About

Horizontally Spinning Rat, originally known as Rats Multiplying, refers to a series of memes based on videos of 3D rat models usually set to the song "Free Bird" by Lynyrd Skynyrd. Spawned in late January 2022 on iFunny with memes in which the number of rats progressively increased, the exploitable format received further spread online in spring and summer 2022 with videos captioned "spinning rat."

Origin

On March 19th, 2020, Fandom^[18] user Hawkybird uploaded an image of a rotating rat from the 2000 game Deus Ex to the Deus Ex Wiki, under the Animals page, captioned "A rotating image of a rat."

On November 24th, 2020, Twitter^[1] gimmick account Low Poly Animals posted the GIF. The post (shown below, left) gained over 2,000 retweets and 13,700 likes in two years.
On March 29th, 2021, user Munashe uploaded an animation of a low-poly 3D rat rotating that he made to /3/ on 4Chan^[2] (shown below, right). It gained instant popularity, and on August 24th, 2021, Tenor^[3] user doseshipment uploaded the animation to Tenor GIFs.

Spread

On November 25th, 2020, YouTube^[4] user Gr33d uploaded the animation of the Deus Ex rat spinning to YouTube, where it gained over 66,000 views in two years. On February 10th, 2021, content creator conkface posted the earliest meme to reference the animation, a Duke Nukem meme voiced by Gianni Matragrano that gained over 88,000 views, 2,200 retweets and 11,500 likes on Twitter^[5] and 58,000 views on YouTube^[6] in one year (shown below).

Rats Multiplying

Prior to January 26th, 2022, an unknown iFunny user posted the second animation, set to the song "Free Bird" by Lynyrd Skynyrd and captioned, one rat (original post removed and no longer available, remake^[7] shown below, left).

The post spawned a meme format on iFunny that saw a series of posts in which the number of rats progressively increased. On January 26th, 2022, iFunny^[8] user ratslapper made the first meme that increased the number of rats to two (shown below, center), which was featured and received over 29,700 smiles in seven months (shown below, center). On January 30th, iFunny^[9] user TooManyUnsmiles posted a video caption meme that gained over 14,200 smiles in seven months (shown below, right).

The trend maintained prevalence on iFunny in late January and early February 2022 (examples seen below).

Horizontally Spinning Rat

Prior to March 11th, 2022, an unknown user posted a video caption meme based on the "Free Bird" edit of the Deus Ex rat animation, captioning it, "horizontally spinning rat." The earliest found uploads of the video were made by Instagram^[10] account nigga.you.just.went.full.pleb on March 11th and by YouTube^[11] account swizzdizzy on March 13th, with the latter gaining over 1.5 million views in five months (shown below).

The edit received viral spread as it was reposted on Reddit,^[12] iFunny^[13] and other platforms in the following weeks.

Starting in mid-March 2022, users on YouTube and other platforms posted derivative versions of the meme. For example, on March 21st, Instagram^[14] page eltandiatv posted a version of the GIF rotated by 90 degrees, captioned, "vertically spinning rat," which received over 45,000 views and 8,900 likes in five months (shown below, left). On April 8th, 2022, YouTube^[15] user RyzenDC posted a skewed version captioned, "diagonally spinning rat." The video accumulated over 109,000 views in four months (shown below, right).

In the following months, the format maintained its presence on YouTube, with more viral versions appearing. For example, on May 19th, 2022, YouTuber^[16] 1PercentBatter posted a version that gained over 1.2 million views in three months (shown below, left). On July 18th, YouTuber^[17] Techlin posted an RTX ON / OFF version that received over 559,000 views in one month (shown below, right).

Related Memes

Halo 3 Rat

Halo 3 Rat refers to a rat NPC character in the 2007 video game Halo 3. In late August 2020, ironic shitposts referencing the Halo 3 Rat gained popularity online following a viral tweet, primarily on Reddit.

Bananas Rotat E

Bananas Rotat E, also known as Banana.mp4, refers to a series of animated memes featuring an audio clip of a distorted voice commenting on a GIF image depicting a three-dimensional bunch of bananas rotating. Originating from a post on Tumblr, the audio has been used in several animations and animatics online, which typically depict fictional characters watching bananas rotate.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References