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research-article20212021
SMSXXX10.1177/2056305121988932Social Media <span class="symbol" cstyle="Mathematical">+</span> Societyde Saint Laurent et al.

Article

Social Media + Society

Internet Memes as Partial Stories:

January-March 2021: 1­–13
© The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
Identifying Political Narratives in sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/2056305121988932
https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305121988932

Coronavirus Memes journals.sagepub.com/home/sms

Constance de Saint Laurent1, Vlad P. Glăveanu2

and Ioana Literat3

Abstract
This article advances a narrative approach to internet memes conceptualized as partial stories that reflect, capture, and
contribute to wider storylines. One key difficulty in studying memes as stories rests in the fact that narrative analysis often
focuses on plot at the expense of roles and characters. Building on narrative psychology and, in particular, transactional and
linguistic types of analysis, we propose a typology of character roles—Persecutor, Victim, Hero, and Fool—that is useful to
uncover scenarios within memes and, thus, reveal their intrinsic narrative structure. We apply this framework to the analysis
of political narratives embedded within 241 coronavirus memes systematically sampled from Reddit’s r/CoronavirusMemes
between January and May 2020. Five main scenarios or storylines emerged from this analysis, the first four depicting a more
or less common narrative of protest against the incompetence and/or malevolence of the political class—from Donald
Trump and the Republicans in the United States to Boris Johnson and the Conservatives in the United Kingdom and, finally,
to politicians in Asia such as Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-un—while the fifth scenario brought to the fore social categories made
salient by the pandemic and focused especially on the relation between people who respect and don’t respect measures. The
psychological, social, and political implications of these scenarios in relation to the pandemic are discussed, as well as the
broader consequences of studying memes as narrative structures.

Keywords
narrative, internet memes, coronavirus, COVID-19, politics, narrative psychology, Reddit, social media

Making sense of the COVID-19 pandemic necessarily are highly salient in internet memes (Huntington, 2016;
involves stories and storytelling. From how the virus came Smith, 2019). Memes about the pandemic and about the mea-
about to the challenges of homeschooling, from losing one’s sures taken to mitigate its effects have been flourishing from
job to losing a loved one, the stories we tell about life under the onset of COVID-19 (e.g., Zhabotynska, 2020), and, as we
COVID-19 are often tragic, but also full of irony and, some- illustrate here, many of these memes function, either implic-
times, humor. They circulate widely, online and offline, itly or explicitly, as a social and political critique (de Saint
oftentimes clashing with counter-narratives, for example, Laurent et al., under review). But do they themselves have a
about the origins of COVID-19 (e.g., Bruns et al., 2020). As narrative structure or simply add non-narrative elements to
they circulate, stories change, grow, or disappear, leaving broader stories about the virus and the political class?
space for new narratives about the who, what, how, and why It is easier to assume, for a number of reasons, that memes
of the pandemic. These individual and collective acts of sto- merely contribute to wider stories rather than consider them
rytelling are also highly consequential, not only for one’s as “holders” of, in this case, political narratives. First of all,
own mental health, but for the confidence we place (or not)
in science and scientists, in the preventive measures taken, 1
University of Bologna, Italy
and in the institutions making these decisions. Ultimately, it 2
Webster University Geneva, Switzerland
is political narratives that make the difference between abid- 3
Teachers College, Columbia University, USA
ing by or challenging measures such as quarantine and social
Corresponding Author:
distancing (Mintrom & O’Connor, 2020). Vlad P. Glăveanu, Webster University Geneva, 15 Route de Collex, 1293
Political narratives are embedded within official news and Bellevue, Switzerland.
everyday conversations, both online and offline. Online, they Email: [email protected]

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2 Social Media + Society

memes tend to be relatively “small” units of online content Narratives, From Theory to Analysis
(Shifman, 2014) and are, in many ways, simpler and briefer
than most narrative genres. Second, they are primarily asso- The fascination with narrativity is very old, going back at
ciated with humorous or ironic takes on events or topics least to Aristotle’s Poetics (see Halliwell, 1998). What narra-
(Laineste & Voolaid, 2017; Shifman, 2014) rather than (re) tives essentially do is place a number of actions and events
tellings or explanations thereof; in other words, meme audi- into a sequence (Ricoeur, 1980), creating order and meaning
ences typically need to have prior knowledge of these events out of otherwise disjointed happenings. Because of their
or topics, derived from other narratives, in order for the relation to meaning-making and, therefore, human culture,
meme to “work.” Third, and related to the above, memes narratives are pervasive in our existence and have been so
need considerable contextual information to be properly since times immemorial:
understood. Memes are, thus, more similar to “inside jokes”
Narrative is present in myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic,
that build relatively closed communities online (Literat &
history, tragedy, drama, comedy, mime, painting (think of
van den Berg, 2019), rather than traditional stories meant to
Carpaccio’s Saint Ursula), stained-glass windows, cinema, comics,
invite a wide audience to participate in making sense of a news items, conversation. Moreover, under this almost infinite
shared event or concern. diversity of forms, narrative is present in every age, in every place,
In this article, we propose counterarguments to the in every society; it begins with the very history of mankind and
points above and advance the notion that memes—in this there nowhere is nor has been a people without narrative (. . .)
empirical context, coronavirus memes—carry what we Caring nothing for the division between good and bad literature,
call “partial stories”: here, partial political narratives narrative is international, transhistorical, trans-cultural: it is simply
about and around the pandemic. They are “partial” in the there, like life itself. (Barthes, 1993, pp. 251–252)
sense that, indeed, any single internet meme requires other
memes and textual material to depict a wider narrative, And, what Barthes could not have anticipated in the early
particularly about complex events; in this way, they also 1990s, stories and narratives are ever-present in online spaces
reflect the potentially fractured, multiple, and often as well, where they are not limited to text-based content, but
incomplete nature of narrative itself. But they are still also embedded within images, both moving and still. To
story-like, a fact we aim to demonstrate by using a series grasp this, though, we need to operate with a wider under-
of narrative constructs, in particular those of character, standing of what narratives are, beyond “classic” cases such
role and scenario. By bringing together narrative psychol- as myths, legends, fairytales, and novels. In fact, since the
ogy (Bruner, 1986; Murray, 2003) and theories of roles narrative turn in the humanities and social sciences, we
(coming out of transactional and linguistic analysis; started considering stories not only as a form of knowledge,
Karpman, 1968; Klapp, 1962), our study advances a par- but a way of thinking. Jerome Bruner (1986) famously pro-
ticular typology of characters—Victims, Persecutors, posed that we can think about the world either in a paradig-
Heroes and Fools—able to capture the story kernels matic or narrative manner. The former is based on analyzing
embedded within internet memes. This typology is used and classifying reality in distinct categories and is specific
here to study political stories as they are reflected in for mathematics and natural science. The latter is grounded
COVID-19 memes, but it is useful to examine the partial in relating events to each other and making sense of them
stories “told” by memes in other contexts as well. through the means of narrative, a way of thinking not only
Our main aim in this study is to explore the political embraced by the humanities and social sciences but also
narratives embedded within coronavirus memes and, in emblematic of our everyday life.
doing so, to model an understanding of memes as narra- Psychologists have been keen to explore this latter way of
tive artifacts or “partial stories.” The article starts with an creating and organizing knowledge, and this interest led to the
overview of narrative psychology and its relation to inter- emergence of narrative psychology, a field of research “con-
net culture, then synthesizes work on coronavirus memes cerned with the structure, content, and function of the stories
and the long-established connection between memes and that we tell each other and ourselves in social interaction”
politics. After outlining our proposed typology, research (Murray, 2003, p. 95). As such, narrative psychology “accepts
questions, and methodology, we report findings from an that we live in a storied world and that we interpret the actions
analysis of 241 memes systematically collected from of others and ourselves through the stories we exchange”
Reddit’s r/CoronavirusMemes between January and May (Murray, 2003). Accompanying this theoretical interest is a
2020. We end with reflections on how the narrative methodological one. Although narrative analysis is still an
approach proposed here helps us understand reactions to emerging area, there are already various established ways in
the pandemic and, more broadly, how it can advance our which researchers work with stories. Bamberg (2012) referred
understanding of internet memes as partial stories that are in this regard to linguistic-based approaches, in which the focus
of interest for psychologists, media scholars, and policy- becomes the lexical and syntactic configurations of the text,
makers alike. cognitive-based approaches that zoom in on plot organization,
de Saint Laurent et al. 3

and interactive-based ones that acknowledge the social and Indeed, research has shown that the attributes of successful
performative nature of storytelling. memes include timeliness and topical relevance (Knobel &
From these, the focus on plot is perhaps the most common Lankshear, 2007; Literat & van den Berg, 2019); furthermore,
in narrative psychology, given that it provides stories struc- intertextuality, that is, the embedded references or connec-
ture, it connects the beginning with the end, and it weaves tions that a meme facilitates, further adds to their appeal and
different episodes together into a coherent and meaningful generative potential (Laineste & Voolaid, 2017).
whole (Murray, 2003, p. 98). Narrative scholars use different With memes having become “a focal point for scholarship
typologies to unpack the plot. A classic example is Labov’s examining the relationship between informal popular cul-
(1972) framework of abstract, orientation, complicating ture-oriented discourse and the formal political sphere”
action, evaluation, and coda or afterword; among these, the (Penney, 2020, p. 794), a growing body of research has been
central component is the complicating action which contains examining the impact of memes on civic and political life.
the action core of the narrative. Beside this generic schema, Studies have found that memes play a significant role in
there are other, less structured approaches to narrative analy- framing news events, as well as shaping political attitudes
sis, for instance grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967), and behaviors (Ross & Rivers, 2017; Shifman, 2014); in
that basically invites us to construct categories in a bottom doing so, memes can either challenge and/or reinforce hege-
up manner and without preexisting assumptions. monic ideals (Vickery, 2014). Political memes are ideologi-
A main challenge when it comes to narrative analysis, and cally versatile and can either function as political propaganda
narrative psychology as a whole, is that it often focuses its (e.g., Makhortykh & González Aguilar, 2020; Smith, 2019),
attention on “complete” stories or stories that are meant to be or—often in activist contexts (e.g., Fang, 2020; Moreno-
formulated, transmitted, and understood as such. For exam- Almeida, 2020; Soh, 2020)—can fulfill significant functions
ple, life narratives are often examined using these approaches as anti-establishment political critique (e.g., Huntington,
and there is even a specific form of interviewing—the narra- 2016; Makhortykh & González Aguilar, 2020). At the same
tive interview—that is specifically tailored to elicit stories time, recent research has identified insightful differences in
from participants (see Jovchelovitch & Martin, 2000). The this regard. For instance, analyzing the use of memes in
issue here is not the explicit elicitation of stories, but the political protests in Ukraine and Venezuela, Makhortykh and
implicit assumption that narrative-oriented inquiry requires González Aguilar (2020) found that, in both contexts, pro-
specific stories elicited through specific methods (Hiles & government memes facilitated propaganda and polarization
Cermák, 2008). This leaves out many “naturally occurring” through the use of simple emotional messages, whereas anti-
narratives found both in online and offline spaces. In particu- government memes relied on more subtle messaging that
lar, online, stories circulate in a variety of forms, some functioned as both creative criticism and a coping mecha-
explicitly narrative in structure (e.g., those that have a clear nism. In some cases, memes can also facilitate communica-
plot and follow, more or less, Labov’s typology) and those tion across diverse political stances (Milner, 2013), yet
that are “loosely” narrative in nature. It is the latter that we recently, memes have been increasingly associated with
are interested in here, focusing on the way in which these hyper-polarization, far-right online activism, trolling, inci-
narratives are reflected in non-traditional narrative material vility, and the distribution of misinformation (Marwick &
like internet memes. Lewis, 2017).
Although a robust body of work has examined the com-
position and messaging strategies that characterize memes
Memes, Coronavirus, and Politics as discursive texts (e.g., Huntington, 2016; Laineste &
Understood as digital units of culture that share common Voolaid, 2017; Shifman, 2014, 2019; Smith, 2019), research
characteristics and spread online via imitation or transforma- so far has not looked at memes as storytelling (although
tion (Shifman, 2014), memes have become ubiquitous arti- meme templates have been previously understood as expres-
facts of contemporary digital culture. What is more, the sive repertoires; Frazer & Carlson, 2017). Indeed, the narra-
COVID-19 pandemic has seen an increase in the creation tive dimension of memes is a vital aspect to consider, and it
and circulation of memes (see, e.g., Blair, 2020; Tiffany, becomes especially salient for memes that comment on cur-
2020). In this particular context, marked by uncertainty and rent events. Here, looking at political memes surrounding
deep shifts in our social and professional routines, memes the coronavirus crisis, we aim to uncover the “partial sto-
can serve as a form of coping, resistance, and connection ries” embedded within political memes. The key conceptual
(Outley et al., 2020), while making light of absurd situations and methodological challenge is how to study these political
(MacDonald, 2020). narratives, given their oftentimes fragmented and limited
In large part due to their ability to effectively articulate nature. For this purpose, we have devised a specific narra-
values (Shifman, 2019), memes often function as “visual tive framework that, we believe, can shed light on meme
political rhetoric” (Huntington, 2016) and both shape and narratives within and beyond the political sphere or the con-
reflect our political imagination (Glăveanu et al., 2018). text of COVID-19.
4 Social Media + Society

A Narrative Framework for the Study as resources to define interactional scripts (e.g., Cinderella).
of Memes Coming from a psychoanalytical tradition, however, both
Berne and Karpman saw the influence of roles as largely sub-
The main difficulty in devising a narrative framework for the conscious and the roles themselves as inter-changeable and,
study of memes is the fact that they rarely tell a story in the ultimately, negative or manipulative (an assumption right-
traditional sense, meaning that they don’t convey a clear plot fully criticized, see Le Guernic, 2004).
and, even when they do, this plot is open to multiple forms of In our theoretical framework, we start from the basic
interpretation. While something “happens” within the triad of Victim—Persecutor—Hero (a renaming of the
meme—either something that is shown, discussed, or Rescuer that gives it a wider scope) and consider it to be the
implied—and there are various actors or characters that narrative kernel of virtually all storylines. Indeed, to have a
make these things happen (or to whom things happen), there story, one needs something to happen, and something hap-
is rarely an explicit organization of events that has a clear pens when the normal flow of action and interaction is dis-
beginning, middle, and end. Instead, a meme often presents turbed somehow; in other words, when our protagonist or
us with a scene or situation and we, as viewers, are left to central character is confronted with a persecutor, villain, or
understand what it means based on collective knowledge antagonist. This “drama triangle,” to use Karpman’s termi-
(Literat & van den Berg, 2019). nology, is widely found in memes (especially in political
This is why, instead of trying to document a plot, which ones) where, as we shall see in detail in the findings below,
is the main aim of classic narrative analysis, we need to start there is often a disturbance or aggression that is called out,
from a more basic level: characters and the relations between protested, or ridiculed. But there is also something else tak-
them. Memes include or make reference to a variety of char- ing place in internet forms like memes and that relates to the
acters, from specific individuals and groups to social cate- role of the person who just does not “get it” or acts in an
gories. What matters most from a narrative perspective is embarrassing manner—the Fool.
what these characters do and especially what they do in rela- We need to look toward other studies to understand this
tion to each other. This is where the notion of role becomes figure. For example, relying primarily on an analysis of lan-
useful as roles are intrinsically relational—characters guage and centered on American culture, Klapp (1962)
always play a role in relation to something or someone else. identified three characteristics of social typing: praise, con-
For example, based on a close analysis of Russian fairytales, demnation, and ridicule, which translate into three funda-
Propp (1968) identified almost a century ago key narrative mental social types: Heroes, Villains, and Fools, respectively.
roles such as the antagonist or aggressor, the giver, the hero Klapp argued that, more than mere characters, these types
and the false hero, the auxiliary, and the mandator or the one offer blueprints or models for action and thus become instru-
who sets the story in motion by initiating a mission or ments of social control, reinforcing, and legitimizing social
journey. systems.
Of course, memes are a different genre and, therefore, More recently, and of particular interest to our study,
they don’t have a quest as a central axis. But they do show Jasper et al. (2020) built on this foundational work and—
surprisingly specific roles that can be qualified with the help bringing in insights from rhetoric, cognitive psychology, lit-
of a different framework: that of transactional analysis. erary theory, visual analysis, rumor theory, and performance
Transactional analysis originated in the work of Eric Berne, theory—demonstrated the application of social types to
a psychiatrist interested in how people interact with each political actors and contexts. Their character theory involves
other and, in particular, how specific roles we play “call” two key dimensions: moral quality (i.e., benevolent or
specific responses and lead to relatively stable interactional malevolent) and power (i.e., strong or weak), which result in
patterns or scenarios. In his well-known book, Games People four character types: Heroes (benevolent, strong); Victims
Play, Berne (1964) discussed in the chapter on “The (benevolent, weak); Villains (malevolent, strong); and
Alcoholic” three inter-related roles termed by him the Minions (malevolent, weak). As Bergstrand and Jasper
“patsy,” “the rescuer,” and the “persecutor.” However, it (2018, p. 230) note, this conceptualization represents “[p]
wasn’t until the seminal paper by Stephen Karpman (1968), artly an extension of narrative theory and partly a critique of
Fairy Tales and Script Drama Analysis, that these roles narrative theory’s focus on plots to the exclusion of charac-
started being integrated into the “drama triangle” of Victim, ters” and thus “revive[s] a sociological tradition that saw
Persecutor, and Rescuer. We can notice how these positions basic characters as embodiments, attacks, or mockery of a
are intrinsically related to each other: there is no Persecutor society’s basic values,” in the vein of Klapp (1962).
without a Victim, and the other way around; at the same time, From the above, and drawing particularly on Karpman
the Rescuer needs a Victim as well and, by implication, a (1968) and Klapp (1962), we propose an integrated frame-
Persecutor to rescue the Victim from. Interestingly, Karpman work of roles in the analysis of meme-based narratives, which
derived these ideas from a study of one of the most classic centers on Victims–Persecutors–Heroes–Fools. These char-
forms of narration—fairytales—and Berne himself was acter roles are not seen as rigid and, indeed, the same actor
widely interested in stories and myths, and often used them can play various roles in different memes and, sometimes,
de Saint Laurent et al. 5

within one meme (e.g., a person can be a Persecutor but also memes). In addition, we also coded for the main aim of the
a Fool in doing so, or a Victim but also a Persecutor of some- meme, for instance, humorous or sociopolitical critique. For
one else). This focus on characters and roles, we argue, is the present study, we focused only on the subset of memes
particularly suitable for grasping “partial stories” and inte- that were coded as political in terms of anchoring (196) or as
grating them into wider narratives that become apparent when having the aim of sociopolitical critique (178), two categories
more memes, or memes and comments or other contextual with a considerable overlap between them (101).
data, are put together. They are also valuable for the analysis The first step of the analysis was to check if, indeed, the
of a situation like the one created by COVID-19 where the sample of memes we worked with included clear political
virus itself can be seen as the ultimate Persecutor. Finally, this references (defined as references to politicians and parties,
character-based narrative framework is useful for unpacking political behavior and the intentions behind and conse-
political storylines. Jasper and colleagues (2020), for instance, quences of policies and political action). We excluded 32
already advanced the application of character types to the memes that lacked such clear references or were incompre-
political arena, framing politics itself as “character work.” In hensible to the three researchers. The remaining 241 memes
a political context, the authors argue, characters are used by were analyzed in the following ways:
politicians (e.g., Donald Trump) to persuade and to solidify—
positive or negative—reputations, but they are also relied 1. Thematic analysis of the external political stories or
upon by citizens to make meaning of politics and policy. “In events the memes referred to. Sometimes reference
public characters our imaginations fuse cognitive understand- was made to multiple such events.
ings, moral judgments, emotional responses, and expecta- 2. Thematic analysis of the story embedded within the
tions for behavior” (pp. 2–3). In other words, they make for meme. The story was captured in this case by retell-
great storytelling. ing or paraphrasing the meme, and thus answering
the related questions of “what is happening in the
meme” and “what is this meme about.”
Methodology
3. Content analysis of characters and roles within the
This study was guided by the general aim of investigating the meme. This included first identifying every character
political narratives embedded within coronavirus memes. More represented in the meme, from individuals to collec-
specifically, we raised the following research questions: tives (including anthropomorphized characters like
the virus) and then coding them as Victim (i.e., the
1. What are the broader political stories that the “par- character harmed by the situation or the actions of
tial” stories embedded within coronavirus memes others), Persecutor (i.e., the character who is inten-
refer to? tionally harming others), Hero (i.e., the character who
2. Who are the roles of Victim, Persecutor, Hero, and is defending Victims and/or opposing Persecutors),
Fool attributed to most often? and/or Fool (i.e., the character who harms others and/
3. What are the main scenarios or storylines emerging or itself unintentionally).
from the meme corpus as reflected in the most fre-
quent associations between Victims, Persecutors, The three steps of the analysis supported each other. It
Heroes, and Fools? was by thematically clarifying what each meme was about
and what people and/or events in the real world it made refer-
Our research site is Reddit, a social news platform where ence to that we were able to categorize characters accurately
registered users can submit content in relevant forums, as as Victim, Persecutor, Hero, Fool, or a combination of these
well as upvote or downvote others’ submissions. Here, we roles. The process of analysis included three different cod-
used both content and thematic analysis to examine 273 ers—the authors of the article—and three stages. In the first
memes posted on Reddit’s r/CoronavirusMemes1 between 23 stage, one coder performed the thematic analysis (of stories,
January and 17 May 2020. This is a subsample from a much external, and internal to the meme) and content analysis (of
larger, systematic sample of 1,544 memes, sourced using the characters and roles). Then this analysis was passed on to a
Reddit API and explored in a previous study (de Saint Laurent second coder who checked the themes and codes and any of
et al., under review). That initial quantitative study focused the questions raised by the first coder. Finally, the third coder
on the question of meaning-making about the pandemic as checked the corrections made and any new comments raised
reflected in coronavirus memes. The specific meaning-mak- by the second coder and, for any outstanding issues of inter-
ing processes explored via quantitative coding were objectifi- pretation, the entire coding team was involved in deciding
cation (i.e., references to concrete dimensions of the pandemic the final outcome for specific memes. This iterative and
such as protective equipment or the transmission of the virus), multi-coder approach guaranteed a close reading of the data
anchoring (i.e., the general domains the memes made refer- and allowed for discussions that enriched the analysis. The
ence to such as history, politics or economics), and identifica- objective was not, therefore, to check one reading against
tion (i.e., the in-group and out-groups identified within the others (as in inter-coder reliability), but to reflect on
6 Social Media + Society

plausible interpretations (Barthes, 1993) that consider what 3. Kim Jong-un / North Korea are Persecutors espe-
is depicted by the meme, the relation of the meme with the cially of North Korean ill people who are the Victims
meme culture of Reddit, and the wider societal debates the (8 memes)
meme connects to. 4. Other world governments (e.g., UK, Australia) are
In the reporting of findings, below, we will focus on (re) Persecutors of their citizens (but not New Zealand)
constructing political narratives or scenarios from the partial (13 memes)
stories “told” by the relations between Victims, Persecutors, a. Boris Johnson as Persecutor, Fool or Victim (but
Heroes, and/or Fools within the memes under investigation. never a Hero) (7 memes)
As noted in the methodological section, the analytical proce- 5. While some people risk their lives to help (Heroes),
dure also involved listing, for each meme, the external events those who don’t respect measures, protest against
the memes made reference to as well as writing down, in a them, or spread conspiracy theories Persecute the rest
narrative format, the meaning of the meme (i.e., we have tried or are depicted as Fools (26 memes)
to put into words what was happening in the meme, to whom, a. Doctors and essential workers are Heroes, often
and with what effect). These pieces of information were not not treated well enough (3 memes)
analyzed as such but used to contextualize the characters and b. People who make money off the virus or the pan-
roles present in each meme. Indeed, even when we know that, demic (e.g., through the stock market) are
for example, a certain politician tends to be portrayed as the Persecutors (especially of the vulnerable work-
Persecutor of a certain group of people (the Victims), this force who become Victims) (6 memes)
information is insufficient unless we know why this relation- c. The virus Persecutes old people / boomers (often
ship is postulated and in what way(s) specifically the Fools for protesting the measures) who, in turn,
Persecutor is harming its alleged Victims. External references Persecute millennials (so the virus can also be a
and narrative retelling of the meme helped us achieve these Hero for the latter) (7 memes)
insights and, as a consequence, give texture and meaning to d. Reddit communities giving a platform to those
an otherwise abstract set of relations. who spread misinformation (Persecutors) play
the role of Fools (2 memes)

Findings General Comments on the Five Scenarios

The analysis of roles revealed a total of five main scenarios What can be immediately noticed from the above, particu-
that, together, accounted for the majority of the 241 memes larly in the first four scenarios, is a wider narrative template
included in the study. These scenarios, as expected, each fea- in which politicians and governments are persecuting their
ture variations in which one key role is replaced by another citizens. This is perhaps unsurprising, given the ethos of
(or several), testifying to the general narrative flexibility of political critique of holding those in power accountable,
political storylines. The five scenarios and related sub-sce- including through the use of humor and satire (especially on
narios (i.e., variations of the main scenario that include one social media; see, e.g., Davis et al., 2018). However, the
or more of their main actors), with the number of memes combination between the role of Persecutor and the other
associated with each, are as follows: roles has in each case unique elements that are country or
context specific. In addition, what sets the current findings
1. Donald Trump / the US government and its agencies apart is the international reach of such critiques, moving far
and also various US state governors are Persecutors beyond “key” actors such as the United States and China,
that endanger US citizens (Victims) (80 memes) and the multiple roles and role exchanges between these key
a. Donald Trump is also a Fool who endangers oth- actors (e.g., Trump is a clear Persecutor but also a Fool, the
ers (and so are his supporters) (7 memes) virus itself plays the role of a Persecutor in most memes,
b. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention except those that turn it into a Hero, for weakening China, in
(CDC) appears either as Persecutor, Hero, the eyes of oppressed actors like Hong Kong). Finally, there
Victim, or Fool (8 memes) is a pandemic-specific narrative that circulates widely within
2. Xi Jinping / China are Persecutors of its own people the memes and that is represented by the newly formed social
and other countries, who are all Victims (25 memes) categories of “people who respect the measures” and “people
a. The virus can be a Hero for persecuting China, who don’t respect the measures.” These novel categoriza-
especially from a Hong Kong and Taiwan per- tions do often map into existing social categories, already
spective (4 memes) popular on social media, such as boomers and millennials or
b. World Health Organization (WHO) joins China Republicans and Democrats, the former groups more inclined
in Persecuting or is a Fool for its defense of to disrespect measures than the latter. And this is precisely
China (4 memes) where the typical political narrative of protest is being
de Saint Laurent et al. 7

Figure 1. Trump as a Fool (meme 62; 8 March 2020).

reversed by the current crisis. Instead of politicians being The contrast between Trump’s declarations and actions and
criticized for upholding unpopular measures that restrict those of other world leaders was particularly sharp. For
individual rights and freedoms—in this case those concern- example, in Figure 1 we see depicted a wide range of coun-
ing the quarantine—they are now portrayed as Persecutors tries around the world (China, South Korea, Italy, Japan,
for not doing enough to uphold strict measures that reduce Germany, France, Iran, Israel) taking the pandemic seriously
individual freedoms but would protect everyone, especially while Trump, in the middle of the image, utters one of his
in Western democracies. usual slogans: “It’s a hoax.” While US citizens are primarily
depicted as Victims of Trump’s inability to grasp the serious-
Donald Trump and the Republicans as ness of the situation, Trump supporters are depicted in other
roles. Most memes depict them as either Persecuting others,
Persecutors and Fools primarily by protesting measures and endangering every-
The vast majority of memes in our sample focused on the one’s health, or as Fools who keep on trusting the lies they
situation in the United States (unsurprising, given that most are told and even finding comfort in them (see Figure 2, a
contributions originate from the United States) and espe- meme with the caption “The MAGA Line Starts Here”).
cially on Trump or other Republican party leaders who con- Meanwhile, bodies like the CDC have a very “unstable” role
sistently alternated between the roles of Persecutor and Fool. in memes, oscillating between the positions of Persecutor,
8 Social Media + Society

Figure 2. Trump supporters as Fools (meme 262; 13 May 2020).

Figure 4. The Virus as Hero (meme 5; 28 January 2020).

connected to COVID-19. It is also a reference to wider

associations between Xi Jinping and the cartoon character
Winnie the Pooh, associations that led to a ban of such
depictions in China (Haas, 2018). Breaking this rule was
especially frequent in protests against the Chinese authori-
ties in Hong Kong. Given the highly unequal distribution of
power between Hong Kong protesters and the authorities, it
is not surprising to find memes that turn the virus into a
Figure 3. Xi Jinping as Persecutor and Fool (meme 72; 10 March Hero for persecuting China. This kind of depictions also
2020). bring up issues related to moral relativism (Harman, 1996)
especially considering the fact that most participants in the
Hero, Victim, and Fool, depending on whether they stand up subreddit are likely to come from Western countries where
to incompetent politicians or, on the contrary, follow their there was a rise in anti-Chinese sentiment at the beginning
orders. of the pandemic. Figure 4 depicts a meme that uses a tem-
plate from the movie Thor: Ragnarok and shows the uneven
fight between Thor (here, Hong Kong) and Hella (here,
Xi Jinping and China Are Persecutors China). Finally, the WHO features in some of the memes
A second main actor in coronavirus memes is, unsurpris- related to China where it is mostly a fellow Persecutor (by
ingly, China, particularly toward the start of the data collec- joining China in downplaying the virus) or a Fool (by refus-
tion period, as that was the time when discussions still ing to listen to its own experts).
revolved around the origin of the virus. By and large, presi-
dent Xi Jinping and the Chinese government are repre- Other World Governments as Persecutors, Fools,
sented as Persecutors but, unlike US politicians, less as
Fools (thus the implicit assumption of being a “competent”
and (Rarely) Heroes
Persecutor); they also Victimize not only their own citizens A series of other countries and politicians appear in corona-
but other countries through the spread of the virus. Some virus memes, illustrating the global nature of the pandemic
images of China and Xi Jinping in memes depict them as and the fact that these political narratives are widely appli-
ominous and powerful figures, while others are deliberately cable and can be found, with different actors, across the
humorous in nature. For instance, Figure 3 shows president world. North Korea and the United Kingdom are featured
Xi as “Winnie the Flu,” a reference both to him and the most in memes, after the United States and China, for differ-
country (through the reimagining of the Chinese flag) as ent reasons.
de Saint Laurent et al. 9

that the UK Prime Minister, in his eagerness to be popular and

make friends, might have gone too far and, given the pan-
demic, can now only expect bad consequences, including for
himself. Finally, some other countries and their leaders were
referenced in the set of memes, from example, Australia,
Italy, and New Zealand. Almost always, politicians from
these countries played the role of Persecutors with the notable
exception of New Zealand and Jacinda Ardern in particular,
seen as a Hero for the country’s initial handling of the crisis.

New Social Groups Emerging as Heroes,

Persecutors, and Fools
As mentioned above, one of the clear particularities of the
pandemic has to do with the emergence of new social catego-
ries, key among them being “rule breakers” and “rule follow-
ers.” In the presentation so far, it became clear that some
politicians, in particular Donald Trump and Boris Johnson,
are rule breakers themselves and they are portrayed nega-
tively because of it. On the other hand, “ordinary people” are
all those individuals who try to respect the measures and still
Figure 5. Kim Jong-un as Persecutor and Hero (meme 7, 30 suffer from the incompetence of the ruling party or the fool-
January 2020). ishness of fellow citizens. A few specific social categories
were featured in the memes, either in a positive light (e.g.,
Kim Jong-un and the North Korean totalitarian regime doctors and essential workers) or a negative one (e.g., people
have long been topics of satire in online communities (see who protest the measures, people who spread conspiracy
Clark, 2018) and the spread of COVID-19 offered a new theories, people who care about the economy and stock mar-
opportunity to retake some of these existing narratives and ket more than they care for others). But, almost in each case,
adapt them to the current situation. By far the most usual sce- the narratives involved are more complex than simple bina-
nario here is the one in which Kim Jong-un is Persecuting his ries. For example, in Figure 7, a medical worker is seemed
infected citizens by killing them before they could be recorded keeping up a groceries line because she doesn’t have enough
as coronavirus cases. The tendency of politicians to tamper money to pay for food. The line “I am sorry! Do you accept
with evidence and not be completely transparent in their claps?” reveals the duplicity of treating doctors and nurses as
reporting has been a wider issue of concern but, for North Heroes and giving them a lot of applause but, at the end of
Korea, the assumption is that this evidence is not only hidden, the day, Victimizing them through low payment and difficult
but literally destroyed. Interestingly, a few memes reverse the work conditions. In Figure 8, we have a unique reversal of
roles by adding the quality of Hero to Kim Jong-un for not the usual Persecutor role attributed to people who protest
letting any tourists in and, therefore, inadvertently, turning his staying at home and Hero for those obeying the rules. Here
country into “the safest place on earth” (see Figure 5). we are made aware of the fact that many individuals, espe-
When it comes to the United Kingdom, a lot of the politi- cially those who had lost their jobs because of the pandemic,
cal narratives including US politicians and the American pub- cannot afford to stay at home and do nothing because that
lic are “translated” to a new context, even if on a smaller will ultimately kill them. The political narrative in this case
scale. Boris Johnson, in many ways Donald Trump’s counter- concerns state aid for people who are unemployed, but it also
part, appears mostly as a Persecutor and/or a Fool but also a critiques those who are ready to judge others from the com-
Victim. The first roles are due to Johnson’s presumed inabil- fortable position of financial safety.
ity to deal with the crisis and his contradictory or inefficient Last but not least, Figure 9 offers an interesting meta-
advice on returning to school or to the workplace. The second reflection on Reddit and in particular the community of coro-
role, that of a Victim, is largely due to the fact that Johnson navirus memes we selected for our study. In the tradition of
had been one of the few world leaders to be in a critical condi- self-parody associated with meme culture (Shifman, 2013),
tion and hospitalized because of COVID-19 (primarily, as the point made is that those who spread harmful conspiracy
several memes show, due to his inability to take his own theories about the pandemic (Persecutors) can reach a larger
advice, keep social distance and stop shaking hands). Figure audience more easily (Victims) when they hide behind
6 shows Johnson in the latter position using a meme template “legitimate” communities, like those on Reddit, who might
that features four Nigerian pallbearers ominously befriending not even be aware of the role they play as massive Trojan
people on Facebook. The meaning of this “partial story” is horses (Fools).
10 Social Media + Society

Figure 6. Boris Johnson as Victim (meme 196; 7 April 2020).

Figure 7. Medical workers as Heroes and Victims (meme 270;

16 May 2020).
Figure 8. People who lost their jobs as Victims (meme 257; 10
April 2020).
Final Reflections on Memes, Politics,
and Narrative
processes embedded within memes. Particularly when these
This article started by making the theoretical claim that a nar- memes concern current events, as in the case of the coronavi-
rative framework can shed new light on the functions and rus pandemic, online communities construct various storylines
de Saint Laurent et al. 11

also “open” enough to follow current events, as they unfold,

and use old visual templates for new contexts. In future work,
we hope to document more closely the temporality of stories
depicted within memes, so as to understand which scenarios
take center stage depending on how external events unfold,
and also to make comparisons between memes posted about
the same topic on different social media platforms that vary in
their general political orientations (as we would expect other
forums might reverse some of the scenarios found here, for
example, presenting people who protest measures as Heroes
standing up for individual rights and freedoms).
By modeling the application of narrative analysis in this
context, this study adds a novel analytical lens to the study of
memes and creates valuable connections between the study
of online creativity and collective expression, narrative psy-
chology, and vernacular storytelling. The present character-
or role-driven approach to narratives could certainly be
expanded to other types of memes and forms of online con-
tent, just as it can be used to consider text and visual mate-
Figure 9. People who push propaganda as Persecutors (meme
232; 24 April 2020).
rial. While it could be argued that focusing on political
narratives in memes is paradigmatic given the story-like
nature of political life, we believe that it is important to start
organized around a number of narrative kernels or scenarios. an analysis on memes as “partial stories” with a case that can
To capture them, however, we need to temporarily bracket the help us highlight and also nuance the four role typology
traditional emphasis of narrative analysis on plot and focus advanced in this article. Our general proposition—by refer-
instead on what lies behind the plot: characters and the rela- ring to memes as “partial stories”—is to recognize that any
tionships between them. Building on ideas advanced by meme, taken in isolation, will have relatively limited narra-
Karpman (1968) and Klapp (1962), we devised a typology of tive information for viewers or, to be more precise, will oper-
four key roles—Persecutor, Victim, Hero, and Fool—and used ate with many implicit references to people and events
it to analyze the partial stories revealed by coronavirus memes. known by specific communities of viewers. However, when
This analysis allowed us to not only discover five main sce- considered as a group and especially across time, memes
narios, but to pay also attention to the variations within them, offer valuable insights into developing plots used to make
forming a rich picture of actors and storylines circulating in sense of a particular social and political reality like the
online spaces such as Reddit. COVID-19 pandemic which goes well beyond the realm of
What stands out from the narrative analysis of coronavirus the biological or the medical. Indeed, political narratives are
memes as they relate to politics and sociopolitical critique is remarkably frequent in memes and coronavirus memes in
the richness of the stories depicted. Even if a single meme particular given the overwhelming involvement of the gov-
cannot capture a complex storyline, it certainly can grasp key ernment in solving (or, rather, failing to solve) the crisis. It
elements of it that are then completed by reference to similar was useful to observe, as we explained above, that the cur-
memes, to other online content, and to broader societal events rent pandemic led to some unexpected twists when it comes
and references. The analysis above focused on the main story- to political narratives of resistance and protest: instead of
lines or scenarios discovered through relating four basic posi- protesting the government for imposing measures that dimin-
tions specific for narratives in general and for online narratives ish individual rights and freedoms, most memes protested
in particular—Persecutor, Victim, Hero, and Fool. What the government for not doing enough to uphold such mea-
emerged was a complex picture in which key actors—such as sures. The role of Persecutor was played, thus, by multiple
politicians—were portrayed playing various roles even in groups and factions, from Trump and his Republican fellows
similar memes (e.g., Persecutor, Persecutor, and Fool, or even to Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-un, Boris Johnson, and ordinary
Persecutor and Hero, depending on the community or issue of people who fight against the quarantine or spread misinfor-
reference). This brings evidence of the flexibility inherent in mation about the virus, protection rules, and treatment.
the partial stories “told” within memes, as well as of the fact We believe that this type of narrative analysis can be very
that meme culture globally tends to encourage a meta-posi- useful for media scholars, psychologists, and policymakers
tion from which different interpretations of a person, situa- who are interested in memes, storytelling, and the narrative
tion, or event become possible (Shifman, 2014, 2019). In the character of social life. The stories captured here, as humor-
end, the political stories documented through the study of ous as some might be, are highly consequential for how we,
coronavirus memes share some similar scenarios, but they are individually and collectively, handle the current crisis and
12 Social Media + Society

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Bruner, J. (1986). Actual minds, possible worlds. Harvard
these findings are undoubtedly shaped by the fact that many University Press.
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tioned platform demographics), who have had a particularly both?: The dynamics of COVID-19/5G conspiracy theories on
challenging experience with COVID-19.2 But there are other Facebook. Media International Australia, 177, 12–29. https://
platforms and other stories available (Motta et al., 2020), sto- doi.org/10.1177/1329878X20946113
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Victims. Understanding these other stories and the hold they Journal of Politics, Policy and Society, 1(1), 234–266.
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Mimetic representations of the COVID-19 pandemic: An anal-
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Acknowledgements in coronavirus memes. Psychology of Popular Media.
We thank Elisa Honegger and Saba Ghezili, the research assistants Fang, K. (2020). Turning a communist party leader into an internet
from Webster University Geneva who helped code the data. meme: The political and apolitical aspects of China’s toad wor-
ship culture. Information, Communication & Society, 23(1),
Declaration of Conflicting Interests 38–58. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2018.1485722
Frazer, R., & Carlson, B. (2017). Indigenous memes and the inven-
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect tion of a people. Social Media +Society, 3(4), 1–12. https://doi.
to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. org/10.1177/2056305117738993
Gaudette, T., Scrivens, R., Davies, G., & Frank, R. (2020). Upvoting
Funding extremism: Collective identity formation and the extreme right
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support on Reddit. New Media & Society. Advance online publication.
for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The https://doi.org/1461444820958123
first author acknowledges the support received from the Swiss Glaser, A., & Strauss, A. L. (1967). The discovery of grounded
National Science Foundation (P400PS-180686). theory. Aldine.
Glăveanu, V. P., de Saint Laurent, C., & Literat, I. (2018). Making
ORCID iDs sense of refugees on social media: Perspectivetaking, politi-
cal imagination, and Internet memes. American Behavioral
Vlad P. Glăveanu https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6029-6718 Scientist, 62(4), 440–457.
Ioana Literat https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8192-769X Haas, B. (2018, August 7). “China bans Winnie the Pooh film after
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Author Biographies
org/10.1177/1461444820912722 Constance de Saint Laurent (PhD, University of Neuchatel) is a
Motta, M., Stecula, D., & Farhart, C. (2020). How right-leaning postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bologna, funded by the
media coverage of COVID-19 facilitated the spread of mis- Swiss National Science Foundation. Her research interests include
information in the early stages of the pandemic in the US. social thinking, misinformation and conspiracy theories, and repre-
Canadian Journal of Political Science / Revue Canadienne sentations on alterity on social media.
de Science Politique, 53(2), 335–342. https://doi.org/10.1017/
Vlad P. Glăveanu (PhD, London School of Economics) is associate
S0008423920000396
professor and Head of the Department of Psychology and
Murray, M. (2003). Narrative psychology and narrative analysis.
Counselling at Webster University Geneva as well as associate pro-
In P. M. Camic, J. E. Rhodes, & L. Yardley (eds.), Qualitative
fessor II at the Centre for the Science of Learning and Technology
research in psychology (pp. 95–112). American Psychological
at the University of Bergen. His research interests include creativ-
Association.
ity, culture, collaboration, wonder, human possibility, migration,
Outley, C., Bowen, S., & Pinckney, H. (2020). Laughing while
and social media.
black: Resistance, coping and the use of humor as a pandemic
pastime among blacks. Leisure Sciences. Advance online pub- Ioana Literat (PhD, University of Southern California) is assistant
lication. https://doi.org/10.1080/01490400.2020.1774449 professor in the Communication, Media and Learning Technologies
Penney, J. (2020). “It’s so hard not to be funny in this situation”: Design program at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her
Memes and humor in US youth online political expression. research interests include online participation, online creativity, and
Television & New Media, 21(8), 791–806. online political expression.