About

Anime Profile Pictures refers to the images of various anime character used as default profile pictures on various social media platforms online. Online, the use of anime-themed avatars is often mocked in a similar fashion to fedoras.

Origin

The earliest known mockery of anime profile pictures was submitted to the DuelistGroundz^[9] Forums by user mmf on March 12th, 2012. In the post, mmf accused those who use anime characters in their profile pictures of being "scum of the earth.'

Spread

On May 11th, 2013, Minecraft Forums^[2] user Zombie Killer submitted a post asking "Why do so many guys choose anime girls as their profile pictures?", which gathered upwards of 300 responses over the next month. On May 19th, 2014, a Facebook^[3] page titled "Anime profile pics are for Losers" was created, gathering more than 208,500 likes over the next four years. On November 19th, a post titled "Why is there a sudden influx of anime avatars across social media?" was submitted to /r/OutOfTheLoop.^[6]

On November 1st, Redditor woodspuma0023 submitted a variation of the oWo comic titled "Anime profile pics in a nutshell" to the /r/justneckbeardthings^[4] subreddit.

On November 5th, NY Mag^[1] published an article titled "How Anime Avatars on Twitter Help Explain Politics in 2015." On August 9th, 2016, the news site The Ringer^[5] published an article titled "Why Do Anonymous Trolls Use Anime Avatars?" The following day, the anime news blog Anime Maru^[7] published a satirical article titled "Steam to Automatically Ban All Users with Anime Avatars." On July 27th, 2017, a picture with the caption "Never trust an anime avatar" was submitted to /r/CringeAnarchy^[8] (shown below, left). On August 5th, Redditor audio45 submitted a picture of Sonic the Hedgehog with the caption "If your profile picture is from an anime, your opinion doesn't count" to /r/dankmemes, where it received more than 8,300 points (96% upvoted) and 90 comments within three weeks (shown below, right).

Search Interest

External References