Potato Girl

About

Potato Girl is the nickname for Sasha Braus, a recurring character from the Japanese anime and manga series Attack on Titan (Shingeki no Kyojin), after a memorable scene in which she gets reprimanded by her drill instructor for eating a potato during a roll call.

Origin

The scene in question comes from Attack on Titan's 15th chapter, One by One.^[4] In the chapter, the Survey Corps drill instructor Keith Shadis asks each new recruit why they joined the Surveyors, when he suddenly notices Sasha eating a potato.^[1] Upon being confronted by the drill instructor, Sasha proceeds to split the potato and offers him a half of it to placate him, although this only angers the instructor even more that he orders her to run laps until she drops. As a result of this episode, other recruits begin calling her the "potato girl" as a nickname. The anime adaptation of the manga scene, which appears in the third episode of the series and first aired on April 20th, 2013, was uploaded two days later by YouTuber Rawr Taiga. Within two years, the video gained more than 150,000 views (shown below).

Spread

On April 24th, 2013, Redditor Dusthunter0 created a subreddit devoted to the fandom surrounding Sasha Braus under the name /r/potatogirl, which has more than 2,800 subscribers as of September 2015.^[6]

On July 26th, Yū Kobayashi, the Japanese voice actor behind Sasha Braus, tweeted a photograph of two potatoes in celebration of the fictional character's birthday, which garnered more than 1,200 retweets and 1,300 favorites roughly over the course of two years.^[10]

On August 15th, Twitter user Weepy sent a fan art illustration of Sasha Braus smiling with two halves of a potato in her hands to the official Twitter account of Denny's, suggesting that the image should be the chain restaurant's new mascot. That same day, Denny's replied to the tweet with a cutout image of Sasha drooling superimposed over a photograph of the "Grand Slam" breakfast plate.^[9]

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References