The Strawberry Meme

"Oh, look, a post!"

@amaliatownNature is magestic. 🍓 . . . #strawberry #strawberries #garden #gardening #zone8b

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This little video made a splash on TikTok a while back, and inspired its share of parodies:

@alchinal_cat🍓oh look, a strawberry! #meme #animation #알치날 #애니메이션

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@baxiwoailuoOk I love them all🤳🏻 #CapCut #creatorsearchinsights #ohlookastrawberry #memestiktok #funny

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The idea behind it is that while the first strawberry conforms to our platonic ideal of a strawberry, the next few get progressively further away from it. Any gardener will tell you that sometimes strawberries do come out looking pretty weird! Likewise, some dogs look just how we expect dogs to look, others not so much.

Even though every photograph in the above memes is unaltered, the sound is altered, with each “Oh, look, a strawberry” digitally degraded from the original. This is the “photocopy of a photocopy” effect, and part of the meme’s humor comes from the idea that these real-life strawberries are just “copies” of other, purer strawberries.

In modern media, we experience the “copy of a copy” effect a lot. Movies and TV shows are often imitating other movies and TV shows.

Al Ewing explored that idea in the recent Venom War #1, in which the Venom Horse—a creature seen briefly in the trailer for the latest Venom movie—is revealed to have a rich internal life. Metafictionally, Venom Horse is aware of the chain of inspiration that led to his own existence:

And Ewing took the exercise further in the next issue. Is this a faithful copy of the original narrative, or an unfaithful one? Depends on where you put your focus, I guess:

Of course, at some point the journey from “faithful copy” through “pure simulacrum” would end in useless nonsense. Even lovers of abstract art love it because of the traces of human experience embedded in the work, traces that would fade if someone else tried to reproduce that same art without understanding it. But that doesn’t mean we can’t find the intervening steps entertaining and enlightening. Decay is a part of life, too.