Hit or Miss

What happens in the video

The footage shows a girl in cosplay, with dark hair in pigtails, a pink cheerleader outfit, and bright anime-style makeup. She lip-syncs the phrase “hit or miss, I guess they never miss, huh,” accompanying it with a signature gesture: she touches a finger to her chin and winks coquettishly. Then, to an altered, slowed-down, “drunk” beat of the same phrase, she performs a dance. The original video was shot as a collage of several angles of the same movement, which later became a visual reference for parodies.

The original video is credited to a TikTok user with the handle nyannyancosplay, whose clip turned the musical phrase into a standalone dance trend.

Origins: the conflict around the Mia Khalifa track

The phrase at the core of the meme comes from the song “Mia Khalifa,” released by the duo iLOVEFRiDAY (Joey Kay and Charlotte Ellen) in summer 2018. The song appeared as a response to a public spat between the duo and former adult film actress Mia Khalifa on social media. According to the common version, Khalifa criticized one of the duo’s videos, after which the musicians released a track with her name in the title, built on a sarcastic chorus about how they “never miss.”

Mia Khalifa herself publicly reacted to the track, which added publicity to the story and helped the song spread across platforms before the line became a standalone meme, almost detached from the original context of the conflict.

How “Hit or Miss” became a TikTok flash mob

After nyannyancosplay’s video was posted in December 2018, the short clip with the phrase and signature gesture began to be widely copied by other TikTok users, forming a full-fledged flash mob, #hitormiss. The format suited viral spread well: a short, easily memorable phrase, minimal choreography, and room for one’s own visual style (outfit, makeup, setting) while keeping the recognizable core.

The trend quickly spread beyond TikTok to Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, where compilations of the best and worst repeats of the gesture collected millions of views. As a result, the phrase became one of the most quoted internet expressions of the turn of 2018–2019, outgrowing its original musical context in recognizability.

Life of the meme after its peak

Over time, “hit or miss” settled into everyday internet language with a broader meaning unconnected to dancing: an ironic remark that the outcome of something is unpredictable and may turn out well or badly (“this will either land or it won’t”). This kind of semantic broadening is typical of memes built on a memorable phrase. The visual part gradually loses relevance, while the verbal formula keeps living on its own.

Typical captions accompanying the meme in this new sense sound roughly like this: “new recipe, hit or miss, I guess they never miss, huh” or “my exam plan: hit or miss.”

The meme’s place in TikTok history

“Hit or miss” is often cited as one of the first truly mass TikTok dance flash mobs, establishing a format that dozens of other viral challenges on the platform later used: a short recognizable phrase plus a simple repeatable gesture. In this sense the meme is interesting not only for its own content, but also because it showed the mechanics of future TikTok trends at the very early stage of the app in its current form.