Stop With the ‘Little Miss’ Memes Already, for the Love of God
Everyone’s mad at Instagram lately, albeit for the wrong reasons. This whole “pivot to video” it’s allegedly doing is good, actually; it means more strangely entrancing clips of JoJo Siwa dancing and doing somersaults on my feed. Recommended content from accounts I don’t follow? Whatever! It’s called “scrolling past them,” people.
One thing I cannot scroll past, however: those wretched “Little Miss” memes. Acquaintances who are certainly not actual friends have inundated me with these horrendously unfunny “jokes,” clogging up the Instagram Story feed for the past few weeks. Every time I log on, someone I begrudgingly follow has declared a randomly assigned character named “Little Miss Cheeto Fingers” or “Little Miss English Major” to be “so relatable ????.”
I’m sure you’ve seen them too. They’re simple posts, parodying the Mr. Men series of kids books that launched in the ’70s. Each book stars a brightly colored blob named things like “Mr. Messy,” “Mr. Mean,” or “Mr. Tickle” (ew). The spin-off Little Miss books were first published a decade later. They lean in more stereotypical directions: There are characters like “Little Miss Bossy,” “Little Miss Chatterbox,” and “Little Miss Scatterbrain,” each with their own story. There have also been several animated series centered around the characters over the decades, with another one tentatively announced for 2023.