As for his article, "Memes so literal they aren't even memes" has over 46K followers, and getting here has been a team effort. "Our small group has been making memes together since 2018," the people behind the page told Bored Panda. "We all ran different OC meme pages of varying themes on our own but enjoyed working together on group projects. This was one of those."
"One of our admins who helped pioneer the 'birds aren't real' meme trend came up with the idea. We figured it was such an absurd concept that it wouldn't go anywhere but then a Megamind meme just took off so we kept going."
The content on the page is a mixture of gems this team discovers on the internet and stuff they create on their own. "Every so often, one of us finds a repost on Reddit that works with the concept but we make the majority of our own stuff," they explained. "Anything with 'arbitrary watermark' somewhere on it was made by one of us."
There's no 'correct' formula that constitutes a good literal meme, so the criteria that determine whether or not a particular meme gets featured on the page vary. Sometimes, the guys post possible submissions in their group chat and if the majority of them approve, the meme gets posted.
"I would say that [our] success is mostly due to the name of the page, the individual memes aren't usually that funny but the fact that we're beating a dead horse kinda makes it funnier," one of the guys, who goes by TQ online, said.
"Like sometimes the joke is just that we're still making this same general joke and it keeps being funny. Meta on several levels."
Additionally, TQ thinks literal memes work right now because they do catch folks off guard in their own special way. "The world has been so messed up this past year... Maybe people just want something simple to digest that isn't trying to change their mind about something (at least that's my personal hypothesis)."
That being said, literal memes aren't for everyone. Even TQ considers them niche. "As previously stated, we are all still flabbergasted that this even took off," they explained. "It may surprise people to know that they can take more work than the average OC sh**post. Sometimes there is even research involved. For instance, I wouldn't know Young Thug's legal name had we not started this page."
Arguably the main reason why literal memes stand out, in my opinion, is originality. While so many of their "competitors" require you to know at least some context in whatever field they were born from, you can enjoy literal memes even if you've literally lived under a rock and just got your first smartphone.
