Your Meme? It Can Be Our Meme. #Create
Memes. You got to love them. Canadian society now is becoming almost translingual, being able to speak fluent English, Profanity and Memes. What happens when a meme becomes self aware? That being the person in the meme, knows their a meme. There have been a few examples, William Hung the horrid singer from American Idol becoming a professional musician, Alex from Target appearing on Ellen and other talk shows, but who could forget the *fire* Twitter accounts of MoonPie, Wendy’s, Gordon Ramsay and the Vegas Golden Knights NHL team.
However, the meme that I’m going to dive into was one of my favourite classic memes. Some may know her as Laina Morris, but you will probably know her as the Overly Attached Girlfriend meme. You know exactly which meme I’m talking about, the creepy pictures of her character with taglines like “Herpes? They can be our herpes.” or “I ran into your ex today…with my car” stuff like that. What makes this meme so special is that it was one of the first memes, I was ever exposed to. Let’s throw back to 2012 and the origin of this meme. The meme was created by Morris when she entered a contest started by the teenage heart throb Justin Beiber. Following the release of his song “Boyfriend” he challenged his fans to recreate the video but make it from a female’s prespective called “Girlfriend”. Morris gladly accepted the challenge and created a video parodying the fact that Beiber’s song can been perceived as creepy and stalkerish. Thus the Overly Attached Girlfriend meme was born.
Now her video started slow, but once Reddit got a hold of it her video got nearly 200,000 views in the first few days. People started making the meme and posting on online chatrooms and Morris decided to do what every sane person would do, she got into character and made more videos. She created videos that featured her character interacting with other internet celebs like Bad Luck Brian, EpicMealTime and Shane Dawson. Exactly one year after her infamous JB video, her OAG channel on Youtube had racked up almost a million subscribers and almost 78 million video views. Morris became an internet celebrity herself and she capitalized on her success in a brilliant way.
She started creating song parodies, parodying songs like “The Motto”, “Blurred Lines”, “Call Me Maybe” and nearly all of Taylor Swift’s discography. This caught the attention of mainstream media outlets. Morris has since made appearances on Jimmy Fallon, The Nerdist, TableTop and the 2013 edition of Youtube Rewind. She has played a computer program called the “Overly Attached Computer” in a Samsung commerical, and she even got the opportunity to report from the American Music Awards. Her character was also used in a 2015 Delta Airlines flight safety video alongside other famous internet memes. Some of these opportunites were met with some backlash from fans, who labelled her a sellout and accused her on trying to create a career off her meme. Morris responded to these claims and started doing fundraising campaigns for various charities. This gained her some incredible fame in the eyes of the mainstream media and Youtube community, crediting her as someone who used their fame for good and not just self benefit.
In my opinion I think she was one of the first people to actually make a career out of being a meme. From 2012 to about 2015 her meme was huge, and helped her sell a lot of merchandise and help legitimize her as an actress/ comedian. Sadly however, like all good memes they peak. Her meme peaking in 2013/2014 means that she hasn’t really been relevant since then. I think that in her prime she was successful on capitalizing her meme status, she was able to as much as she could to grow her image on social media. Currently as of Valentine’s Day 2018 she has 1.2 million Youtube subscribers but has not posted a video in more than 5 months. However, no matter what happens her meme will always be a part of our culture. While it might not be popular now, it’s been cemented in meme-ology and become one of the most famous. For the actress who played the OAG, she had become somewhat of a household name in 2013/14 and gained Youtube celebrity status.
Overall she was sucessful in gaining a following and creating this empire based on some creepy internet video.
Images: Google Images
Sources for the post:
https://www.dailydot.com/upstream/bieber-girlfriend-contest-overly-attached-meme/
