Among other monumental bummers, 2016 will be remembered as a particularly bad year for high-profile deaths, with the sheer volume of celebrity losses reaching almost absurd levels over the course of the year. In the middle of all this was Harambe, the 17-year-old silverback gorilla who was shot dead after a 4-year-old boy climbed into his enclosure in the Cincinnati Zoo. While the incident initially inspired a seemingly genuine outpouring of sadness and anger, this soon gave way to increasingly ironic memorializing and a veritable bounty of meme goodness. But for a while there, the outrage was very real.

Among those targeted were the Cincinnati Zoo's staff, with zoo director Thane Maynard's Twitter account getting hacked a couple times and bombarded with Harambe memes during the period. In an email to the Associated Press, Maynard expressed his staff's immense grief over the death of the gorilla and how the constant memes were making it difficult for them to mourn their loss properly and move on.

But the continuum of blame and harassment really leaned most heavily on the child's mother, Michelle Gregg. As reported by the BBC, Gregg suffered a torrent of harassment online, including death threats.