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!
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