If you’ve been active on Facebook (well, who hasn’t?), you would have noticed a certain purple bird taking over the site. It is the latest trend to hit the interwebs, after “Om Telolet Om“, saltbae, and “Cash Me Outside“.
Not only is it dominating comments threads like this (regardless if the post is about the purple bird or not):
And that’s not all.
It also comes in the form of funny gifs or memes like this:
And some of it exist for the sole purpose of annoying you:
But what exactly is it?
It is actually called “Trash Dove”, a collection of Facebook stickers by American artiste Syd Weiler. The illustrator, who is based in Florida, drew the bird in September but only submitted it as a Facebook sticker in January 2017. The most popular sticker of the series is the “headbanging dove”, which shows the purple bird vigorously thrashing its head up and down.
It wasn’t until this week that we saw this dove making it rounds on Facebook, but apparently it has been trending since the start of February. It all started on a video of a popular Thai Facebook page, which showed the trash dove in a dance-off with a cartoon cat. The video has racked up more than 4 million views and has been shared more than 77 thousand times as at time of writing.
If you haven’t watched it, here it is:
Our next question is: Why exactly is it so popular?
We don’t have an exact reason for its popularity, but then again, it’s the Internet, and things get popular for no reason at all. It might be because they are cute, or annoying, or people jumping on the bandwagon.
However, some have speculated that it is because the Thai word for bird, “nok”, describes someone who is hopelessly single, and what better time for this to trend than Valentine’s Day, right?
Well, your guess is as good as ours!
Like it or hate it, it’s here to stay – at least until the next trend appears.
Before we end this piece, let us share a few trash doves memes we found over the internet!
Enjoy:
Not only are there trash dove socks now, the trending icon even has a dedicated Facebook page, which you can follow here.
What’s your favourite trash dove meme/gif? Share it with us in the comments section below!
