Always a hard race to call, but meme of the month this time around goes to netizens in China, where “karma is a bitch” clips are viral-ing out of control.
Despite the restrictions of the Great Firewall of censors, the country has a proud history of sparking social media phenomenons, from “are you as thin as a piece of A4 paper?” to the belly button challenge.
And continuing that run now is the “Karma is a bitch” challenge, which like the US TV show Riverdale that it’s inspired by, apparently has little logic or reason but is damn entertaining.
The origin story of the meme comes from an episode in Season 2 of the show, which is based on the characters from Archie Comics.
In said episode, one of the characters, Veronica Lodge, utters the line “Oh well, karma is a bitch” in response to news about a horrific car accident.
Netizens, you see, have hijacked the line and inserted it into short clips of themselves transforming while a mashup of Kreayshawn’s Gucci Gucci and Beat Antique’s I Got plays in the background.
We are not quite sure how a brutal line in a US TV show morphed into a Chinese social media phenomenon, other than to say it’s the internet, it doesn’t have to make sense.
A compilation of the best “Karma is a bitch” videos even became a top post on Reddit. Our favorite one is the guy who went all Ming Dynasty.
For further details, watch the clips!
The craze was picked up by Buzzfeed on Friday, which reported that the videos were made using a video app called Dou Yin, which allows users to shoot 15-second music videos over popular songs. — a bit like a combination of Vine and Musicl.ly.
Since then, the meme has spread overseas, with even US celebrities taking part such as singer and actress Lena Hall and Dawson’s Creek actress Busy Philipps and author Kelly Oxford, who joined thousands more people uploading their take on it onto Instagram.
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bee6nHqhBeC/?taken-by=busyphilipps
https://www.instagram.com/p/BegsdMXngD8/?taken-by=lenarockerhall
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