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Part of Memes and virality as copying: why viral is only a past tense
Six meme archetypes, and why their examples age so quickly
Memes and virality examples described as six archetypes rather than instances, with the fixed part, the variable part and the failure each one runs into.
What to take away
- Six meme archetypes organize most viral formats. Three are caption over a still, fill-in-the-blank sentence, and reaction. The other three are paired opposition, audio over new footage, and remix chain.
- One public example each is Business Cat, the "Nobody:" frame, and Awkward Look Monkey Puppet. The second set is Two Soyjaks Pointing, the Harlem Shake, and Loss.
- Every format has a fixed part and a variable part, and the ratio between them decides how far it travels and how fast it wears out.
- The cheaper the variable part is to produce, the faster the format saturates and the sooner it dies.
- Formats that require a skill spread slowly, live longer, and leave a clearer record, because each copy is an effort somebody chose to make.
- A format whose fixed part carries a person is a different object with different obligations, and this site does not work with those.
A format is not a picture. It is instructions for making more pictures, and those instructions are never written down. People infer them by looking at copies.
A format can be described structurally even when no single instance is worth describing. The useful question about an example is not what it means but what it asks the next person to do.
This page names one public example per archetype to show the fixed part, then explains why each example faded. The archetype is the durable object; the instance is the moment.
The six archetypes
The table below splits each archetype into its fixed part and its variable part, with a named public example and the failure that dates it.
Cost to copy is the column that predicts most. A format anyone can produce in seconds reaches everyone quickly and exhausts its variable part almost as quickly, because the whole space of plausible captions gets filled.
| Archetype and named example | Fixed part | Variable part | Cost to copy | Typical failure |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Caption over a still: Business Cat (2011) | A cat in a tie at a desk, a stock-like office image | The caption about corporate life | Almost nothing | Saturation; the image stops carrying meaning and becomes wallpaper |
| Fill-in-the-blank sentence: "Nobody:" (2018) | The word "Nobody:" and the colon | The person and action that follow | Almost nothing | The frame gets applied to everything and stops selecting for anything |
| Reaction: Awkward Look Monkey Puppet (2021) | The puppet's sideways glance | The context it is dropped into | Nothing at all | Becomes punctuation, then invisible |
| Paired opposition: Two Soyjaks Pointing (2020) | The two pointing figures and the object between them | The object and both labels | Low, but requires a real contrast | Lazy pairs; the contrast is asserted rather than shown |
| Audio over new footage: Harlem Shake (2013) | Baauer's "Harlem Shake" drop and its timing | Everything visible in the shot | Moderate; requires shooting something | Dies when the sound is retired or the timing is misread |
| Remix chain: Loss (2008) | Nothing; each copy is the input to the next | Everything | High and rising | Generation loss; the chain drifts until the origin is unrecoverable |
A format that costs an afternoon reaches fewer people and stays interesting longer. Its space is nowhere near filled when interest fades. This is the copying economics from memes and virality, applied one archetype at a time. The named examples show the same pattern: low-cost slots fill first, high-cost chains last longer.
Six archetypes: cost vs. failure
Archetype
- Caption over a still
- Almost nothing
- Fill-in-the-blank sentence
- Almost nothing
- Reaction
- Nothing at all
- Paired opposition
- Low
- Audio over new footage
- Moderate
- Remix chain
- High and rising
Cost to copy
- Caption over a still
- Saturation
- Fill-in-the-blank sentence
- Stops selecting
- Reaction
- Becomes punctuation
- Paired opposition
- Lazy pairs
- Audio over new footage
- Sound retired
- Remix chain
- Generation loss
Typical failure
- Caption over a still
- Fill-in-the-blank sentence
- Reaction
- Paired opposition
- Audio over new footage
- Remix chain
What the fixed part is doing
The fixed part is a shared reference, recognizable without explanation, so it must already be widely seen. Most fixed parts are borrowed from something that had its own audience first. Business Cat came from an office-cat photo. The Harlem Shake came from a 2012 Baauer track that had its own listeners before the videos.
The borrowing is where attribution usually breaks. The fixed part arrives detached from wherever it came from, and every later copy inherits the detachment rather than the source. Two Soyjaks Pointing uses drawings whose authors are rarely credited. Loss uses a 2008 Ctrl+Alt+Del comic by Tim Buckley, and many remixes drop the title and the source.
A fixed part also carries a stance. A gesture that reads as exasperation constrains what the variable part can say; nobody can use it sincerely.
Awkward Look Monkey Puppet carries a sideways, skeptical stance. Formats fail when a copier ignores this and pairs a stance with content it cannot support. The copy reads as wrong, and nobody can say why, because the rule it broke was never stated.
What the variable part is doing
The variable part is the membership test. Filling it correctly proves you understood the instructions, which is most of what a copy is for. This is the same mechanism that runs vocabulary, described under social media slang: using the thing correctly is a claim about who you are, and the claim is checked by everyone who sees it.
A "Nobody:" post fails when the action after the colon is too predictable. Two Soyjaks Pointing fails when the object between the figures is not worth the two labels.
A format has an internal quality standard that nobody enforces and everybody applies. A copy can be technically correct and still be rejected for being obvious, for arriving too late, or for being made by an account whose presence in the format reads as intrusion.
None of this is documented, and none of it survives into an archive. That is one reason the archived record of a format is so much thinner than the thing it records.
The internet culture archives page describes what that record does and does not preserve. Loss is a clear case: the 2008 comic is archived, but thousands of remix chain entries are not.
Reading an example you have never seen
Six questions, in order, get you most of the way without a search:
- What is repeated across the copies you can see? That is the fixed part.
- What changes? That is the slot, and the slot's shape tells you the format's subject.
- What would a wrong copy look like? If you cannot say, you have not found the rule yet.
- How long would one copy take to make? That gives you the spread rate and the likely lifespan.
- Does the fixed part depend on a specific tool or a specific sound? If so, the format is bound to whatever provides it.
- Is a person the fixed part? If so, stop.
Question six is not a technicality. A format built on a real person's image, name, or recorded behavior recruits someone into a joke they did not agree to, and that recruitment does not expire.
The critiques of social media page treats this under exposure. The practical rule: structural description is available for every other archetype but not for this one. Distracted Boyfriend, the 2017 stock photo by Antonio Guillem, is the clearest caption-over-still case built on real people, so it stays outside this page's working set.
Why examples date so badly
Writing about a specific instance describes a moment, and the moment is the least durable part. A later reader lacks the ambient familiarity the format depended on, so the description reads as an explanation of a joke, the least intelligible form.
Writing about the archetype avoids this. The archetype still operates even when every instance of it is gone.
The named examples show why each instance fades. Business Cat had a caption slot anyone could fill, so its image became wallpaper. The "Nobody:" frame was applied to every topic, so it stopped selecting. Awkward Look Monkey Puppet turned into punctuation.
Two Soyjaks Pointing produced lazy pairs. Harlem Shake died when the sound was retired or the timing was misread. Loss drifted through remix chains until the 2008 comic was one input among thousands.
Two general reference entries are worth reading alongside this page. The account of the internet meme as a class of object covers the terminology and its disputes. The entry on semiotics covers the fixed-part and variable-part relation in its general form, which is older than any of this and better worked out.
Common questions
Can a format belong to two archetypes at once?
Regularly. A paired opposition whose halves are both captioned stills is two archetypes stacked, and it inherits the failure modes of both. Describe the layers separately.
Why not just name examples? Everyone else does.
Naming one example per archetype shows the fixed part. Naming every instance ages out, and many named examples carry a person. The archetype survives the instance and carries no one along with it.
Is the remix chain really a format?
It is a format whose only rule is that the input is somebody else's output. That is enough of a rule to produce recognizable results, and enough of an absence to make origin claims about it worthless. Loss is the clearest case: the chain can continue after the 2008 comic is forgotten.
How do you tell saturation from decline?
Saturation is when new copies stop being distinguishable from old ones. Decline is when copies stop appearing. Saturation comes first and is visible earlier, which makes it the better signal if you are trying to write about a format while it is still alive.
