By Talos This Can't Be Happening

About

By Talos This Can't Be Happening is a catchphrase that became a popular way to end posts describing a minor or humorous inconvenience on Tumblr in the summer of 2021. The phrase is a Elder Scrolls reference that originated in a popular 2019 Tumblr post where a user posted the phrase and a screenshot form the game.

Origin

On March 21st, 2019, Tumblr user @hobnob-69^[1] answered a question from an anonymous user asking, "How is your husband?" with "He should be fine I left him with enough food and water for a week." User the-real-santino-rice reblogged the post adding "That was two weeks ago," after which the-real-rupaul replied, "Oh god no, let me go check on him" then reblogged the post again with the phrase "By Talos this can't be happening" and a screenshot from Elder Scrolls of a man dead in jail. The entire post^[2] gained over 122,000 notes (shown below).

Spread

The phrase saw little use on social media in the years since it was first posted. Twitter user @plounce^[3] tweeted the phrase on May 14th, 2020, but only received 11 retweets. It wasn't until August 2021 that the phrase began seeing popular use in Tumblr posts, often as a way to announce that the poster had suffered a minor inconvenience. On August 22nd, user spritespi^[5] posted the quote as a response to their post, "alright i cleaned my glasses surely they will remain unsmudged for at least a few minutes," gaining over 38,000 notes (shown below, left). On August 27th, user diecishet^[4] used the phrase after posting "time to online shop" and "sure hope my bank account won't get charged like last time," gaining over 42,000 notes (shown below, right).

The phrase evidently grew popular enough on Tumblr that there was some backlash to it. This was parodied in an August 28th self-referential post by interstellarvagabond^[6] that used the phrase as a reaction to someone complaining the meme was overused, gaining over 27,000 notes (shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References