L.A. Noire "Doubt" / Press X To Doubt

About

L.A. Noire "Doubt", also known as Press X to Doubt, is a reaction image taken from the video game L.A. Noire by Rockstar Games used in memes to express disbelief in a headline or a thread's previous statement.

Origin

In the video game L.A. Noire, the player plays as detective Cole Phelps in 1940s Los Angeles.^[1] One of the major gameplay features of L.A. Noire are scenes in which Phelps interrogates witnesses to crimes. After a witness makes a statement, the player is presented with three options. The player must choose whether to accept the statement as truthful ("Truth"), express doubt of the witness' statement ("Doubt"), or accuse the witness of lying ("Lie"). An image of Phelps' face looking disbelieving accompanied by the "Doubt" prompt became the reaction image (shown below, left). On December 4th, 2012, the image without the caption was posted to Funnyjunk, ^[2] and the comment accompanying the image was "(X) Doubt." This likely was the first iteration of the meme (shown below, right).

Spread

The image was posted on Funnyjunk several more times over the course of 2013,^[3][4] cementing the meme's purpose as a means to express doubt. The meme also found use on Tumblr and Reddit in the coming years. In this time, it also began being used in Coaxed Into a Snafu variations. For example, a post from Tumblr user loatheoflaughing about Fallout 4 expressed doubt that the game would feature no loading times as promised, turning into a thread^[5] with several Coaxed Into a Snafu variations (shown below). The post gained over 28,000 notes.

The popularity of Coaxed Into a Snafu edits made the meme a good fit for the Increasingly Verbose Meme template. On September 30th, 2016, Redditor le 43eyes compiled previously existing Snafu edits to make it appear as an Increasingly Verbose Meme, gaining 4,700 points on the Coaxed Into a Snafu subreddit^[6] (shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References