Sup memelords,

Jovian here. A couple of weeks ago, I received this insane message on LinkedIn.

This young man is Nobel Rimal, a Nepalese Gen-Z memelord who lived through the 2025 Nepalese Gen-Z protests.

He reached out to Memelord because he wants share his on-the-ground experience during this crazy period that ended up with a new Nepali Prime Minister being voted in via Discord.

Nobel’s experience through this movement is fascinating. He’s a real life keyboard warrior, with emphasis on the warrior part.

From quantitatively analyzing the memes that triggered the movement, creating a Telegram group full of Gen-Z memelords criticizing the government, to genuinely fearing for his life.

All because of memes.

This is a real life example of what we believe in Memelord, that Memes Make Movements.

We know and have seen the power of memes in politics, but now we have a story that proves it’s happening all around the world, not just in the West.

Today’s Memelord Magazine article is written by Nobel.

Here’s his story.

When memes stopped being jokes

Between 8 and 12 September 2025, Nepal lived through five of the most chaotic days in its history.

Police stations, supermarkets, ministers’ homes, even the Supreme Court burned. 

Seventy-four people were killed.

It started with memes.

The day the parliament burned, it felt like I was stuck in some absurd split-screen version of Call of Duty: Nepal Edition.

On my left monitor: smoke curling over the supreme court.

On my right monitor: TikTokers dancing, making memes about kawaii protestors.

And the comments didn’t only read “be safe at the protest”, they also read: “bro getting all the huzz at the protest 🥀.”, “This generation is only scared of weak wifi 💀.”

It looked like chaos, but it wasn’t random.

What we were watching was a meme-based revolution rehearsing itself in public.

For weeks, I’d been watching something stir online.

Tonal shifts in memes, old joke templates reappearing, new hashtags bubbling up with envy and irony.

Traditional media didn’t get Gen-Z humor, and no one was measuring what we were really feeling.

So I started doing it myself by treating TikTok like a Bloomberg terminal, logging meme formats, and tracking mood swings through comment sections.

It wasn’t my first time reading a feed like this.

Back in 2022, I predicted Kathmandu’s mayoral election just by studying memes about Balen, the rapper-turned-mayor (Kanye, take notes).

In my mind, every meme template carried voter sentiment more honestly than any poll.

So when that same pattern started flickering again, the same sarcastic optimism, the same velocity of reposts, I knew what every “I’m unhappy with the government” TikTok actually meant.

We weren’t joking.

We were signaling.

The first signal: a luxury Christmas tree

And then the first signal appeared – nepobaby edits.

A CapCut template so petty it cracked open what decades of investigative journalism couldn’t.

The “Nepobabies” were the influencer children of Nepal’s political and business elite. They posted designer hauls and European vacations while the country dealt with power cuts and inflation. 

Many of them were tied by blood or money to the same ministers accused of corruption. They were people posting from luxury yachts while their hometown was flooding.

The trend started as remixes of their luxury vlogs.

In a country where the average income is USD 1,400 per year, one nepokid even built a Christmas tree out of luxury brand boxes. It was tone-deaf and intensely provocative.

People were angry.

They were using CapCut templates cutting between clear skin and glossy Europe trips to videos of broken roads, school kids wading through floodwater, and unsanitary hospitals.

These before/after edits turned into rich/poor montages. And every montage was increasingly accusatory, mocking, furious.

And the spread was instant.

Within hours, meme pages had cloned the format, and comment sections turned into megaphones for calls to action. Influencers started getting shamed for who they followed.

Cancel culture finally cancelling something important. Even the friends of the friends of the politically corrupt weren’t safe.

If every meme’s content, form, and stance could get a virality score, Nepobaby edits maxed out all three dimensions. I’ll come back to what that actually means later. 

These memes capitalized on resentment and envy, feeding off the frustration of a generation that had spent its entire life scrolling through thousands of 15-second packets of people living their best lives and flexing their money.

By that point, I didn’t need polling data or op-eds

The system had already been diagnosed in CapCut.

From the feed to the streets

Soon enough, the day every comment had been preaching finally came – September 8.

I barely slept the night before. My phone was full of DMs, rumors, and half-confirmed plans.

I wasn’t really scared, but I did feel a bit nervous. It felt like everyone knew something was about to break, and we were all waiting for impact.

Then, Gen-Z went from terminally online to IRL.

That morning, I packed my camera, a BIG water bottle, and a portable charger. I had made a brochure titled Memes Are Our Only Option. Inside, I wrote:

“Today’s protest is only the spark.

The real blaze is online.”

I printed stacks and handed them out in the crowd.

Each copy explained the power of memetic warfare using Minecraft imagery and had a QR code that linked to a Telegram group, MemePack HQ, with the Strawhat Pirates logo. 

The symbol had already become a meme for rebellion across Southeast Asia. We saw the same mischievous skull during student protests in Indonesia.

By noon, the area outside Parliament felt less like a protest and more like a real-life meme convention. I walked past hundreds of recognizable influencers, vloggers, and livestreamers, taking the battle out of the fluid, memetic cyberspace and into the harsh, physical world.

One guy had a speaker blasting “Money, Money, Money” by ABBA while holding up a sign that said “performative male protesting period cramps”

Then I saw another group doing the boatkid aura farming pose in front of the barricades, perfectly framed for the algorithm.

Every pose looked like a thumbnail.

Every second felt like a clip waiting for music.

The whole street was a stitched-together edit, looping faster, louder, brighter. Like the protest was meant to be a huge meme.

Then the rhythm cracked.

Gunfire.

Sharp, mechanical, unreal.

For a moment, it felt like the world lagged.

People ducked, ran, dropped phones still recording.

Humor brought us here, but humor couldn’t protect us anymore.

Do not stop making memes

The gunshot was a reality check. I ran away, dejected. My phone wasn’t working either. 

It turned from a meme convention into a GTA lobby: ambulances without windows speeding through the crowd, motorcycles speeding past crowds of children in school uniforms. The state had won.

The fluid, memetic cyberspace would obviously be no match for real bullets fired at real people with real families. 

That’s what I thought – until I went home and opened TikTok.

The feed was on fire again.

Thousands of clips of bodies, gunfire, chaos. And a lot of them were already looping into edits of foreigners panicking while the Subway Surfers soundtrack plays and dark punchlines.

It was as if people were grieving by making memes.

Some part of me was relieved.

Some part of me was proud.

We meme louder than they can govern

Then came the comments:

“Too soon.”

“Have some respect.”

“People died.”

It made sense. The outrage was real. But silence is tyranny’s favorite weapon. If we stopped posting, opportunists would fill the vacuum with its own narrative.

It had already started happening. Facebook groups changed their names from “Nepal Communist Party Youth Wing” to “Gen-Z Nepal”. A leaderless movement could be hijacked by anyone. 

So I did what any nerd with a camera and a hyperfixation on memes would do: I made a TikTok explaining memetic warfare and the hijack in real time.

I broke down a NATO Strategic Communications report titled “It’s Time to Embrace Memetic Warfare,” explaining how governments had already started studying memes as psychological weapons. 

And if institutions could use them for control, we could use them for protest.

People flooded the comments with support.

DMs poured in from students, creators, even a few journalists. They all wanted to join the memetic fight. 

So I built our own response infrastructure: meme packs. The Telegram QR from the zine was raking in members fast.

Inside MemePack HQ, I dropped raw videos and formats that matched our demands but stayed meme-ready.

Videos that exposed planted agitators looting courts.

Clown edits of opportunists freeing prisoners.

Old viral templates that could be reused.

After I sent the raw footage or a template, the crowd would remix it within minutes. Each edit was funnier, sharper, and angrier than the last.

Crisis comms powered by irony. Using references and slang the older generation couldn’t hijack, each meme became a checkpoint, a counter-narrative, a reminder that Gen-Z wasn’t the violent mob burning court files and freeing prisoners.

Democracy in Discord 

The memes began looping on autoplay. Then, something even more surreal happened.

Nepal’s next interim prime minister was being chosen on Discord.

The same app we used to game through lockdowns had turned into a national parliament.

A community poll went up in the “Hami Nepali” discord server, a community created by an NGO to spread on-ground information about the protests.

With a shortlist of names pulled from discord, Tiktok, and Instagram, the gen-Z started voting for their representative. 

Among them was Sushila Karki, Nepal’s former Chief Justice.

Her name shot to the top, boosted by coordinated meme campaigns and retweets from youth pages.

People with anime profile pictures were debating cabinet positions in voice channels, dropping reaction emojis as votes, and arguing constitutional law in threads labeled “#no-mic”. Estimates suggest over 100,000 users were on the server during this period.

Then, the impossible headline turned real: Sushila Karki was sworn in as Nepal’s interim prime minister. It was surreal to hear the word “discord” at the oath taking ceremony for the new interim PM of Nepal.

Somewhere between irony and institution, memes had become the medium of governance.

We were living inside the aftermath of a meme revolution.

Decoding the virality of memes

After the protests, I was stuck replaying EVERYTHING that just happened, trying to make sense of it all.

Around a week before the protest, I started doing what I’d hinted at earlier, treating TikTok like a Bloomberg terminal. For me, that meant tracking the feed the way traders watch markets.

I was monitoring trend spikes, comment sentiment, and meme velocity instead of stock prices.

My first challenge while looking at massive meme data was that memes that live inside videos are deceptively contextless. 

A clip can go viral without anyone agreeing on what it means. The same five seconds could be used as satire, mockery, or propaganda depending on how people perceive it. 

So I turned to the comments. That’s where the real data was: hundreds of mini-annotations translating each meme into emotion, sarcasm, or outrage. 

I scraped and logged comment threads, then tagged videos by their tonal signature.

Using that, I clustered posts with similar comment ecosystems into “variants”. Over time, I watched those clusters evolve. 

Irony clusters were replaced by anger, coordination language (“bring water,” “meet at Mandala”) was spreading faster than a side-hustle guru promising financial freedom by Tuesday.

Now I knew sentiment had crossed from meme to movement. 

From the digital to IRL. 

Soon enough, I realized I was seeing something measurable. I built what I called the Emotional Volatility Index, a simple line chart tracking how irony and anger moved over time.

At first, irony climbed. People were still joking through their frustration.

But two days before September 8, the curve flipped, anger spiked and irony was moving up with it. The emotional tone of the comments on protest memes had turned from coping to coordination.

Now I was sure that the memes were not only mirroring emotions, but also driving it.

To classify memes more systematically, I borrowed a framework from Limor Shifman’s Memes in Digital Culture and tagged each by:

• content (what it’s about),

• form (how it’s presented),

• stance (what it wants you to feel)

I treated tagging new trends as a way to read the emotional circuitry of the frustrated gen-z youth. A snippet of the protest dataset can be found here under “Nepal Protests Analysis”.

The protest dataset now functioned like a sentiment network. Each meme represented a node, and each comment sentiment a signal bouncing across the system, reflecting latent emotions of resentment and anger.

And the faster the replication, the closer we were to ignition.

It’s the same pattern you see behind the virality of Labubus.

Overusing the word starts as a joke, then everyone’s For You Page has mutated a collectible toy into a meme stock. The velocity itself is an indicator.

The engagement treadmill 

We thought we were joking our way to freedom, but memes are never just jokes.

What we were caught in was what Etymology Nerd calls the engagement treadmill: a feedback loop where latent emotion becomes memetic content, and that content amplifies the very emotion that made it viral.

In Nepal, it looked something like this:

This is the same treadmill that fuels everything:

• AI slop that colonizes children’s minds until they can quote every character 

• Shock memes that normalize extremism so we edge closer to radical frames

• Oddly specific thirst traps that spiral into digital fetishes.

What the algorithm amplifies, we start to crave. What we crave, we replicate.

That’s the paradox of memetic revolutions: they democratize attention but centralize emotion. Everyone is a broadcaster, but no one is fully in control.

A protest that began as non-violent memes online ended as proof that the algorithm is the new state and memes its propaganda. 

Read the jokes before the smoke

People say that the revolution won’t be televised. After this experience, I’m confident it’ll actually be auto-captioned with Subway Surfers gameplay. 

The meme isn’t just how we process reality anymore; it’s how we produce it.

Watching it all unfold, I stopped trying to separate irony from intention.

For my generation, there’s no line.

Humor is infrastructure.

Laughter is logistics.

Governments can still ban platforms, but they can’t ban punchlines. Because every time someone laughs, they’re syncing with the collective memetic bandwidth.

I’ve lived through what happens when the jokes turn real, when the punchlines start dictating policy and the comment sections write history faster than newsrooms.

I’m still trying to figure out what that means. But I know this much: the memes will always know before we do.

So if you want to know where the next protest begins, or who the people will be voting for next, don’t look for petitions, polls, or sentiment analyses.

Scroll your feed.

Read the memes before the smoke.

Memes make movements.

That is the story of Nobel Rimal, the Gen-Z memelord who used memes to overthrow a corrupt government.

Thanks for reading memelords.

Create some cool shit this week.

Jovian “The Child Labor” Gautama

VP of Memes at Memelord.com