Tumblr In The Wild
Have you ever seen a meme floating around somewhere in the great beyond—your family group chat, your friend’s Instagram story—and you’ve thought quietly to yourself, I saw that on Tumblr first, ha! Or maybe you even said it out loud. And then everyone looked at you funny.
Well, this is a post about those special moments: seeing Tumblr in the wild, when a meme or trend or really good post breaches containment like a particularly powerful cryptid.
First and foremost, in 2021, there was gaslight gatekeep girlboss, a meme that sprouted in Tumblr’s native soil early in the year. Following its spread to Twitter, it took the whole internet by storm until it became part of everyone’s standard vocabulary.
Then there was the whole #2014tumblr phenomenon on TikTok, which continues to be a Whole Thing. Basically, people are obsessing over the historical aesthetic of this very website. From a mere seven years ago. Which has been WILD to see for all the people on Tumblr who were around to invent it.
In 2020, iconic Tumblr account @thatsbelievable, a compendium of Victorian-aesthetic jokes with a modern twist, had a successful post in the form of The Best Gorilla Joke of 1897. But when it went viral on Twitter in 2021, people uninitiated in Tumblr vibes believed it really was from 1897, and others had to jump in to clarify.
We all had a good laugh at the Tumblr post about “vertically oriented igneous intrusion,” but many of you took a non-zero amount of offense at an aggregator website kicking off their reporting on the meme with the sentence, “Tumblr’s no longer popular, but that won’t stop content from spreading on other platforms.” Because come on!
On Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest, there are a bunch of accounts devoted to reposting Tumblr screenshots, the most impressive being @exaltiora’s Twitter thread which runs to over 11,000 continuous screenshots of Tumblr posts! But as a Tumblr user so winningly put it, this is akin to selling bootleg tickets to the clown carnival.
Finally, to cap off the year, we had the feminine urge meme. Like gaslight gatekeep girlboss, this one began on Tumblr and then flooded the channels on many other platforms. But WE know that a meme this good could only have come from one place: right here. In other words: do not cite the deep magic to me, witch. I was on Tumblr when it was posted.