About

Im a Starving Child Starving to Death and This Is the Very Last Thing I Have Ever Read. Gootbye is a copypasta generally used in replies on Twitter to mock what a poster sees as the triviality and overcomplexity of an opinion or hot take. Often, the phrase will be posted in reply to tweets referring to identity politics or fandoms, joking about how little the discourses around these things may actually matter. Similar to memes like Touch Grass, the post is often used to comment on the extreme "online-ness" of particular communities.

Origin

Before it spread as a copypasta, the reply was first posted on March 21st, 2022, by Twitter^[1] user @frank6988441522 in response to a March 20th tweet by @commietarawrist (seen below).

im a starving child starving to death and this is the very last thing i have ever read. gootbye.

The original @commietarawrist tweet, which discussed whiteness and nonbinary identity, received over 130,000 likes in two days. In replies (some of which are seen below) to the original viral tweet, @commietarawrist walked back their position, claiming they had not expected the tweet to take off as it did and that their remark was not fully formed, but did not delete the original tweet.^[2]

Twitter user @frank6988441522 has since deleted both their reply and their account, making it so the amount of likes gained by the original iteration of the copypasta is unclear. The reply, however, did lead to much appreciation from others. Based on screenshots of past @frank6988441522 tweets, which users unearthed and reposted in search of "Frank deeplore,"^[3] it appears the account posted most frequently around topics related to the LGBTQ+ community and previous targets of its satire included J.K. Rowling and others.^[4]

Spread

The reply gained the attention of many in leftist circles on Twitter in the following months, including prominent streamer and commentator Vaush, who posted a screenshot of the famous exchange months later on August 1st, 2022, earning almost 22,000 likes in one month (seen below).^[5]

Throughout the spring and summer of 2022, posters like Twitter^[6] user @aphrobeesiac, who earned almost 1,600 likes in six months for their post on March 28th, 2022, used the phrase as a reply to other tweets (seen below).

Others, like Twitter^[7] user @genderfucko on March 26th, 2022, expressed appreciation for what they saw as the original tweet's insight on Twitter as a platform (seen below).

In the late summer of 2022, users began posting the text of the original reply to tweets that struck them as overwrought and trivial. On August 9th, 2022, Twitter^[8] user @5h09un found a tweet about the alleged ableism of bookshelves worthy of the reply and received over 1,500 likes in the course of a month (seen below).

As the copypasta usage of the phrase became more widespread, modifications to the sentence crept in, with some replacing the verb "read" with "hear" (example seen below, left) to describe a response to music,^[9] while others shortened the phrase (example seen below, right).^[10]

Various Examples

External References