Four Generations Challenge

Submission 8,685

Part of a series on TikTok. [View Related Entries]

About

Four Generations Challenge is a video meme in which users introduce four members of their family, each of whom represent four generations of a family, respectively. As members enter the frame, they call to the next person in their lineage. For example, a daughter, mother, grandmother and great-grandmother. The meme began on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok.

Origin

The meme began on the lip-syncing app Douyin in early 2019. The earliest available post of the meme outside of the app was posted by YouTuber Victor Sun on January 2nd, 2019. The post, which featured a compilation of examples, received more than 150,000 views in five days (shown below).

Spread

That day, Redditor ^[7] queens-gambit shared the video in the /r/videos subreddit, where it received more than 2,400 points (89% upvoted) and 225 comments in four days.

On January 3rd, the Facebook for the publication Shanghaiist posted a compilation of examples, received more than 44,000 reactions, 3,200 comments, 19,000 shares and 1.8 million views in less than one week (shown below).^[1]

The following day, BuzzFeed News reporter Kassy Cho tweeted ^[2] one of the examples. She added the caption, "this Chinese four generations meme is so wholesome omg." The tweet received more than 340,000 retweets, 1.4 million likes and 18 million views in three days (shown below).

Several media outlets covered the meme, including BuzzFeed,^[3] The Daily Dot, ^[4] HuffPost,^[5] NBC^[6] and more.