About

This Is a River of My Tears is a meme depicting K-pop singer and NCT member Kim “Doyoung” Dong-young pointing at a river with the accompanying text “This is a river of my tears.” The image is usually used as a form of expressing sadness or despair as a reaction image to captions about something depressing.

Origin

Originally the image shown in the meme comes from a V Live stream NCT posted to the service on July 24th, 2018. In the video, the group explores a beach and cleans up litter they find along the way. At one point, the group stops near the sea and Doyoung can be seen pointing at a buoy in the water as he jokes about renting the “boat.” According to the group’s post, Doyoung says “Please don't drop litter!”^[1]

After the video was posted, fans of the K-pop group pulled the image of Doyoung and began using it on Twitter with the accompanying text “This is a river of my tears.” On August 16th, 2018, a captioned image of the scene image was then uploaded to Pinterest^[2] by user Emily Sanchez.

Spread

As the image started to spread around the internet, particularly on social media, fans of Doyoung and NCT started picking up the image and adding more captions of their own.^[3]

Although it was used occasionally by fans in 2018 and 2019, the meme didn’t gain much traction until January 2020. During this time period it was spread outside the NCT fan base when meme accounts on social media and users on Reddit began creating their own versions.

On January 21st, 2020, the Facebook account Memes posted a version of the meme with the caption “how’s your life going?” and received over 23,000 likes, 7,400 comments and nearly 10,000 shares (seen below).

Another post on the popular Game of Thrones subreddit r/freefolk by user sairohit21 depicting the meme alongside the caption “When you ask GOT fans to talk about Season 8” garnered over 16,000 upvotes.^[4]

Examples

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Search Interest

External References