About

Insult Deflection or Insult Reflection is a single-panel cartoon illustrating the effects one's insults or other forms of verbal attacks directed at a disliked person can inadvertently have on their mutuals, depicting a stick figure shooting at another, who then deflects it into a third person. Spawned by a viral Tumblr post about bodyshaming, the cartoon has been used as an exploitable meme since June 2022.

Origin

Prior to May 25th, 2022, Tumblr^[1] user fluoresensitivearchived made a post arguing that no form of bodyshaming is acceptable. Tumblr^[2] user uxji then replied with a crude cartoon illustrating the way one's harmful words directed at one person can affect people they care about (shown below, right). The exchange (shown below, left) gained over 84,000 likes and reblogs in three months.

Spread

In the following months, both the image and the exchange saw viral spread. For example, on July 19th, 2022, Twitter^[3] user @red5rainbow posted the image, with the post gaining over 210 retweets and 4,200 likes. On September 28th, Redditor clueless_docking then shared the post in /r/tumblr,^[4] where it received over 7,500 upvotes in one week.

On May 27th, 2022, Tumblr^[5] user martian-maritan-martian made the first edit of the image, recaptioning it. The post gained over 41,000 reblogs and 43,000 likes on Tumblr in four months (shown below, left).

In the summer and fall of 2022, more edits of the cartoon were shared by users on Tumblr and Twitter. For example, on June 14th, Twitter^[6] user @krystalwokfy posted a version about misgendering that garnered over 22,300 retweets and 136,000 likes in three months (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Template

Search Interest

External References