2022 was a big year for media and to come with that is memes. A meme is an image, video or text that is found as funny and if enough people find it humorous it can become a trend to use that format.
Background of memes
The term memes was introduced back in 1976 by a British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. Dawkins conceived memes as the cultural parallel to a biological genes and considered them as being in control of reproduction. In 1996, The Dancing Baby meme came out and by many is considered the first digital meme.
Memes also are just extremely popular due to them being simple, funny and appeal to a large audience. Memes present a quick and easy way to express your emotions, giving audiences a way to react.
2022 meme trends
Morbius is a villain in the Spider-Man series. After the success of “Venom”, Sony produced a film on Morbius, the Living Vampire. “Morbius” is considered one of the worst movies due to its silly screenplay and acting.
People quickly made it gain highly more popular on memes about it being the best. The movie gained massive attention for months and do to this, even got a re-release in theaters.
In 2016 someone posted an image with the text on it featuring “Ohio will be eliminated.” This image gained massive popularity and was more popular than ever this year. Video and images with strange figures would be posted and the caption would usually say “only in Ohio.”
A Tiktok trend even sparked from this creating the final boss of Ohio. In Japan Ohayo means good morning but was mistaken for the Ohio meme trend here in the west causing a Japanese Tiktoker Satoyu0704 who used that phrase to grow heavily throughout the years.
This year the concept of a “Multiverse” was bigger than ever with the release of “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness”. Different images would be put on the movie’s, movie poster with the phrase “this is my Multiverse”.
This would also stem to cosplayers saying they are a Multiversal variant of a character. Or even people posting characters in worlds or franchises that they are not normally in.
And those are just a few examples out of hundreds of popularized media and memes though out 2022.
Community stance on memes
Mohammad Sial thinks that “They were better than the ones during 2021 and were a lot more based on older references and TV shows.” 2022 was a year were people looked back on old art and media a lot to try and relive there childhood. Memes were a great way to allow someone to laugh and cry over their great childhood memories.
Akram Bahi states that “they’re good I guess” and this is shows another side of memes though how some memes this year were so over saturated and some memes were milked so much until they fully died off and become highly unpopular to the public eye.
And Xavier Brooks said that “My thoughts are that they have been very good and overall 2022 had some great memes”. This shows though that the community response on memes overall will always be mixed and can never appeal to everyone. Even though Brooks and Sial think they’re pretty decent some people like Bahi are unsure on them throughout the year.
