The background of the Arthur’s Fist meme
Oh cartoons. Oh childhood. Everyday as I child, I remember when I came back home from school I was constantly glued to the TV. I always got excited when my favourite show was put up on the TV especially during the weekends. I loved the stories behind each episode and of course all the characters. If you asked me off the top of my head the amount of TV shows I have watched as a kid; trust me, I could name a whole list. You may be wondering, why are we talking about children cartoons today? Well today is the day we can reminisce and talk about the meme that took over the Internet, Arthur’s fist.
But before we begin…..do you know what a meme is?
The official definition of a meme according to Merriam-Webster dictionary is:
“an amusing or interesting item (such as a captioned picture or video) or genre of items that is spread widely online especially through social media”
This definition will be very helpful as I dive into the history of this meme, so remember it!
History behind the meme
So as mentioned earlier, this meme is based on the popular children’s TV show called “Arthur”. This series has been running on air since 1996 and was adapted based on the books written by Marc Brown according to TV Guide.
The origin of this meme is from an episode called “Arthur’s Big Hit” in their Season 4 episode 1 (Or episode 2 as each episode is split into 2 different stories). The image was taken out of the scene where Arthur was angry at his younger sister, D.W. for breaking his model air-plane, and punches her for that reason. Here is a clip of it if you would like to watch it.
From there onwards a Twitter user called @AlmostJT, shown and made a tweet out of that image.
And the rest was history.
Why did it become so famous?
One of the reasons why I felt like it blew up was because of how many of us as children grew up watching this show and now as teenagers and adults we can find the meaning behind the joke funny. Also, as a funny story is I vaguely remember watching this episode however I never got the actual meaning of it. Now that I am watching it as an adult it is quite interesting to see and interpret it.
As millennials, our generation knows quite a bit certain types of things and one of them is media as stated by the Metro. Well it also goes to show how creative we are especially in the hands of social media which we all like to indulge and create our own memes! That was why on many platforms it completely took off such as reddit.
Another reason why it became so famous is because the meme was introduced in many columns of articles that involves popular culture. A few examples are PopSugar, Paper Mag, and many more! This allowed more exposure of the meme itself to the point where everyone knows what it is.
How is it trending right now?
When this meme first came out, everyone and I mean EVERYONE was using it and it was an overnight sensation. As you can see from this image, this meme hit its peak of popularity around August 7 to 13, 2016. This is quite accurate as the first tweet involving Arthur’s fist came out back in July 27th, 2016. After that week, it had a significant dip and a lot of up and down motions according to the graph. After 2017, from there onward the trend is going downwards. As of February 2018, this meme’s popularity has somewhat died down. This in which would be understandable as not everything that was once trending frequently will always be on top. People will always try and find something new.
Something else to point out is that the Verge also reported that even before this meme became well known, other memes have already been created that were based on the show. And under google trends, oh boy can you can tell that’s true. Over the past 5 years, it seems to have spiked in large numbers especially if you compare it to the Arthur’s Fist trend.
How Do you use this meme?
This is the big question of the day! The meme is meant to be used as a way of showing and describing frustration or being in a frustrating situation.
Many people have changed and redesigned the original picture to fit the context of those situations. Here are some very creative memes that others have done to incorporate the usage of Arthur’s fist.
(FYI: These are super relatable)
And of course here is my remixed version:
My feelings since I could never make it to the Top 3 **cries on the side**