i saw a post that was like ‘tumblr has become such a garbage site’ and I don’t think they were around for the bird in the chocolate fountain gif that set off a website-wide war sometime around 2012
to elaborate on this bc nobody does it quite like they do.
i can’t believe i’ve been on this blue hellscape for so long that im called upon as a scholar of ancient tumblr memes but yet……here we are……
[cracks knuckle] so the chocolate bird meme.
the chocolate bird meme actually started in 2011, technically. a gif of a cockatoo in a chocolate foundation began circulating…
….and for some reason struck people as “relatable content.” i remember seeing it as early as april 2011. that post ended up getting hundreds of thousands of notes (which was a HUGE deal at the time since the site’s user base was much smaller. think the equivalent of getting like 1.5 million notes now.)
then, shockingly, someone decided to write an essay about why the gif wasn’t funny at all, but rather problematic and abusive. i believe this was written in december 2011/january 2012.
what this person and a shit ton of others DIDN’T know (because no one fucking googles anything) is that it was a CGI bird. the entire scene was fake. it was from fucking JACK AND JILL, aka the movie widely regarded as the WORST ADAM SANDLER MOVIE OF ALL TIME–let me say that again bc it’s saying a lot: the worst ADAM SANDLER movie OF ALL TIME.
by janurary/february 2012, the gif had started a site-wide debate about whether or not it was a depiction of animal abuse. people were literally unfollowing other people based on whether they supported/condemned the gif. no matter what opinion you voiced, you were pretty much guaranteed to get flack or anon hate, tbh.
one person defending the gif replied to the OP of the post that condemned it, and the OP’s response is what really launched The Meme.
the OP’s reply, beginning with “listen here cum-slut….” became a copy pasta. at first, people would just paste the entire unedited rant into any situation where injury or insult was perceived. then people started adding it as a caption to unrelated or tangentially related posts (anything to do with birds or people eating chocolate were frequent targets)
the one i remember the most vividly was the version that someone attached to a gif of augustus gloop in the chocolate river from the 2005 charlie and the cholate factory where any mention of birds was replaced with “fat kid” (2011/2012 tumblr was v problematic and The Discourse had not yet taken root)
eventually the entire rant just got shortened to “listen here cum-slut” because the meme was so pervasive that pretty much everyone who had a tumblr at the time had memorized the rest of the post or some variant of it. just quoting the opening line implied the rest of the copy pasta (very similar to “what the fuck did you just fucking say about me you little bitch?”)
so that’s how a cgi gif of a bird in a chocolate fountain caused a website-wide war. the lesson here is that tumblr has and always will be a garbage site. started at the bottom and yeah no we’re still at the bottom nothing has changed get used 2 it kids. or leave and save yourselves. it’s obviously 2 late 4 me
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