About

"Because Your Mother Loves Roses", refers to a series of image macros in which a parent tells their child that another family member is named after a piece of culture, only to reveal that their own child is also named after a pop-culture reference.

Origin

The meme's text comes from a joke that has been spread around the internet as far back as 2010. On March 30th, 2010, user anon posted this Rage Comic appeared on Joyreactor.^[1]

Spread

A variation on the joke appeared on Twitter, when user @teenstweethis tweeted a variation on December 16th, 2011 (shown below).^[7] Additionally, User @Pluume_ posted the joke without image on January 4th, 2012^[2]

The tweet appeared again when @DARKSKlNDRAKE^[3] tweeted the joke, receiving more than 300 retweets and 64 likes (shown below, left). Later that year, on March 26th, 2012, the same joke was tweeted again by @ComedyPosts to more than 1,400 retweets and 320 likes (shown below, right).^[5]

The joke continued in this form, appearing on the /r/Jokes subreddit on September 4th, 2016.^[4] Later that year, the joke changed, replacing "Rose" to "Jude." The earliest known instance of this is from Twitter user @InfinitelySY on October 29th, 2016.^[6] The Tweet received more than 240 retweets and 130 likes.

Over the next few days, users shared the meme frequently, changing the text to fit their own interests. On April 4th, 2017, Redditor Lazy_Titan50 posted one of a father and son.^[8]

Dad In Car Example

Over the following years, the joke was most commonly shared with an image of a father talking to his son in the car. For example, on July 17th, 2017, Redditor Oskcarco posted an example about Net Neutrality to /r/me_irl,^[9] gaining over 35,000 points in seven years (shown below, left). On July 26th, a Redditor posted an anti-meme variation to /r/dankmemes,^[10] gaining over 27,000 points in a similar time frame (shown below, right).

Various Examples

External References