The Meme Universe

Doge is an internet meme built around photos of a Shiba Inu named Kabosu, overlaid with colorful Comic Sans captions in deliberately broken English. The format took off in 2013 after years of quiet spread across Tumblr and Reddit, earning Know Your Meme's "top meme" of the year[3]. Kabosu's sideways glance launched a cryptocurrency worth billions, inspired an NFT sale of over $4 million, and gave its name to a U.S. government department, making it one of the most consequential memes in internet history.

Distracted Boyfriend is a stock photo turned object labeling meme showing a man checking out another woman while his girlfriend looks on in disapproval. Taken by Barcelona photographer Antonio Guillem in mid-2015, the image first appeared as a meme in a Turkish Facebook group in January 2017 before going massively viral across Twitter, Reddit, and Instagram in August 2017. It won Meme of the Year at the 10th annual Shorty Awards and helped popularize the object labeling format that dominated meme culture in the late 2010s.

Penguin Walking Toward Mountain is a viral video meme originating from Werner Herzog's 2007 documentary *Encounters at the End of the World*, featuring a lone Adélie penguin abandoning its colony and marching inland toward the Antarctic mountains to its certain death. The clip circulated online as early as 2008 but exploded into a major meme in January 2026 when TikTok users paired it with a pipe organ cover of Gigi D'Agostino's "L'Amour Toujours," turning it into a widely shared symbol of existential dread, individualism, and the urge to abandon society[4]. The meme crossed into political territory when the White House shared an AI-generated version featuring Donald Trump, sparking international controversy[6].

"This Is Fine" is a two-panel reaction image from KC Green's 2013 webcomic "On Fire," showing an anthropomorphic dog calmly sipping coffee in a burning room while saying "This is fine." Born from Green's personal struggles with depression and antidepressants, the comic became one of the most widely shared memes of the 2010s, used as shorthand for denial or forced calm in the face of obvious disaster[1]. The Atlantic called it "a work of near-endless interpretability," and its relevance kept growing through political crises, pandemics, and everyday stress for over a decade[13].

Pepe the Frog is a cartoon frog character created by artist Matt Furie for his 2005 comic *Boy's Club*, best known for his catchphrase "feels good man." After 4chan users turned Pepe into one of the internet's most versatile reaction images in 2008, the character exploded into mainstream culture before being co-opted by alt-right groups during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, leading the Anti-Defamation League to add him to its hate symbol database. Pepe's story is one of the most complex in meme history: an innocent stoner frog that became a political flashpoint, a legal battleground, and a global protest symbol.

Arthur's Fist is a reaction image featuring a close-up screenshot of Arthur Read's clenched fist from the PBS children's show *Arthur*. The image went viral in July 2016 after Twitter user @AlmostJT posted it with a caption about its emotional relatability[1]. It quickly became one of the defining memes of that summer, spreading across Twitter, Reddit, and Instagram as a universal shorthand for suppressed frustration and bottled-up anger.

Nyan Cat is an 8-bit animated GIF of a cat with a cherry Pop-Tart body flying through space, trailing a rainbow, set to the endlessly looping Japanese Vocaloid song "Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya!" by daniwellP. Artist Christopher Torres created the animation during a Red Cross charity livestream on April 2, 2011; three days later YouTuber saraj00n paired it with the song, and the combination quickly became one of the biggest viral memes of the early 2010s. The original video pulled in over 205 million YouTube views and sparked games, merchandise, a Webby Award, and a landmark NFT sale worth nearly $600,000.

Rickrolling is a bait-and-switch internet prank where someone tricks another person into clicking a disguised link that leads to Rick Astley's 1987 music video for "Never Gonna Give You Up." Born on 4chan's /v/ board in May 2007 as an evolution of an earlier prank called "duckrolling," the Rickroll became one of the longest-running jokes in internet history. The official YouTube video passed 1.5 billion views[2], driven by nearly two decades of people gleefully tricking each other.