Gen Z's Chaotic, Ironic Emoji-Swapping Meme

If keeping up with TikTok trends brings up cafeteria-table trauma or the anxiety of not getting invited to the right parties, you're not alone: fitting in with the in-crowd on Gen Z’s internet can often feel like racing to get in on the joke before anyone else even knows there's a punchline.

For the predominantly younger-skewing "chronically online," riding the wave of emerging trends helps forge identity and create distance from the “out-of-touch” older generations. In a culture shaped by brainrot, post-irony, and existential dread, avoiding the mainstream is a badge of honor.

Creating underground memes and micro-viral moments that distinguish an in-the-know in-group from outsiders can be mini-milestones in establishing a generation’s internet identity, leaving others on the outside feeling confused and out of the loop, often intentionally so.

Over the past few years, emojis have become the subjects of internet conspiracies and pranks aimed at fostering this sort of in-group cohesion, sometimes in quintessentially Gen Z unhinged, seemingly meaningless, chaotic ways.

🥀 AN EMOJI FOR SADNESS: IF IT'S BROKE… DO FIX IT?

One of the most typical memes gaining traction among the TikTok contingent is the “X has gone mainstream / we now use Y” format that declares a given meme, emoji, or cultural symbol as out of date or past its prime and offers a replacement, usually a derivative of the original symbol in some way but sometimes totally arbitrary.

It’s what gave rise earlier this year to a microtrend in which the the 🥀 Wilted Flower emoji, sometimes called the “dead rose” or the “dead flower,” was deemed the chosen emoji to convey sadness, replacing the 💔 Broken Heart, also known as the “heartbreak emoji,” in the comments of videos and in many videos themselves.

The trend began in late February 2025, when a series of memes clowning on the overuse of the heartbreak emoji as too mainstream an emblem of performative sadness took root, starting with a video from one TikTok user claiming with the caption “‘💔’ lowkey starting to become too mainstream / i might just start using ‘🥀’.”

@savo.rl 🥀🥀#luracks#fyp#foryou ♬ not myself - luracks

The 💔 Broken Heart had originally been used somewhat unironically by fans of late rapper XXXTentacion—and also by those poking fun both at him for being a cringe and corny personality before his death and at his fans who were using the 💔 Broken Heart in earnest.

The meme gained traction in niche circles of TikTok like the hood irony sector known as JuggTok, with videos in the following days. Many of these videos featured some variation of the “💔 has gone too mainstream / we will now be using 🥀” rhetoric, sharing the joke more widely to even higher engagement. 

@zane2low “💔” has gone mainstream and Dandy’s world players have been using it 🥀 #nba #lebron #fyp #viralvideo #vexbolts #xyzbca #fy #fyp #basketball #funnyvideo #meme #tiktoker #dandysworld ♬ RAUUUUUUGHHJ lil_culture - Music_4dayz

@pubert.17 spread ts word 🥀 #druski #ts #meme #fyp ♬ slime u out - jordan

The meme eventually reached a status where it became prevalent enough to start to sow confusion in the unaware without becoming mainstream itself, prompting the likes of out-of-the-loop Reddit users to ask what the Wilted Flower means—and users in the comments to respond with their own teasing.

Alrught guys.. What is does this emoji mean and why is it used so much?
byu/No-Tale-1090 inteenagers

Others decided to be more generous, articulating the progression of emoji meanings to get the confused up to speed on the joke. 

Comment
byu/No-Tale-1090 from discussion
inteenagers

The 🪫 Low Battery emoji referenced at the end of the pipeline became for many the next evolution of the 🥀 Wilted Flower, since the arbitrary switching of one emoji for another started to become somewhat of a meta meme of its own, with users continuing to build on the trend and suggesting other alternatives, including the 🍂 Fallen Leaf.

@p4st3l_p0sh #Slimetok #slimetok #fyp #viral #farewelljuggtok #slimetokisthenewjuggtok ♬ original sound - hldmyhnd.wav - 𝘩𝘰𝘤𝘩𝘸𝘦𝘳𝘵𝘪𝘨

Because the meme hit a peak around late February and sort of faded into history, you’re perhaps less likely to see the 🥀 Wilted Flower cropping up in the wild these days. But that doesn’t mean there haven’t been—and still won’t be—other emoji replacement schemes taking over the internet.

😂 LAUGHING FROM THE CHAIR AND THE TRAMWAY: MORE EMOJI SWITCH-UPS

As mentioned, the 💔-to-🥀 meme isn’t the only—or even the first—emoji swap phenomenon to have its 15 minutes of fame on social media.

To varying degrees of success, content creators and viral-aspiring influencers in the recent internet era have pitched their own plans to initiate a “this-for-that” emoji switcheroo, with a textbook example being the 🪑 Chair emoji, the second feature of Emojipedia’s Emoji of the Week series.

@emojipediaofficial This #EmojioftheWeek deserves a seated ovation for its cultural impact 👏😂📈 #emojis #emoji #tiktok #jokes #pranks #internet ♬ Cozy Day (Lofi) - The Machinist Beats

In September 2021, TikTok user Anthony Mai, seeking to spark a viral trend, proposed spamming the comments of the videos from mega-influencer KSI with the 🪑 Chair as a stand-in for laughter, instead of the classic 😂 Crying Laughing Face emoji.

Within the following days, the chair-for-laughter joke had spread like wildfire across social media, with 🪑 Chair emojis popping up all over TikTok video comments and as the subjects of videos themselves, confusing much of the internet at large.

Whether the chair-for-laughter joke blew up so much that it crossed the threshold of being an inside joke at all is debatable, especially considering that major media outlets started giving the trend attention, though mostly to speculate on the meaning of the meteoric rise of the 🪑 Chair without actually getting it right.

Now, the latest trend building off the “we use X now” hype is reminiscent of Mai’s nearly 4-year-old prank—this time with another seemingly random emoji as the laughter reaction replacement. 

If you’ve used TikTok or the internet in general in the past month, you might have seen a confusingly and surprisingly high concentration of 🚡 Aerial Tramway emojis floating around the comments of social media posts.

That’s because, in an all-too-familiar attempt to make internet history echoing Mai’s viral trend, YouTuber John Casterline posted a video urging people to use the emoji as a replacement for the 😂 Crying Laughing Face, claiming that the 🚡 Aerial Tramway was the least used emoji in the world.

Casterline's claim was quite outdated, however. Tweets from 2018 from the Least Used Emoji Bot Twitter account seem to have been the source of that claim, based on data from the then-active emojitracker.com. 

The automated bot announcement prompted an outpouring of love from and a grassroots campaign by the emoji’s enthusiasts, people partial to public transit, and hoping to lift the emoji out of the depths of obscurity.

The least used emoji is now: 🚡 (Aerial tramway)

— Least Used Emoji Bot (@leastUsedEmoji) November 12, 2018

🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡ride high in the sky lil guy🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡🚡

— alexandra (@bigmoodenergy) November 12, 2018

One thing that is certain is that the 🚡 Aerial Tramway has now racked up enough attention to give it a boost in popularity that likely would put it far out of reach of the title of the least used emoji.

In the 3 weeks since its publication, Casterline’s video has racked up more than 6 million views, and the sudden upsurge in the use of the emoji has earned media coverage. 

We should note, however, that the tramway-for-laughter joke was actually proposed earlier in a response to Mai’s chair-for-laughter joke, which you can see in a September 2021 TikTok from influencer BrentTV, who cited the same Least Used Emoji Bot tweet.

@brenttelevision Let’s confuse TikTok 🚡 #aerialtramway #fyp ♬ Monkeys Spinning Monkeys - Kevin MacLeod & Kevin The Monkey

Though the trend didn’t catch on in 2021, some TikTokers have returned to comment in amazement that BrentTV had managed to predict today’s then-future reality where the 🚡 Aerial Tramway would, in fact, have its viral moment.

Whether the buzz lasts and the meme has staying power will become clearer over the coming weeks and months.

But the aerial-tramway-for-laughter meme has proven again that the seemingly meaningless Gen Z humor in its manifestation as the emoji replacement paradigm meme resonates with at least some users, time after time.

🤓 EMOJI TREND TAKEAWAYS

Overall, standard emoji usage is overwhelmingly the online norm; most emojis clearly communicate their literal and intended meanings to a broad general audience with little confusion.

It’s in playing with deviations from such a norm that internet users who are looking to subvert expectations for the sake of a joke can build a new reality to mark in-group belonging. Turning the expected meaning of a given emoji on its head has become, over the last few years, a surefire way to prank the internet at large and create what some users hope to be a meme revolution. 

Whether that emoji is somewhat related to its original (like the drooping 🥀 Wilted Flower standing in for sadness as the 💔 Broken Heart emoji does) or whether the choice of a replacement emoji is completely made-up and arbitrary (like the emojis for laughter being swapped for the completely unrelated 🪑 Chair or the 🚡 Aerial Tramway) seems not to matter as much as the fact that the inside joke exists in the first place, and that some select people are on the inside of it