TikTok users have been engaging in a viral trend that involves them typing the phrase “Damon Salvatore Rule 34” into Google Image Search, but some of those taking part may be unfamiliar with its broader meaning.
Damon Salvatore, as many are no doubt aware by this point, is a fictional character in The Vampire Diaries, a popular novel series with a TV adaptation.
“Rule 34,” meanwhile, is an Internet meme that has roots in a 2003 webcomic. It originally appeared on the Zoom-Out website.
WHAT IS THE MEANING OF INTERNET MEME ‘DAMON SALVATORE RULE 34’?
First of all, it’s important to understand that this is a combination of two things, or the application of one to the other.
“Rule 34” is an Internet meme that claims that NSFW content exists relating to every conceivable subject. In other words, if it exists on the Internet, there is adult content featuring it.
Damon Salvatore, portrayed by Ian Somerhalder in the TV adaptation of The Vampire Diaries, is a “darkly handsome” and “charming” vampire in his mid-20s.
Typing “Damon Salvatore Rule 34” into Google will therefore prompt the search engine to trawl the Internet for NSFW content that relates to Damon Salvatore – that is the “meaning” of the trend, inasmuch as there is one. So, take this as a warning that, depending on your search settings, doing so will produce results along those lines.
WHERE DID ‘RULE 34’ COME FROM?
Google reportedly first cached it on October 5, 2004, suggesting it originated on or shortly before that date. Five years later, in 2009, a user in the forum Something Awful posted a thread titled ‘Ask me about inventing Rule 34,’ in which he claimed to have invented it with his sister. It came to him, he said, via an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) chatroom.
It appears among the Lurk Wiki’s eight Rules of the Internet.
The comic depicted his shock at finding NSFW parody content relating to Calvin and Hobbes – a daily newspaper comic strip. He used the phrase “Rule 34” to refer to the apparent “rule” that Internet users will subject even the most innocent and mundane things to the NSFW treatment.
The comic itself faded into obscurity, but the phrase “Rule 34” stuck. Webcomic xkcd later published a comic titled Rule 34, further establishing it in the canon of Internet terminologies.
SOME TIKTOK USERS MAY STRUGGLE TO GET THE ‘MEANING’ OF ‘DAMON SALVATORE RULE 34’ AT FIRST
A Google search for the phrase “Damon Salvatore Rule 34” – rather than an image search – brings up all sorts of explanations for its meaning, not all of which are useful.
One claims that it has something to do with how Google ranks webpages in its search engine; that it is a “set of guidelines” that Google uses to improve the quality of its search results.
For most TikTok users, it seems, the purpose of the “rule” is to prank people. Over the past two years or so, several have shared “before and after” videos of them searching it. Others encourage their followers to do so only “with discretion,” and “at your own risk.”
In other words, they don’t contain explanations of what the “Damon Salvatore Rule 34” trend means, or why the images the come up on a Google Image search are the ones that do.