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Keyboard Cat is a viral video meme featuring an orange tabby cat named Fatso, filmed in 1984 by performance artist Charlie Schmidt, appearing to play an electronic keyboard while wearing a blue shirt. The clip sat dormant for over two decades before being uploaded to YouTube in 2007 and exploding into one of the internet's most recognizable memes in 2009, when Brad O'Farrell created the "Play Him Off, Keyboard Cat" mashup format that paired the footage with fail videos as a comedic send-off.

Nyan Cat is an 8-bit animated GIF of a cat with a cherry Pop-Tart body flying through space, trailing a rainbow, set to the endlessly looping Japanese Vocaloid song "Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya!" by daniwellP. Artist Christopher Torres created the animation during a Red Cross charity livestream on April 2, 2011; three days later YouTuber saraj00n paired it with the song, and the combination quickly became one of the biggest viral memes of the early 2010s. The original video pulled in over 205 million YouTube views and sparked games, merchandise, a Webby Award, and a landmark NFT sale worth nearly $600,000.

"Bruh" is a slang term derived from "brother" that became one of the internet's most versatile reaction expressions. Rooted in African American Vernacular English dating back to the 19th century, it exploded online in 2014 when a Vine video dubbed a deadpan "bruh" over footage of a basketball player collapsing in court. The word now functions as a one-syllable catch-all for disbelief, frustration, humor, and everything in between.

Blinking White Guy is a reaction GIF of Drew Scanlon, a video producer at gaming website Giant Bomb, doing a subtle double-take during a 2013 livestream. The clip sat dormant for years before exploding on Twitter in February 2017, becoming one of the most-used GIFs on the internet for expressing disbelief, confusion, or a polite "what the hell?"[3]. Scanlon later used his accidental fame to raise tens of thousands of dollars for multiple sclerosis research[4].

"Wait, That's Illegal" is a reaction image meme taken from the Rooster Teeth web series *Red vs. Blue*, featuring the character Church delivering the line. The source material dates back to 2004, but the screenshot didn't take off as a meme format until January 2019, when it blew up on Reddit's r/MemeEconomy and r/dankmemes. It's used to react to anything that seems like it shouldn't be allowed, whether genuinely rule-breaking or just absurd.

Harambe was a 17-year-old western lowland gorilla shot and killed at the Cincinnati Zoo on May 28, 2016, after a three-year-old boy fell into his enclosure. The incident spawned one of the defining memes of 2016, mixing ironic tributes, mock-serious mourning, and the viral rallying cry "Dicks Out for Harambe" into a sprawling internet event that outlasted every thinkpiece written about it.

Baby Yoda is the internet's nickname for Grogu, a tiny green alien character from the Disney+ series *The Mandalorian* who looks like an infant version of the iconic Star Wars Jedi Master Yoda. First revealed in the show's premiere on November 12, 2019, the character instantly broke the internet with an avalanche of memes, reaction images, and photoshops that made him one of the biggest memes of the year. Despite Disney officially naming him "The Child" and later revealing his canonical name as Grogu in Season 2, the internet overwhelmingly stuck with "Baby Yoda."

"Karen" is a slang term and meme archetype describing an entitled, middle-class white woman known for demanding to speak to the manager, harassing service workers, and weaponizing privilege against people of color[1]. The meme coalesced from multiple internet trends between 2014 and 2018, drawing on Black American internet culture's tradition of satirizing racial hostility through commonplace names[1]. By 2020, "Karen" had become one of the most recognizable character archetypes on the internet, fueled by viral videos of real-world confrontations and the COVID-19 pandemic's mask wars[7].