KYM Review: Breakthrough Meme Formats Of 2022

When memes first got their start, there weren't a lot of meme formats to exploit. Nowadays, however, you could say there are almost too many meme formats to exploit.

As imagined, the year 2022 gave meme creators plenty of new, wacky and inventive ones, coinciding with the continued rise of TikTok, Twitter's new ownership and Tumblr's resurgence of indecency, among other crucial events.

No one could have predicted (except maybe LeBron) what this year's breakout meme formats were going to be. But now that it's December, it's time to look back on the year in memes and reflect on how the internet invented new ways of creating them.

AI Art

Across timelines and feeds this year was AI art, which begs the question, "Will meme creators be replaced by robots soon enough?" The future of entertainment might be randomly generated, but at least the humans still have to provide the algorithm with a prompt.

Meme formats using art generated by artificial intelligence were some of the most prevalent and fascinating this year. Probably the most potent was DALL-E mini, which let any normie make a Gigachad version of anything as if it was Scribblenauts in real life.

DALL-E mini was soon followed by many others like Craiyon, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, which all seeped from 4chan to Twitter as the inventiveness led to explicit exploitation and many other uses.

Eventually, everyone and everything became an anime character with Different Dimension Me, seemingly satisfying many's main character syndromes.

There ended up being many AI art generators, provoking a mass uncanny valley across social media — not to mention the controversies surrounding such artwork.

Name Soundalikes and Red Circles

Red Circle Perpetrators was an underlying hard-hitter in relation to meme formats this year. Pretty much all social media platforms saw these memes, as they were easy to make, cute and playing on recognizable clickbait imagery.

The concept led to the now-notorious Name Soundalikes trend that originally found LeBron James' name everywhere, across Wikipedia, Google and random subreddits. The red circles and arrows became more egregious, soon filling up the majority of an image, making it look almost deep-fried.

TikTok Photo Mode and Slideshows

When Snapchat invented the concept of social media "stories," it later evolved into Instagram stories and Twitter fleets. Even TikTok created a stories feature in 2022, but perhaps more importantly, TikTok created its Photo Mode feature this year that has since invented a new style of posting never seen on social media.

It works like this: A creator can add over 20 photos to a slideshow, which they can then set to any sound. The photos swipe through automatically every two seconds, which sometimes syncs up to the beat of the song. The viewer can also swipe by themself and follow the rhythm on their own accord.

The feature essentially made TikTok a place for photo-sharing and not just video-sharing and led to multiple trends. Nowadays, when scrolling shitposts on Instagram or iFunny, a TikTok watermark with a username is often visible. The frequency of this occurrence will most likely increase in 2023 … though one can never be too sure of the nature of the internet.

QRposting

The average 123movies user also got a meme format this year when QRposting reached oversaturation back in January. Of course, it's illegal to post the entirety of The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie, but (at least according to some) it's more of a grey area to post a QR code of it that links to the available torrent.

Barnacle Boy Sulphur Vision was the original meme template used in the format, but My Child Will X became the predominant heavyweight.

Although no massive controversy about anyone getting burned with a link to some sketchy malware plagued this trend, the format's ability to spread misinformation is also something to be noted. After all, those QR codes could have sent the innocent scanner anywhere.

Luckily, no shock sites were significantly wrapped up in the trend. Instead, it was mostly cautionary memes being shared.

Misheard Song Lyric Speech Bubbles

The history of misheard lyrics and phonetic translations dates back to the early days of internet memery. However, a new bufflaxing phenomenon emerged this year in which moldy speech bubbles were placed over characters, showing them singing their hearts out to such classics like Wenomechainsama and Turi Ip Ip Ip.

Many chronically online people know exactly what the two aforementioned songs sound like but don't know their titles, only the mumbled jargon reiterated in the Misheard Song Lyric Speech Bubble videos.

These memes were all over TikTok and YouTube this year, resulting in a mass amount of earworm melodies with unidentifiable Shazam results. Something about these low-quality videos proved infectious.

BeReal

The app BeReal has officially been named the number one app on the Apple app store this year and its prominence on phones across the world has mirrored its use in memes. If you're unfamiliar, BeReal sends out a daily, synchronized notification to all its users at a random time during the day. As everyone gets the notification, they're prompted to take a BeReal photo that shows what both the front and back cameras capture.

Zoomers, specifically, have really taken to the app and its ritual, leading to gimmick accounts that post both real and parody BeReals. The memes imagine what Hunter Biden's BeReal would look like or Queen Elizabeth's after she died, among many others.

Even videos using the BeReal camera emerged in which TikTokers screen recorded their interactions after asking a stranger to take a picture of them.

Powerscaling Edits

Powerscaling memes put the internet's most powerful personalities head to head as if they're on Deadliest Warrior. It's essentially the Who Would Win? format but put into video form, showcasing abilities and stats, similar to fighting games like Super Smash Bros.

Whether it's a match between Kumalala and Savesta, the Ohio Final Boss and the King of Ohio or toddlers and pitbulls, these powerscaling memes give the viewer a good idea to how the simulation fight would pan out. They've been floating around TikTok and YouTube all year, stretching their versatility to almost any meme that involves a central character.

railmoo Credits;yeat> #fypシ #savesta #kumalala #goofyahh #chinesemonkeysong #zaddygio #monarchsofanitok #lightskin #uwu #viral #global ♬ original sound – ZaddyGio

@pimpin..phantom dark humor ladies n gents #fyp #taskforce607 #gibbygang😩😩 #phantomguard #darkhumour ♬ original sound – Pimpin..Phantom

Zoomerification

Just because Generation Z is arguably running the meme game on TikTok right now doesn't mean that the rest of the internet won't make fun of them. First of all, it's their haircuts, like, the Zoomer Perm is objectively hilarious looking. The Edgar Cut is not much better.

Mix those two visuals with their iconic slang and you got the Zoomerification format that could make any sigma male character into the epitome of Zoomer, fuckboy cringe.

The format was pretty easy to follow: Just find a PNG of that curly, birds nest haircut and insert the word bussin' into any movie dialogue. Like magic, Don Draper from Mad Men looks like he's running the Twitter page for Barstool Sports.

As Gen Alpha is coming of age right now, maybe there will be some sort of "Alphaification" trend that emerges in 2026. But for now, let's just enjoy the generational struggle as Millennials get their last hoorah.

Twitter Video Combinations

Just before Elon Musk acquired Twitter and supposedly changed the color of the like button every week, the old development team at Twitter decided to make Twitter video combinations a thing.

Of course, Twitter image combinations in one tweet have been a part of the timeline for quite some time. Having four videos in one tweet was previously unheard of, but once launched, the feature led to the resurgence of multiple meme templates that could now have moving parts.

With Twitter video combinations, the cuddling couple watching TV could finally be watching something and Pope Francis could actually be holding something that's moving.

Among Us Art Tutorials

In a very Mandela Effect kind of way, the internet realized this year that they could draw a lot of things if they started with an Among Us crewmate and worked from there. It's as if seeing the Among Us crewmate everywhere wasn't enough for people — meme creators had to insert the imposter into their art too.

Among Us art tutorials is therefore one of the more creative meme formats of the year, hopefully leading to art tutorials that start with many iconic, meme visuals.

On Twitter, artists dedicated to the craft of subtle trolling took to reshaping the crewmate's figure like SpongeBob drawing a perfect circle.

Reanimations

Although this meme format has not been properly identified in the database, "reanimations" refers to the redrawing of videos. As video-sharing has become the most dominant form of social media posting over the past year due to TikTok's popularity, the motions, movements and angles of certain videos are getting more remixes than image macros.

Take the Dr. Livesy Walk or the Cat Breakdancing, skilled video creators can insert characters from any fandom or subculture, circling back to the original viral video or GIF that started it all.

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Looking for more of this year's best viral phenomena and memes? Be sure to check out our other 2022 meme roundups below:

• The Top 10 Memes Of 2022
• KYM Staff Picks Of 2022
• The Slang of 2022
• Breakthrough Meme Formats Of 2022
• The Year Of AI Generators
• Top Gaming Memes Of 2022
• Wildest Stories Of 2022
• Top Streamer Moments Of 2022
• Top TikToks Of 2022
• Top Lewd Memes Of 2022
• Trolls, Rumors and Hoaxes Of 2022
• Top Exploitables Of 2022
• Top Meme Creators Of 2022
• Top Meme Revivals Of 2022