So, the dedicated raccoon meme page is called Nocturnal Trash Posts, alluding to the age-old facts that raccoons are night-time critters with a huge affection for trash. The page currently boasts 570 posts that it has shared with an audience of over 324,000 followers.
The page is run by retro game streamer and meme creator Hanna (@NocturnalHanna), with whom Bored Panda got in touch for an interview. The page also has a complementary shop called the Nocturnal Trash Pile that sells everything from clothing to accessories to home décor, all adorned with lovely raccoon artwork.
"I decided to make my Instagram page after I had been making raccoon memes to send to my friends for a few months," explains Hanna about the origins of the now-viral page.
"There were barely any raccoon memes at the time, so I decided to make my own and then ended up posting them to Instagram. It was slow initially, but it soon started to take off, and it was cool to see how many people were relating to my posts."
For the most part, the page is all about getting in touch with the existentialist in us, being apathetic about life, and self-loathing. All of this is wrapped in a fine coat of comedy because everyone loves humor as a coping mechanism.
But besides that, there are also memes that focus on love, mental health, unexpected wordplay, and the like, hitting on some contemporary ideas and concepts from the internet along the way.
Oh, and the visuals—all of the sayings and phrases are complemented by the amazing raccoon pic collages and photoshop work, accentuating the humor to the next level.
"The inspiration for the posts is all over the place," elaborates Hanna. "I sometimes see a raccoon photo and I instantly have an idea of what I want to do with it, and then sometimes it's the other way around. I spend a lot of time thinking of different ideas and testing them with different photos. There's a lot of drafts I don't end up posting. There's also some meme formats that I'll see circulating around that I will love and end up making a raccoon version of."
Hanna has been making trash panda memes for around 3 years at this point, and though they have evolved a lot over this time, for the last year, she has been trying to make the style more consistent.
"I like to make my memes look very aesthetically pleasing with backgrounds and layouts that help emphasize the message. A lot of my memes are dramatizations of feelings many of us share. I feel by dramatizing these emotions it can be relatable and an easy way to share it with others," adds Hanna.
She described her memes as ranging from sad and existential to silly and surprisingly motivational. After all, raccoons are a great animal to represent and to convey these topics and themes since many view this majestic animal as "the underdog", which is relatable. Also, they're cute, so why wouldn't you use raccs for memes?
Creating memes is a form of art, especially if you do it kinda sorta professionally, so of course there will be challenges along the way, as explains Hanna:
"The most challenging part of creating a raccoon meme is thinking of ideas and what will resonate with people. I've been doing this for over 3 years now and it can sometimes be difficult to find new inspiration or think of something I haven't done yet. It can also be really difficult to find photos sometimes for what I'm envisioning. There really aren't that many different raccoon photos out there compared to, say, dogs or cats."