“It was the first snow in Colorado a couple weeks ago, and she had new snow boots,” Trujillo said, recalling a text conversation. “She was the one who told me you could change the outfits,” said her daughter, Susie Trujillo. She recently changed her Bitmoji outfit to depict an image of her orange tabby, Roger.
Often, after learning a piece of slang, like “on fleek” - a phrase for which Trujillo’s explainer was simply a link to its origin-story Vine - Susan makes a point to use it in a sentence. (“She was like ‘Is this person sneezing?’” Trujillo recalls.) And before that, it was the avatar sitting on a giant key, as a hat tip to the once-buzzy DJ Khaled catchphrase “major key.” The updating Bitmoji memes became daily lessons for her mother.
The app’s perpetually updated avatar choices - which contort themselves to act out the latest in movies, television, music, slang, and memes - were a window for her mother into a whole new web.īefore the Evil Kermit breakdown, there was the dabbing Bitmoji. Then, six months ago, Trujillo helped her mom create a Bitmoji, one of those expressive cartoons that anyone can customize to look like themselves, and all that changed. Trujillo’s mother has always been relatively tech-savvy, but never ventured too deeply into the more involved parts of internet culture.
Informal internet lessons have become a familiar ritual between Susie, a 29-year-old marketing consultant, and her mother, Susan, a 61-year-old head of communication at Denver’s Office of Economic Development. Trujillo even followed up by emailing a few sample memes for context. The two hopped on the phone together for a brief lecture on hooded Kermit, an online joke based on a scene from 2014’s Muppets Most Wanted that’s meant to convey a person’s conflicting thoughts and desires. “Kermit?” Trujillo’s mom, Susan Liehe, replied. “Haha you used that wrong,” Trujillo replied. Earlier this month, Susie Trujillo received a text that included an unexpected image: her mother’s Bitmoji - an illustration of a mature woman with short brown hair, bangs, and wire-rimmed glasses - mimicking what her mom thought was the “Evil Kermit” meme.
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