meme-review

KYM Review: The Wildest Stories Of 2022

By Adam
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Published 2 years ago

The internet can sometimes be a dull place to spend all your time. For weeks on end, it can feel like the only things happening online are dull political arguments, inane TikTok sound effects and immediately overused reaction images. But every once in a while, something breaks that makes all that crap-sifting worth it.

Occasionally, a story or a controversy seems to bubble up from the ether that is the equivalent of a Twitter user’s Christmas morning. Suddenly, the dull bane of social media explodes into something hilarious, wild and fun before the story inevitably recedes back into the noise, only to be recalled six months later in a “hey, remember that time when … ?” post.

Compared to previous years, the bananas moments of 2022 are slightly less politically motivated, as goofy politicians of the Trump era either stepped out of the spotlight or were superseded by even wilder stories produced by the common man.

These stories were feats of the scatological, pornographic and imaginative talents of the indomitable human spirit, sometimes all rolled into one. The hegemonization of social media platforms over the past half-decade may have once threatened to sand away the internet’s odder edges, but if 2022 proved anything, it’s that the weirdness of being online is here to stay.


Italian Senate Tifa

The year kicked off with one of the greatest cocktails of the internet and politics when the Italian Senate was in the middle of a meeting about Transparent Public Service. Because they wanted the public to be able to view this very important meeting, they opened it up for anyone to log in and view it in a Zoom meeting. Naturally, a prankster jumped into the meeting and used the moment to stream Final Fantasy pornography.

It continued streaming for minutes on end while the chat mod was apparently unaware of Tifa and Cloud doin’ the dirty in front of scores of politically active citizens. That mod scrolled through Discord until they found yet another rule 34 video, this time of Xiangling from Genshin Impact. The comedy of errors launched a zillion memes of Tifa crashing Italian politics, setting the year up for a constant stream of wonderful weirdness.


Fentanyl Panic

Drug panics are nothing new, particularly in the United States, but something about fentanyl made the public lose their minds in 2022. This was aided largely by police reports that seemed to suggest merely being in the same room as fentanyl would be enough to cause fatal seizures or whatever constitutes the medical equivalent of spontaneous combustion.


Time and again, 2022 saw stories of people apparently coming into contact with fentanyl and collapsing from mysterious symptoms. One particularly viral story involved a woman whose husband, a cop, had just finished explaining to her the dangers of “fentanyl-laced dollar bills” strewn across the streets of America. The lady then remembered she had recently picked up a random dollar bill and coincidentally fainted on the spot.

Could this have been the work of the nefarious Fentanyl Bandit? Likely not. After every fentanyl story grabbed headlines on social media, medical experts were forced to chime and explain that one would need to actually get fentanyl in one's system for it to possibly have the negative consequences displayed by the victims of the supposed lethal fentanyl exposure. It’s far more likely that all of the headline-grabbing stories of people fainting from fentanyl exposure were simply psychosomatic reactions.


Grimes Hidden Baby / Chelsea Manning Affair

Musician turned headline-generator Grimes had another excellent year thanks to a timely decision to break up with Elon Musk. However, while one might think losing her spot as paramour to the world’s richest man might push her out of the limelight, she quite literally had a couple of surprises up her sleeve to make sure the world didn’t forget about the chaotic wonder that is Grimes.

On March 10th, Grimes was profiled in a Vanity Fair interview where the journalist discovered she’d had a secret second baby with Musk — named "Exa Dark Sideræl Musk." This was quite a shock, though the child’s unusual name fit right in line with the naming conventions she and Musk had apparently adopted for their offspring.


What really turned the story into the "March of Grimes" was that the very day after her secret second baby was revealed, Page Six scooped that Grimes had begun dating Chelsea Manning. The 1-2 punch of discovering Grimes had a secret second child and was dating one of the most visible and controversial trans figures in the world was more than some people could bear, making 2022 quite the year for her.


Dubai Porta Potty

In a year that had its fair share of “Don’t Google” stories and trends, there’s one that stood head and buttocks above the rest by recalling the holy grail of shock media, “2 Girls 1 Cup.” “Dubai Porta Potty” is actually an insult rather than the title of a specific video, but when a video of one such “Dubai Porta Potty” went viral earlier this year, the two became synonymous.


Ripping off the band-aid, we’ll just explain it. The “Dubai Porta Potty” video shows a butt pooping into a woman’s open mouth. There is supposedly a subculture of wealthy men from Dubai purchasing prostitutes for this very reason, and the women have been dubbed “Dubai Porta Potties" as a result.

While the veracity of the video and the practice are unconfirmed, we can tell you from our own research (a process we wouldn’t wish on our worst enemy) that there are at least blogs and posts supporting that both exist. While the story spread on TikTok in the first half of 2022, just trust us when we say that this is definitely something you shouldn’t Google.

Chess Anal Beads

The summer of 2022 saw a wave of cheating scandals from all sorts of minor games and hobbies, but it felt like they were all offshoots from the granddaddy of them all — the Anal Beads Chess Cheating Controversy.

In September, chess grandmaster Magnus Carlsen (widely considered the best in the world) withdrew from a tournament after losing to Hans Niemann, a highly ranked player that isn’t generally thought of as on Carlsen’s level.

Carlsen implied that Niemann was cheating in subsequent days, leading the internet to speculate how Niemann could have possibly cheated in such a high-security over-the-board event. This led one fan to jokingly posit that Niemann could have snuck into the tournament with a vibrator in his butt that somehow was connected to a chess-playing AI, and would vibrate a code to inform him of the perfect move every time.

Of course, this is ridiculous, but it was salacious enough that the internet ran with it because there was frankly no better way to explain how Niemann could have cheated at the event.

In the following months, the controversy saw Carlsen make more formal cheating accusations and Chess.com appeared to confirm that Niemann had likely cheated in some online matches in the past, but as of now, we are no closer to resolving whether Niemann has ever cheated in an over-the-board match, whether that be via anal beads or some other, more sophisticated technique.

Goncharov

Without a doubt, Tumblr’s greatest contribution to meme culture in 2022 was “Goncharov,” a fever dream that rivals some of the greatest work the site has ever produced. The site discovered a weird pair of knockoff boots that curiously had a branding label that said they were from a movie called “Goncharov” directed by Martin Scorsese. What followed was a sitewide exercise in creative writing and gaslighting, and soon there were enough GIFs, art and plot points that anyone ignorant of the developing meme could reasonably assume that Goncharov was a real movie.


Tumblr has unquestionably had a few “down” years since its ban of adult content and paltry sale to WordPress, but with Twitter’s future increasingly uncertain and Tumblr’s userbase appearing to enter a new golden age of memes, Goncharov could well prove to be the harbinger of a massive social media shift in 2023.

Seth Green’s Stolen Ape Movie Drama

Right as Bored Apes and NFTs were starting their death throes, one story sent up the ridiculousness of the entire craze and its celebrity spokespeople. Actor and creator Seth Green had purchased a Bored Ape and was planning on making a movie in which the ape starred as the main character. While we’re sure everyone is super excited to see what wacky shenanigans “Fred Simian” will get up to on the silver screen, there was a small hiccup that occurred which threw the whole project into jeopardy.

Earlier this year, Green fell for one of the NFT space’s many phishing scams, as Fred Simian landed in the hands of a ne’er-do-well and ultimately was resold to one DarkWing84. This led to Green publicly pleading with DarkWing84 on Twitter for days, begging for him to get his ape back so he could make his movie, but he ultimately received no reply.

While the image of a crypto trickster laughing while keeping an increasingly mad and red celebrity under his thumb for days proved humorous to many, it wasn’t quite the case. Turns out DarkWing84 was simply the alternate account of a guy who rarely used Twitter, so he was unaware of the fracas his ownership of Fred Simian had caused.

Eventually, he pledged to get the ape back to Green, and the world waits with bated breath to see what sort of rollicking comedy involving a highly unpopular IP Green comes up with.

4chan Pony Cum Jar Fact Checking

You do not question 4chan when it comes to one very specific subject. In May, a picture began spreading on social media that purported to show the bedroom of a Buffalo mass shooter. The room shows a Confederate flag, MAGA gear, and, most importantly for this story, a My Little Pony jar supposedly filled with his own ejaculate.

This certainly paints the picture of a sheltered, /pol/-browsing monster, and while that is true of the Buffalo shooter, we can be sure that at the very least, the image is not of his room. We know this because 4chan users determined the cum jar rules it out.


See, the shooter claims they had begun browsing 4chan in 2020. However, as the supposed picture of his room went viral, 4chan users were able to find that it had been posted two years earlier, in 2018, in an MLP cum jar thread. This essentially made clear that the idea that the picture was of the shooter’s room was false.

While the story didn’t gain national attention, we can, in part, give thanks for that to the efforts of 4chan’s MLP cum jar experts, perhaps the internet’s greatest fact-checkers.

Guy Wants Child To Jump In Front Of A Tesla

There was so much Elon Musk content we could cover on a list of the weirdest stories about 2022, like that time his Twitter verification "tweak" potentially cost a pharmaceutical company millions of dollars or the time he supposedly engaged in an affair with a Google founder’s wife, but frankly, we’ve spilled too much digital ink on the billionaire Twitter owner and his antics, so we’ll use this space to recall perhaps the greatest moment one of his fans has ever had.

In August, a viral video supposedly showed that Musk’s Teslas would not stop for children on the road when engaged in autopilot. The unintentionally hilarious clip shows Teslas ramming over children-shaped cardboard over and over, while other companies’ self-driving cars stopped.


The test was accused of being done in bad faith by Tesla fans, who thought the car was smart enough to recognize that cardboard was not a human child (not conceding that it would also not be good if an auto-driving car ran over trash in the middle of the street). One man was ready to risk it all to prove that Teslas actually would stop for a child. All he needed was a child to prove it.


It’s unclear if WholeMarsBlog’s test actually came to fruition, but he did announce he had found a man ready to place his live child in front of a moving car, though many imagined the conversation that father would have with the child’s mother would be very funny indeed.

This would have been a great story by itself but it reached elite status when, just a few months later, WholeMarsBlog admitted that A) Tesla’s autopilot would inevitably attempt to kill its driver by making a fatal error, and B) that driver would be responsible should the Tesla run over a pedestrian.


Ana Mardoll / Lockheed Martin

The best sorts of Twitter dramas are the ones where every new development feels like a fresh punch in the face. This was the case and then some with the Ana Mardoll-Lockheed Martin Twitter fricassee that became a pristine slice of Twitter discourse in 2022.

It starts with Ana Mardoll, a young adult novel author and social justice poster who, early in 2022, went viral for suggesting that mocking authors for not reading very much is “ableist.” This galaxy brain hot take on its own could have qualified Ana for this list, but it’s when it was discovered after that Mardoll, in fact, worked at arms manufacturer Lockheed Martin that the controversy hit a new tier of prestige.

Mardoll champions social justice causes on social media, and the fact he worked at a weapons manufacturer, one many felt was a "bad place to work" if you care about social justice, gobsmacked Twitter users. But not only does Mardoll work at Lockheed Martin, but he also has the job because his family is employed there. Thus we have a story that can be boiled down to this incredible sentence:

A young adult author and social justice blogger who once went viral for arguing that “thinking writers should read” is “ableist” actually works at one of the world’s most notorious weapon manufacturers and tried to play it off by noting he only got the job because his family is rich and employed there, making him a nepotism hire.


Knockout.

Looking for more of this year's best viral phenomena and memes? Be sure to check out our other 2022 meme roundups below:

Tags: ana mardoll lockheed martin, italian senate tifa, fentanyl, grimes, chelsea manning, dubai porta potty, goncharov, seth green bored ape, tesla, 2022 review,

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