About

Fish are Trying to Read refers to a series of photoshopped images of fish trying to read books and expressing in Russian how difficult it is to do so.

Origin

On March 17th, 2015, the page "Рыбы пытаются читать" (translation: "Fish are Trying to Read") published its first post on Russian social media site, VK.com.^[1] The image of a fish trying to read and expressing frustration (shown below) has gained over 7,500 likes and 470 shares as of August 31st, 2016. The page solely posted pictures of fish expressing their difficulty reading.

Spread

After acquiring over 29,000 followers in less than a month, VK.com/fishread^[2] went dormant. A similar page, VK.com/fishwantread,^[3] appeared on May 11th, 2015. Similar to a Weird Facebook page, VK.com/fishwantread began by posting images in a similar vein as its predecessor, but has since expanded to publishing variations on the joke that have fish in popular image macros, webcomics, etc.^[4]

On August 27th, 2016, a post by Tumblr user thottielamottie^[5] that explained the meme for english-speaking audiences began circulating on the blogging website:

"k so i made this new russian friend at school this week and we were talking about memes, you know, as one does, and she was telling me about this underground russian meme where its pics of fish reading and saying shit like “i cant do this” and i thought it was the funniest fucking thing ive ever seen in my life so here u go. in order, theyre saying “help”, “disaster”, “pretty difficult”, and “it’s hard for me”"

The post, shown below, has gained over 45,000 notes as of August 31st, 2016.

On August 29th, 2016, The Daily Dot^[4] published an article calling Fish Trying to Read "Russia's coolest underground meme."

Various Examples

Search Interest

Unavailable

External References