10 Nuked Memes That May Never Recover

For some people, deep frying a meme isn't enough. They need to go further, they need to go weirder. Colors must turn more deranged, thematic material must become darker, more cursed, more outlandish. There are no treaties on the regulation or non-proliferation of meme nuking, and so in various corners of the online world =\such as Reddit's /r/nukedmemes, content that has been burnt and irradiated in this way accumulates. Look upon the scorched results, and wonder.

If nuked or deep-fried memes aren't your cup of tea, that's fine too, it just means you're lame. The deep-fry and nuke are maybe the most purely visual kind of meme: they're a set of image-editing processes that can be accomplished only through digital tools, and they show off what those tools are capable of. They also are designed to be off-putting, shocking, and unnerving: perhaps like certain kinds of experimental metal music or writing. Like Vincent van Gogh's choice to make chunky, thick brushstrokes that made the paint itself highly visible and showed the paintingness of his paintings (many of his best are arguably not actually trying to represent a field or flowers, but rather be an arrangement of colors and vibes) these memes are self-reflexive and highly vibrant, pointing always to the tools used to manipulate and create them.