Apple With A Face / Wapple

About

Apple With A Face, also known as Wapple or Smiling Apple, refers to a stock photo of a smug and humanlike red apple with green eyes used predominantly in memes on the /r/OkBuddyRetard subreddit. It was originally uploaded to the stock photo website Dreamstime in 2015. It first gained notoriety as a character within several, political Discord servers and later became the subject of contextless, Impact font memes that fell under the category of Pics That Go Hard. It is additionally used in memes on iFunny, TikTok and Instagram, among other platforms in 2022.

Origin

On September 4th, 2015, Dreamstime^[1] user Marino Bocelli uploaded a stock image titled, "Apple with a face," to the website. It is described as a "surreal" apple as well as an, "Apple with a face isolated on a white background" (shown below).

Spread

The image would go largely unnoticed between 2015 and 2020 but later resurfaced in late 2020 on several, political Discord servers under the name "Wapple." It became a notable emote within these servers. Evidence of this can be seen in a Twitter^[2] reply posted on January 7th, 2021, by Twitter user tylercruel99.

Wapple started to appear in video memes on YouTube in late 2020, however, all of them were originally posted within private Discord servers. For instance, the first YouTube video to use a Wapple thumbnail was uploaded on October 27th, 2020, by the YouTube channel *bruhserk * with the video being a nightcore remix of the song "DEMON WITH A SCOPE" by rappers DIAMONDSONMYDICK & Hi-C. The video received over 500 views in a year and a half (shown below).

Wapple was used in another YouTube video on November 14th, 2020, uploaded by YouTuber The Meme Plaza and titled, "apple stares at you for 12 seconds." It earned over 750 views in a year and a half (shown below, left). On April 2nd, 2021, a video showing a cryptic slideshow of Wapple that played over the song, "Demons" by Imagine Dragons was uploaded to YouTube on by the channel Bones, where over the course of 13 months, it received roughly 3,400 views (shown below, right).

On May 30th, 2021, another Wapple video was uploaded to YouTube by the channel Massive Legend, whose video had a different song playing in the background titled, "I Can Fantasize About Whatever I Want," created by YouTuber^[3] mrgirl. The song's primary lyric is about Minecraft and being in a cave looking for "minors." Over the course of one year, the video received roughly 137,600 views (shown below).

Around this time, the apple with a face started being used in memes on Reddit's /r/OkBuddyRetard subreddit. For instance, on March 16th, 2021, Redditor BigPP360 used the apple in a meme^[4] that received roughly 3,000 upvotes over the course of 14 months (shown below, left). On June 4th, 2021, Twitter^[5] user Chaseroony posted an apple with a face meme, earning over 310 likes in 11 months (shown below, right).

On April 27th, 2021, the /r/wapple^[6] subreddit was created. As of early 2022, it is the largest known source for Wapple content. For instance, on April 16th, 2022, Redditor treypowor uploaded the most-upvoted post^[7] in the subreddit as of May 2022, being a video that received over 420 upvotes in four weeks (shown below).

Various Examples

Templates

External References