The original stonks.
Overview[]
Stonks is a meme of disputed surreality featuring Meme Man in a business suit with a background representing the stock market, with the caption "stonks". In 2019 and 2020, the image became a mainstream meme in its own right, and was used as a sarcastic reaction image mocking instances of people showing poor financial knowledge or having stupid finance-related ideas.
History and Growth[]
Stonks was first posted by Special meme fresh's facebook account on June 5th, 2017, and it currently has 3,700 reactions. In July of 2017 the same image was posted to r/Ooer, a shitposting subreddit. In 2018, Stonks made a fes appearances on Youtube, Imgur and Reddit.
Later in 2019, the meme grew popular on reddit and started to appear on subreddits such as r/dankmemes and r/memes. It continues to grow in popularity and became a large mainstream and spread to other large platforms such as Instagram. The meme continued to be popular well into 2020, but by then many considered it to have become stale and unfunny.
Variations[]
Main article: Stonk variants
As stonks grew in popularity, variations of the meme began to spring up. These variations all feature Meme Man's face photoshopped onto a person doing something, paired with a misspelled word related to that thing. They generally mock people doing that thing badly.
Controversy[]
When it was popular, Stonks became overused quickly. Many people consider it to be a normie meme, largely because it's a reaction image often used with Twitter screenshots. Stonks is now much more widely known than Meme Man or Surreal Memes, causing Meme Man to be called "Stonks Man" or something similar.
Stonks is regarded by many in the Surreal Memes community to be the straw that broke the camel's back and finally made Meme Man a dead meme, by making him mainstream and overused. For this reason, stonks is unpopular with most people who knew Meme Man before.