About

Dying in a Glue Trap is a series of fan art creations that imagine various characters in their final moments before dying in a glue trap. Spawned by simplistic fan art of the character Dobby from Harry Potter stuck in a glue trap posted to Tumblr in January 2023, the redraw format achieved virality on Twitter in March of that year.

Origin

On January 11th, 2023, Tumblr^[1] user icarianarts posted a simplistic fan art of the Harry Potter character Dobby (a house elf) lying down facing away stuck in a glue trap (a cruel^[7] device used to entrap small rodents with glue) and captioning it, "Fan art I drew of dobby dying in a glue trap" (post and image shown below, left and right). The post accumulated over 11,500 reblogs and 17,400 likes in two months.

Spread

Screenshots of the Tumblr post were widely circulated online in the following weeks. For example, on February 5th, 2023, Redditor byrobot posted the image to the /r/ComedyHell^[2] subreddit, where it gained over 1,300 upvotes in two months. On March 2nd, Twitter^[3] user @SO0u0o posted it, with the tweet gaining over 1,500 retweets and 10,100 likes in a month.

On March 17th, 2023, Twitter^[4] user @radishrrabbit posted the earliest parody of the original fan art, a South Park version with Eric Cartman stuck in the trap. The post (shown below) gained over 1,100 retweets and 5,900 likes.

On March 21st, Twitter^[5] user @woodsjpeg posted a Hannibal Lecter version of the meme that received over 2,600 retweets and 13,000 likes in one week (shown below, left).

Following the initial parodies, the format achieved virality on Twitter, with users often accompanying their submissions with a version of the title used in the original post, "Fan art I drew of X dying in a glue trap." For example, on March 24th, Twitter^[6] user @catfinches posted a Fred Durst version that received over 2,800 retweets and 17,100 likes in three days (shown below, right).

The fan art format maintained viral popularity on Twitter throughout late March 2023, with versions of the meme also appearing on Tumblr and other websites.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References