I am too young to have really “been there” for Advice Animals. Sifting the flour of deep memory, a recollection of some older kid showing me a Bad Luck Brian meme in the early 2010s pops out — and also some Confession Bear action in Middle School computer lab. But that’s it. I really only became aware of Advice Animals after they were already “old” and already “classic.”

So I think that’s why I’m so fascinated by them: they come from a very different internet, and are one of our best sources for how the memes I love today developed and came of age. It’s the same thrill I get from reading old books: you learn what people were rebelling against and revising. It’s like going behind the scenes of the modern world and watching how it all developed.

So what was happening online in 2010 while I was listening to Coldplay on a Bono-approved Product Red iPod shuffle?

The Advice Animals subreddit has a rule for potential posters, written in 2015, which defines an Advice Animal as a “two line joke over a re-usable character.” But going more in depth, the rules could be described as:

These are (generally) what remains constant across different postings. It’s not too different from poetic forms: a Shakespearean sonnet is a Shakespearean sonnet because it has fourteen lines, rhymes a certain way, and has some kind of twist around the twelfth line. No matter what it’s about or who it’s by, it behaves that way on the page.

Everybody writing a sonnet or doing an Advice Animal follows these rules, but there’s plenty of room to play around within them. There’s also plenty of room to play against them: some of the best memes break this formal pattern in an innovative way.

Each distinct Advice Animal (Know Your Meme counts 116) implies a particular tone, mood, or perspective. Socially Awkward Penguin is for when something cringe happens, the Most Interesting Man in the World for self-deprecation, Condescending Wonka for talking down to someone. The image of this animal/human/character becomes its own kind of constant, its own format within the broader class. The variables within each kind of Advice Animal are:

In some Advice Animals, the words in the top and bottom text are said through the character by the meme’s maker, like in the Confession Bear meme above. Confession Bear offers a framing through which to admit some shameful or relatable take on any topic, and the bear’s facial expression stands in for the presumed speaker’s

In other said through Advice Animals, the meme’s maker is sharing an example of the kind of thought which that Advice Animal represents — like Paranoid Parrot, below. That kind of thought could be had by anybody, including the meme maker and the viewer. But the thought is without the anchoring of an “I” or any identified speaker, and it’s not clear if it’s dialogue, caption, or narration.

In these sorts of cases, the Advice Animal functions a little bit like a reaction image, but the top text and bottom text give us two beats (top text and bottom text) instead of one. It represents the self of the person who posts it, or the understood general self of the people who read it.

Condescending Wonka is another example of this type: it’s not as unanchored as the Paranoid Parrot example, and it’s a bit less direct than Confession Bear (there’s no “I”) but the meme works because one assumes that the highly specific “condescending” view shared by Wonka matches the meme maker’s perspective. Implicitly, the kind of person being insulted is a kind of person that the meme maker, Wonka, and the viewer collectively don’t like.

But then there’s cases where the top and bottom text are said about or said by that character. Take Scumbag Steve as an example. The text of the first meme, top left, and the last meme, bottom right, are narrations of action, things said by the meme maker about Scumbag Steve. The second, third, and fourth are dialogue said by him. The fifth meme (the most formally innovative) eliminates the bottom text entirely.

Scumbag Steve doesn’t hold our voice the way the said through Advice Animals do, and the meme depends on us (the viewer and meme maker) not being like him. I’ve always felt the inclusion of the door in the Scumbag Steve image offers a subtle visual cue: we could close it on him. He’s not in the same space as us, he’s apart.

An Advice Animal is a kind of triangle between three characters: “I,” “you,” and the stereotype-representing animal or human pictured in the meme.

The implied you and I, in Advice Animals, are really the most interesting part. In their work on Advice Animals, specifically on Scumbag Steve, Linguists Barbara Dancygier and Lieven Vandelanotte identify a “supervisory mental space” apart from the character which contextualizes and judges him:

“…(the meme consists of) a higher-level telling/thinking space, aligned with a narrator or another kind of teller, and an embedded space representing the words or thoughts aligned with the narrator herself or with another speaker/character…

Vandelanotte and Dancygier go on to diagram this relation. It’s kind of like discussing the fourth wall: the stage is an embedded space, the camera is a higher-level telling/thinking space. When Jim smirks at the camera in The Office, he’s jumping out of the embedded space and interacting with us in the higher-level telling/thinking space.

For Scumbag Steve, the “embedded space” is whatever house he’s in, standing in a doorway. The “higher-level telling/thinking space” is the same space that footnotes in books and captions on pictures come from, the space on our side of the fourth wall. It’s the space where “you” or “I” share an idea of what a scumbag does, says, and looks like. It’s the space where we know this is a meme.

The meme is meaningful both in itself, a picture of a Scumbag and description of what he does, but also as itself, a niche kind of communication act that says “if you know, you know.” And it’s ethically charged: implicitly, if “you” are in the higher-level space of the caption, you are not like Scumbag Steve. If “you” are with Condescending Wonka and the meme-maker, you are not like the person Wonka is insulting. The meme’s real effect is to orient your allegiances and feelings in the higher-level space. Put otherwise, this is about the layering of contexts.

But where do the embedded space and the thinking/telling spaces end?

The embedded space might be outlined simply enough: it ends at the borders of the photo. The higher-level space isn’t quite as visible — the “you,” after all, is implied rather than pictured. So the borders aren’t seen, but rather understood: they are the rules that structure our viewing.

The borders of the thinking/telling space are the constants in the meme format: the Impact font, the top text/bottom text convention, all of the things which make Advice Animalness. The things which establish an “interpretive community,” in which the meme illustrates (or validates, challenges, whatever) a feeling that we, assembled in the higher-level space, hold to be true.

If you don’t get how these rules are meaningful — if you don’t know what an Advice Animal is — it’s just a picture of a dude and some words. It doesn’t hold meaning. It’s not a “thinking/telling space,” but just a random place online.

But as people who “get” a given Advice Animal, we are aligned. By “getting” Scumbag Steve, we know we are not Scumbags. The room he’s entering (but remains outside of) is our room.

Every encounter with a piece of art is also a social situation. Especially a meme, because a meme is a live performance: somebody posts it in real time in front of an audience of people who, while spatially distant, are simultaneously and numerously present in the same online space.

Formal rules help to structure the way a social situation unfolds. Not only that, but they offer cues to understand the identities and expectations of other participants. The Impact text on an Advice Animal is like the boundary lines on a soccer field. The top-text and bottom-text rules are like the rule that you can’t use your hands and you must move the ball down the field by passing or dribbling. These formal rules are the things that allow people the freedom and structure to play with each other and try to gain from the interaction.

These rules also tell us that are two teams playing on the field, a few people who are on the field but don’t play for either team since they’re referees, and a whole other group of people who sit on the bleachers and aren’t allowed onto the field at all. Formal rules create an “embedded space” (whether it’s the space of the sports field or of Scumbag Steve) which a “higher level thinking/telling space” (the space of an audience) can be assembled around.

Formal rules help set the tone and behavior of a community - and Advice Animals are no exception. Looking at early meme cultures, you see the importance of making in-groups and out-groups, often using these said about structures which put the viewer and meme maker in an alliance against some other imagined person. This pattern still holds across many memes today.

ncG1vNJzZmign6zBsLDOrZ%2BippeoxKrAx6acpp2jY8C2rtKtmJyjXpi8rnvPaKSoqpVirqXCyJycZqWfp7Jurc2ipJqkow%3D%3D