![]() ![]() ![]() Thank god the original dumb tweet was co-opted as both a way to mock our current president’s supporters and to show respect to those who deserve it. I probably blocked all of that out as a way of self-preservation. Molly McHugh : Over the course of this year, I forgot that this meme actually had anything to do with someone actually showing President Donald Trump actual respect. Thank you, anonymous Shutterstock models who never wished to become famous this way, for giving us the visual language to describe one clusterfuck of a year. And the original crux of the meme managed to encapsulate the feeling of this momentous year-a time when the news cycle accelerated to warp speed, when the most basic tenets of our belief systems and government suddenly felt wobbly and uncertain, and distraction was an unavoidable part of being online. The models were even recognizable enough that their other Shutterstock images were molded into fan fiction. Eventually it saturated our feeds to the point that the only acceptable new Distracted Boyfriend entries were meta. The boyfriend with the wandering eye suddenly took on roles as grand as “America,” as sweeping as “pop music right now,” as intimate as “me.” His female counterparts represented binaries as expansive as “socialism” versus “capitalism,” as granular as “the second key change in Beyoncé’s ‘Love on Top,’” versus “the fourth key change in Beyoncé’s ‘Love on Top.’” Like all healthy memes, Distracted Boyfriend ran through a predictable life cycle: It was drawn over, Photoshopped, rearranged, and mashed together with other memes. On its own, the Shutterstock image is unremarkable, a cheesy scene meant to depict SEO-friendly terms like “jealousy” or “cheater.” But the moment some brilliant internet user plopped white boxes beneath the photo’s three characters, it morphed into an endlessly relatable template to express humankind’s constantly shifting interests. Of all the viral images that graced our feeds in 2017, Distracted Boyfriend was by far the most effortlessly applicable. Today, we honor that latter part with the best memes of 2017.Īlyssa Bereznak : Memes live and die by their malleability. It can also be a well of unimaginable creativity and ever-expanding hilarity. The internet can be a dangerous, hateful, fun-crushing place. ![]()
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