Expression Meme

Editor’s Note: Work in Progress

About

Expression Meme refers to an illustration fad on online artist communities which depicts characters facial expressions in various situations in accordance with the instructions of a fill-in-the-blanks template image.

Origin

In cartoons and animations, creators usually make model sheets of characters designs and facial expressions to keep them consistent. And, depicting characters in various situations is an essential training for them to improve their drawing skills. Based on these cultural backgrounds and by the help of online art sharing services, “Expression Meme” has spread amatuer illustrators since late 2000s.

The earliest instance of this kind of fad found on the web was “25 Essential Expressions Challenge” submitted to deviantART by napalmnacey^[1] on May 17th, 2007 (shown below, left).^[2] As shown by its title, that is an image template which has 25 panels for essential facial expressions.

On the other hand, Expression Meme is called as “Expression Practice” (Japanese: 表情練習, HyōJō Renshū)^[3] in the Japanese online artist community pixiv. And it is known as the first fad utilizing pixiv’s “Illustration Response” feature which is equal feature to YouTube’s “Video Response”. This fad was originated by Hide (秀)^[4] on December 5th, 2008.^[5] That is a fill-in-blank template to practice their favorite characters face by drawing his/her facial expression in 12 situations into it. Its English-translated version was submitted to deviantART by NotSoFluent on July 1st, 2009 (shown below, right).^[6]

Spread

[Editor’s Note: Researching]

As the manner in deviantART users that calls something popular a meme, this kind of image templates for exercises of facial expressions is known as “Expression Meme” on the English web.

“Expression Practice” had received more than 250 illustration responses in its first month, and succeeded to show the possibility of this feature. The amount of them had increased to 1200 in its first year. Then in December 2012, it had surpassed 3400.^[7] And, its English-translated version has become to one of the standard templates of “Expression Meme” in there.

In addition, several variations of “Expression Meme” templates which have different number of panels of situations have been created. Some of them have more specific theme than that of the original.

Other Blank Templates for Expression Meme

As of December 2012, the amount of illustrations related to this fad on deviantART is more than 8000.^[8]

Aftermath

Under the influence of this fad’s success, many illustration fads with the same format, answering the theme set on a blank template, have been created and practiced in both online communities. Famous instances in those are “Bottle Meme”, “If You Know 80% Of These You’re My Friend”, “Reactions when he/she is told “I love you”” etc… In particular, one response featuring Princess Zelda from the Nintendo video game series The Legend of Zelda in "Reactions when he/she is told “I love you”" was imported to Westerner’s web and reincarnated to an exploitable fad "Zelda's Response To…" on 4chan in 2012.