About

NYC Werewolf refers to a viral photograph of a person on the subway holding a matching doll-sized werewolf. Online, the photograph received a slew of reactions and speculation about who made the doll.

Origin

On March 5th, 2018, Twitter ^[1] user @bootyslime tweeted several pictures of a man in a green jacket with a matching werewolf doll on his lap on the subway. They captioned the post, "this dude sat down & pulled a fucking goblin in a matching outfit out of the nike bag." The post (shown below) received more than 20,000 retweets and 71,000 likes in four days.

Spread

Two days later, on March 7th, Twitter^[2] user @southheastt tweeted, "I literally saw this same guy in nyc wtf!!" In addition, they included a video of the encounter (shown below) and received more than 670 retweets and 3,900 likes in two days.

People online reacted negatively to the pictures. Most describing their fear or disgust with the doll (examples below).

Twitter^[3] published a Moments page regarding the reaction to the tweet.

WerePup Speculation

Some online thought that the doll was a WerePup, a type of realistic werewolf doll (example below). However, Slate^[4] spoke to the founder and creator of WerePup, Asia Charity Eriksen, who said, "I can recognize my work: the hair, placement of the ears, things like that. I have a guess [of who made it], but I would like to reach out to them first to make sure. There are a few other artists that picked up on the idea a few years after I started doing it in 2010. Some of them are actually friends of mine. I’ve run into instances where people were actually copying my designs or using my company name and things like that. That’s not one of the knockoffs, so to speak."

Search Interest

External Refereces