I Am Going To Create An Environment That Is So Toxic, And This Week's Other Best Memes, Ranked
Here at Digg, we try our best to cover the most important and confounding memes that come across the timeline. But the web is littered with tons of great memes that never quite hit the mainstream and instead just bounce around the weird corners of Twitter or Reddit.
Enter our recurring feature, Memes, Ranked. This week, we've got Spotify Wrapped, look who decided to come out of their room, I am going to create an environment that is so toxic, they don't know I… and thank you for changing my life.
5. Look Who Decided To Come Out Of Their Room
The meme
With Thanksgiving dinner fresh in everyone's mind, someone decided to unearth a years-old image macro of a large family seated at a dinner table looking toward the camera.
According to KnowYourMeme, the photograph originates from a website called MyFamilyDinnerProject.org, a nonprofit initiative to encourage families to eat at the dinner table together. The goofy earnestness of the picture made it ripe for memeing, and it originally made its way around 4chan and other dark corners of the internet before being discovered by Twitter user Reagan.
Reagan imagined this family giving one of its socialist family members a hard time.
Soon after, others were joining in on the fun with other hilarious captions.
Examples
James Crugnale
4. Thank You For Changing My Life
The meme
An offshoot of the popular Wojak character universe, this is a meme of gratitude, at least in part. In it, an affectionate statement aimed at one of life's simple pleasures is met with a banal response. It's literally a meme, after all.
Examples
Adwait Patil
3. Spotify Wrapped
The meme
As is tradition, Spotify on Tuesday rolled out its customized end-of-year review for subscribers. Despite people's varied taste in music, however, reactions fell along remarkably similar lines: namely, feeling exposed.
Examples
Apple Music subscribers, on the other hand, just felt left out.
Jon-Michael Poff
2. They Don't Know I…
The meme
In late December, memes of a Wojak character standing in the corner of a room watching other people have fun at a party began to circulate on social media. Usually captioned, "You don't know I…" the meme reveals the internal monologue of the Wojac as he wistfully looks on at the merriment unfolding around him. Some of the memes highlight the feelings of isolation one might feel at a party, while others contain more comical and eccentric thoughts that sometimes pop up when one's brain wanders.
Examples
BJ Pang-Chieh Ho
1. I Am Going To Create An Environment That Is So Toxic
The meme
This meme is as old as — well, as old as the episode of "Glee" from which the screencap comes. It's Jane Lynch as Sue Sylvester, a cheerleading coach at the high school where the show takes place. In the scene in question, from the first season of the show, she's plotting to bring down the school's glee club by turning its members against each other.
The meme has popped up a lot this year in particular, and it's lived many different lives. Sometimes it's presented as-is with a Twitter caption that suggests an alternate "toxic environment":
And sometimes the caption on the image itself is whittled down to a few of its letters to say something else:
But increasingly, people are liberally editing and writing over the photo's caption to say entirely different things, to suit any scenario at all. And, somehow, the image is still perfectly apt: there's just something about Jane Lynch's antagonistic yet authoritative expression that is extremely comical and endlessly adaptable.
One particular way the meme iterated this week was to capture the way moms tell stories, or generally behave.
Examples
But beyond that, people have just been enjoying riffing on this meme anew.
And as always, the best part of any meme's life is when it proves itself adaptable enough to mirror any and all other new memes or news items that appear on the scene.
Thank you, Sue.
Molly Bradley
And if you're hungry for more memes, here's last week's "The Week's Best Memes, Ranked" article, where we rank a mysterious monolith in Utah, when your circle small but y'all crazy, Clifford the Big Red Dog and Paulie Walnuts shooting at things.
