Ohio

Ohio refers to a midwestern state in the United States of America, situated next to Lake Erie.

Online, various memes have gained popularity, revolving around a looming threat, posed by the state, most of which appeared following the spread of a photo depicting a bus stop screen, saying Ohio Will Be Eliminated.

The Ohio Will Be Eliminated photo first appeared online in a post on Tumblr, uploaded by user screenshotofdespair on August 6th, 2016.

It gained a lot of likes and shares, while being simultaneously reposted on other sites, appearing in articles and tweets.

A related meme about Ohio posing a danger on neighboring states was posted on r/mapporncirclejerk by u/chukotkaa on January 26th, 2017, marking the beginning of “Ohio” memes.

“Ohio” memes started taking off slowly, with variations of image macros appearing sporadically throughout 2018 and 2019.

Examples of these include a popular meme of Garfield thinking it’s time to Nuke It from Orbit as well as the classic Wait, it’s all Ohio? format, the latter of which spread on sites like iFunny, Twitter, Tumblr and Instagram at the end of 2019.

At the beginning of 2020, “Ohio” memes swarmed the web, spreading on the aforementioned sites, as well as various subreddits, which include r/dankmemes and r/DeepFriedMemes.

• Instagram.com – Ohio Memes
• Melmagazine.com – Ohio Memes Represent the Creeping Fear of Ordinary America
• Reddit.com – r/OutofTheLoop