Domino Effect
Where it came from
A two-panel labeling format that spread around 2019 across the usual meme platforms. There's no single creator. It grew out of the older "domino chain reaction" visual — the real physics demo where each tile is about one and a half times bigger than the one before it, so a domino you can barely see can topple one the size of a building a dozen tiles down the line. Someone started slapping labels on the first and last dominoes and it took off from there.
Top panel: a row of dominoes, the first one tiny, each bigger than the last, the final one enormous. Bottom panel: the little domino tips over. You label the small first domino with some trivial action and the giant last one with a wildly disproportionate outcome. "Texting back 'k'" knocks over the chain that ends in "World War 3." The cause is microscopic and the effect is apocalyptic.
It runs on absurdity, not warning. You reach for it when the line from the small thing to the huge thing is technically real but insane to actually draw. The escalating sizes do the comedy — your eye walks down the row and you know the punchline is catastrophic before you read it. The bigger the gap between the two ends, the harder it lands.
Still in regular rotation. It's never been the main character of any given year the way the marquee templates were, but it's durable — the "tiny cause, deranged consequence" structure is too useful to die. People reach for it any time they want to blame something enormous on something stupid.
Search interest, over time
↳ data courtesy of google trends
