The viral meme. An awesome amalgamation of poorly-drawn, staged, or Photoshopped images; blunt sentencing (or none at all); generally horrible spelling; and – more often than not – a sentence voicing an opinion shared by hundreds of thousands across borders and languages. The success of the meme largely lies in its variability: All play off a common theme, but can be twisted visually or linguistically to reflect entirely different emotions (see: Socially Awkward Penguin/Awesome Penguin).
But memes and other things that “go viral in the night” have been a distinctly American Internet phenomenon – until now. With the Japanese innovation of “Hadokening” (thank you, Buzzfeed, for wrongly attributing this to DragonBall Z, when it’s really of Street Fighter 2 origin)…
…and pan-Asian “Potato Parties“…
…not to mention, the awesome power of the written Chinese language’s tendency toward Internet-related funny homophones, and China’s willingness to take on government corruption via meme…
…it would appear that Asia as a whole is winning 2013. Time to go watch more videos about a Japanese cat figuring out cardboard boxes and a traditional Beijing opera “female impersonator” get his transsexual rock-opera on. Not exactly memes, but maybe some day they’ll go viral in America, too.