Text Posts That Never Happened

So this couple walks in- a broad-shouldered man with an accent (Italian, I think) and a man that I can best describe as looking like Cecil Palmer. 

“Okay- weird question. So you guys did our wedding- amazing by the way. And it’s been a month and just about all the flowers in the vases have died by now except for this one thing that’s really holding on in there. And we want to know what that plant is and how to take care of it to keep it alive. And we don’t know how to like… describe it and it sounds kind of weird to go to up to a stranger and say ‘hey what’s this weird wiggly green plant you put in our vases a month ago?’ but I guess that’s what I’m asking.”

“Sounds like curly willow. If you keep it in water it will eventually start rooting and you can grow a new plant from it from the cutting.” 

“That is too cool! What do you suggest we do?”

“Well, you can keep it in the water for now, but eventually you’ll want to pot it in soil because that’s how it’s going to get its nutrients.”

“Can we,” the Italian guy asks. “Can we plant it in the floor?” I figure he means ‘plant it outside.’ 

I nod. “It’ll keep growing.”

“What does it look like when it’s bigger? Does it stay like a wiggly stick?”

“Oh, no, it’ll branch out. It’s actually a tree.” 

The skinnier one turns to his husband and says:

“Did you hear that, honey? They gave us a tree! We have a tree now!” 

and the unfathomable evil that is reddit

last year my followers and i began an investigation into the origin of oppa homeless style and we quickly discovered that there appears to only exists one single screenshot of the mythical tumblr post:

the screenshot was posted to imgur on the 1st of march, 2014, and appeared on /r/thatHappened/ in a thread titled ‘Fedora’d villain shames woman for giving to the homeless’

to further our investigation, @swordcats contacted the reddit user who had posted the thread. the user responded, saying they believe they “found it on 4chan”, adding that it was “probably fake”

we still had hope that it could be a real tumblr post, but this confirmed our suspicion that it was possible the story was never posted to tumblr to begin with. 

we then tried everything we could think of to find any mention of oppa homeless style that predates the imgur upload, but nothing showed up

we even tried carbon dating the post by the shade of blue in the screenshot

this didn’t help us find oppa homeless style, but by comparing it to older posts we were at least able to determined that the screenshot could have been taken around the time of the imgur upload

an anon later messaged me and suggested we should take a look at the post history of reddit user MechaMew2

as the anon noted, they were a frequent contributor to /r/thatHappened/

here are some of the tumblr stories they’ve posted:

after posting 10 different MechaMew2 screenshots to my blog, i was contacted by fellow detective @bluesidefanclub who had done their own investigation

and the findings were devastating…

ALL of these screenshots are fake. all of the posts that arent a screenshotted reblog are his own posts, evidenced by the little x’s on the bottom of some of the screenshots, which used to be tumblrs old delete button. i looked through his ENTIRE post history and every single one of them that isnt a screenshot of a reblog has the delete button on them. none of the posts that are screenshots of reblogs have the x on the bottom, though, so i tried searching for them. ive been on tumblr since 2011 and never saw any of them, even the ones that seemed viral. i searched key phrases from every single one and wasnt able to find any of the originals, and the only images of them that come up are the ones that were posted to imgur and reddit. this especially makes no sense for the “AAAA IT BURNS IT BURNS” post because (according to the screenshot) it had at least 83k notes at the time of screenshotting. so he probably just edited those with inspect element.

MechaMew2 has also been a frequent submitter to r/fatlogic were they post similarly ridiculous stories intended to make fat people look bad:

Tumblrina gets triggered by nephew; Hides his homework under the couch so it can’t hurt her anymore (3rd of october, 2014)

Fat-shaming Barbie gets told off at the gym (31st of october, 2014)

nowadays MechaMew2 is mostly fabricating fake facebook stories about pitbulls (they’re a frequent poster to r/banpitbulls)

Diapered pit bull named Naruto escapes through a window. Catch him and win dinner at Chili’s. (3rd of november, 2020)

Family cancels their Christmas; Sends the money to Trump (30th of november, 2020)

of all the tumblr screenshots, @bluesidefanclub​ was only able to find one real post (which still showed the url of the person who reblogged it)

in a last ditch effort @bluesidefanclub:  

searched for oppa homeless style on google, every major image hosting site (photobucket, flickr, imgur, etc) and also did reverse image lookup on about ten different sites, and each came back with the imgur result from march 2014 being the earliest upload. i searched every visible tag on the post up to the end and found nothing, and searched twitter for “oppa homeless style” pre-dating the imgur upload and couldn’t find anything explicitly pointing to the tumblr post.

so yes…  i think we must finally accept that oppa homeless style was never a real tumblr post

oppa homeless style was made by a redditor whose passion in life is to make fake screenshots of fake tumblr stories for fake internet points

I was 13 and I was on a cruise for my Cousin’s quinceanera (Royal Caribbean gave discounts for those)

So My cousin was doing some stuff related to the event and didn’t have time to get food, so She asked me, my sister and a Family friend who was my age to go get her some pizza from one of the lower floors.

So we moved from the pool deck to get on the elevator.

Now we didn’t see anyone coming, so naturally I pressed the Elevator close button. and just as it was half-way closed, this crazy woman JUMPS IN, causing the the Elevator doors to sputter and then open.

The older woman, (who was a clear Karen as defined by now) was hella pissed. She makes a nasty snide comment “Thanks for holding the door” Clearly bitter and spitting venom. She was ready to give me a tongue lashing.

Now my 13 year old brain wanted to say “Sorry, I didn’t see you.” or “You blindsided us” But I ended up saying.

“I’m Sorry, Im Blind.”

The Karen’s eyes went wide and her mouth closed. She looked at me, unsure of how to respond to that.

Normally this would be an obvious lie. But I was wearing Sunglasses and she couldn’t see my eyes. I also wasn’t looking directly at her.

So the elevator ride was silent.

My sister and My fam friend were doing their best not to laugh.

A family got on and got off the elevator over the course of the ride.

The woman does make another snide comment.

“Why didn’t you close the elevator on them?”

I look down, not at her.

“I learned not to touch anything” as sad as I could.

Her face goes back to confusion. She is starting to think.

‘Oh s***. I think I have been insulting a blind kid.’

Unfortunately, I realized that we were all heading to the same floor.

I knew I was screwed once we got off on the floor. So, I made a gamble.

When we arrived on the floor, the elevator announced the floor number.

I stuck my arm out, Waiting, Praying my sister would understand.

She knew what I was going for. She took my hand and led me out of the elevator and away from the mean Karen. 

Because the event that happened: three 13 year olds, one of which happens to be wearing sunglasses, get on an elevator and don’t see another woman trying to get on. She insults them and, panicking, the sunglasses-wearing girl says “I’m blind,” then decides to roll with her lie to avoid an increasingly awkward situation. Her sister picks up on a fairly obvious social cue to roll with the situation as well, and the woman then visibly felt uncomfortable for insulting who she thought was a blind girl.

-the storytelling style -the fact that everything in this person’s blog is set up to be a viral text post -the use of the “Karen” meme (still sexist btw) -the overly precocious 13 year old

This isn’t one of them; it’s just worded in a ridiculous fashion (on purpose, for comedic effect, like most stories told for the purpose of entertainment). They’re using memes, terminology, and syntax in a way that’s typical of stand-up; it’s not particularly rocket science, and I’ve heard similar types of stories related to me by my friends that work in retail and with teenagers. The story is likely true, just exaggerated for comedic effect.

Whether or not it’s “objectively funny” is a different question, but when your goal is to tell a story in an entertaining way you use different language than you would if you were just…upset and relating that a woman harrassed you in an elevator and you panicked.

And you didn’t have to explain it to me; you had no obligation to respond to me. Considering how much condescension drips from your response you didn’t seem to feel like responding was worth your time in the first place, so I’m not sure why you actually did.

Important update as we hit paper 70. 

It ended when our school principal took the gorilla down (yeah, tackled him to the ground, if you knew our principal you’d understand… we were a school of like 300 people TOTAL and he was like all of our best friend. Dude was cool) and yelled, “This is a banana safezone young man!”

The following day, there were ‘banana safezone’ posters everywhere and we had a school assembly where our guidance counselor talked about banana rights.