On a quarantine evening in the spring of 2020, artist Daiyaan Colá “had just finished making dinner, I jumped on Instagram to browse for inspiration and I saw a post of a random couple cuddling and I got an idea to do something similar but I made the couple interracial instead.”
Daiyaan posted the cartoon on Facebook, and over the next three years it turned into a meme and journeyed across the internet: jumping from Reddit’s /r/wholesomememes to Elon Musk’s Twitter account, from Tumblr to TikTok, and captioned not just in English but in Turkish, Spanish, and many other languages.
At each step along its journey, the meme meant something different — and did a different kind of work for the people posting it. Daiyaan Colá says “I think it touched so many people because it was needed during a time of tension and confusion, with so much gloom going on at one time, I think a cool cartoon of a mixed couple put an emotion response out that everyone didn't know they needed.” For Colà, the cartoon helped “to highlight the importance of mixed couples because diversity is what makes our world so unique.”
The mixed couple in the cartoon sits on a bed, eating Chick Fil A, smoking weed, Netflixing and chilling. Because I’m always someone who looks for a story in a picture, I imagine that he’s just come back from working late and she’s stayed up to meet him. Or maybe he just went out to get the Chick Fil A. Who knows — art is great because you can interpret it in so many ways.
Daiyaan says he works on “my iPad 7th gen running the program Procreate, I'm trying to capture a nostalgic/ pop art /new age modern art… tons of bright 80s and 90s primary colors.” The colors are bold, and the composition of the image is meticulous: if the door weren’t slightly open, if the sheers weren’t that shade of green, if her knee wasn’t bent at that specific angle, it wouldn’t work the way it does. Everything is there for a reason, even the parts you don’t really notice as much.
The cartoon feels very 2020. First, there’s a lot of weed and watching Netflix going on — which brings me back to the quarantine state of mind, for better or worse. The meme also centers not just on an interracial couple, but on male vulnerability — something you don’t see as much in art from earlier times. The woman is comforting him, not the other way around: it shows a kind of masculinity that started to feel more possible around 2020.
Remix Meme
In the spring of 2020, the meme took off as a remix trend. Most of these remixes focused on the screen. If you were a fan of some show or movie, you could paste that media into the screen the couple watched. Many of these first memes used a different version of Daiyaan’s cartoon, where his signature either wasn’t there or was on the wall instead of the the woman’s thigh.
In these postings, the meme signals you’re a fan of Nathan For You or the Simspsons. It also describes a lifestyle, and many of the memes swap out different items for the objects on the bed, or leave the bed empty entirely. This kind of use of the meme reminds me of Starter Packs, and other memes which involve listing a bunch of things belonging to a certain type of person. Some couples are Netflix-and-weed couples, and some couples are Starbucks-and-Nathan-Fielder couples. You tailor the meme to reflect your own experiences.
Some meme-makers took a different approach. Robert Wyatt Duncan, on Twitter, "saw it going around and just knew I had to put the dumbest thing on the TV that I could think of,” leading to the meme above with a clip from the Pink Panther. For Duncan too, the meme was really about quarantine: “…the mass whiplash that the pandemic gave people had something to do with it. A meme about being stuck at home with somebody you love was probably the thing that people wanted to see most at the time.” The purple tint on the image could be a kind of deep-frying, a process which many memes undergo where the image’s colors are altered to make it seem more unfamiliar and bizarre.
DTF Goals
On July 30th, 2020 on Reddit’s /r/wholesomememes, a user called JoshDaBoiOnReddit (whose account has since been deleted) posted the meme but replaced the Netflix loading screen with a screen cap of a viral tweet posted by @RidiculousDak on November 25th, 2018, which earned over 180,000 likes:
DTF traditionally stands for “Down To Fuck.” Dak’s tweet went viral enough that it was reposted to sites like iFunny and 9Gag, which might have been where JoshaDaBoiOnReddit found it to put into his wholesomememes post, because Dak’s handle is gone. Daiyaan’s cartoon is also cropped.
For the Redditors, Daiyaan’s couple was “goals.” The post’s 860 comments are full of people sharing stories from their own relationships, expressing dissatisfaction with modern dating culture and asking for advice about finding someone who will support them like the woman in the meme supports her man.
For the Redditors, the most striking thing about the meme image was its depiction of what they were looking for in a relationship: a woman who would be emotionally available and support them, accepting their vulnerability. The poignancy of the meme was that it showed a kind of intimacy that many want but not as many are able to get. There were a great number of men who were just smoking weed and watching Netflix alone all through quarantine, and some of them went on this Reddit thread in July.
Cryptocurrency Emblem
And then, Elon Musk got involved:
It’s probable he didn’t make this meme himself. Elon usually steals all his memes. But when he posted it in October 2021, it received attention — and may have played a significant role in the Bitcoin markets.
Some posters interpreted Elon’s meme as a “top signal,” the high-water mark of Bitcoin, when people should start selling to get the best price. The meme also includes a little “69” and “420” jokes (both of which Elon loves). I’m not one of those people who thinks Elon is always playing 4-D chess, but I do think he used his social media clout to scam money off his fanboys — and he has to know that posting about a cryptocurrency will have some effect.
But why pick Daiyaan’s cartoon? Wondering about the soul of Elon Musk is always a trippy task. Maybe he had Grimes on his mind, and saw the two of them in the couple sitting on the bed. Or maybe he saw himself in the exhausted man. The image does show a kind of ideal heterosexual vibe: Elon, who will always have the heart of an incel no matter how many children he fathers, may have identified with the yearning in it.
And Elon still remembers this meme. He reposted one yesterday which shows the couple watching a film about the Roman Empire. Funnily enough, that Romeposting could also be read several ways: Elon getting in on the latest gendered internet joke (that men think about the Roman Empire every day), Elon distracting from his CEO’s disastrous appearance at the Code Conference, Elon making a commentary about how he thinks America is an empire in decline… the list goes on.
After his first posting, though, the meme went on to be posted frequently in the crypto community, becoming a staple of the vocabulary they used to speak with each other:
Twitter Video Combinations
In October 2022, just days before Elon’s reign began, Twitter added a new feature: posters could now embed up to four videos in a single post, or three pictures and one video. A variety of meme formats that could be split into four parts were adapted into this new format. Quarantine Couple (which by now was two years old) was a perfect meme to use for this trend:
Memes respond to changes in the technology used to make and distribute them. A new feature added to a platform can usher in a whole new genre — most obviously, this happens when Snapchat or TikTok create a new filter — but it also happened with Twitter Video Combinations, and with softwares that made it easier to remix, copy-and-paste, and alter images. A whole new wave of memes has also been brought about by artificial intelligence generators.
Other Uses
The meme also spread internationally. For example, Lithuanian EDM artist Atsiprisijunges used a remixed version of the meme, which showed the couple as fans of Michael Jordan, Gatorade, and McDonald’s, for the cover art of a track released on Soundcloud.
Examples also abounded in Turkish, where there were enough to inspire a longish listicle on Onedio. I’m describing only a very small sample of all the ways this meme was used, and all the lives it touched, but I hope you get the idea.
For some, the meme represented quarantine and 2020, for some it represented a cure for male loneliness, for some it was a chance to share their fandom for a show or film, and for some it was a way to send a signal on the cryptocurrency markets.
There is a polysemy to this meme — like a word, it can mean a bunch of different things depending on what context you put it in. Quarantine Couple can be both a commentary on mixed race couples and diversity, like Daiyaan originally made it, or it can be Elon Musk’s attempt to game the cryptocurrency exchanges. It never stops meaning any of these things — but at the same time, as it travels between people, it takes on more and more new meanings. The power of a meme, like the power of a word, rests on this ability to constantly mean new things — to enter into new mouths, new pages, and new conversations.
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