About

Grain Entrapment refers to when a person gets submerged in grain when the pile of grain they were standing on, like quicksand. The phenomenon has been joked about online for several years before growing in popularity in late 2017.

Precursor

Before becoming a meme, the concept of Grain Entrapment had seen some popular spread online. For example, On April 23rd, 2011, YouTube channel PioneerRescueLLC posted a simulation of grain entrapment, gaining over 280,000 views (shown below).

On September 23rd, 2013, Tumblr user @aglaja,^[1] since deactivated, posted an illustration of the grain entrapment phenomenon, gaining over 70,000 notes (shown below).

Origin

Jokes about grain entrapment began appearing several years later. Meme Documentation^[2] traces the first humorous reference to grain entrapment to a September 3rd, 2015 post by Tumblr user worm^[3] titled "the last thing my enemies see before succumbing to the grain," which gained over 87,000 notes (shown below).

Spread

The meme saw some spread in niche communities over the following two years. On November 1st, 2015, Facebook page ＬＳＤ： ＭｅｍｅＥｍｕｌａｔｏr^[4] posted the PioneerRescueLLC video to their page, where it gained over 1,000 likes and shares. On May 16th, 2016, YouTube channel Scrapple TV uploaded a video in which they predicted Grain Death would be the next big meme of 2016, including some examples of image macros referencing Grain Entrapment. The video gained over 1,500 views (shown below).

On October 13th, 2017 a Tumblr devoted to shitposting about grain entrapment, grain-entrapment,^[5] launched. Meme Documentation cites this as the spark which made Grain Entrapment shitposts more popular on Tumblr. Some used the image posted by aglaja as an exploitable. For example, a post by imgayjokes gained over 1,500 notes (shown below, left). A post by positively-lgbtq^[6] labeled grain "That Gay Shit," gaining over 600 notes.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References