About

Subway Porn refers to a series of photoshopped images and original fanart in which explicit content has been censored with submarine sandwiches, making it appear as if the characters are engaging in sexual activities with a sandwich, usually of the Subway brand. This type of Work-Safe Porn was initially used within the Brony fandom to humorously protest against explicit art, but was quickly adapted by other fandoms as a way to humorously censor any image.

Origin

In late 2011, a handful of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic fans began including a ponified version of its creator, Lauren Faust (shown below, left), into explicit Rule 34 fan works. These were mostly met with negative comments due to Faust's iconic status within the fandom, leading other bronies to edit sandwiches in to the fanart in an attempt to stop its creation (shown below, right). Due to the closing of the largest My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic image board Ponibooru in August 2012, many of the original instances of both the Rule 34 images and the edited versions have been lost. The earliest archived image was uploaded to the image board 20% Cooler on October 31st, 2011.^[7]

Spread

During the final months of 2011, Bronies began vulgarizing fanart illustrations of Lauren Faust’s ponified character Fausticorn^[8] with pictures of sandwiches. Soon, cutouts of sandwiches began appearing in safe-for-work fan art^[9][10] images as well, in similar vein of unnecessary censorship.

On December 26th, 2011, the photoshop meme made its way beyond the My Little Pony fandom, when Facepunch forum user Jackald asked other posters to photoshop Subway sandwiches on to scanned images of hentai manga and doujin pages (examples shown below).^[1] As of April 2013, the thread has amassed more than 200 posts worth of contributions. Sometime in early 2012, a Facebook fan page titled Hatsune Miku Troll also launched, which shared a number of hentai manga images censored with sandwiches until its deactivation later that year.

Subway's Facebook Flooding

On August 15th, 2012, members of the Hatsune Miku Troll Facebook fan page began tagging Subway's official fan page^[11] in the censored images uploaded to their page, resulting in the sheer volume of tagged images flooding the Subway page. Though the company quickly banned the Hatsune Miku Troll page from posting on the page, Facepunch forum posters^[12] as well as other Facebook users who found the images humorous began uploading their own pieces directly to Subway's Facebook. A screenshot of the flood of tagged photos (shown below) was quickly shared on the Funny subreddit,^[6] where it gained more then 11,000 upvotes and 1679 points overall before being archived. The event was soon covered by The Daily Dot,^[3] Gawker,^[4] Hypervocal^[5] and Uproxx.^[13] Later that same day, Subway replied that they were aware of the content and began removing it.

Search Interest

Though "Subway Hentai" has been searched for consistently since 2008, there is a large peak of search interest corresponding with the Subway Facebook page flood in August 2012.

External References