Which one are you out of your friends? Truck freak, Crazy ass, The fighter, or maybe друг? Using the Russian word meaning "friend", друг is especially dear to the inhabitants of that cold country, including me, so I could not pass by this meme, as it is a weighty reason of introducing the Russian memes, their features and problems.
When a meme from the west comes to Russia, it is the norm, but a leak of our meme abroad is a whole event that happens once in a blue moon. This is the first time when a Russian meme has transcended the boundaries of the so-called "mass memes", and in the case of Russia, such memes mock stereotypes, communism, and hypertrophied soviet culture. Although this meme does not belong to the realm of surreal memes, it technically has certain similarities, and is pretty abstract. Paradoxically, the first Russian meme of such an orientation was originally created abroad, and not even by a Russian person. Друг was made by a Twitter user
@korolevcross, and, as can be seen from some of his other posts, they are attracted by the Russian web culture, at least the language.
Howbeit, друг has raised the level of cultural awareness in narrow circles and made the Russian language more memetic, but has not triggered the expected "revolution". On the other hand, друг is a new milestone of the Russian memes, a fresh sip after endless pictures about the USSR and vodka.
Memes about Russia have always been popular, the oldest example is the
Russian Reversal — "In Soviet Russia..." which originated even before the Internet. As the web had been spread in Russia, new, less generalized but no less stereotyped memes were born in the foreign consciousness. For example, "Cyka blyat" which gained wide popularity because of the Russian players in CS:GO and other multiplayer games, as well as "Cheeki breeki", a phrase from the Ukrainian game S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl. Other forms of media also did not stand aside: the hardbass music, as well as variations of Gondola, which popularized the image of gopnik abroad.
It is worth noting that such abstract Russian memes have already seeped to the west. In 2016, there were fish trying to read. Back then, the meme did not make such a sensation and over time was forgotten. As for other Russian memes and our culture as a whole, it is pretty dynamic and highly affected by outer perturbations, but is also very independent and distinctive. For example, nowadays post-irony has become a huge trend. Despite its popularity, only few use post-irony correctly, as usually people misinterpret it as a form of extremely absurd, ironic shitpost. Such content is created on the principle of template "inconsistency", i.e. the less there is a connection between two pictures, the more it is absurd, and therefore, allegedly funnier. Because of that, some of our memes resemble the works of ShitpostBot5000, even despite all the difference in approaches of memeing. Ironically, but there is also its
Russian version which automatically combines two pictures and randomly picks a text, and its content is often as the same quality as the real post-ironic memes.
The current state of our "dank" meme segment can be called a "big cargo cult of post-irony", and my friend (I hope him to be the hope of Russian memeology) even wrote an
article about it. Of course, at first glance it could seem that our memes are stagnating. Actually, the situation is more complex. I have been revising my attitude to the Russian memes for a long time, and now (autumn 2019) have decided to refresh the article in order to consider its problems with open mind. Sure, most issues are definitely present, though they are not that tragic. I think that the root of our problems lies in the very regard to the memes, but that is a global issue of the meme culture itself. Even despite this, many have developed in themselves a purely shitposter perception of memes; not as creativity, but quick entertainment, and even business, considering that some big groups in VK exploit memes by stealing content and even get paid for advertising. This leads to the notorious misinterpretation of post-irony, and also the low quality both from the point of content and form. However, to stigmatize everything without understanding the situation is the first sign of meme elitism. Of course, the cult of shitposting that conquered the Runet is not the most pleasant thing, but one can find the advantages in it. I dare to call shitpost a genre of memes, which is being created to quickly get lots of fun, often through forcing. Paradoxically, but even being that quick entertainment, shitpost can still be of high quality.
More to say, I started to notice that many foreign "dank" memes follow trends already popular in Russia, like the demotivators resurgence. Another thing is that one can (and better do, in my opinion) shitpost creatively, as we often lack of this, unfortunately. Another problem is the fact that many memes are created for the sake of forcing, initially being a cancer. On the other hand, even despite the cancerous origin, it is important to evaluate memes from different points. Also, by "shitpost" I mean specific, rather dominating, stratum of the meme culture which is quite diverse. There are too "smoothed" translations of foreign memes, as well as sincere "normie" memes, and local gems, and even the quality, stylish "shitpost", including the memes that use Western content, or its rules and mechanisms as a basis for creating something new and unique (such acts like
peplix and
buterbroder). Maybe, that is the Russian meme renaissance we all wanted.
I would venture to guess that from the memeologic point of view the quality problem of our memes lies in the absence of unity between the idea and form. Many memes are keeping balance between these two paradigms, but if a meme doesn't have idea as such, it tries to count upon form, and vice versa. Maybe we just have not fully mastered this concept and thus often make mistakes. On the contrary, our meme culture has almost reached its "awakening" stage: we are able to ironize over anything and be aware of ourselves in a meme plan, even about the memes themselves, but still cannot take over them due to lack of understanding of many concepts. Therefore, especially important tools are used incorrectly. We do not have style as an aspect of internal form as well, this is why many of our memes seem to be quite raw and narrow. For sure, the Russian memes are diverse in their internal form, yet unpredictable, one even can find them chaotic. Few people make memes by unspoken rules of taste, while overwhelming majority use macros with different fonts and colors, the most infamous of which is
Lobster. This is compounded by an internal VK photo editor that devalues form.
On the other hand, I believe our memes to be the most unique ones on the Internet, and if I were born abroad, I would have dedicated most of my free time to its research and, possibly, even forcing. Notable that our memes already "leaked" in 2018 to the Western Twitter segment, and I was trying to boost the meme xenoculture of surreal memes, based on Cyrillic imitation, as well. Also, we have developed a culture of video memes, including a unique subgenre of YTP, the Russian YouTube Poop. Years of fame and premature death in 2012 brought this genre back to the underground, and despite some say that RYTP is depreciated now, it gave a strong push to the development of the original montage genre, and even mashups.
Below are the examples of some Russian memes that have foreign counterparts, but on the whole take original forms:
Winged Doom (The Omsk Bird, Омская птица) — an independent character, which indirectly does belong to Advice Animals. Based on the drawing by Heiko Muller and born on the Russian imageboards in 2009, the meme had made Omsk to be associated with the city of junkies. As the fame was growing, the Omsk Bird become an unofficial mascot of wordplay.
Memchiki (Мемчики) — basically, the Russian Coaxed Into a Snafu. It is noteworthy that they appeared independently and even outstripped the Western analog for a couple of months. Memchiki became one of the first ironic memes in the Runet and had spread with incredible speed among the masses. However, people took them seriously, which led to the degradation of Russian memes and a misunderstanding of irony. Coupled with the above factors, culture was plunged into stagnation. In addition to the images, the slang was also important (the word "butthurt" was replaced by consonants or any other Russian words with the letter "B"), which were accompanied by comics. The basis for jokes implied trolling IRL, coition of another's mothers, and so on. They were highly popular in 2013–2014, and set the development vector for future memes as a whole.
Wonnie (Вонни) — in fact, a whole layer of Dolan-like memes, featuring the characters mainly from the Soviet and Russian cartoons ('
Winnie the Pooh', '
Well, Just You Wait!', '
Leopold the Cat'', '
Three from Prostokvashino', '
Gena the Crocodile', and others). In a biting manner, these memes ridicule the culture of drug addicts, exposing some dark aspects of their life, and morphing the childhood characters into filthy junkies. Often such comics are impregnated with gloomy, depressive atmosphere and black humor, as well as parodic speech of drug addicts without vowels (y brght? — "т прнс?"). Having gone to the masses after 2012, Wonnie, like the Omsk bird, flowed into the form of lexis, throwing comics into the background. Memchiki
for a while have revived them, as well as the original Dolan and Spoderman memes.
"Collages" — our version of Expand Dong memes. Though these memes do not have actual name at all, they are quite popular. Various photoshopped captions are usually used with movie posters, video game pictures, and other kinds of media. Beside the funny phrases, the characters themselves are important too, so the memers chop their appearance as well.
Despair — a style meme, one of the most unique phenomena of Runet. It is a kind of tribute to anguish, hopelessness and depression, to gloomy forests and dark industrial landscapes, of which there is plenty in Russia. Stylistic features are black and white colors, trees, and "empty" luminous eyes of the characters. The main motives are endless sorrow, nihilism, misanthropy, lack of meaning of life, and the references to Post-Rock. Roots of Despair lie in the comics about Wonnie and
Transcendental Cat and also, actually, in the Post-Rock memes.
Neomemes — a template-style type of memes, created by the founder of the VK group "
Degradach" in order to complicate the meme structure and "make them great again". These memes have strict rules and canons: for example, each post contains several images (up to 10, the limit of VK) being a part of a certain story, each picture's resolution is strictly 1080x1080, and it includes a neon captions inside the black frames. The meme model is also universal: after the joke setup and a couple of captions goes the punchline preparation with the upscaling of the image, and finally the punchline itself. Basically, the neomemes are dissected comics. Such content has been highly appreciated by the users, and the popular VK groups began to steal the neomemes from its owners, which led to overusing and abusing the format. As for me, I think that neomemes quickly exhausted themselves, having ceased to be funny, thus becoming monotonous, since its essence was not in the uniqueness of style (like in the Rage Comics with their artistic freedom), but in the pattern itself. With that being said, such severity along with the uncontrollable forcing has led to their devaluation. However, neomemes as a protest, an appeal, and an attempt of changing the Russian meme culture, deserve respect, indeed.
An article in Russian.
"An Old Man and a Nazi" — a constructive exploitable meme which mocks the difference in living standards of Russia and Germany after WWII. Usually the joke is set between two characters from pop culture with a continuous and complicated relationship history. The main forge of a such content is the eponymous
group in VK. Also, this is an excellent example of the prevalence of meaning over form (that, as it has been said, our memes suffer the lack from), that is, the idea of a meme increases its the value, despite the picture is in not of the best quality.
Of course, those are not all the memes that I consider truly original and unique, but rather a little glimpse at what the Russian meme culture has been over the years, and what it can be.
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