“It’s getting more embarrassing for Millennials to share anything prior to probably 2012,” she says. But Meg Lewis, a meme expert and social media manager at Giphy, thinks we’re finally witnessing the last gasps of the Millennial reign over the digital kingdom. Think about it: how many of the most tired memes – like the Mean Girls, ‘ So you agree…’, Gossip Girl’s, ‘ gopissgirl’, and that Sue Sylvester meme from Glee – have been derived from pop culture that Millennials loved? They were the first generation to grow up with the internet and be Extremely Online, and therefore feel a certain ownership over it.
This backlash forms part of a wider rejection of the ‘Millennial meme’. The general consensus is that the ‘actual villain’ of the film is this unoriginal, annoying take. 2021 was the year that it went viral yet again and people finally started to get pissed off about it. This meme is so overused that it’s now been a meme in itself. Sometimes it adapts to new formats, like, ‘The movie villain / the actual villain’, but the message is the same: “Wow, looking back at it, the REAL villain of The Devil Wears Prada wasn’t Miranda… it was Andy’s unsupportive boyfriend and friends!” The one that lurks in the drafted tweets of Millennial start-up brands, in the depths of BuzzFeed’s old listicles and still haunts Gay Twitter’s soul.
