MEME QUEENS

Ah, memes. They make us laugh, get us thinking and hold up a mirror to society. But what becomes of the people behind our favourite faces on the internet? Alley Pascoe tracks them down to find out

- Alley Pascoe

Imagine walking down the street and running into a stranger wearing a T-shirt with your face on it. How would you feel if you found out you were the butt of a family’s in-joke for a decade? What about if you saw someone dressed up as you for Halloween? Becoming a meme is an unusual experience; it’s hard to comprehend how it would feel for millions of people to know your face, or to be thought of as “Success Kid”, “Disaster Girl” or “Trying to Hold a Fart Next to a Cute Girl in Class Guy”. Here, we speak to three regular people who became meme-famous and lived to tell the tale.

“I was about 11 years old, playing dress up at my friend’s house and taking Polaroid photos. I pulled an outfit together from her dress-up box and she put my hair in pigtails and had me put my [dental] retainer in. She gathered some Goosebumps books and told me to give the most excited expression possible. That’s how the photo came about, but I had no idea how it went on to appear on Reddit, which is how it became a meme.