About

Overlord Manatee is an advice animal image macro series featuring a photo of a young girl who appears to be frightened by a large manatee looming over her head against the glass in an aquarium. The captions typically depict the animal as an imprisoned force of evil or as an all powerful leader of dark forces, sometimes using quotes of famous villains in films, television and video games.

Origin

The background image was taken by CMGW Photography^[1] on May 8th, 2012 at Sea World in Florida. Weeks later on May 24th, the photo was uploaded via Flickr^[2] with the title “First Contact." From there, the image was featured on BoingBoing^[3], the Wall Street Journal^[4] and culture blog DeadFix^[5] before it was posted to Reddit^[6] on May 25th, 2012. The first Reddit submission only received 90 points, but a second post^[7] submitted 25 minutes later reached the front page with 5412 up votes and 1505 points overall. Later that day, a captioned version was submitted to the Advice Animals subreddit^[8] naming the series "Overlord Manatee." The post received 12,385 upvotes and 1488 points overall.

Spread

A Facebook fan page^[13] was created for Overlord Manatee on May 27th, 2012, but only managed to accrue 18 likes in two weeks. Culture blog Modern Primate^[10] was the first to host a series of these images on May 28th, followed by humor blog Heavy^[11] and entertainment blog International Secret Agents.^[12] Additional Instances have been seen on other image-sharing communities like Tumblr^[14], Reddit^[9], Funnyjunk^[16], and Quickmeme^[15], which has 1356 submissions as of June 2012.

Notable Examples

Search Interest

External References