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"It's a Trap!" is a catchphrase and reaction image based on Admiral Ackbar's famous line from the 1983 Star Wars film *Return of the Jedi*. The image macro version first appeared on Something Awful in the early 2000s and quickly spread to FARK, YTMND, 4chan, and YouTube, making it one of the most recognizable and long-lived memes from the early internet era. The phrase is used as a humorous warning about anything deceptive, misleading, or suspicious.

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.

"Ah Shit, Here We Go Again" is a catchphrase and reaction meme from the 2004 video game *Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas*, spoken by protagonist Carl "CJ" Johnson at the start of the game. The line sat dormant for over a decade before exploding online in 2019 after a green screen edit made it endlessly remixable. It's now one of the internet's go-to expressions for weary frustration at repeating an unwanted experience.

Surprised Pikachu is a reaction image pulled from a 1997 episode of the Pokémon anime, showing Pikachu with wide eyes and an open mouth in a look of shock. First used as a meme on Tumblr in September 2018 by user popokko (Angela), it became the most-used meme of that year by pairing the image with scenarios where someone is "surprised" by a completely predictable outcome. A WIRED investigation into its viral trajectory raised questions about whether its November 2018 popularity spike was connected to the Detective Pikachu film marketing, though no definitive link was established.

Big Chungus is a meme built around a screenshot of an overweight Bugs Bunny from the 1941 cartoon *Wabbit Twouble*, typically presented as a fake PlayStation 4 game cover. The meme went viral in December 2018 after a GameStop employee shared a story about a customer trying to buy the nonexistent game. It became one of the defining absurdist memes of late 2018 and eventually received official recognition from Warner Bros.

Baby Yoda is the internet's nickname for Grogu, a tiny green alien character from the Disney+ series *The Mandalorian* who looks like an infant version of the iconic Star Wars Jedi Master Yoda. First revealed in the show's premiere on November 12, 2019, the character instantly broke the internet with an avalanche of memes, reaction images, and photoshops that made him one of the biggest memes of the year. Despite Disney officially naming him "The Child" and later revealing his canonical name as Grogu in Season 2, the internet overwhelmingly stuck with "Baby Yoda."

Loss is a four-panel webcomic strip from Tim Buckley's gaming series Ctrl+Alt+Del, published on June 2, 2008, depicting a miscarriage scene that was so tonally jarring it became one of the internet's most enduring and widely parodied memes. The strip's simple visual layout, a single figure, two figures, two figures, and one standing with one lying down, was distilled into the minimalist notation "| || || |_" and hidden in countless images, objects, and artworks across the web. Recognizing the pattern became a game unto itself, spawning the catchphrase "Is this Loss?"

Harambe was a 17-year-old western lowland gorilla shot and killed at the Cincinnati Zoo on May 28, 2016, after a three-year-old boy fell into his enclosure. The incident spawned one of the defining memes of 2016, mixing ironic tributes, mock-serious mourning, and the viral rallying cry "Dicks Out for Harambe" into a sprawling internet event that outlasted every thinkpiece written about it.