke’s daughter need her; to the ironic foreshadowing from 6x02, when Bellamy, under the eclipse psychosis, got into Clarke’s face and told her “Maybe you haven’t noticed, Clarke, but I don’t need you anymore”(of course, it was obvious that he was just protesting too much). I sometimes have mixed feelings about the phrase “the head and the heart”, because it has been overused and misinterpreted in the fandom, and has led to me oversimplifications of both Clarke’s and Bellamy’s character. But it was used beautifully in this scene. And yes, Bellamy’s CPR skills are crap and he seemed to be massaging Clarke’s belly instead of restarting her heart (while mouth on mouth actually doesn’t matter much compared to restarting the heart – it just looks good on TV) – but it wasn’t the CRP that brought Clarke back, anyway. It was hearing Bellamy’s voice in her mind, passionately telling her that he needs her and wouldn’t let her go, that he couldn’t lose her again, and that she’s a fighter and needs to fight.

If there still people arguing that Bellarke is not an epic romance, it must be incredibly difficult to argue that after Bellamy has actually brought Clarke back to life with his love. In 6x07, Clarke gave up and was going to let Josephine have her body while she dies, after Josephine had made her believe that Bellamy had given up on her and already moved on from her death. She changed her mind later, prompted by the part of her mind that is her moral compass and voice of reason, embodied by her mindspace version of Monty. But she really got strength to fight and defeat Josephine after hearing Bellamy’s voice and knowing that he needs her and has fought for her, and after he gave her strength with his voice. Proving that love is not a weakness – it can be an incredible strength.

However, I also enjoyed the scene of Josephine and Gabriel’s reunion and goodbye that happened right before the Bellamy/Clarke reunion, the scenes in Clarke’s mindspace – which I was so glad to return – and all the Clarke and Josephine’s interactions. And, of course, Bellamy coming to save the day (in a very similar way as he did when he saved the Delinquents from the Mount Weather guards in season 2), and the awkward hug between him and Octavia.

This entire storyline is great enough to put Matryoshka among my favorite episodes. But, to be objective, I can’t give it a perfect score, because the other storyline in the episode – taking place in Sanctum – while also good, wasn’t as great, and missed some chances.

The title of this episode is one of the The 100’s best ones. Russian nesting dolls are a pretty good analogy for the way that each new iteration of a Prime has, in their mind, memories of all the previous lives.

More thoughts under the cut...

I loved Clarke’s snark about how much Sanctum guards suck. Because, well, they really do. They have obviously never needed to fight a really dangerous enemy, as the Primes are used to having all their people brainwashed and docile, and their only real enemy before the Earth people arrived, the Children of Gabriel, are also rather incompetent. As Josephine pointed out, they have never managed to kill any of the Primes. They seem to have just killed a few of the potential hosts. The Primes have, in fact, been better at killing each other, since Kaylee killed Josephine, Josephine killed Kaylee, and then had the entire Lee family wiped. (This makes me wonder about the lifespans of the Primes in their previous hosts. It doesn’t seem that most of them lived to old age, going by how many of them there were over the course of 211 years, which begs the question what the causes of death were. Illness? More “accidents” like the one Josephine VII died in?)

Clarke and Josephine’s interactions in this episode were lots of fun and even featured some funny moments (a rarity on The 100), with Clarke snarking at Josephine a lot. Their relationship turned into more of a frenemy one, as they started to see some of their similarities and had some sort of almost-bonding… which, of course, was not going to last. That was obvious even when Josephine was trying to convince Bellamy that she and Clarke were friends – which he didn’t buy. Still, it was fun to see Clarke and Josie arguing like roommates or even sisters annoyed when one is leaving her things in the other’s room.

So much in this episode focused on the history between Josie and Gabriel, such as when she and Clarke were in the hatch where Josie used to come for “research” – and to have some fun with Gabriel. It reminds me of season 1, when Clarke used to go and research Earth, first with Finn, and later with Bellamy, as they found the depot with the weapons. But, unlike Gabriel and Josie. they never got to have a drink and other things together.

I like the way they continued to use drawings/books as embodiments of Clarke’s and Josephine’s memories, respectively, with the image of books lying around in heaps in Clarke’s side of the ship, as their minds started merging and Josephine’s memories spilled into Clarke’s mind. She didn’t need to go into Josie’s side of the mindspace to see glimpses of her memories, most of them from scenes we have already seen – such as that Dave guy killing himself right in front of her; Russell killing her during the Red Sun eclipse; Josephine waking up in Brooke’s body; or scenes that had been referenced and that we were meant to see – Josephine convincing Tai and his wife to give up their baby son to be sacrificed to the gods, telling them that his spirit will be with the gods. This is a scene that was deleted from 6x07 (as confirmed on Twitter by the actress who played the mother), and I now I wish it had not been, since this subplot played such a big role in this episode, but seeing a few seconds of it, at least, made up for it to an extent.

It’s interesting that the drawings on the walls of Clarke’s mindspace room have changed significantly since the last time we saw them, in 6x07. I noticed it as soon as Clarke woke up in her mindspace, because the wall right behind her bed was completely different and, most obviously, featured a huge drawing of season 5/6 Bellamy, to Madi in shock collar. (Not to be confused with another drawing of the same scene of Madi in shock collar, next to a drawing of a smiling Madi, which was and still is on the wall to the left of the door.) Another new drawing on the same wall is the season 4 scene of Jasper showing the Arkadians the list, and there are other drawings that have been moved around. After rewatching the episode, I noticed a lot of other differences as well. See the screenshots for comparison in this post.

The fact they reworked the entire room for this episode suggests that the changing walls reflect the way that Clarke’s mind works - some memories are more prominent than others, or are brought back from her subconscious, and they also cluster in different ways. But the main reason the prop department made an effort to change the drawings was most likely because they wanted to focus on different images this time. So the scene of Clarke waking up immediately shows, most prominently, Bellamy next to Madi – which may mean that Clarke is now letting herself think of Bellamy more and in a different way, knowing he is trying so hard to save her and how much she means to him – unlike in 6x07, when she was scared to face him and afraid that he could never forgive her.

Another reason for the reworked walls is so Josephine and Clarke can focus on the drawing of Tondc after the bomb, which was already there in 6x07, but is now in a different place and larger, covering the entire wall opposite of Clarke’s bed. (More on that below.)

One of the reasons Josephine was such an effective villain is because she was a "shadow " character to Clarke, with both many similarities and sharp contrasts. Josie is, in many ways, what Clarke haters (in universe and in the fandom) say that Clarke is. The show seemed to purposefully play with the parallels between them, between the Lightbournes and the Griffins, while the Gabriel/Josephine relationship was played as a parallel and contrast to Bellamy/Clarke, especially throughout episodes 6x09 and 6x10, even down to the casting of all the actors who played the former two characters.

Episode 6x07 Nevermind was mostly focused on loss, grief and guilt. Clarke’s spirit was almost broken by her trauma and her guilt over the deaths she caused directly or indirectly, especially those of people close to her (e.g. blaming herself for Maya’s death and for Jasper’s downward spiral it caused), or even those she almost caused (Blodreina blaming her for the times she left Octavia to die, but also for her greatest regret, leaving Bellamy to die in Polis). We saw that her darkest place was about the trauma caused by the deaths of her lovers, Finn and Lexa, the primal traumas that Josephine referred to, and Clarke uncovered Josephine’s primal trauma, Dave’s suicide. While we don’t know for sure what previously happened between Josephine and Dave, the way those memories were paralleled made me think he was Josie’s Finn, so to speak. (If you don’t think that comparison is fitting, remember that Clarke rejected Finn once he made up his mind about her, that he turned into a stalker by season 2, did something terrible and basically caused his own death, which caused a lot of trauma to Clarke, and her first retreat into the “Love is weakness” mentality.)

But this time, Josephine’s memory that was focused one of her and Gabriel, which represents love and happiness for her. It is my second favorite scene of 6x10, and it isvery beautifully done, with the music and the cinematography giving it a dreamlike quality and conveying the romance between those two, which we hadn't seen much on screen even though it plays such an important role this season. (The choice of songs used on The 100 is always on point – and the song “Apocalypse” by Cigarettes After Sex is perfect for the show in general, and contributed a lot to making this scene what it was.) It felt romantic and dreamlike because it is Josephine's happy place and a memory she didn't want to give up - but we were also reminded of the disturbing aspects of it - through Gabriel’s obvious discomfort and guilt (he didn’t want to be brought back, but after having killed at least 46 people to bring Josie back, he couldn’t have held it against her that she did the same) and the fact that neither of them were in their original body - reminding us of the fact that many innocent people were murdered to make those 160 years of romance and happiness possible.

Josephine looked lost in her memory, which made Clarke look at her in a different way, seeing some humanity in her, as it is the first time Josephine showed genuine love for someone. Clarke easily empathizes with people and is usually inclined to see the good in them (though she had almost lost that ability, as we saw in Eden: “There are no good guys”.), so she saw something she could relate to - it's no coincidence that she went on to believe, for a moment, that Josephine could get a second chance to be better.

Josephine: I wasn’t always like this.

Clarke: Trust me, I know the feeling. I mean, look around you.

Clarke: We can let the bad things that happened to us define who we are, or we can define who we are.

The scene of Tondc are the bomb are an easy visual way to convey the destruction that Clarke ended up causing while trying to save people she cared about - but it’s also arguably the first morally bad choice she has made, and the first time she genuinely started doubting herself and losing her moral certainty. It was also her letting a bunch of strangers die (and putting Bellamy’s sister at risk, which he blamed her for during their confrontation in 3x05) mostly to protect Bellamy. (Lexa, who convinced Clarke to do it, justified it with strategic reasons, which were her motivation, and, of course, it was also, by extension, about making sure that the mission of saving Delinquents from Mount Weather continues. But, for Clarke, it was mostly about removing a threat to Bellamy.) Is it meaningful that this is the bad memory Clarke brings Josephine’s attention to, right after seeing a memory of the romance between Gabriel and Josephine, which happened right after Josephine had brought Gabriel back, after he had brought her back - which meant murdering innocent people (two of the many) so the two of them could get their 160 years of happiness? Was Clarke thinking that maybe she could move on from the bad things like Tondc (and Mount Weather etc.) and do good in the future while also finding happiness, as Monty told them to?

And she was ready to extend that hope even to Josephine, someone she had previously seen killing babies and decided was so evil that she definitely needed to be stopped. For a moment, she thought Josephine could be stopped by some other way than destroying her. Wrongly, as it turns out - Josephine was defined by bad things in her past, as the last thing she did was try to kill Clarke in the exact same way Russell had killed her 236 years before, even saying the same lines: “Sanctum is mine”. Selfish, immoral people can fall in love and have relatable feelings, but they are still selfish and immoral.

One could say that Josie did feel responsibility for “her people”, as her reason for not letting Clarke live was because she thought Clarke would kill everyone in Sanctum. But her “people” she cares about really only consist of 12 8 people. We know she never cared about the rest of the people in Sanctum and never saw hosts as anything but bodies to be used, black blood gene carriers as anything but breeding cattle, and nulls are useless and disposable, or even vermin to be exterminated.

And no, Clarke would not kill everyone in Sanctum – not if there was any other way to save her people and stop the Primes. But people like Josephine are inclined to project and see the worst in other people.

Mindspace Clarke was in her season 5 gear this entire episode (unlike in 6x07, when she kept switching between looks from different periods of the show), but it’s interesting that she appeared as early season 5 Clarke, with pink streaks in her hair, when she fought Josephine in the end.

Eliza Taylor has really been knocking it out of the park all season, and she was fantastic again at the end of this episode – first playing Josephine in her reunion/goodbye with Gabriel, and later playing Clarke in her reunion with Bellamy. Chuku Modu was also excellent, and both of them did a great job convincing us that their characters have had a 236-long history, even though this was their first scene together. What made the ending even stronger was the parallel and contrast between Gabriel telling Josephine he still loved herm but that they had had their time, and he had to let her go; and Bellamy refusing to let Clarke go. Gabriel had to kill Josie, after having been the one to revive her the first time, while Bellamy brought Clarke back to life. The important thing there is that letting Josephine keep Clarke’s body – as Josie suggested to Gabriel, with her tempting suggestion that they use another life and then grow old and die together, taking out their mind drives - would have been morally wrong, while bringing Clarke back was the right thing to do. Gabriel had done a lot of bad things in the past – for over 160 years, he killed a lot of people to bring Josie back, he created the system of bodysnatching, and lived for a century as one of the Primes, before having his moral awakening. But better late than never. The look on his face as Clarke and Bellamy were hugging was a mix of many different feelings – he could easily relate to them, even though he had never met them before, and see the similarity with his determination to bring back the person he loved, and there was some sadness and maybe envy at seeing something he had but wouldn’t have anymore – but he also knew that, indeed, he and Josephine had had so much more time than regular people ever get, and should now let other people live and experience happiness.

It is nice to see Octavia acting like the old Octavia of season 2, with love and concern and happiness for her brother and for Clarke. But Bellamy’s awkwardness around his sister makes perfect sense, because he still doesn’t know anything about Octavia’s change of heart and personal growth, and she still hasn’t actually done anything to atone and show that she’s changed. He wasn’t willing to hug her back, but he did give her a little pat on the back, because he doesn’t really hate her, but you can’t just erase everything that happened between them.

Josephine is definitely dead now. As Gaia pointed out, the mind cannot be in two places at once. Just as there has been no copy of Clarke’s mind in the Flame, because she left it and Clarke’s mind has been in her own body since - Josephine stayed in the neural mesh instead of returning to the mind drive, so there can’t be a copy of her in the drive.

Meanwhile, in Sanctum…

Abby and Raven didn’t bring any reinforcements from the ship, because they had no idea about the things that have happened in Sanctum while they were away (Madi killing Miranda and attacking Delilah, Jordan’s injury, Russell arresting all the Earth people, Bellamy taking Josephine to CoG territory, or even the fact Clarke had been bodysnatched). They finally learned about Clarke’s “death”. Unfortunately, with the events happening so fast, we didn’t get to focus much on their reactions.

After reading the released script pages for the scene between the Earthkru in captivity, I think that it was a big mistake to cut some of the lines – Miller’s and Raven’s exchange about Jordan, and Raven’s comment that she is sure Clarke will also be fine, because she has Bellamy to save her. Both of these would have gone a long way to show 1) that our protagonists do care about Jordan and are worried about him and 2) that Raven does care about Clarke, which a lot of the fandom is doubting this season.

Raven seems to have had some subtle character development – she’s not inclined to be mean and judgmental to people as she was in the first few episodes, but is taking a cue from Kane and trying to be gentler and more compassionate as she talks to Murphy about him screwing up and about the importance of morality. (Are many Arkers religious? The idea of avoiding hell by doing morally right things certainly sounds like a religious one.)

Why are some fans now dissing Abby for her anger at Murphy? Fans wanted to see Abby upset over Clarke’s death, and now we see it, that’s not good, either? When she learned about Murphy’s betrayal, Abby must have also realized that it was Josephine, not Clarke, who convinced her to go with the plan of the Primes and put Kane in another body, so she’s aware that Murphy helped Josephine manipulate her, pretending to be Clarke and saying she’s doing it all out of concern for her. Of course she’s furious.

Emori is again trying to defend Murphy, by presenting his actions in the best possible light, but not lying: “He was trying to protect us all. When he learned she was alive, he did the right thing… Eventually.”

One of the things I love the most about the Sanctum plot is this episode is that it showed that Russell is really the worst. I’ve hated him from 6x03, but many fans believed he would turn out to be not-such-a-bad-guy. He looks sad as he does bad things, but then he does them anyway, and justifies his actions, and while he may appear less ruthless than his wife or daughter, in the end, he is just a bigger hypocrite. He is a megalomaniac who thinks he is better than anyone else. And oh, God, could he be more hypocritical? Dude actually thinks he and the Primes are somehow morally superior to the Earth people, calls them criminals and think he is doing justice by burning them at the stake. Justice for what, exactly? Because they didn’t take revenge when Russell and his wife tried to murder and bodysnatched one of them? When he (as he believed) murdered Clarke, he thought “Sorry” was good enough, but when Madi, a child grieving for her mother, lashed out in revenge and killed one of the Primes (who can come back), this is a crime that he needs to get “justice” for by executing one of the people who had nothing to do with it? Then he decides to burn them all, because one of his own people killed Simone after learning the truth about them, realizing that he had let them take and kill his baby son? I guess, in his mind, no one except the Primes qualifies as real people? (And not even all the Primes matter. He doesn’t seem to care that his wife and daughter wiped four drives and murdered the Lee family for good.)

Unlike Russell, who was obviously never going to turn around and be a good guy, Ryker is a character torn between doing the right thing, and being loyal to his family or ‘family’. (Priya is his mother, but Russell and the others are also the only family he’s had for 200 years, after he arrived to Sanctum as a teenage boy.) Which makes him wishy washy (although for understandable reasons) and a character whose actions can’t be always predicted.

When Echo told him: ‘Echo and Ryker “Admit it, it feels good to be on the right side”, she may have been talking from her own experience. But I’d expect someone like Echo, an experienced spy / assassin, to be more suspicious and careful and not so trusting as she was with him.

It’s very fitting that Russell is burning people at the stake (just as Cadogan, another cult leader, did) – as this was the traditional method of execution of “heretics”.

The episode was very tense until the moment when we learned all the Earthkru were going to be burned. All the tension was gone - one character dying is something that seemed likely, but all of them? That was obviously not gonna happen.

But poor Tai did get burned. And Ryker must be feeling pretty guilty now – he initially caused Tai to turn against the Primes by telling him the truth about them, although he didn’t predict Tai would kill Simone; and then he stopped Echo from assassinating Russell, who went on to burn Tai at the stake.

Echo remarked that Gaia only cared about Madi, even after she had banished her. But the truth is slightly more complicated – as a Flamekeeper who deeply believes in the Grounder faith, she cares only about Madi as the Commander, but she is also ready to consider killing Madi, if it saves people from a Chaotic Evil Commander, Sheidheda 2.0 (who was apparently so bad that it would make people long for the days of Blodreina). The relationship between Commanders and their Flamekeepers is complicated, and we learn that Sheidheda murdered three of his Flamekeepers (so, two more after his mentor), until he was killed by the fourth one. But the whole thing begs the question, even more than before, why does anyone think that putting the Flame into people, especially children, is a good idea? The idea is to help new Commanders use the knowledge and wisdom of the previous ones – but that doesn’t really work if one of them is incredibly evil, does it? All this time, we have only seen the Flame do something helpful once, and that was in 5x12 when it helped Clarke deal with her emotional issues. Other than that, it doesn’t seem to have helped a lot (especially with the Grounders somehow forgetting all the technology, in spite of having Becca’s memories). Other than that, we know that the previous Commanders were against Lexa abandoning the “blood must have blood” policy, and were not the ones to stop Madi from killing all the prisoners of war in 5x13. So, is it really worth keeping it, when it presents such a huge danger?

This is why I like this Dark Madi storyline – it really shows the dangers of making a child Commander and letting them have too much power, which season 5 glossed over, because Madi ascending was a means to an end. Now, contrary to what some fans have been complaining about, no one who is currently on the planet, other than Madi and Gaia herself, actually cares but the Grounder religion or considers Madi their leader, Bellamy and Clarke even left her sleeping while they took the team with them to the planet. But the fact is that is there are hundreds of people sleeping on the ship - the Grounder part of Wonkru – who do take Madi’s authority seriously and would follow her. Gaia pointed that out – the danger of what could happen if Madi goes back to the ship and wakes up her sleeping army, while she’s being demon child controlled/influenced by the Dark Commander.

Let’s take another moment to appreciate the fact that Simone wasn’t against burning a child, but only against wasting a potential host. Russell may have had an objection on the grounds of her being a child, but considering the fact he was OK with sacrificing newborn babies, I’m pretty sure he also is mostly concerned about not wasting a good host until she comes of age. The Primes are the worst.

Murphy saved the day with his quick thinking, suggesting a way to make new hosts, in order to stop the execution and saved all their lives, while Raven again proved to be a great problem-solver by coming up with a way to isolate and delete Sheidheda from the Flame and save Madi, and used bone marrow extraction as an excuse. It was very lucky that Russell was either suspicious, or just being himself, when he refused to be the bone marrow donor to save his wife, instead ordering it extracted from Madi – which will be a great opportunity to fix the Sheidheda problem. No, the Primes should not be allowed to create new hosts, but this is clearly a temporary solution, to buy time. (And BTW, contrary to what some fans think, bone marrow extraction doesn’t necessarily mean torture and certainly not death, people donate bone marrow to save people’s lives in real life, and no, the doctors who do it are not evil or Mountain Men-like. Nor did, for that matter, Abby’s experiments to find a solution to save the human race in Becca’s lab in season 4. Fandom seems to forget that the Mountain Men were killing the Delinquents only because 1) they needed too much bone marrow, and 2) they were d1cks and didn’t give a damn about other people’s lives.)

Questions and speculation for the rest of the season

Among brief glimpses of Josephine’s memories we saw spilling into Clarke’s mindspace, the one we have have not seen before or heard referenced featured a guy reading a book. In the end credits, he is called “Adjustor”. This must have something to do with the “Adjustment Protocol” from the title of episode 6x12, whatever exactly that is. The Primes have mentioned that a certain period for adjustment is necessary after waking up in a new body.

Why did Rose ask Clarke “Are you here to take us home” in 6x02? Will long-running mystery get resolved by the end of this season, or is it something for season 7?

What happened with Diyoza in the Anomaly? Or with Octavia? I think we’ll get a hint about that in the finale, but it will be the big theme for season 7.

Will Sheidheda be defeated by the end of season 6? Will Madi keep the Flame? If the Sheidheda problem/Dark Madi storyline continues long enough for Bellamy and Clarke to come back and learn about it, I expect Bellamy to feel very guilty about the consequences of Madi taking the Flame that he had not foreseen. (He never really gave much thought to the Flame itself, he just saw it as a pragmatic means to defeat Blodreina ensure peace and save the people he loves, and I don’t think he seriously thought it posed much danger to Madi beyond the danger she was in from Blodreina.) Fans have complained that this issue has not been addressed between Clarke and Bellamy this season, while we have seen Clarke feel guilty and apologize to Bellamy for leaving him in Polis.

Just how brainwashed are the majority of people in Sanctum and how long will they continue like this? They were obviously uncomfortable watching Tai die at the stake. We’ve seen what happened when Ryker revealed the truth to Tai. Delilah’s parents were similarly shocked and unhappy. But I’m afraid it would be too optimistic to hope that they all turn against the Primes, which would make the resolution way too easy, as there are currently just three active Sanctum Primes – Russell, Priya and Ryker. Gavin’s widow, for instance, is still fully loyal to the Primes, but she seems convinced that they are gods and that hosts get to be “one with the Primes”, rather than deleted from existence.

I’m sure Jordan will recover, but will he continue defending Priya, hoping to get Delilah back, or will he soon realize it is impossible, and what will his reaction be then?

(SPOILER) The synopsis for 6x12 mentions a “special Naming Day”. I like the idea that this will be the official ceremony for Josephine VIII – because it’s now time for Clarke to pretend that she is Josephine, just as Josephine pretended to be Clarke in order to fool the Primes and their loyalists, for a while. Clarke has a huge advantage there, as she’s gotten to know Josephine quite well.

Rating: 10/10

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biofunmy · 4 years

Text

100 Best Memes Of The Decade

Debora Westra for BuzzFeed News

This decade, memes became something not just for a handful of internet nerds who lurked on message boards; memes are now for everyone. The online culture of this decade hasn’t just changed the words we use, it’s changed how we express ourselves. Huge technological shifts of the 2010s led to this: widespread smartphone adoption and the rise of newfangled social media platforms like Vine. Memes also became a business — brands used meme-speak and accounts like @fuckjerry made big bucks by reposting memes.

To determine the ranking of this list, we considered the overall popularity of a meme, its longevity, and historical importance — what kind of impact it had on other memes and internet culture. Here they are:

100.

Yodeling Walmart Kid

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In 2018, 10-year-old Mason Ramsey sang a Hank Williams song in a Walmart, and the internet went nuts. But this time, the reaction to a precocious kid singing somewhat oddly (a sort of yodeling) was very different than it was in 2011 when Rebecca Black sang “Friday.” Instead of mocking the kid, the internet loved him, declaring the clip a “bop” that “slaps.” This is the change that happened over the decade: Instead of relishing cringe, the more memetic and ironic thing to do is embrace and love something like a child yodeling in a big-box store. Ramsey has gone on to have some version of mainstream success, performing country music to live crowds, and, well, good for him. —K.N.

99.

Moth Memes

Twitter: @thebobpalmer

Much like a moth is drawn to a flame, we were drawn to memes about moths and their unquenchable thirst for lamps in summer 2018. They got their start with a Reddit post that July, a close-up photo someone took of a moth, which people soon began captioning and photoshopping until it took on a life of its own as a meme. There’s really not much you can say about moth memes, besides that they are funny and good and I will love them until I die. —J.R.

Every generation has its subcultures, and in 2019, Gen Z’s was undoubtedly VSCO girls. The aesthetic comes with a number of signifiers: scrunchies (piled high on the wrist), Hydro Flask water bottles (covered in stickers), puka shell necklaces, oversized T-shirts, Crocs, Fjällräven backpacks, metal straws (save the turtles!), Carmex lip balm, and the ubiquitous catchphrases, “sksksk — and I oop.” The easy-breezy look, named for the photo editing app VSCO, was essentially “Tumblr girl” meets “basic white girl.” Though the style became trendy in earnest through Instagram and internet stars like Emma Chamberlain, it catapulted to popularity (and mockery) on TikTok. —J.R.

97.

Duck Army

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Kevin Innes, a Norwegian twentysomething, was in a store with his girlfriend one day when they came across a bin of squeaking duck-shaped (technically, the toy is a pelican) dog toys. To embarrass his girlfriend, he pressed down on the whole bin, and an unholy cacophony that sounds like the wheezing sum total of human misery was released. Innes posted to Facebook, then YouTube, and then someone else ripped his YouTube video and posted it to Vine, where it went viral. The beauty of this 2015 meme was a perfect Vine: absurd, easy to understand, surprising, and based on something that happened in real life. —K.N.

96.

Deep-Fried Memes

reddit.com

You might not even know what they’re called if you saw them, but a deep-fried meme is one of those pictures that has been screenshotted, edited, and reuploaded across Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit so many times that has started to degrade in quality. At first this deep-frying process was largely genuine, kids refiltering and remixing each other’s images. But as the phenomenon became more known, a second wave of ironically deep-fried images started to appear. It’s a fairly silly thing on its surface, but it also speaks to the innate desire for people to share stuff online. If Instagram had a share button, there’s a good chance this sort of thing would have never started happening in the first place. The walled culs-de-sac of proprietary platforms will never be able to stop the world’s teens from sharing a picture of Peter Griffin from Family Guy smoking a huge blunt. —R.B.

95.

Twitter Sign Bunny

|￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣| vaccines save lives you stupid motherfucker |＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿| (__/) || (•ㅅ•) || / 　づ

02:12 PM – 01 Dec 2019

A series of ASCII image memes popped up on Twitter this decade: “Howdy, I’m the sheriff of,” “In this house we…” “got dat” cat, a stick figure falling off a building, or even the simple ¯_(ツ)_/¯ or (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻. These work in part because they visually take up a lot of space on the Twitter timeline, making them stick out and be more likely to be interacted with or remembered. Plus, there implies some element that the poster has some technical abilities to be able to summon the ASCII. But it’s the bunny that’s had staying power over those other ones. —K.N.

94.

Doggos and Puppers

This is Rey. She’s a very puptective doggo mommo. Will grrbork bork at any potential threat. 13/10 heartwarming as h*ck

12:00 AM – 20 Oct 2017

Dogs have been man’s best friend for thousands of years, but only around 2015 did they evolve into “doggos” and “puppers.” “Doggo-speak,” as NPR called it, arose in Facebook groups like “Dogspotting” before exploding on Twitter with the @dog_rates Twitter account. The lingo is characterized by cutesy nicknames for dogs (Samoyeds are “floofs” or “clouds,” corgis are “loaves,” any huge fluffy dog is a big boofin’ woofer) and onomatopoeia (a doggo can “bork,” or stick their tongues out and do a “blep” or “mlem”). To me, it’s a fascinating as “h*ck” thing that an entire dialect, with all its own grammar and syntax and vocabulary rules, could spring up in an organic way online. —J.R.

93.

Planking

CC BY-SA 3.0 / Donkey100 / Via commons.wikimedia.org

In 2011, everyone was taking pictures lying facedown on the ground, rigid as a board. It was a thing, and that thing was called planking. Plankers would assume the pose in unexpected places — atop a car, inside a supermarket freezer, even across two camels — then get a buddy to snap a picture. The trend got so big The Office even did a cold open about it. Soon, it spun off into other photo pose trends, including owling and leisure diving, but it also sadly led to at least one death.

Eight years later, these photo memes can feel a bit old-school, but they represent a key moment when ready access to cameras (both the digital kind and iPhones, which were still pretty new) was still a novelty, and people were leaning into ways to use it creatively. —J.R.

The point of bros icing bros was simple: At any point during the day, present a warm bottle of Smirnoff Ice to your bro, and he has to get down on one knee and chug the cursed beverage. However, if he produces his own bottle immediately, he is exempted, and it is you who must chug. This prank was the peak of IRL-memeing in 2011. Smirnoff denied any sort of marketing stunt, which makes sense if you consider that the central conceit is that being forced to drink a Smirnoff Ice is a form of punishment. The meme threatened a resurgence in 2017, but never really caught on again. —K.N.

91.

Bone App The Teeth

In 2016, someone posted a pic of white bread just absolutely smothered in corn and captioned it with a phrase that ignited a million memes: “bone app the teeth.” Those four words — sometimes edited to “bone apple tea,” “bone ape tit,” or even more bonkers iterations — became the battle cry for shitty food porn posters everywhere. It’s a pretty simple meme, but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to look at a picture of Goldfish sushi or a chicken noodle watermelon without completely losing it. —J.R.

90.

Clowns

Instagram: @davie_dave

Remember that brief moment in fall 2016 when towns around the US were overtaken by mass hysteria over scary clowns being spotted in the woods (which then immediately stopped being a concern when Trump got elected and everyone suddenly had other stuff to worry about)? Yeah, that was a thing that happened. Clowns had quite a ~moment~ in the latter half of the 2010s. Less than a year after the clown sightings, a remake of the horror movie It came out, prompting a ton of memes of Pennywise in the sewer and dancing (and, of course, people wanting to fuck the It clown). The clown memes just kept going from there, with clown photos being used as reaction images to illustrate our most dumbass moments. Sometimes I wonder if those clowns are still in the woods. I hope they’re happy. —J.R.

89.

Kim Kardashian Breaks the Internet

Jean-Paul Goude / papermag.com

In November 2014, Kim Kardashian appeared on the cover of Paper magazine bearing her whole entire ass. It went massively viral, and people immediately got to work photoshopping it into a centaur, Miley Cyrus’s “Wrecking Ball” (which had just come out), the turkey in a Norman Rockwell painting, you name it. The phrase on the cover “break the internet,” would go on to become timeworn, but it all started with Kim K and her big, glossy butt. —J.R.

88.

Bed Intruder

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In July 2010, Antoine Dodson appeared on the local news in Alabama after a home invader attempted to assault his sister, saying: “He’s climbin’ in your windows, he’s snatchin’ your people up… So y’all need to hide your kids, hide your wife…” The news clip went viral, and a few days later, Dodson’s words were remixed into the Auto-Tuned “Bed Intruder Song,” which made it onto the Billboard 100 charts and become the most-viewed YouTube video of 2010.

“Bed Intruder Song” captured two powerful vectors that would come to define the rest of the decade: a normal person being propelled to some sort of viral fame, and a critical backlash over the exploitative race, gender, and class dynamics. At the time, some people pointed out that turning a video of poor black man expressing anguish over the attempted sexual assault of his sister was problematic. Years later, this feels even more true. Dodson went on to a strange post-virality career, with a reality show that never got off the ground, celebrity boxing matches, controversial statements about being gay, and a Trump endorsement. —K.N.

87.

Alex From Target

Alex LeBoeuf / Twitter: @auscalum (deleted)

In November 2014, a young woman tweeted a photo of a teenage checkout clerk at Target with Alex on the nametag. Her tweet was simply, “YOOOOOOOO,” signaling that, well, this teen boy was cute. The tweet went viral, and people fell in love with this mysterious Alex from Target, creating memes and tributes in his image, leading anyone over the age of 23 to wonder: What the fuck is happening here?

There was some legitimate confusion over how and why Alex’s photo blew up. An internet marketing company stepped forward, claiming that it had gotten the original girl to tweet the photo of Alex as a viral marketing stunt, and seeded the meme with inorganic retweets and promotion. But the woman who made the tweet (whose Twitter account is now suspended) said she had never heard of the marketing company, and that she just randomly found the photo on Tumblr and tweeted it out, and it seems that the marketing company was trying to claim stolen viral valor.

But the ending wasn’t so great for the guy at the center of it. Alex LaBeouf, who went by Alex Lee as a stage name, eventually dropped out of high school because he had missed so many days to fly to Los Angeles for appearances on talk shows. He was homeschooled and joined the 2015 DigiTour, a tour for social media stars, mainly Vine stars at the time. In a 2017 video, he said that his managers at the time had stolen $30,000 from him, and since then he’s abandoned his public social media accounts. —K.N.

86.

Insane Clown Posse’s “Miracles”

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The music video for “Miracles” debuted in April 2010. The song had been kicking around since 2009, but the video is what really did it. It’s been viewed 18 million times — and watching it back in 2019, it is still just as deranged as it was when it debuted. A lot of the meme songs on this list exist in that uncanny valley of like “misunderstood banger.” I want to be clear: “Miracles” is not that. It is a nonsense song. And while it’s best remembered for its “fuckin’ magnets, how do they work” and “Magic everywhere in this bitch” lines, I would argue the best part is the line about pelicans: “I fed a fish to a pelican at Frisco Bay / It tried to eat my cellphone, he ran away / And music is magic, pure and clean / You can feel it and hear it but it can’t be seen.” Damn, that’s real. —R.B.

85.

First-World Problems

Thinkstock / Twitter: @ughshaye

When you’re eating nachos and one stabs the roof of your mouth, when one pillow is too low but two pillows is too high; these sorts of issues — annoying, but generally indicating your life is pretty easy and privileged — were best summarized by the early-2010s macro image “First-World Problems.” A lot of things feel dated about “first-world problems” memes, ranging from the style of the image all the way to the use of the concept of countries being first world vs. third world. But the meme was also one of the first concerning social privilege, which many people would learn about for the first time in the 2010s. —J.R.

84.

Kylie Jenner Lip Challenge

vine.co

Kylie Jenner dominated the 2010s, particularly with the launch of her Kylie Lip Kits in 2015. The now-billionaire’s lips had been the subject of gossip and envy that year when she suddenly debuted thick, pillowy lips (the result of lip fillers, though she denied it until two years later). The star kicked off something of a lip-plumping craze, and teens starting trying to plump their own lips by sticking them in shot glasses and sucking till they swelled up. Needless to say, it did not come doctor-recommended.

The rise in popularity of injectable fillers and the instabaddie takeover are inextricably linked to the Kardashian/Jenner family’s influence. Each trend made way for the other, clearing the way for a bunch of teens to damage their faces to score Kylie-level lips. —J.R.

83.

Sad Keanu

nerdlikeyou.com

Keanu Reeves kickstarted the decade as a meme after a paparazzi photo of him eating a sandwich on a park bench was shared on 4chan. “Instead of Chuck Norris, let’s make Keanu Reeves a meme,” one redditor wrote as the image started to spread. Which is interesting to think about — that this particular decade, one so heavily shaped by increasingly radicalized social media platforms, began with users of heavily male communities like 4chan and Reddit deciding to abandon an aggressively masculine meme like Chuck Norris and instead embrace a picture of disheveled loneliness. Splash News, the agency behind the photo, has attempted to remove the picture from the internet via DMCA takedowns, but Reeves and his sandwich have proved too popular (and photoshoppable) to really scrub away. As for how Reeves feels about the whole thing, at the time he told the BBC, “Do I wish that I didn’t get my picture taken while I was eating a sandwich on the streets of New York? Yeah.” —R.B.

82.

“Haven’t Heard That Name in Years”

Twitter: @goIfkart

As you read this list, you’re probably at various points looking at a meme, taking a drag on a cigarette, and saying, “Gangnam Style? Haven’t heard that name in years.” —K.N.

If you dumped a bucket of ice over your head in summer 2014, it was probably to raise money for ALS research in the Ice Bucket Challenge. The challenge involved participants dousing themselves in ice water on video, then nominating others to either do the same or make a donation to fund ALS research. Many did both, using the viral videos to promote the cause, and the ALS Association wound up raising more than $100 million in a month. The rare meme that did demonstrable good. Sadly, the man who inspired the meme died in December 2019. —J.R.

80.

“I’m in Me Mum’s Car, Broom Broom”

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A Vine of a British girl in her mum’s car (broom broom) was a perfect Vine: It makes no sense, it doesn’t follow any known comedy format, it’s vaguely cringe, and yet it’s so silly it’s guaranteed to make you laugh. The brief and glorious life of Vine thrived on these moments of surprising and unexpected humor. TikTok is the closest thing we have now to Vine, and yet it requires a certain knowledge of its memes and tropes to “get” it. “I’m in me mum’s car, broom broom” only requires you to be a human with a pulse to find Tish Simmonds’ 2014 masterpiece funny. —K.N.

79.

The Rent Is Too Damn High

Kathy Kmonicek / AP

The thing about Jimmy McMillan’s slogan for the 2010 New York gubernatorial campaign is that he’s absolutely correct: The rent IS too damn high, and he was accurately predicting the coming housing market crisis in New York City. McMillan was a minor local politics figure, having run for mayor a few years earlier. But it was the televised debates for the governor’s race in 2010 that brought him national fame for his flamboyant facial hair, gloves, and his one-issue campaign platform. He was parodied on Saturday Night Live, and a meme was born. —K.N.

78.

“What Does the Fox Say?”

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Few music videos of 2010s hit it bigger than one by Norwegian comedy duo Ylvis, as they tried to answer a perplexing question: What does the fox say? The video — which featured a cast of people dressed up in animal costumes and a whole slew of sounds a fox might purportedly say — was named the top trending video on YouTube in 2013. It’s a video that feels definitively old, and it’s hard to imagine it coming out now and being earnestly enjoyed, but we were doing lots of things more earnestly back then. And I’d bet you anything you still know the words. —J.R.

77.

Hot Dogs or Legs

times-new-romann.tumblr.com

Showing off your tan in 2013? The trendiest vacation humblebrag in 2013 was snapping a pic of your thighs and captioning it “hot dogs or legs.” The meme first went viral on Tumblr but had a long life on Instagram afterward. This was mostly annoying, unless it was actually hot dogs, which was pretty funny. –J.R.

76.

Darude’s “Sandstorm”

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One of the bright spots about the 2010s is the way that young people immediately understood and identified the parts of shit culture of the ’90s and ’00s, and mercilessly mocked it. Guy Fieri, Shrek, Bee Movie, and the hit 1999 techno song “Sandstorm” by Darude. To be fair, “Sandstorm” is probably the best and most well-known trance song, but still, it’s incredible silly. It also became a huge meme to namedrop the song in the comment sections of random YouTube videos. What’s silliest about it is the idea that it has lyrics (it does not), and they’re simply dun dun dun dun dun dun DUN DUN DUN DUN DUN dun dun dun dun. —K.N.

75.

*Record Scratch*

*record scratch* *freeze frame* Yup, that’s me. You’re probably wondering how I ended up in this situation.

03:44 PM – 25 Aug 2016

*record scratch* *freeze frame* Yup, that’s me. I’m a meme you could not stop seeing all over your feed in 2016. The meme was based on the clichéd movie trope in which a protagonist would begin to explain how they got themself into a ~wacky situation~. The meme spread quickly, with Twitter users aligning the text with all sorts of images. This was not the first text-based Twitter meme, nor would it be the last, but its takeover was so big it eventually became a Twitter trope in and of itself. —J.R.

74.

Double Rainbow

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What makes Paul Vasquez’s effusive awe at seeing a double rainbow distinctly from 2010 as opposed to 2019 is how it’s barely what we’d call a “meme” now. It’s a viral video, sure, and it was one of the first truly huge and popular ones. In many ways, even though it happened in 2010, it resembled the memes of the 2000s more: It went viral after Jimmy Kimmel’s show account tweeted it, and it spread over email and Gchat from person to person.

The things we think of as memes now are mostly defined by being iterative: a photo you can write new captions over and over ad nauseum and can mean a million different things. But “Double Rainbow” is just a funny video – you watch it once, you laugh, and that’s it. It’s more of the Tosh.0 version of the internet where there are funny things to be found than the Distracted Boyfriend or Pepe the frog version where there are existing memes that we make our own meaning out of. The monetization of the video was also (by current standards) primitive: He appeared in a Microsoft ad. —K.N.

73.

Mannequin Challenge

There were a lot of dance crazes and video fads in the 2010s — the suddenly widespread use of phones with cameras made it possible — but few grew as big as the Mannequin Challenge of 2016. The videos involved standing as still as a statue, usually with the song “Black Beatles” by Rae Sremmurd playing. The meme’s origins lie with a group of Florida high schoolers, and within just a few weeks there were Mannequin Challenge videos from pro sports teams, then– presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and quite possibly your family on Thanksgiving. The Mannequin Challenge went viral because it was the stationary dance craze version of the “Cha Cha Slide” — it was family-friendly, everyone could catch on pretty quickly, and it was something that could bring everyone together. —J.R.

72.

“Harlem Shake”

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In early 2013, a dance meme was born. Set to the techno song “Harlem Shake” by Baauer, the premise was to start off dancing very mildly, and when the beat drops, all hell breaks loose and a large group of people dance wildly. It’s stupid, I know. As quickly as the meme came to life, it died: A few days after the first few videos went viral, BuzzFeed’s office did a version (Ryan is in the horse mask; I run and hide into a conference room), and six days after that, the Today show anchors did one, which seemed to everyone to signal the end of the meme. But the real nail in the coffin was in 2017 when FCC chair Ajit Pai did a video to help explain the end of Net Neutrality. —K.N.

71.

Bottle Flipping

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If you were a teen in 2016, you probably flipped a bottle or two. The trend really took off when high school student Mike Senatore executed a flawless flip at his school talent show to rapturous applause. After that, everyone was flipping bottles, and a “replica bottle” signed by Senatore himself fetched over $11,000 on eBay. Teens do all sorts of kooky things, but to this day, it’s hard to watch a video of a perfect bottle flip and NOT feel unbridled joy and triumph. —J.R.

70.

Bronies

Katie Notopoulos / BuzzFeed News

The world first learned of bronies when in 2011 Wired wrote about the adult men who loved the rebooted My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic show. For the next five years, bronies seemed to dominate every aspect of internet culture — they were rampant on Reddit, 4chan, DeviantArt, Twitter, Tumblr, and even IRL conventions (and of course, horrible, horrible version of pony porn, known as “clop”). The fandom morphed through every phase of an online community, including a small faction of fascist bronies, creating fan art of the colorful horses in Nazi uniforms.

No group since furries has been as routinely mocked as the bronies. And yet, now that they’ve sort of faded away slightly, we sort of miss them. —K.N.

68.

Bee Movie

quilavastudy.tumblr.com

According to all known laws of memes, there is no way Bee Movie should have been able to go viral. And yet, posting the entire script to the 2007 movie somehow became a big Tumblr meme. The reasons for this semi-flop movie becoming a meme aren’t totally clear. Perhaps it was the realization of how grotesque the plot is (a bee and a human woman fall in love), perhaps it was that star Jerry Seinfeld was having a moment. Or maybe because it was just because it’s random and shitty movie, which is inherently funny. Unlike beloved childhood characters Shrek or SpongeBob, Bee Movie’s mediocrity is what makes it memeable. The crummier, the more nonsensical the meme, the better. The layers of ironic detachment have to be so thick that to pretend to love Bee Movie and post its entire script is something only someone with a truly online brain in 2015 could be capable of. —K.N.

67.

¯_(ツ)_/¯ (Shruggie)

Fun fact: The symbol in the center of the shruggie is a Japanese Katakana character called “Tsu.” It’s commonly used in Japanese fiction to represent the end of a line of dialogue. Kind of perfect right? Nothing left to say? Shruggie time. The shruggie was the perfect emoticon of the Obama era: a slightly worried-looking, yet pleasantly numb smirk, throwing its hands up at everything’s lack of meaning. Also, it just looks really cool! Things are going to probably only get worse over the next decade, so I say we bring the shruggie back. Let’s all really get into casual nihilism. I mean, everything’s fucked, so why not, right? ¯_(ツ)_/¯ —R.B.

66.

Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe”

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The infectious pop song became a hit in early 2012, and by late spring, the distinctive rhyme scheme of the chorus had become a meme. Example: This still of Marty McFly and his mom in Back to the Future: “Hey I just met you / and this is crazy / but I’m from the future / and I’m your baby.” Or a tweet by @jwherrman: “HEY, I JUST MET YOU / AND MY DOG IS CRAZY / WOOF WOOF WOOF WOOF / HE HAS RABIES.” —K.N.

65.

Dashcon

notsafeforweabs.tumblr.com

There was a time right around the middle of this last decade where the internet was a largely more innocent place. Nerdy fandom subcultures built around TV shows like My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, Sherlock, Doctor Who, and Supernatural weren’t quite in the mainstream yet, nor did people fully understand the realities of what happens when you bring a bunch of people from the internet together in real life. That giddy naivete died with Dashcon. The unofficial Tumblr-based convention wasn’t quite a Fyre Festival–level disaster, but the level of secondhand embarrassment it generated seems to have killed an entire mode of internet use. One could even argue that Tumblr — the little social network that could — lost its last bit of grip on the larger culture of the internet. From the sad photos of cosplayers sitting in a weird ball pit to the haunting photos of empty of showrooms to accusations later of fraud, for fandom internet there was a before and after Dashcon. Based on things like Tanacon and Fyre Festival, though, it seems like those who do not learn from Dashcon are doomed to repeat Dashcon. —R.B.

64.

Galaxy Brain

reddit.com

This 2017 meme has staying power because it’s so simple and applies to so many things. The format shows several different concepts in increasing order of brainpower, culminating with something ridiculous. It speaks so perfectly to how we argue and discuss any topic online: a basic idea, a smarter take, slowly devolving into anarchy. —K.N.

63.

Loss.JPG

cad-comic.com

There’s really no way to sugarcoat what loss.JPG is. It’s a four-panel web comic about a miscarriage that has evolved into some weird Where’s Waldo? game played on social media. The story behind the infamous comic is that Ctrl-Alt-Del creator Tim Buckley wanted to make his series more mature. His audience recoiled at the mature storyline and found the whole thing incredibly lame. To make matters worse, the text-less comic was uploaded to the site with the filename loss.JPG. There’s a good chance you’ve come across loss.JPG parodies and never even realized that’s what they were. Buckley has spoken a bit about the meme over the years. “Perhaps I had miscalculated my demographic’s ability/willingness to approach such a sensitive subject matter,” he said. “As much as I hate to admit it because I certainly don’t want to make light of the subject matter itself, I found them quite amusing.”

But still the meme remains. And there’s a good possibility it will continue to stick around well into the next decade, if only because it’s too tasteless to ever really address directly. —R.B.

62.

Baby Shark

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The origins of why a techno version of a public domain campfire song became accurately described as “‘Sicko Mode’ for babies” isn’t totally clear. Normally, internet culture has no interest in what the parents of young infants and toddlers are doing (gross, old people). And yet somehow the catchy story of a multigenerational shark family (doo doo doo doo) meant for babies became inescapable. In a review for the live stage show of Baby Shark, the New Yorker wrote, “It wasn’t Disney or Nickelodeon executives who plucked it from among the millions of other videos on YouTube. Instead, babies themselves made it a juggernaut, by relentlessly clicking Play on their parents’ phones. It might be the first genuine example of baby pop culture.” —K.N.

61.

Infinity War Memes

yoongis-home-moved.tumblr.com

TV shows and movies that become their own sort of visual meme language all tend to come from the same place emotionally. There seems to be a certain secret sauce for cracking through the zeitgeist, and it largely comes down to particular kind of glee people get from taking the piss out of something serious. Avengers: Infinity War wasn’t the first Marvel film to get memed (Bruce Banner’s “That’s my secret, Cap” line from The Avengers was the first big one), but Infinity War hit in a big way. I’d argue that all came down to its shocking ending where literally half of everyone’s favorite superheroes all died horribly. First were the Infinity War spoilers-without-context posts, followed by the “I don’t feel so good, Mr. Stark” memes, and then there were even thicc Thanos memes. Ultimately, Infinity War memes didn’t have a huge staying power, but it seems to have rewired the way audiences digest big blockbuster movies; if you jump on Twitter right as you get out of the theater and start retweeting memes, you suddenly don’t feel so silly for crying when Spider-Man dies. To be honest, thicc Thanos is much more traumatizing. —R.B.

60.

Binders Full of Women

bindersfullofwomen.tumblr.com

Mitt Romney made a truly weird gaffe in a 2012 debate when he answered a question about pay equality — describing how, as governor, he asked to see more women candidates for Cabinet positions and was shown “binders full of women.” Twitter, in peak parody account mode, immediately latched onto this weird and vaguely sexist turn of phrase. A parody Tumblr was made that posted photos of binders. People flocked to Amazon listings of binders to write funny reviews.

Now it seems laughable that this was the biggest gaffe of the election, the most shocking thing a politician said. Yet in the 2012 internet ecosystem, this perfectly played out a cycle of political memes that we don’t really have the stomach for anymore. No one’s making a “grab them by the pussy” Tumblr. —K.N.

59.

“Gangnam Style”

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Here’s the thing about Psy’s 2012 hit: It’s extremely good. The song is catchy, but it’s the visuals in the music video that propelled it to an international hit and the most-viewed YouTube video for years. It’s a video you want to watch more than once, one you want to show it to your friends. The fact that it was by an artist unfamiliar to most people outside of South Korea didn’t matter. The videos that would later best its YouTube record — “Despacito,” “See You Again” — did so more because of how long their respective songs stayed at the top of music charts than the nature of the video itself.

But “Gangnam Style” is a wildly entertaining as a video. The sets and backup characters change constantly, Psy’s style of deadpan serious rapping while lying on an elevator floor with a man in a cowboy hate gyrating over him is funny. Psy’s pony-riding dance is funny. It was the dance, of course, that people did at weddings and high school dances and flash mobs. —K.N.

58.

Forever Alone

knowyourmeme.com

Constructing a linear narrative out of internet content is extremely complicated — things connect across time and space in ways that make a traditional retelling almost impossible. That said, if there is a story of the internet in the 2010s, I’d argue it’s about loneliness and the bizarre and surreal ways people try to overcome it. So perhaps it’s fitting that this decade started with FunnyJunk user Azuul’s May 2010 rage comic “April Fools” — the first appearance of the phrase “forever alone.” Azuul’s swollen-faced character has more or less gone extinct, but the phrase, and more importantly, the meaning behind the phrase, have gone on to define the core irony of the internet: We are deeply isolated, yet connected enough to each other to commiserate about it. —R.B.

57.

Wholesome Memes

Twitter: @tenderfiresign

Ah, wholesome memes. In a decade in which things online (and offline!) tended to be pretty bleak, wholesome memes were a salve. In these memes, the punchline lies in the genuine surprise of an online joke actually being pure and good — particularly about “loving and supporting” one’s friends, significant other, or yourself. —J.R.

56.

There’s Always a @dril Tweet

Without a doubt, @dril is the most important person on Twitter of the 2010s. He has a specific absurdist take on living in some modern digital hellworld where his boss doesn’t let him kiss his ferrets at work, people keep asking him about fucking the Betsy Ross flag, and his candle budget is out of control. He never breaks character — there’s never a “but seriously folks, I’m sorry about that last tweet” — and has, miraculously, nearly maintained his anonymity.

@dril’s fans have taken some of his tweets and turned them into specific terms for online existence: “Corncobbing” is when someone has been owned and refuses to admit it; “help my family is dying” is a reference to the candle budget tweet.

During and after the election, people noticed that often there was an old Trump tweet that said something almost the opposite of what he had just said, coining the phrase “there’s always a tweet.” Soon people started to notice that Trump’s tweets had an odd similarity to @dril tweets and that you could often find an old @dril tweet with a parallel message. —K.N.

55.

Game of Thrones Memes

reddit.com

Like Infinity War, Game of Thrones became its own genre of meme. It wasn’t the first peak TV drama to do so — I’d argue Breaking Bad set the stage for it — but GoT did something both Breaking Bad and movies like Infinity War didn’t: It got much worse over time. Game of Thrones, especially in its early seasons, was an outrageously grim, dark show full of sex and violence, which made the memes it generated feel even more fun and risqué to share. But as the show’s ratings increased and its digital footprint became nearly unavoidable, it also became a much stupider show. Somewhere in that uncanny valley of extremely serious and incredibly stupid was the perfect breeding ground for memes. Much like the army of White Walkers pouring into Winterfell in an episode shot so dark people had to desperately try to readjust their TV settings, once internet users smell blood in the water, they’re going to swarm. —R.B.

54.

You Know I Had to Do It to Em

Twitter: @LuckyLuciano17k (deleted)

There’s something so visceral about the YKIHTDITE photo. You either get why it’s funny, or it’s just a random photo. I also think people notice things about this photo in different orders. For instance, I notice the sock tan lines and the diamond earrings first. The tweet also begs us to answer the question of what exactly “it” is that he had to do to ‘em. Luciano’s pose — hand in hand, loafered power stance — has evolved into something akin to an internet-wide Where’s Waldo? with people photoshopping him into anything they can. People even go on pilgrimages to where the photo was taken (it’s in Florida, obviously). Like I said, I can’t explain why it’s funny, but it is. Maybe that’s the “it” that he’s doing to ‘em. —R.B.

For a brief time in early 2017, people were transfixed by Turkish chef Nusret Gökçe, who would slice steak and sprinkle salt on it, but, like, in a sexy way? (See #13) A still image of “Salt Bae” tossing on the salt like it’s fairy dust became a meme representing any time we’re being our most extra selves. (Oh yeah, and then he hugged Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro at his restaurant and Marco Rubio doxed him for it. Becoming a meme is a rich tapestry.) —J.R.

52.

Jet Fuel Can’t Melt Steel Beams

timmie-cee.tumblr.com

The theory that 9/11 was an inside job, as evidenced by the fact that jet fuel can’t melt steel beams, was floated in the 2005 documentary Loose Change, which, despite being Alex Jones–level conspiracy theory, became incredibly popular on YouTube. It takes countless levels of irony to use the phrase (along with “Bush did 9/11”) as a joke. On some level, it’s not unlikely that a young person has been exposed to Loose Change or some other truther and perhaps believes it a little bit. On another level, they’re making fun of boomers and truthers who actually believe it. And then there’s the gallows humor of laughing at a tragic event that only those too young to remember could exhibit. It’s not callousness that made this a meme; it’s a reaction to the noxious conspiracy theories that flourish online and the disillusionment of an event that led to a war that’s lasted the entire lifetime of the young people who make the joke. —K.N.

51.

Cringe

knowyourmeme.com

True cringe is something posted in earnest, and being earnest is the enemy of internet culture in the 2010s. Irony is the online currency. Cringe as a concept started on Reddit, where r/cringepics and a YouTube-focused version posted awkward and embarrassing earnest photos and videos taken from social media. R/CringeAnarchy, a more cruel board that tended to make fun of women and minorities, was banned in 2019 by Reddit (other forms of cringe boards are still active).

“Cringe” became a catchall for something embarrassing and uncool. Hillary Clinton tweeting in meme-speak was cringe. Your old LiveJournal is cringe. BuzzFeed is cringe. Everyone has posted cringe; it’s universal, and that’s why we’re so obsessed with it. —K.N.

49.

Drake/”Hotline Bling”

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Drake has been a massively popular and famous rapper for the entire decade, and there’s always been memes about pop stars. But Drake has managed to be more memeable than his musical peers, except for maybe Kanye West. There’s been the “In My Feelings” dance challenge, where people dance out the side of a moving car to his 2018 hit, the “hope no one heard that” lyric from “Marvins Room,” Drake’s myriad of faces and expressions while he watches basketball games, images of his character from Degrassi: The Next Generation, and the handwritten scrawl of the cover art for his album If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late.

But it’s the video for “Hotline Bling” that was memed a million times. The Day-Glo colors and goofy dancing made for perfect GIFable moments. The meme was nearly killed when Donald Trump danced to it on Saturday Night Live, but a version managed to live on: Drake shaking his finger to one thing, and smiling in acceptance to another thing. —K.N.

48.

Evanescence’s “Bring Me to Life”

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“Bring Me to Life” is like the goth cousin of “All Star.” It works for the same reason. It’s from that ridiculous Ben Affleck Daredevil movie. It has a call and response. Its sadder lyrics definitely fit my general mood about all of life right now. Also, Amy Lee can sing! This song is a genuine banger. When is the Evanescaissance coming? —R.B.

47.

Ryan Gosling

feministryangosling.tumblr.com

Hey, girl. Ryan Gosling was more than just a Hollywood heartthrob in the 2010s — he was also the basis of multiple memes. First came the Tumblr “Feminist Ryan Gosling,” in which photos of the actor were superimposed with quotes that mixed feminist texts with shit your imaginary hot-yet-sensitive boyfriend might say (this was 2011, so the sheer concept of a man openly calling himself a feminist was still a Big Deal and kind of a pantydropper, which is bleak in retrospect!!).

On a completely different note, the actor became an online sensation again in 2013. In the Vine series “Ryan Gosling Won’t Eat His Cereal,” creator Ryan McHenry would feed real-life spoonfuls of cereal to an onscreen Gosling, who would “reject” the bite by turning away or appearing to slap away the spoon during intense movie moments. In 2015, McHenry died of cancer when he was just 27 — and in his memory, Gosling made a Vine of himself actually eating cereal. —J.R.

46.

ASMR

me drinking iced coffee on an empty stomach knowing it’s going to make me feel like shit

05:00 PM – 11 Aug 2018

One of the decade’s hottest trends was getting a bunch of tingles down your spine. Among the biggest genres on Youtube, “autonomous sensory meridian response” videos usually involve people whispering, tapping on a glass, or even crunching on pickles straight from the jar. For some, the sounds provoke a sensory response that feels extremely calming and euphoric, and may help listeners go to sleep. Though many had long experienced the strange tingly feeling, it wasn’t until recently that people knew what to call it. Following conversations on message boards about the nameless sensation, a woman named Jennifer Allen coined the term in 2010 and made a Facebook group in its name.

From there, it entered the popular consciousness, becoming gradually more well-known over the decade. Many enjoyed it in earnest, but it also was widely parodied. There were celebrity ASMR videos, and ASMR creators became YouTube celebs in their own right. One of the biggest ones, a teen girl named Makenna Kelly, became the basis for a ton of memes. Some of these YouTubers became famous for their funnier themed ASMR videos, such as “1300s A.D. ASMR: Nun Takes Care of You in Bed (You Have the Plague).”

Self-care and wellness were major buzzwords in the 2010s, which helped popularize the relaxing videos. But perhaps the most interesting part is how social media helped many people name the bizarre neurological phenomenon they’d experienced their whole lives and find out they weren’t alone. —J.R.

45.

Cropped Gay Porn

Instagram: @http://bit.ly/2ElyLuw

Porn! It’s the central driving force of the internet (see #13). So much of the web culture created in this last decade has been defined by an explosion of diverse and global points of view suddenly entering the mainstream (and the conflicts that sometimes rise up when that happens). So it makes sense that most defining porn meme of the 2010s is cropped gay porn. It’s cheeky, it’s wildly inappropriate, and, fuck, it was so big. The meme really climaxed with the “Right in front of my salad” clip, where two adult film actors interrupt a woman peacefully eating her salad by having sex behind the kitchen counter. It’s sort of nice to think that no matter how crazy things get, there’s one thing that can still bring us all together online, and that’s porn. —R.B.

44.

Cash Me Ousside

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Imagine you’re Dr. Phil. Having helped families and individuals through countless crises on your television show, you’re feeling pretty good about your abilities. There is nothing you, a couch, and a camera can’t fix. Then one day, a 13-year-old Floridian named Danielle Bregoli comes on set and rocks your world. After she calls your audience a bunch of hoes, you repeat the accusation, just making sure you heard right. When she confirms, the audience goes berserk, and Bregoli gets upset. You hear her say “Cash me ousside, howbow dah?” five magical words used to challenge the audience to a fight. The phrase lives on in infamy. And now you, Dr. Phil, are part of one of the decade’s greatest memes. —Alex Kantrowitz

43.

Spider-Man Pointing at Spider-Man

ABC / MARVEL

It’s simple: Spider-Man points at another Spider-Man. What’s not to get. It’s us, looking at ourselves. Iconic. —K.N.

42.

Nickelback

youtube.com

The Canadian band has miraculously remained untouched by the trend of critical reassessment and appreciation of pop music. They occupy an uncanny valley of being wildly popular AND wildly reviled by anyone who considers themselves a person of taste. For a while, they occupied a space as the punchline to something bad (there was a time in 2014 where you could use a Facebook graph search to find which of your friends “liked” Nickelback and unfriend them).

But it was the still from the video for “Photograph” where singer Chad Kroeger holds up a photo, along with the memorable lyric “look at this photograph,” that blew up in the second half of the decade. The meme ultimately died when President Donald Trump tweeted a version where the photo Kroeger holds is of Joe Biden golfing with his son and another American who also served on the board of a Ukrainian company at the center of the impeachment inquiry. Nickelback’s label filed a copyright claim, and the video has been removed from Trump’s tweet. —K.N.

41.

Rebecca Black

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It’s Friday, Friday, gotta get down on Friday! In 2011, then–13-year-old Rebecca Black made her debut with “Friday,” and looking forward to the weekend was never again the same. The music video went enormously viral, but it was widely dubbed the “worst song ever.”

Still, it was also a hit, and the song debuted at No. 72 on the Billboard Hot 100. It was covered on Glee, and Black even appeared as herself in Katy Perry’s music video for “Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.).” Two years later, Black got in on the joke, releasing a sequel to “Friday” — named, of course, “Saturday.” Whether you think “Friday” slaps or is a nightmare, I’d bet you anything you’ll know all the words until you die. —J.R.

40.

“Come to Brazil”

diorc.tumblr.com

If you’ve ever clicked through on a tweet from any sort of celebrity, chances are you’ve seen the phrase “come to Brazil” written over and over in the replies. According to Know Your Meme, the first time the phrase was tweeted at a celebrity was April 2008. Then, when Justin Beieber joined Twitter in 2009, it exploded in popularity. I once asked some members of BuzzFeed Brazil why exactly it was such a common occurrence among Brazilian internet users. I was told the answer is actually pretty simple — American musicians rarely tour Brazil. But to really best understand why Brazilians mass-send it though, on a deeper level, you probably need to know the concept of “zuera,” Brazilian slang for “zoeira” which means “heavy fun.” It basically means that moment when a meme becomes a meme and spirals completely out of control. COME TO BRAZIL, MIGAAA. —R.B.

Guns or glitter? Touchdowns or tutus? One of the most inescapable party themes of the 2010s was that of the gender reveal. At gender-reveal parties, expecting parents and their loved ones gather to find out what kind of genitals their unborn child will have. This is often accomplished by cutting a cake, with pink or blue frosting revealing whether it was a boy or a girl.

Party planners tried to one-up each other, sometimes executing the big reveal using explosives — which, as you might guess, often had disastrous results. In 2018, a father-to-be accidentally ignited a wildfire in Arizona. The following year, a grandmother was killed in an explosion, and there was even a gender-reveal plane crash.

As our understanding of gender (and how it was not the same thing as sex) evolved over the decade, so did criticism and mockery of gender-reveal parties. And some people had changes of heart; in 2019, Jenna Karvunidis, the lifestyle blogger who had the first viral gender reveal in 2008, criticized the parties, which she said put “more emphasis on gender than has ever been necessary for a baby.” She added, “PLOT TWIST, the world’s first gender-reveal party baby is a girl who wears suits!” —J.R.

38.

*tips fedora*

Twitter: @MoonOverlord

One of the most magical things about the internet is when we all collectively realize something is a thing. For instance, sometime between 2010 and 2012, everyone on the internet realized that every town has a couple weird guys who wear fedoras, trench coats, fingerless gloves, have terrible facial hair, and talk to women like they’re 12th-century knights. Long before these dudes turned into violent incels, there was just a really nice moment where we could all agree that these dudes were goofy and awful and fun to rag on. Swag is for boys; class is for gentlesirs, m’lady. —R.B.

37.

This Is the Future Liberals Want

36.

Ted Cruz, the Zodiac Killer

During his run for president in 2015 and 2016, a widely circulated, joking conspiracy theory accused Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of being the Zodiac Killer, the unidentified serial killer who murdered at least seven people in California between the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Cruz was born in 1970 — after the first killings — so he is probably not the Zodiac Killer, in my expert journalistic opinion. But for many people he just…seems like kind of a weird dude, right? He pretty much made the perfect candidate for a bonkers conspiracy theory about a decades-old serial killer.

It seems like Cruz got a kick out of it eventually, though. He later acknowledged the meme, tweeting an image of the Zodiac Killer’s cypher on two separate occasions. —J.R.

35.

Confused Math Lady

TV Globo

If there was one dominant theme in the 2010s, it was “I have no idea what’s going on right now.” This was expressed in a bunch of different ways, from the fact that teens and the internet curled up with increasingly obscure memes and terms meant to confuse the Olds (the boomers don’t know what “sksksksk” is) to the rise of explainer journalism like Vox or email newsletters/catch-you-up-quick news like the Skimm. We are all confused. We have no idea what’s going on. If you take the time to catch up on one story, you’ll miss what’s happening elsewhere.

Hence, Confused Math Lady, a meme featuring an actor in a Brazilan soap opera looking confused, spread on Brazilian internet. By 2016, the GIF of the confused woman became a four-panel comic with various math symbols over it, suggesting she’s trying to solve some complex calculus problem. Confused Math Lady is us, trying to understand it all. —K.N.

34.

“Old Town Road”

youtube.com

Country music fandom went mainstream in the 2010s, and with it came the rise of the “yeehaw agenda” at the end of the decade. The term described a reclamation of country aesthetics among black Americans, who have long been erased from extremely white cultural depictions of the Wild West (despite the fact that 1 in 4 cowboys were black).

The concept exploded in popularity at the end of 2018 when rapper Lil Nas X released his breakout hit “Old Town Road,” a country rap song that became one of the biggest singles of the year — only getting bigger after being disqualified from the Billboard Hot Country chart over claims that it did “not embrace enough elements of today’s country music.” In response, the artist released a remix featuring Billy Ray Cyrus, practically daring critics to say it wasn’t country enough.

The song was a viral hit, and videos featuring it — particularly one of Lil Nas X surprising a bunch of elementary school superfans, and countless transformation TikToks — only boosted it more. The song broke records as the longest-running No. 1 song on the Billboard Hot 100, and Lil Nas X became the first openly gay black artist to win at the Country Music Awards. —J.R.

33.

American Chopper Yelling

vox.com

Paul Teutul Sr. and his son, Paulie, were the stars of American Chopper, a 2000s reality show about their custom motorcycle shop. Not infrequently, they argued. The show was popular at the time, but not particularly cool or internet-y during its run. So it was slightly surprising when in 2018, stills of a scene of an argument between father and son became a meme. The more esoteric the argument — the role of media communication in science, Lord of the Rings plot holes, linguistics — the better. Part of the joy of the meme was seeing macho men argue about anime, but also acknowledging that a lot of our online lives is over-the-top screaming arguments about trivial things. —K.N.

32.

Brands Acting Like People

At the end of the day, consumers are people. And people crave authenticity. It’s what they look for in their relationships, their entertainment, and, yes, their brands. Which is why the orange juice account pretends to have depression now, and everyone likes it, and it’s good.

05:06 PM – 04 Feb 2019

Largely inspired by the Denny’s Tumblr in 2013, brands’ tweets over the decade have steadily grown to become surreal, humanoid, and Extremely Online. As the companies tried to figure out how to navigate their role in online spaces, there were missteps (who could forget the SpaghettiOs tweet about Pearl Harbor, or the time DiGiorno used a hashtag about domestic violence to make a pizza joke?). Eventually, many came into their own with genuinely fun and bonkers tweets, with MoonPie, Steak-umm, and Wendy’s being standouts. But in early 2019, things kind of jumped the shark when SunnyD just really went for it with a full-on depression tweet.

“I can’t do this anymore,” SunnyD tweeted in February. Immediately, all the other memey brand accounts got in on it, basically staging an intervention for the orange drink brand in crisis. “Hey sunny can I please offer you a hug we are gonna get through this together my friend,” Pop-Tarts tweeted. “Buddy come hangout,” tweeted Corn Nuts. It was pretty bleak, and many saw it as making light of mental illness and suicide. Most recently, brands started, uh, acting horny, in a nightmare Twitter thread started by Netflix. Who knows what other horros we’ll see in 2020? Brands! —J.R.

31.

Arthur’s Fist

The children’s show Arthur turned 20 in 2016, and with it came a ton of Arthur memes. But none had nearly as much staying power as a still image of Arthur’s clenched fist. Just a flat cartoon image of an aardvark’s curled-up hand, it somehow embodied such passion, such fury, that the meme became instantly relatable. —J.R.

30.

Florida Man

Florid Man Charged With Assault With a Deadly Weapon After Throwing Alligator Through Wendy’s Drive-Thru Window http://bit.ly/2Ppcn9P

11:48 PM – 08 Feb 2016

A meme that mocks someone’s shoes might seem to be more mean-spirited than other memes of the decade. It’s a catchphrase to laugh at someone for wearing ugly footwear, after all. But the most effective examples of the meme, including the Instagram video (and then Vine) that started it all, are always about punching up — taking a small shot at someone more powerful, like a teacher, a celebrity, or even Jesus.

But like “on fleek” and other viral catchphrases and memes, the “what are those” meme spread without any control from its creator, Brandon Moore. In a 2018 interview with HuffPost, Moore said that he “felt sick” when he heard his catchphrase in the movie Black Panther, because it was a reminder of how he had missed a chance to copyright or watermark his video and had seen his creative work monetized by others without him benefitting at all. Six months after the interview, Moore died in his sleep at age 31. —K.N.

28.

Kanye West

Twitter: @kanyewest (deleted)

Is Kanye West a meme? Is he a collection of memes? Is he the original material that gets remixed into memes? Is he all of these things? Perhaps. Kanye’s “Imma Let You Finish” moment happened in September 2009, but was still humming along by the time the decade started (the internet was slower then). For a while, his Twitter account was an endless source of internet content: “I hate when I’m on a flight and I wake up with a water bottle next to me like oh great now I gotta be responsible for this water bottle.” Damn. Huge mood. And then, of course, like many memes, he went full MAGA after the election of Donald Trump. For much of the decade, it seemed like all of culture either flowed from or through West. Based on the reviews for his newest album, Jesus Is King, and the general lack of buzz around his Sunday Service project, that might be something we’re leaving in 2010s. Although, he did just bless us with Silver Kanye, so who knows really. —R.B.

27.

Dat Boi

ppt.wz51z.com

In the same way that a bunch of the X-Men are all blue for some reason, the internet really likes green frogs. Sadly for Dat Boi, he hasn’t had the same staying power as Pepe or Kermit. The version of Dat Boi that we all know was first posted in April 2016. In many ways, he’s the last meme specifically from Tumblr — a nice, wholesome shitpost featuring a picture stolen from an AP physics textbook that doesn’t really make any sense but is just kind of funny. Dat Boi, in my opinion, is the platonic ideal of a meme: It’s funny, it works as a cute little wink for superusers, it doesn’t make a lot sense, and it disappears before getting turned into some dumb brand tweet. —R.B.

26.

Harambe

On May 28, 2016, a gorilla who went by Harambe was fatally shot at the Cincinnati Zoo after attacking a 3-year-old boy who had climbed into the enclosure.

The incident absolutely dominated the news cycle, and it quickly spawned a ton of memes. People made videos of Harambe’s banger of a funeral, paid homage in their yearbook photos, and even painted street art in his memory. All across the land, dicks were out for Harambe.

It’s more than a little dark for a dead gorilla and an injured toddler to become meme fodder, but that’s exactly what happened. Harambe memes should not be funny, which means they totally, always will be. —J.R.

25.

Damn Daniel

View this video on YouTube

youtube.com

High schooler Josh Holz loved taunting his friend Daniel Lara by following him around, filming him, and commenting on his sneakers. When he compiled the videos and tweeted it, the world loved hearing a creepy voice saying “Damn, Daniel, back at it again with the white Vans.” The teens boys went on The Ellen DeGeneres Show and received a lifetime supply of Vans. In 2019, both Daniel and Josh are in college. Josh is studying fashion and works for, you guessed it, Vans. —K.N.

24.

Tiffany Pollard

Vh1

A still of Tiffany Pollard, best known as New York from the VH1 dating show Flavor of Love, lying on a bed in her clothes, hands folded in her lap, sunglasses on, seeming to stew in quiet anger, became a meme in 2015 and continued for the rest of the decade. In an interview with BuzzFeed News, Pollard described what she was actually feeling in that moment: “I just remember being so alone, so pissed off; I wanted to get away from those girls … I was really having a rough time in that moment and I think me sitting there was actually me just trying to center myself, centering myself through this bad energy I was dealing with.”

Pollard’s memeability goes beyond that one image of her lying on the bed. Her over-the-top personality is what made her a standout reality star in the ’00s, and that same quality made her perfect for reaction GIFs in the ’10s. —K.N.

22.

Blinking White Guy

Drew Scalon / giantbomb.com

One of the biggest reaction memes of the decade, the “blinking white guy” perfectly summed up when you truly just could not believe what you were seeing. The man is Drew Scanlon, and the specific blink came from a gaming video he appeared in in 2013, though it wouldn’t become a meme until early 2017. It’s a simple reaction, but it seemed to say it all at a time when the world was a confusing mess and people were feeling pretty dang incredulous a lot of the time.

“As long as they’re not mean, I don’t have a problem with the tweets,” Scanlon told BuzzFeed News in 2017. “I think we need more positivity on the internet these days.” —J.R.

21.

Minions

Universal Pictures

Ah, yes, the official mascots of every boomer’s divorce announcement Facebook post. These little bastards took over the internet with a speed that was honestly unparalleled. Their disgusting yellow bodies flooded news feeds like a DDoS attack. I think to understand exactly how the great Minionfication of the internet happened you have to separate it out into two movements. First, there were people genuinely posting Minion memes. Then came the second wave, where people started using Minion memes to make fun of the people who posted Minion memes. I’d love to say that we’re in the clear now and we can leave these beasts in the 2010s, but Minions: The Rise of Gru is coming out on July 3, 2020, so get ready, everyone. —R.B.

20.

Milkshake Duck

The whole internet loves Milkshake Duck, a lovely duck that drinks milkshakes! *5 seconds later* We regret to inform you the duck is racist

08:07 AM – 12 Jun 2016

Coined by @pixelatedboat, a milkshake duck is some person or entity that enjoys a viral moment and then is swiftly exposed as problematic. The ultimate example was Ken Bone, a man in a distinctive red sweater and mustache who asked a question during a presidential town hall debate in 2016 — who after becoming the meme of the night, was discovered to have a spicy sexual Reddit user history. Cancel culture may not be real, but milkshake ducking certainly is. —K.N.

19.

Gavin

Twitter: @gavinthomas

There’s a good chance you know Gavin’s face even if you don’t know Gavin’s name. It’s sort of incredible to include Gavin Thomas on this list because he was literally born in 2010 at the start of the decade. He first went viral when his uncle Nick Mastodon started putting him in Vines. Gavin really solidified himself as a meme when he turned 5 years old. Suddenly, he was everywhere. He had this extremely relatable confused grimace that really seemed to capture the zeitgeist in 2015 and 2016 (not totally sure what was going on at the time that would explain why). He’s 9 years old now and has a million followers on Instagram. For all the cautionary tales out there about what life after being a meme is like, so far it seems like Gavin’s doing all right. His family seems to be looking after him and, more bizarrely, it also feels like the internet at large is looking after him. He grew up on social media, and it does feel like we’re all invested in making sure he ends up OK. —R.B.

18.

Shrek

Dreamworks / reddit.com

Even though the first Shrek came out in 2001, it took a few years for the internet to really embrace the green Scottish ogre. Ever since, it feels like he’s buzzed just below the surface of mainstream internet culture — always there, always talking about onions. My theory as to why he’s stayed so popular? Aside from maybe a postmodern riff on the extreme overcommercialization of children’s entertainment (see Minions), I think there’s actually something really relatable about a big, fat ogre who doesn’t want to leave his swamp. It’s the perfect metaphor for being online. —R.B.

17.

“Do It for the Vine”

View this video on YouTube

youtube.com

Vine shut down on my birthday, and because of that, I’ve always felt a weirdly intimate connection to Vine. A good friend once told me he thought of a Vine as one sentence in the visual grammar of video. Everything you need to convey one idea in a video you could do in a six-second Vine. It was a revolution and you could argue it has had a more profound legacy on how we create and share videos than bigger platforms like YouTube or Netflix. For a long time, I, like many people, believed that Vine was shut down too soon. Now, I think it actually shut down exactly when it should. Social networks probably shouldn’t last! It’s weird that we still use Twitter.

The phrase “do it for the Vine” comes from a song created by YouTuber Kaye Trill and it immediately became the anthem of a summer full of people doing extremely outrageous things. Many of the original great “do it for the Vine” posts have been deleted, sadly. But, luckily, we’ll always have the YouTube compilations. —R.B.

16.

Real Housewives

Bravo / Instagram: @smudge_lord

Memes are often tied to some technological advance, such as the six-second looping video or the quote-tweet format. At the start of the decade, animated GIFs were actually hard to make. You needed Photoshop, which is expensive and hard to use. Sourcing high-quality video to turn into a GIF was also harder. In a pre-Giphy world, truly good animated GIFs were prized and hoarded, saved in folders on a desktop to use in reactions. On Tumblr, the main source of GIFs, there was a vast gulf between the number of users actually making GIFs and the amount of people reposting them. One of the early and prolific makers of high-quality reaction GIFs was the RealityTVGIFS.tumblr.com, made by a man named T. Kyle McMahon (who now works for Bravo), who pumped out GIF after GIF from the Bravo universe, particularly the Real Housewives series. Because of the format of the show, where the women were literally asked to react directly to the camera, the Housewives were perfect for emotional reaction GIFs.

The enduring power of the Real Housewives through the decades was proven in 2019 by the popularity of an image of an early season of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, where one Housewife is yelling while another holds her back, juxtaposed with a white cat named Smudge scowling at a dinner table. —K.N.

15.

The Joker

The Joker obviously existed long before social media, but the character’s glee-filled take on chaotic nihilism has, for better or worse, become inseparable from how we imagine a very specific kind of kind internet user: angry, insular, often violent, male.

Over the last decade, a symbiotic relationship has evolved between new Hollywood iterations of the Joker and the internet’s digital underbelly. Starting in 2008, Heath Ledger’s anarchist, anti-capitalist Joker became the unofficial mascot of 4chan’s Anonymous hacktivist movement. The idea of a nameless grungy psychopath burning piles of dirty money, throwing a city into chaos to satisfy his twisted rage, was a perfect avatar for a generation of Occupy-adjacent millennials graduating into a global economic recession and harnessing technology to claw back control of their own lives. Jared Leto’s 2016 take on the Joker, even though none of them would ever admit it, mirrored the rise of Gamergate somewhat perfectly, giving the world a sniveling misogynist covered in face tattoos, singularly focused on controlling the anatomy of Suicide Squad’s standout woman character Harley Quinn. All the clown prince was missing was a vape to better embody late millennial toxic masculinity. So it’s fitting, then, that we close out the decade with Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker, a chain-smoking, self-described mentally ill loner who hijacks mainstream media via an act of extreme violence and sets off a reactionary protest movement.

The Joker isn’t always a serious meme, like with the most recent Joker film giving us the scene of Phoenix dancing down a flight of stairs in Harlem. Instead, it’s something closer to SpongeBob, a visual and emotional language we use to express a part of ourselves online. As for whether the Joker will continue to evolve alongside social media, well, there are rumors already circulating of another Phoenix-led Joker film, so it’s likely he’s not going away anytime soon. —R.B.

14.

Why You Lyin’

View this video on YouTube

youtube.com

The beauty of Nicholas Fraser’s Vine in his backyard singing “Why you always lyin’” over the music of “Too Close” by Next is that it makes no sense for why it exists. Why is his shirt open? Why is there a toilet in the yard? Who is lying and why is he so seemingly happy about accusing someone of lying? And yet, it turns out 2015 was the right moment for this meme to exist and serve as the perfect totem for the impending post-truth internet. Now, replying with a screenshot of Fraser’s smiling face is internet shorthand for “this is a lie.” —K.N.

13.

Being Horny

.@tedcruz my young daughters and sons follow you for good wholesome content can you please explain this???

04:40 AM – 12 Sep 2017

If you think about it, being horny is like when content trends before it becomes a meme (sex is the meme). And whether it’s Ted Cruz faving a porn tweet on 9/11 or Kurt Eichenwald screenshotting Chrome tabs full of hentai, if someone is online long enough, they will be caught being horny and it will be embarrassing. The only silver lining is that it can happen to any of us. My hope for the next decade is that we all just accept that most of the time people are online, they’re also probably looking at pornography or sexting with each other. That’s what this whole thing was made for! Horny users of the web, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains! —R.B.

12.

Distracted Boyfriend

Stock photo memes had a moment in 2017, but none became as big or enduring as the one that became known as “Distracted Boyfriend.” The photo depicted a man checking out a woman while his own girlfriend glared at him with disgust. It quickly became a meme, though photographer Antonio Guillem told the Guardian at the time he “didn’t even know what a meme [was] until recently.” The photo has now been around a few years, but it’s still a classic, popping up as a meme pretty often and perfectly embodying so many emotions: deception, distraction, heartbreak, loss, and hope. —J.R.

11.

Doge

shibaconfessions.tumblr.com

The only meme of the decade to inspire an actually used form of blockchain currency, Doge was a breath of fresh air in 2013 when people were starting to feel burned out about what the first iteration of what “memes” were. “Memes” now means something different — funny tweets screenshotted and posted to Instagram, or absurd teen humor. But in a darker, earlier time, “memes” were something like rage comics or the Forever Alone Guy. They took themselves seriously in a sense, and were the domain of redditors or angry 4chan guys, or something a brand used in a Super Bowl ad to seem relevant. Then, a friendly Shiba Inu appeared with funny language and words around him, just being amused and delighted by the world. This wasn’t FFFFUUUUUUU, it was such wow. Doge was here to make us happy. Of course by now, the phrase “such wow” is cringey and outdated, but it had a good long run. —K.N.

10.

Kermit

Lipton Tea

The lovable green amphibian became one of the most memeable nonhuman characters of the decade, next to perhaps only SpongeBob and Shrek. Two massive memes, Kermit sipping tea and Evil Kermit, earned the Muppet his place in meme Valhalla, and made a bunch of smaller memes (Sad Kermit puppet, Kermit in the car) take off. There’s something deeply funny about children’s characters behaving like naughty adults, by the idea of Kermit having shady opinions about others while he sips his tea or encouraging you to do something dangerous or sexual or drug-related. Part of the joy of Kermit memes is that everyone knows Kermit; he’s not obscure or niche. And yet someone, the official Twitter account for Good Morning America to be precise, called the Kermit-sipping-tea meme “tea lizard.” —K.N.

Reaction GIFs

NBC / Via giphy.com

It’s hard to remember a time when reaction GIFs weren’t ubiquitous, but they really rose to prominence in 2012 with the launch of the Tumblr blog #whatshouldwecallme. The blog posted GIFs paired with ~relatable~ captions — for example, the GIF of Homer Simpson disappearing into the bushes, captioned, “When I’m in an argument with someone and realize I’m completely wrong.” This blog was a huge deal at the time, inspiring countless spinoffs, particularly at colleges. Though it was a pretty fresh meme format at the time, #whatshouldwecallme posts just look a lot like the way we communicate online today. —J.R.

Guy Fieri

Fun fact: Guy Fieri is so ubiquitous and embedded in the language of American social media that we basically got to the very end of making this list and realized he didn’t have his own entry, even though he’s referenced throughout. Becoming a meme these days is pretty easy: You do something or appear in a piece of media, people latch onto it because of some innate and relatable reason, and voilà, you’re viral. But to stay a meme is a much harder feat. Usually it involves a bizarre and inexplicable alchemy of having chaotic high/low culture energy and a total lack of self-awareness. Memes can’t know they’re memes. Guy Fieri is embodiment of this. He looks like a failed ‘90s energy drink marketing campaign, he drives around in convertibles eating absolute garbage (he literally has a recipe for nachos made in a trash can) and seemingly cannot fathom that his entire persona is ridiculous. Even when he does lean into his memeness, he still doesn’t really seem to get it, like with his recent Baby Yoda photoshop. Whether Gen Z continues to latch on to the Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives host is unclear. Only time will tell whether or not Flavortown can survive the ages. —R.B.

The Dress

Cecilia Bleasdale

“Black and blue or white and gold?” was the question that seemingly everyone on earth was asking on one day in early 2015. A woman in Scotland showed her friends a photo her mother took of a dress she planned to wear to a wedding, and a friend of the woman posted it to Tumblr, asking for help — “what colors are this dress?” She submitted it as a question to BuzzFeed’s Tumblr, and former BuzzFeed employee Cates Holderness reposted it to our account. From there, it blew up as a fun visual gag that was infuriating and odd.

The Dress was posted to BuzzFeed the same day two llamas escaped in Arizona, and a live TV police chase of the two animals enthralled the internet as adorable mayhem broke out. In retrospect, that two such happy, carefree, unproblematic things took over the internet on the same day seems like wild serendipity. It also feels like the last day the internet felt purely joyful, before the onslaught of the 2016 election took place and things took a darker turn.

The dress is, indeed, black and blue, even though over two thirds of the millions of BuzzFeed readers who voted said they thought it was white and gold. In 2018, a similar sensory illusion, this time auditory, went viral over whether a voice was saying “yanny” or “laurel.” But somehow, the special feeling just wasn’t there again; it felt like trying to recreate some old magic that was lost, like kids who have graduated hanging back at high school. —K.N.

“This Is Fine” Dog

K.C. Green / Via kcgreendotcom.com

The dog engulfed in flames, denying that anything is wrong, is from a 2013 webcomic Gunshow by K.C. Green. In the full comic, the dog’s face eventually melts, while he continues to drink his coffee and insist he’s OK, but the version that became a symbol of the decade is just the first two panels where he says “this is fine.”

The meme has been used a lot to describe various political situations: The official @GOP Twitter used it once, and a senator even described the comic on the House floor while describing how Russian election interference was not fine. But the staying power of the dog is about how we all grin and bear it through everything that’s happened over this decade that feels like the house is on fire — the climate crisis, elections, the disappointing last season of Game of Thrones. There is nothing that captures the 2010s more than “this is fine” dog. —K.N.

Smash Mouth’s “All Star”

me.me

Like Shrek, Smash Mouth’s “All Star” is another one of those millennial nostalgia points that has evolved into something bigger than itself thanks to the internet. It’s lasted for several reasons: One, it’s just a damn good song; two, the lead singer of Smash Mouth looks like Guy Fieri; three, it was on the Shrek soundtrack; four, it’s a cheery song about how shit everything is — which is exactly how it feels to be online. —R.B.

What makes “on fleek” a crucial meme for understanding the 2010s is not simply why the meme was catchy, but what happened to the meme after it left the hands of its creator and what that says about the commercialization and monetization of memes — i.e., who gets paid and who gets credit. Kayla Newman, who goes by Peaches Monroee online, was a teen when she posted a Vine musing that her eyebrows were “on fleek” because she thought she looked good. The Vine caught on because it’s simple and fun and enjoyable. Soon, brands were using the phrase on their social media. IHOP tweeted “pancakes on fleek.” Denny’s tweeted “Hashbrowns on fleek.” JetBlue and Taco Bell also used it, and the phrase all of a sudden seemed inescapable in marketing. Corporations were using Newman’s invention of a phrase without giving her any credit or compensation.

In the Fader, Doreen St. Félix wrote how “on fleek” is an example of an endless trend of black teenagers creating the memes, lingo, and jokes that make up internet culture, and how those black teens are often uncredited and don’t profit when brands use their creative works. This is in contradiction to a handful of white teens who also went viral around the same time: The “Damn, Daniel” boys got free Vans and appearances on talk shows; the Walmart yodeling boy got a record deal, as did Danielle Bregoli, the “cash me ousside” girl.

In 2017, Newman started a GoFundMe campaign to launch a beauty line, but it only raised around $17,000 of the $100,000 she was hoping for. In a 2017 interview with Teen Vogue, Newman said if she had known the phrase would catch on like it did, she would’ve been more aggressive about it, adding that she was trying to trademark the phrase. —K.N.

Pepe the Frog

Matt Furie

None of us wanted to write about Pepe. What’s even left to be said about him that hasn’t been said already? He started as a chill frog in a 2008 comic by artist Matt Furie. He then became a consistent, but largely forgettable fixture of 4chan in the early part of the decade. The first time I saw him was in a meme that read, “We are the middle children of history. Born too late to explore Earth, born too early to explore space.” I thought it was pretty funny. Sometimes he’d be in memes about blasting the toilet bowl with piss to clean it. He’s something different now — a literal hate symbol that is still being used by far-right extremists and white nationalists.

In the course of his transition from slacker goof to hate symbol, he’s taught us a lot about symbols — not just how the internet works — but he’s also maybe revealed something deeper about how symbols work. Furie has famously tried to litigate Pepe away from fascists, but it hasn’t really worked. Pepe’s effectively theirs now. It’s a grim, but important reminder that all culture can be hacked and warped and poisoned. All speech, online and off, is political. And all symbols, even chill frogs, require protection and upkeep. Feels bad, man. —R.B.

Crying Jordan

Stephan Savoia / AP

Michael Jordan wept during his 2009 induction into the Basketball Hall of Fame, but it wasn’t until at least 2012 that the still of his face, red-eyed with tears streaming down both cheeks, became a meme. It started with sports fans but soon spread to become an enduring and universal image for faux sadness. It’s a bit of an anomaly for a celebrity photo meme; Michael Jordan isn’t particularly memey otherwise, and although he was one of the biggest celebrities in the world in the ’90s, he hasn’t been in the spotlight this decade. Perhaps his role in the movie Space Jam has lent him some level of internet irony that makes the meme so satisfying. Jordan has said through a spokesperson that he doesn’t mind the popularity of the meme, so long as it’s not used for commercial purposes. However, his former teammate and friend Charles Oakley did tell TMZ that Jordan actually isn’t amused. That feeling Jordan may have — a moment of vulnerable emotion being plastered all over the internet for laughs — of course would be best depicted by, well, the Crying Jordan meme. —K.N.

SpongeBob

Nickelodeon / dearnville.tumblr.com

Did anything result in as many memes in the 2010s as SpongeBob? The show, which started in 1999 and is still going 20 years later, is so deeply entrenched in pop culture it would be hard to count how many memes have come out of it. But let’s try: There’s been caveman SpongeBob, mocking SpongeBob, tired naked SpongeBob, “ight Imma head out” SpongeBob, traveling SpongeBob, Krusty Krabs vs. Chum Bucket, evil Patrick, blurry Mr. Krabs, sleeping Squidward, and so many more.

The meme’s staying power can be attributed to a few things. It was an enormously popular show with a nearly universal sense of nostalgia for millennials and Gen Z’ers, who are the most prolific of meme creators. The simple art and animation style also beget some of the most instantly understandable reaction memes. May SpongeBob memes continue to prosper until [SpongeBob narrator voice] one eternity later. —J.R.

CORRECTION

Dec. 14, 2019, at 19:59 PM

T. Kyle MacMahon’s name was misstated in an earlier version of this post.

Drake starred in Degrassi: The Next Generation. An earlier version of this post misstated which Degrassi series he was on.

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Optimal Blog Design: 11 Elements and Examples of Blog Layouts and Designs

Are you trying to create the perfect blog design? You know, one that encourages people to read your content and share it on the social web and, most importantly, gets high rankings in the search engines? If you are trying to create a popular blog, here are the 11 essential elements (and examples of each) that you need within your blog design. Element #1: Threaded comments There are a lot of commenting systems out there. From Disqus to Facebook comments, the options are endless. But do you know what the best commenting system is? Threaded comments like this.

“Why?” you may ask. Because threaded comments will typically increase the number of comments you receive per post by 16% to 33%. The more comments you receive, the more text you’ll have on each page. And the more text you have on each page, the more long tail keywords you will rank for. Stick with threaded comments no matter what. Even if you have an active Facebook community, don’t use Facebook comments. Facebook owns that content, and it won’t help you get more search engine traffic. Element #2: Snippets Have you noticed that I don’t list the full post on the Quick Sprout’s blog homepage? I only show you a few paragraphs (a snippet), which prompts you to respond to the call to action “click to continue” to read the rest of the post. You want to have snippets instead of full posts because of two main reasons: People have short attention spans – you have an attention span of 8 seconds, and so do your readers. By only showing them snippets, you allow your readers to choose from a number of posts. They will scroll until they find a post that piques their interest, and then they’ll read it. Duplicate content – if you place your full post on your homepage, you will create duplicate content, which will hurt your search rankings. This is another reason why you want to use snippets. On your homepage, you can test the call-to-action text to find out which version maximizes the number of people clicking through and reading your post. I’ve tested the phrases: Continue reading Read more Click to continue Continue The text “click to continue” outperformed the other variations by at least 10%. You should, of course, test this as what works on my blog may not work on yours. For example, I noticed that GotchSEO uses “Continue Reading” on is blog and I would bet that he has tested many alternatives to find what performed best for him.

Element #3: Scrolling social buttons I’ve tested a lot of social buttons on Quick Sprout. I have had buttons at the beginning of the posts and at the end, and I have asked people to tweet about a post from within the blog post. The one design that continually outperforms the others is scrolling social buttons. Plugins like Sharebar and Flare have increased my social traffic by 27%. Backlinko uses a nice share bar that is clean and scrolls nicely for an example.

When using a scrolling social plugin, make sure you limit the number of options to three. In other words, pick the three most popular social networks your readers are using. For me, it’s Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus. If you add too many options, in my experience, it will decrease your social traffic. Element #4: 11-point font size or larger About a month ago, I wrote a blog post on how text size affects readability. I did a test on 13 blogs, and I found that by increasing font size from 8 to 9, I was able to increase the time readers spend on site by 13 seconds. I saw another 8-second increase when I went to size 10. And I gained another 6 seconds by going to font size 11. I have noticed that the Smart Passive Income Blog uses some nice large fonts in their headings and content. Check them out for another example I like.

Granted, this only works if you are using a readable font type like Arial or Times. If your font type is hard to read, increasing the size won’t help much. When in doubt, use a bigger font size. Element #5: A sidebar on the right Have you noticed that some blogs have their sidebars on the left? Or even worse, some have two sidebars? I’ve played around with different layout types, and I’ve found that the optimal layout is to have your content on the left side and one sidebar on the right side. This way people can focus on reading your content, yet you’ll have the flexibility of promoting other things within your sidebar. Just make sure the main content area takes up at least 60% of your design. People come to blogs to read, so you don’t want to distract them with other elements. If you want to place your sidebar on the left-hand side, you can. But what I’ve found is that it typically decreases the number of people who read your content by 15% to 25%. I prefer the look of a blog where a sidebar is on the right side, but it tends to convert better when it is on the left. Here’s what I learned… When you place your sidebar on the left-hand side, you will get more email opt-ins, and more people will read your bio and do whatever else you promote through your sidebar. But you will also get fewer people to read your content. I’ve found that having a sidebar on the left side of Quick Sprout causes a 9% drop in people reading the blog posts. On the other hand, it increases the number of sidebar opt-ins by 13%. Overall, I decided to place my sidebar on the right-hand side even though it generates 13% fewer opt-ins. Why did I do it anyway? Because it increased the number of blog post reads by 9%. In the end, the purpose of a blog is to educate you through content… so why would I take that away? Here is another simple, yet effective, example from the A Better Lemonade Stand Blog. They use their right sidebar to display their featured posts and offers in a way that is very user friendly and that does not take away from their content.

In general, you should consider keeping your sidebar on the right-hand side even though it will cause fewer conversions. People are coming to your blog to read, so your primary goal should be to make your content as easy to read as possible. Although I recommend using a sidebar, you don’t need one on each of your pages. For example, the homepage of Quick Sprout doesn’t have a sidebar. Consider not having a sidebar on the pages you are trying to improve conversions on or make money from. Why? Because it makes people focus their attention on the area you want—the area where you make money. So, for my “money” pages, I tend to have no sidebars. Also, for any page that has a defined goal, you should consider removing unnecessary distractions such as a sidebar. Element #6: Your bio Whether you have a corporate blog or a personal blog, you want to build a connection with your readers. Without that personal connection, people are less likely to comment or buy from you. One way you can create a bond with your readers is by opening up. Within your sidebar, put a short bio of yourself, and then link it to your full bio. Marie Forleo does a nice job of presenting her bio in her left sidebar (however, as mentioned above, I would suggest putting you sidebar on the right)

If you have a corporate blog, put the bio of your founders or the team that manages the blog in the sidebar. Make sure you include a picture right above your bio. People need to see you in order to connect with you. Element #7: Email subscription options I’ve mentioned this before: collecting emails is one of the most important things you need to do if you want to grow your traffic. Your options vary from an opt-in at the top of your sidebar to a pop-up if you want to be more aggressive. I like the way that FireNation has their email box setup as a popup. It really grabs your attention and makes you want to input your email. Who doesn’t want financial freedom??

You’ll also notice that by offering a free e-book or a course, you’ll get a good number of email subscribers. You will also see that if you ask only for people’s email addresses instead of their names and emails, you’ll get roughly 10% more opt-ins. For the month of June, emails made up 28% of Quick Sprout’s overall traffic. That’s not too shabby. Those users also generate the majority of my comments and social shares. No matter what, start collecting email addresses of your readers. That way you can notify them when you publish a new blog post. Element #8: Most popular widget Can you guess what the most-clicked area on the blog is? It’s actually not the content. Within my sidebar is an area that showcases all of my guides, my most popular posts, and my current hits. That’s the most popular clicked-through area on the blog. Not only does it help drive traffic to my most important posts, but it also helps with search engine rankings because of the way I cross-link. Check out how I Will Teach You To Be Rich uses their right sidebar to display their guides and most popular posts in the screenshot below.

You too can have this on your blog if you use the popularity contest plugin. You’ll have to get a developer to modify it so that you can have tabs similar to mine. Element #9: Yoast SEO plugin This is probably the simplest tweak you need to make to your blog. In the long run, you’ll notice that it will help your search engine traffic grow by leaps and bounds.

If you are running a WordPress blog, download and install the Yoast SEO plugin. If you are not running a WordPress blog, you’ll have to optimize your site for search engines manually by following the steps in this post. Element #10: Keep your color scheme and design simple Different colors have different meanings. Make sure you pick the colors for your blog carefully. They matter, and not just from a psychological standpoint. Some colors make it easy for your readers to read your content, while others don’t. For example, red text on a black background isn’t as easy to read as black text on a white background. Keep things simple by creating as much white space within your blog design as possible, and use black for your text color. There’s no need to make your design complex because at the end of the day people are coming to read your content. Your goal should be to make your content readable. The ahrefs blog does a good job of this and keep an ultra clean blog design that is easy to read on any device.

Element #11: Images Have you noticed that I place an image at the beginning of every blog post? I didn’t always do that, but from testing, I found that it increases the number of people who click through from my blog homepage to a post. Can you guess by how much? A whopping 37%. All from just one image. If the image you are using is appealing, you’ll see good results. If the image you use sucks, fewer people will click through. I prefer using stock photography images. You can also use royalty-free images, but the quality of those images typically isn’t as high. The Duct Tape Marketing Blog usually uses some stellar images in their posts that I bet improve their click through rates as well.

Infographic: The blue print of an optimal blog design For a visual roadmap I have also created this infographic that breaks down the blueprint of an optimal blog design. Use this as a guide to improve and optimize your blog.

Conclusion Designing a blog that can boost your traffic isn’t that hard. All you have to do is follow the steps above. If you do, you should see an increase in traffic. If you don’t have time to make all of the adjustments above, start with installing a scrolling social plugin and threaded comments. Those two simple changes will increase your social media traffic and search traffic in the long run. If you implement the advice provided in this post and the infographic above, you’ll see an increase in your readership. Xhostcom Lead Generation, Funnels, SEO & Wordpress/eCommerce specialists. Get a kick start with you online career - use our automated done for you funnels system to generate over $1000 Per Day Online! Get FREE TRAINING at Discover Funnels Need hosting for Wordpress or similar? Get it with SSD and SSL for just $1.52 at Fast Web Hosting with NO yearly increases. Do you need a great SEO tool? Check out SEMRush FREE at FREE SEO Tool Also check out Xhostcom.com ‎ for more great offers and news! Read the full article

#Marketing #Startup #technology #Trends

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filipeteimuraz · 5 years

Text

Optimal Blog Design: 11 Elements and Examples of Blog Layouts and Designs

Are you trying to create the perfect blog design?

You know, one that encourages people to read your content and share it on the social web and, most importantly, gets high rankings in the search engines?

If you are trying to create a popular blog, here are the 11 essential elements (and examples of each) that you need within your blog design.

Element #1: Threaded comments

There are a lot of commenting systems out there. From Disqus to Facebook comments, the options are endless. But do you know what the best commenting system is?

Threaded comments like this.

Stick with threaded comments no matter what. Even if you have an active Facebook community, don’t use Facebook comments. Facebook owns that content, and it won’t help you get more search engine traffic.

Element #2: Snippets

Have you noticed that I don’t list the full post on the Quick Sprout’s blog homepage? I only show you a few paragraphs (a snippet), which prompts you to respond to the call to action “click to continue” to read the rest of the post.

You want to have snippets instead of full posts because of two main reasons:

People have short attention spans – you have an attention span of 8 seconds, and so do your readers. By only showing them snippets, you allow your readers to choose from a number of posts. They will scroll until they find a post that piques their interest, and then they’ll read it.

Duplicate content – if you place your full post on your homepage, you will create duplicate content, which will hurt your search rankings. This is another reason why you want to use snippets.

On your homepage, you can test the call-to-action text to find out which version maximizes the number of people clicking through and reading your post. I’ve tested the phrases:

Click to continue

Continue

The text “click to continue” outperformed the other variations by at least 10%. You should, of course, test this as what works on my blog may not work on yours.

For example, I noticed that GotchSEO uses “Continue Reading” on is blog and I would bet that he has tested many alternatives to find what performed best for him.

Element #3: Scrolling social buttons

I’ve tested a lot of social buttons on Quick Sprout. I have had buttons at the beginning of the posts and at the end, and I have asked people to tweet about a post from within the blog post. The one design that continually outperforms the others is scrolling social buttons.

Plugins like Sharebar and Flare have increased my social traffic by 27%.

Backlinko uses a nice share bar that is clean and scrolls nicely for an example.

If you add too many options, in my experience, it will decrease your social traffic.

Element #4: 11-point font size or larger

About a month ago, I wrote a blog post on how text size affects readability.

I did a test on 13 blogs, and I found that by increasing font size from 8 to 9, I was able to increase the time readers spend on site by 13 seconds. I saw another 8-second increase when I went to size 10. And I gained another 6 seconds by going to font size 11.

I have noticed that the Smart Passive Income Blog uses some nice large fonts in their headings and content. Check them out for another example I like.

Granted, this only works if you are using a readable font type like Arial or Times. If your font type is hard to read, increasing the size won’t help much.

When in doubt, use a bigger font size.

Element #5: A sidebar on the right

Have you noticed that some blogs have their sidebars on the left? Or even worse, some have two sidebars? I’ve played around with different layout types, and I’ve found that the optimal layout is to have your content on the left side and one sidebar on the right side.

This way people can focus on reading your content, yet you’ll have the flexibility of promoting other things within your sidebar. Just make sure the main content area takes up at least 60% of your design. People come to blogs to read, so you don’t want to distract them with other elements.

If you want to place your sidebar on the left-hand side, you can. But what I’ve found is that it typically decreases the number of people who read your content by 15% to 25%.

I prefer the look of a blog where a sidebar is on the right side, but it tends to convert better when it is on the left.

Here’s what I learned…

When you place your sidebar on the left-hand side, you will get more email opt-ins, and more people will read your bio and do whatever else you promote through your sidebar. But you will also get fewer people to read your content.

I’ve found that having a sidebar on the left side of Quick Sprout causes a 9% drop in people reading the blog posts. On the other hand, it increases the number of sidebar opt-ins by 13%.

Overall, I decided to place my sidebar on the right-hand side even though it generates 13% fewer opt-ins.

Why did I do it anyway? Because it increased the number of blog post reads by 9%. In the end, the purpose of a blog is to educate you through content… so why would I take that away?

Here is another simple, yet effective, example from the A Better Lemonade Stand Blog. They use their right sidebar to display their featured posts and offers in a way that is very user friendly and that does not take away from their content.

Although I recommend using a sidebar, you don’t need one on each of your pages. For example, the homepage of Quick Sprout doesn’t have a sidebar.

Consider not having a sidebar on the pages you are trying to improve conversions on or make money from. Why? Because it makes people focus their attention on the area you want—the area where you make money.

So, for my “money” pages, I tend to have no sidebars.

Also, for any page that has a defined goal, you should consider removing unnecessary distractions such as a sidebar.

Element #6: Your bio

Whether you have a corporate blog or a personal blog, you want to build a connection with your readers. Without that personal connection, people are less likely to comment or buy from you.

One way you can create a bond with your readers is by opening up. Within your sidebar, put a short bio of yourself, and then link it to your full bio.

Marie Forleo does a nice job of presenting her bio in her left sidebar (however, as mentioned above, I would suggest putting you sidebar on the right)

Element #7: Email subscription options

I’ve mentioned this before: collecting emails is one of the most important things you need to do if you want to grow your traffic. Your options vary from an opt-in at the top of your sidebar to a pop-up if you want to be more aggressive.

I like the way that FireNation has their email box setup as a popup. It really grabs your attention and makes you want to input your email. Who doesn’t want financial freedom??

For the month of June, emails made up 28% of Quick Sprout’s overall traffic. That’s not too shabby. Those users also generate the majority of my comments and social shares.

No matter what, start collecting email addresses of your readers. That way you can notify them when you publish a new blog post.

Element #8: Most popular widget

Can you guess what the most-clicked area on the blog is? It’s actually not the content.

Within my sidebar is an area that showcases all of my guides, my most popular posts, and my current hits.

That’s the most popular clicked-through area on the blog. Not only does it help drive traffic to my most important posts, but it also helps with search engine rankings because of the way I cross-link.

Check out how I Will Teach You To Be Rich uses their right sidebar to display their guides and most popular posts in the screenshot below.

You too can have this on your blog if you use the popularity contest plugin. You’ll have to get a developer to modify it so that you can have tabs similar to mine.

Element #9: Yoast SEO plugin

This is probably the simplest tweak you need to make to your blog. In the long run, you’ll notice that it will help your search engine traffic grow by leaps and bounds.

Element #10: Keep your color scheme and design simple

Different colors have different meanings. Make sure you pick the colors for your blog carefully. They matter, and not just from a psychological standpoint. Some colors make it easy for your readers to read your content, while others don’t.

For example, red text on a black background isn’t as easy to read as black text on a white background.

Keep things simple by creating as much white space within your blog design as possible, and use black for your text color. There’s no need to make your design complex because at the end of the day people are coming to read your content. Your goal should be to make your content readable.

The ahrefs blog does a good job of this and keep an ultra clean blog design that is easy to read on any device.

Element #11: Images

Have you noticed that I place an image at the beginning of every blog post? I didn’t always do that, but from testing, I found that it increases the number of people who click through from my blog homepage to a post.

Can you guess by how much? A whopping 37%. All from just one image. If the image you are using is appealing, you’ll see good results. If the image you use sucks, fewer people will click through.

I prefer using stock photography images. You can also use royalty-free images, but the quality of those images typically isn’t as high.

The Duct Tape Marketing Blog usually uses some stellar images in their posts that I bet improve their click through rates as well.

Infographic: The blue print of an optimal blog design

For a visual roadmap I have also created this infographic that breaks down the blueprint of an optimal blog design. Use this as a guide to improve and optimize your blog.

Conclusion

Designing a blog that can boost your traffic isn’t that hard. All you have to do is follow the steps above. If you do, you should see an increase in traffic.

If you don’t have time to make all of the adjustments above, start with installing a scrolling social plugin and threaded comments. Those two simple changes will increase your social media traffic and search traffic in the long run.

If you implement the advice provided in this post and the infographic above, you’ll see an increase in your readership.

Trust me, it works. I’ve tested a lot of these design elements on Quick Sprout, and the tweaks helped me grow my readership to the size it is today.

http://www.quicksprout.com/blog-design/ Read more here - http://review-and-bonuss.blogspot.com/2019/02/optimal-blog-design-11-elements-and.html

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