About

Poisoned Water refers to a series of jokes that grew popular on Reddit's /r/me_irl subreddit in late October of 2018 in which a user made several posts in which he offered the subreddit a poisoned glass of water and that a cure to the poison was being worked on in Greenland, which itself is a reference to the video game Plague, Inc.

Origin

On October 28th, 2018, Redditor kubapoke made several posts creating a narrative where water offered in the first post was poisoned (examples shown below).^[1][2]

Spread

kubapoke continued the narrative over several other posts, concluding with a post saying a cure for the poisoned water was being developed in Greenland (shown below, right). The reference to Greenland is itself a reference to the game Plague Inc., in which a player attempts to affect the world with a deadly pathogen. Greenland is difficult to infect in the game as it is a sparsely populated island.

Each post gained over 20,000 points in less than 24 hours. As these posts grew popular, other me_irl frequenters began posting their own memes referencing the poisoned water "epidemic" in the subreddit. For example, user caleb-s posted an edited webcomic, gaining over 11,000 points (shown below, left). User B3NJ1MN10 posted a still of the Antidote item from the Pokémon games, gaining over 21,000 points (shown below, right). An inquiry about the surge in poisoned water memes was posted to /r/OutOfTheLoop.^[3]

Various Examples

Search Interest

Unavailable

External References