the whole eeby deeby superhell horse plinko blorbo era of tumblr is & was a bit frustrating for me bcos i was Online enough to watch the whole thing percolate and as a result was often stuck explaining to less Online people what in the world was going on AND also pretty routinely see people be wrong about where all the Parts came from
remember once explaining where 'I'm bald' as a tumblr poll option came from and having someone be like 'oh I actually think people started saying it bcos xyz' and having to be like no you are wrong. i have done the research & have sources.
here's the low down on 'I'm bald':
was your hair a different color when you were little? yes, lighter yes, darker no i don't know / i'm bald / any other miscellaneous infinite
^ this is the original poll. it only got about 1800 votes. OP has moved blogs so I don't have the source on this anymore but they made some follow up posts explaining that they worded the final answer that way bcos they'd had some people complain about a previous poll they made on a different subject being insufficiently inclusive and they wanted to make sure all bases were covered. this is also presumably why it has an exasperated tone to it.
if you think you remember seeing and voting in the OG poll you probably didn't, just statistically.
me when someone asks me literally anything:
^ somebody thought the wording was funny and posted a screencap with a caption. THAT post has just under 70,000 notes and counting.
people agreed that the way it was worded was funny & start applying it to various fictional bald people
(source)
(source)
& also people begin using 'I'm bald' as an alternative to 'not applicable' on polls.
#I felt like this when people didn't know goncharov came from the boots.#some people started saying it was collectively made up by tumblr users and didn't have a known origin. no it was the knockoff boots!
YEAH ppl will confuse 'I'm not sure where this came from' with 'people just randomly started saying this'
especially frustrating with Goncharov bcos it didn't just blow up when it did at random either. it blew up bcos tumblr user beelzeebub made a poster:
💬 0 🔁 60080 ❤️ 75389 · Goncharov (1973) dir. Martin Scorsese “The greatest mafia movie (n)ever made.”
the Goncharov one does particularly annoy me bcos with the arguable exception of Goncharov himself all the characters people were memeing about (Katya, Andrey, Ice Pick Joe) were beelzeebub's OCs and yet most people don't seem to be aware of their influence.
can't blame people for just not being very online obviously but there is Something here with regards to people viewing meme cultural as this kind of self-generating content soup rather than something individual creators contribute to.
I haven't seen anyone post the actual goncharov boot origins so here it is. credit to @zootycoon who's no longer active and doesn't have the post up anymore.





















