TikTok Meme Imagines Getting ‘Snapped’ Throughout ‘Avengers: Infinity Battle’

  • A Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) event called “Snap” is the foundation of a new TikTok trend.
  • In the MCU, the “snap” erased half of life in the universe for five years.
  • The TikTok meme contains videos depicting what it was like for normal people to disappear.
  • You can find more stories on the Insider homepage.

In the years since Avengers: Infinity War premiered in 2018, later entries in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) have grappled with the effects of what is known as “snap” – the extermination of half of life in the super villain’s universe Thanos caused.

Now a new TikTok meme explores what it would actually be like to be one of those who temporarily disappeared.

The “Snapshot” takes place during “Avengers: Infinity War” when Thanos manages to defeat the Avengers with the power of the Infinity Stones – artifacts steeped in reality. When Thanos snaps his fingers with all the infinite stones by the hand, billions of people and life forms instantly disappear. What the MCU then calls “blip” happens when those people return during the continuity of “Avengers: Endgame,” Kevin Feige, president of Marvel Studios, told Fandango in 2019.

The new TikTok meme focuses on the “Thanos snapped” sound uploaded by TikTok user @goshuajonzalez. This user also seems to have created the meme themselves, which is relatively simple: users create TikToks from perspective to set up specific scenarios. When a reverberant scream sounds, the image becomes blurred, indicating the moment the Avengers lose and Thanos snaps his fingers. Users get the blurry picture effect using TikTok’s built-in “ghosted” filter.

The meme stems from another viral video by @oh_mosheh, who posted a TikTok video on March 10th commenting on the dryness of Popeyes’ cookies, something Popeyes himself joked about on his social channels in the past . In @ oh_mosheh’s original TikTok, a voice says “Ooh, Popeyes cookies” as the camera shows a cookie, and then a hand reaching for a drink before the image fades and the camera falls. The audio from this video was used for Thanos “Snap” memes.

The first meme videos by @goshuajonzales, posted on March 19-20, use this Popeyes sound, while subsequent entries use the “Thanos snapped” sound, which includes the scream but not the biscuit line. From then on, @goshuajonzales posted several “Thanos snapped” videos before others caught the trend.

While the meme is obviously humorous, it builds on fertile ground in the MCU. Post “Avengers: Endgame” films and television series have explored the effects of so-called “blip”, including “Spider-Man: Far From Home”, “Wandavision” and most recently “The Falcon and The Winter Soldier”. “Of course, these depictions have focused on the major characters of the franchise. This TikTok meme contextualizes the event in the life of an average person and what could have been interrupted by Thanos’ villainy.

The “snap” was one of the most weighty events on the entire MCU. The new TikTok meme plays off the event with much-needed ease.

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