About

In Kindness There Is Evil refers to a meme depicting various characters or people on a chart which ranks how good or bad they are, pairing them with variations on the Yin and Yang symbols and a text. The meme is most often used to compare casts of anime/manga characters or video game characters.

Origin

The earliest known post of the meme can be found on X. On October 15th, 2020, X user @nctventi made a post using the text and several variants of the Yin-Yang symbol alongside members of the KPop group 00z, a subgroup of NCT.^[1] The post (shown below) received over 16,000 likes and over 6,400 retweets over two and a half years.

Spread

The edits gained popularity over the next few years on Reddit, where they were applied not just to fandom topics but to other subjects. It was used in a manner similar to Alignment Charts. For example on April 24th, 2021, Reddit user DragonlordYTlelz uploaded an edit about insects to the /r/memes subreddit.^[2] The post received more than 47,900 upvotes in two years (shown below, left). On August 12th, 2022, Reddit user A1-D0 uploaded a similar edit about birds and poultry to the same subreddit, which received more than 2,800 upvotes in one year (shown below, right).^[3]

On February 28th, 2022, Reddit user KosmicBread uploaded an edit about JoJo's Bizarre Adventure characters to the /r/ShitPostCrusaders subreddit.^[4] The post received more than 2,300 upvotes in one year (shown below, left). On the next day, Reddit user Soul699 uploaded similar edit to the same subreddit, but with every position filled in with "JoJo," which received more than 5,700 upvotes in one year (shown below, right).^[5]

Template

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References