Characters

The post-meme transformed the use of characters to represent emotions in memes. In “How Minions Destroyed the Internet,” Awl contributor Brian Feldman explains the difference between advice memes and “Minion memes”:

Socially Awkward Penguin is tied to social awkwardness, Sweet Brown’s “Ain’t Nobody Got Time For That” is linked to being too busy, the facepalm is about being very disappointed… But Minions are not tied to any central emotion. They occupy an odd middle ground as a specific piece of intellectual property unbound from a specific feeling or worldview. Minions are sarcastic, honest, smarmy, snarky, playful, mean, and downright sour depending on the need… Minions are basically emoji.

Feldman is absolutely right about Minions. And they show up frequently in post-meme collections:

Facebook’s “Shut Up I’m Still Talking” group has 2.5M followers.

But they’re just one member of a recurring cast: Garfield, Betty Boop, Jeff Dunham’s puppet Walter, the cast of Looney Tunes (especially Tweety, Daffy, and Taz), and an occasional Donald Duck or Goofy. Some generic characters and abstract decoration round things out. These characters aren’t such blank slates as Minions, but they all combine a mild trickster personality with lovability.

This cast can’t be sorted by emotion. It seems almost any character can be used with almost any text. Even the character’s expression might not match the text’s tone. But the medium still has an identifiable range of expression, one even more specific than the traditional advice meme.

Taxonomy

The taxonomy of the traditional advice meme lets us easily identify its core audience as young, nerdy middle-class straight white men. The most popular advice memes skew toward this group’s values.

For example, Scumbag Steve, Sheltering Suburban Mom, and Scumbag Stacy all interact with an implied young straight male. Scumbag Steve borrows money from him but doesn’t hit on them. Sheltering Suburban Mom parents him with racist and classist views. Scumbag Stacy withholds sex from him while slutting around with non-nerds. In Successful Black Man, the assumed-white reader is playfully teased for making racist assumptions about black men.

But Foul Bachelor Frog and Socially Awkward Penguin are presented as first-person characters for for the reader to identify with. FBF is decidedly male (he’s constantly told to “blast it with piss”), and SAP frequently “strikes out” with straight women.

Obviously, plenty of women, gay people, trans people, older adults, and children also made and read advice memes. But one viewpoint clearly dominated the format. Privilege denying dude was never as popular as Idiot Nerd Girl. (This sort of bias might be a major reason that the increasingly progressive vanguard of meme culture has abandoned the format.)

We can similarly analyze the post-meme to learn about its audience. But since it can’t be broken down by character, we have to piece out the themes manually.

Some are nearly universal, though with a lack of irony that excludes many “hip” or “alternative” subcultures. For example, declaration of sassy confidence: