Meme Queens of the 5Cs

Submission 741

Part of a series on The 5Cs as. [View Related Entries]

About

Meme Queens of the 5Cs is a Facebook group for memes about the Claremont Colleges. It has over 7000 members (as of April 2020),^[1] reflecting a substantial portion of the roughly 7700 undergraduate students enrolled in the consortium,^[2] as well as some alumni and others. It is the primary forum for memes about the colleges.

Background

The Claremont Colleges (abbreviated 7Cs) are a consortium of five prestigious undergraduate liberal arts colleges (abbreviated 5Cs) – Pomona College, Scripps College, Claremont McKenna College (CMC), Harvey Mudd College (HMC), and Pitzer College – and two graduate schools – Claremont Graduate University (CGU) and Keck Graduate Institute (KGI). The consortium is located in Claremont, California, in eastern Los Angeles County.^[2] All but KGI share adjacent campuses, and the colleges share some central facilities like a library. The social life of the undergraduate colleges is closely linked, although each college still maintains a distinct identity.

History

Several meme Facebook pages have existed at the 5Cs, including one active circa 2012.^[3]^[4] However, the consortium's meme culture didn't mature until the creation of Meme Queens of the 5Cs in September 2016. The closed Facebook group, so called because its founders self-designated as meme queens, offered a more open forum for contributions, and was modeled off of similar (far larger) groups such as "UC Berkeley Memes For Edgy Teens".^[5] It quickly grew to well over a thousand members, with popular posts often receiving hundreds of likes.

Memepocalypse

In late January 2017, there were several instances where politically charged or offensive memes caused controversy in the group, resulting in heated discussions about the appropriate limits of free speech and proper role of moderators. The moderators of the group, exhausted by criticism from various sides, decided to quit en masse and delete the group. Unable to find a technical means of doing so, they instead began removing members of the group manually. This caused widespread panic, with group members nearly universally pleading the moderators to reconsider.^[6]^[7] Ultimately, the moderators accepted offers from others to take over moderating responsibilities and the situation was resolved. This incident has come to be known by several names, including the Memepocalypse, the Great Meme War, and the Collapse of Meme Queens.^[8]

Spinoff Groups

As a result of students' weariness of the kind of political and otherwise charged content that helped lead to the memepocalypse, a spinoff group, Discourse Queens of the 5Cs, was founded in March 2017 as a designated space for such content to help keep it out of the main group.^[8] After some periods of activity and others of inactivity, it was ultimately archived in March 2020.

In September 2017, the existence of a secret spinoff group, called U PC BRO (read as "you politically correct, bro?"), was revealed.^[9] The group was a space for alt-right and otherwise edgy or offensive memes. The revelation, along with selected posts published in campus media, sparked outrage among the general 5C student body, which leans heavily progressive.^[10] Pomona declared some posts in the group a bias-related incident, but decided a few days later not to open a disciplinary investigation.^[11] The group was (as far as is publicly known) disbanded.

Notable Memes

Memes in the group often reflect broader front-edge trends in meme culture. For instance, 5C-specific variants of the Tag Yourself meme were shared frequently in the group's early days, although they have waned in popularity as the meme has aged.

Most memes in the group are adapted specifically to the 5Cs, although some are borrowed verbatim from other college meme groups or elsewhere on the internet.

The 5Cs as

The 5Cs as is one of the most popular and enduring memes in the group, having been a persistent presence since the group's early days. It consists of a map of the 5Cs with images placed over each college representing a stereotype about that college.

Parodies and meta versions are frequently shared, often making fun of how arbitrary the stereotype designations are, or using obvious or obviously wrong designations. It has drawn some criticism for reinforcing shallow stereotypes and sometimes overwhelming the group at the expense of other meme formats.

Overheards

This meme consists of a short snippet of conversation that the poster claims to have overheard somewhere at the 5Cs.^[12] It typically takes the form of a text post beginning with "OH at [college or location]:" followed by the dialogue. The snippets often reflect a stereotype about the college where they were heard, or are otherwise amusing. Many of them are sexual.

Dig Dog

In late March 2018, people at the 5Cs began widely playing Dig Dog, a crude iPhone / Android mobile app that had at that point not been updated in three years.^[13] The craze was quickly reflected on and fed off of Meme Queens, with a flood of posts relating to the game. After a few weeks, students grew tired of the posts and they subsided, but the episode remains notable for its intensity and is still referenced in group conversations. The app has since been taken offline.^[14]

Online Presence

The group has received occasional media coverage in most 5C campus publications, including The Student Life (the colleges' largest paper and its publication of record^[15]),^[16]^[17] as well as the CMC Forum,^[18] The Scripps Voice,^[19] the Claremont Independent (representing Claremont's minority conservative perspecitve),^[20] and the Golden Antlers (the 5C satire publication).^[21]