Subtle Facial Twitches

About

Subtle Facial Twitches refers to a copypasta taken from the 2009 Watchmen film. The full text reads, "His subtle facial twitches wouldn't have been noticed by the layman but to me, he might as well have been sobbing." The copypasta grew popular on Reddit in reference to videos of people who seem to be on the verge of crying.

Origin

The line is spoken by Watchmen character Adrian Veidt, aka Ozymandias, in the 2009 film adaptation of the graphic novel. Referring to a scene featuring Dr. Manhattan, a generally stoic character, Veidt says, "I've known John long enough to see he isn't devoid of emotion. His subtle facial twitches wouldn't have been noticed by the layman but to me, he might as well have been sobbing."^[2]

Spread

The copypasta did not start spreading on Reddit until February of 2018. Prior to then, a GIF of Breaking Bad character Gus Fring was posted to Imgur with the copypasta in the title on October 20th, 2013 (shown below).^[1]

On February 9th, 2018, Redditor real_human_person^[3] posted to /r/videos a video of Elon Musk appearing to be on the verge of tears in an interview with the copypasta as the title, gaining over 32,000 upvotes (shown below, left). The same day, Redditor dejvidf^[4] uploaded a video to /r/videos of a black man crying with the copypasta as the title, gaining over 24,000 upvotes (shown below, right).

This sparked several Reddit posts with the copypasta as the title. For example, an image of Dennis Reynolds from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia was posted to the subreddit /r/the_dennis,^[5] gaining over 90 upvotes (shown below, left). An image of Anakin Skywalker was posted to /r/PrequelMemes^[6] with the copypasta on February 10th. On the 9th, an inquiry about the copypasta was posted to /r/OutOfTheLoop^[7] that gained over 300 upvotes.

Search Interest

Unavailable

External References