Memes are helping viewers process the horrors of HBO's Chernobyl

The A.V. Club

The five-part miniseries on the 1986 nuclear disaster "has quietly grown in popularity in the aftermath of Game Of Thrones’ divisive final episode," says Randall Colburn. "With every episode, Twitter and Reddit’s digital thoroughfares flood with digital tears and praise for the series’ painstaking adherence to historical accuracy. That’s a good thing for HBO, obviously, but we’re living in a post-Game Of Thrones era, one where much of that chatter manifests not in words, but memes. Considering Chernobyl delves into a terror that caused an untold number of deaths and irrevocably changed the world as we know it, that’s...weird. It’s also, though, just par for the course in the social media age. Every Game Of Thrones episode this season, for example, seemed to cull unity among the Extremely Online not in their content, but in the two, three, or four memes that inevitably emerged in their wake. Making memes have, for a large swath of culture, simply become a means of reaction, of processing, of conversing."