Hello again, and welcome back to another fresh segment in the meme chronicles. Last we talked, I went over the intricacies and nuances of THANOS CAR. This month, in honor of the Halloween spirit I have taken on the role of mortician and on today’s autopsy table are moth memes.
So without further ado let’s break out the bone saw and see exactly how this meme came about, and what killed it.
This meme was spawned out of the depths of Reddit on July 4, 2018, when user No-Reason27 posted a close-up of a moth outside their window, making it seem giant. This post received 33,000 points on the thread it was posted on.
This post started jokes in other subreddits about moths being attracted to lamps, which of course turned into memes about moths being attracted to lamps. This all snowballed into a massive surge of moth memes, ones that used text and themes similar to those of the loop memes, which had been relevant just a few weeks before.
These memes were eventually picked up by big Instagram meme pages and the memes were spread to the masses, which of course is usually when a meme hits its peak, the last step in a meme’s life cycle.
I would like to take a second to talk about the essence of a meme; a meme is appealing, or funny even, because it an inside joke, something only a select group of people know about, so as it is spreads across Instagram feeds and Reddit threads the joke slowly loses its meaning until even Facebook moms are aware of the newest meme. This, my friends, is stage 4, what I would like to call meme death.
It would seem, according to Google trend searches for the term moths that the moth meme still had some life left in it. Even though the moth term peaks every year around October, this peak was much higher than normal because of the meme. But there was a new challenger approaching.
On the horizon with great force and elegance, spooky memes took the stage. Instagram and Reddit pages were once again flooded with dancing skeletons and users putting spooky in their names.
And with this change, came a change in the Google analytics. As spooky memes climbed the search term charts, moth took a sharp dive and as of October 7th spooky memes have taken the cake and will most likely not stop climbing until the end of October.
The hostile takeover of spooky memes coupled with the widespread success of the moth meme is ultimately what brought our fateful hero down. May he forever rest in peace and go gracefully into that long goodnight.
In loving memory of moth memes.