My Favorite 2014 Tumblr Memes

It’s been a great year for memes in 2014.

I absolutely love Internet memes. From rickrolling to doge, the fact that a widely distributed group of people can laugh about the same thing and find endlessly unique ways to change it to enhance the humor demonstrates a type of communication and creativity that humanity has never really experienced before.

Tumblr has its own unique meme culture which often leaks to other platforms like Twitter and Reddit. Usually there’s one original post which people find funny or unexpected. The concept in this post is then twisted, changed, or combined with other memes to make it even funnier.

A very recent example surfaced on Tumblr just this month: Goats craving minerals. Here’s the original post:

According to Business Insider, the post originally surfaced on Reddit, but the addition of sixpenceee’s caption made Tumblr go crazy. Soon, every Tumblr user was craving that mineral. These pages have more great examples of this meme. Of course, “they crave that mineral” is only one of the most recent Tumblr memes in 2014. Here’s a list of some of my favorites from this year, including links to where you can find more examples of them:

Selfie Olympics

The Selfie Olympics started to grow in popularity in December 2013 and became Internet popular in January 2014. Tumblr and Twitter accounts were created to showcase the best and most challenging selfies people had ever taken. A few notable examples:

This BuzzFeed article also has some examples of the best Selfie Olympic challengers of 2014.

It’s a Metaphor

John Green’s young adult novel The Fault in Our Stars was released as a movie in June 2014. One of the most memorable lines comes from the character Augustus Waters, who carries the same pack of cigarettes around but never lights one. In the teaser trailer of the movie, released in April 2014, Augustus tells another character, Hazel Grace, “It’s a metaphor, see. You put the thing that does the killing right between your teeth, but you never give it the power to kill you.”

This is the meme that resulted from the trailer:

More examples of popular “It’s a metaphor” posts can be found here and here.

Free Him

This meme started with a post by transboyscout. He posted a picture of a Pikachu bouncy ball with the caption, “Free him.”

The resulting meme:

Fortunately, the widespread campaign to free Pikachu was eventually successful, thanks to Tumblr user ruinedchildhood:

I came out to have a good time and I’m honestly feeling so attacked right now.

This meme seemed endless. According to Know Your Meme, it originated with a post by Tumblr user chardonnaymami in June:

Photo via Know Your Meme

However, some people thought it came from Nick Jonas, who supposedly tweeted the phrase soon after:

In any case, the meme became very widespread and kept reappearing over the course of the summer.

DashCon/The Ball Pit

In March 2013, a few Tumblr users decided that they wanted to create a fan convention specifically for Tumblr users. After Tumblr told them they couldn’t use the name “Tumbl-Con USA” (since it was not officially affiliated with Tumblr), the event was named “DashCon” after Tumblr’s dashboard. It was held July 11-13, 2014 in the Schaumburg Renaissance Convention Center in Illinois.

These are some great articles about the many failures of the event, but the main things that went wrong were that the hotel supposedly demanded $17,000 upfront to keep the convention running and the main speakers (Welcome to Night Vale) cancelled their appearance because they weren’t paid on time. In recompense for those who had bought tickets for Night Vale, DashCon personnel supposedly offered ticket holders “an extra hour in the ball pit” that was available at the convention:

The strangest part is that this offer was not meant as a joke. Those in charge of DashCon seriously offered patrons an extra hour in this tiny ball pit for the loss of their tickets. It was perhaps inevitable that the ball pit became its own meme.

And, of course, it wouldn’t be Tumblr if memes didn’t collide at every opportunity.

These are just a few of my favorite Tumblr memes from 2014. My Halloween post shows an example of a few memes from later in the year. Let me know what your favorite memes were in the comments!

Tumblr: Friendly Community or Outlet for Hatred?

Although many people have heard of the social networking site Tumblr, not a lot of the people I associate with have their own accounts. The Tumblr content they see comes from other websites, such as BuzzFeed, which uses Tumblr content in posts like “19 Times Tumblr Asked The Really Important Questions.”*** However, these posts often highlight the funniest, most unique and though-provoking content of the site. Non-Tumblr online users only see the best or most intriguing posts, so their sense of social network and its users may be skewed.

Tumblr users bring many important issues to light, combine old and new content to creative amazing pieces of fanart and media, and share inspirational stories with their followers. A majority of Tumblr users have very liberal political views, advocate for LGTB+ rights, and promote awareness of mental health, all of which can be great things. But often Tumblr users escalate these views to an alarming point: support for homosexuality turns into hatred of heterosexuality, feminism becomes an anti-male agenda, and support for people of color prompts mockery of anyone whose skin is white. Here’s one example.

Although the original post by user pomfette may be seen as funny initially, the contribution by user sjwf*ckups invites a different interpretation of the post. What is it about Tumblr’s atmosphere that makes a post “glorifying abusive relationships” funny? The 200,000+ notes indicate that this post has been liked and reblogged that many times on the site. Did the users who shared it find the post funny, or are they trying to call attention to the issue sjwf*ckups brings to light?

What strikes me the most about this post (which you can view by clicking the link in the caption) is that the original user, pomfette, can no longer be found at that URL. Often this indicates the user received so much hate regarding their content that they moved to a different URL or left Tumblr altogether.

Here’s one more example. I’ll try to censor Tumblr posts in my blog to be as user-friendly as possible (since Tumblr users LOVE to swear), but if you want to see the original uncensored version just click the link in the caption.

User candycoatedcreepies’ rant goes on, providing links to the article and even including quotes, but this screenshot gets the point across. Tumblr has a tendency to jump on the hate-train without bothering to check sources or even to wonder whether the content they are posting could be considered hateful or offensive. Often the original post circulates long before other users bring these issues to light. It makes you wonder how many of the people who reblogged the post initially agreed with these views of hatred.

By the way, I would have linked to candycoatedcreepies’ page to give you an idea of their views, but unfortunately the page could not be found. What a shame.

Thankfully, not all of Tumblr’s users are ignorant to this issue. This post by user year-0f-the-kyle reminds other users that you can’t fight fire with fire. Although Tumblr’s community of haters may not be very big, I see these types of posts circulating way too often for me to think it’s an insignificant issue. Next time you see Tumblr content circulating on the web, ask yourself what sort of views that post is really promoting.

 

***Some or all of the pages I link to on this blog may include foul language and/or views I don’t agree with. Click on them at your own discretion.