Ball State Daily

by Baylie Clevenger Memes come in many different variations. From Pepe to Knuckles and from Tide Pods to Spongebob mocking everyone, they can be used for many different purposes. Sometimes they are even used to celebrate holidays: specifically Valentine’s Day around this time of year. While Valentines Day may be a gimmicky Hallmark holiday, meme lovers take it and make it their own every year. Using pop culture references as well as other memes, they create poorly edited virtual valentines. According to Know Your Meme these virtual Valentines originated in February of 2008. The comedy website Cracked posted them as “honest” valentines. They contained sexual messages and were used just for humor purposes. In 2010, College Humor released similar humorous valentines featuring the characters from Jersey Shore. A few years later the Tumblr user Ben Kling published more valentines of this nature. They displayed historical figures. One had Sigmund Freud on it and it read “Care for a cigar?” There was also one which featured Charles Darwin which said “I select you!” After these, the trend of valentine e-cards was heading more toward the direction of the current-day memes that are seen on social media every February. The following year, in 2013, NBC shared their version of the e-cards with ones inspired by Parks and Recreation. Mashable also contributed with their own valentines that featured grotesquely misspelled words for the sake of humor. The Mashable e-cards were the biggest step toward what the valentine E-card meme has become. The similar humor blazed the trail for the hundreds of pop culture related e-cards that followed. For anyone who may not be familiar, here is one of my favorites. There was also an entire Twitter thread made of different variations of this meme. More examples can be found on Know Your Meme. With their long evolution and many forms, the Valentine's Day E-card memes took social media by storm about every February since 2014, following the similar ones from NBC and Mashable. Though these memes have been popular in the past, it is almost as if in 2018 everyone has forgotten about them. I have only seen a few on social media and I must say that I am disappointed. I am not the only one to notice: So where did they go? Why have the Valentine memes been abandoned? It seems as if they have disappeared without a trace. There is really no way to tell; memes die out for many reasons. I hope though that they will be revamped in 2019 and Valentine’s Day memes will once again flood social media. There is plenty of content that is Valentine meme worthy. So, since many of them were missing this year, here is content that I propose is worthy of being meme-ed.