The New Infestation Of Bunny Memes Is A Harbinger Of Memes To Come
Another day, another meme takes over Twitter. Last week, it was this bunny meme, where a cute ASCII bunny character offers up an emoji or a phrase, only to yank it away. They look like this:
It's a good visual joke that's easy to manipulate and iterate on but with little reliance on text, which helped it rocket to worldwide phenomenon status in just a few days. Here's a relatable one from a Costa Rican Twitter user:
It's also wholesome enough for brands to jump on the train in a somewhat genuine way:
And plenty of room to get a little more creative and use the full 280 characters:
And this, friends, colleagues and memers, is the future of memes: the past, but freer — and with more characters.
The thing about these little bunnies is we've seen them take over Twitter before. Vox explained the phenomenon of the bunny holding the sign back in 2014, and Mashable covered a flare up earlier this summer.
What changed in a meaningful manner between 2014 and 2018? In addition to the internet's collective sense of humor growing ever more cynical, Twitter's character count doubled.
We're going to keep seeing this. As Madison Malone Kircher chronicled in Select All in November 2017, the Icebox/Plums meme flared up again on Twitter that month after initially hitting popularity on the internet in 2015. Why? Well, that's the month Twitter bumped up its character limit on a single tweet from 140 to 280.
We're going to see this again. As boundlessly creative as the internet is, everyone loves a good reboot. In order to predict what's to come, let's take a look back on the pre-autumn 2017 memes that could be improved with 140 extra characters.
We might see longer instruction manuals for how to talk to women wearing headphones:
Now that there's more to fear than ever before, we'll likely see longer lists of New York fears:
And everyone's oddly intelligent toddlers are going to begin speaking in even longer, more complexly composed sentences:
If you're looking for viral fame at the end of 2018 and the new and popular "don't say it" meme won't cut it for you, dip back into the catalogue. The old material is fair game — you just need to stretch it out a bit.
