About

In the Distance, Sirens is a dramatic story-telling cliché to signify oncoming chaos, trouble or resolve. The line has been used in photo captions and comedic re-tellings of dramatic stories since 2016 and has since become a popular cliché used in tweets.

Origin

On February 3rd, 2016, Tumblr^[1] user laurelhach posted a dramatic anecdote about moving an image in Microsoft Word (shown below). The post gained over 568,000 notes in three years.

Spread

On March 25th, 2016, Twitter user @gossipgriII^[2] tweeted "using microsoft word moves an image 1 mm to the left all text and images shift. 4 new pages appear. in the distance, sirens" similar to laurelhach's text and gained over 99,100 likes and 63,100 retweets in three years. On July 16th, 2018, Redditor LRiver used the caption "In the distance, sirens." for a meme posted to r/dndmemes^[3] which gained over 200 points (99% upvoted) in a year (shown below, left). On October 2nd, 2019, the University of the Philippines Materials Science Society Twitter^[4] account advertised metal water bottle information by posting a short dramatic sentence about a Hydro Flask dropping and used the cliché (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References