About

"Tell Me Your Secrets" is an image macro series featuring photographs in which various subjects are shown embracing inanimate objects with captions based on the snowclone, "Tell Me Your Secrets, X," as if they are trying to communicate with them.

Origin

The original image was taken from a scene in Season 4, Episode 3 of American TV drama series Lost, titled "The Economist" and first broadcasted on February 14th, 2008. In the episode, a character named Dr. Daniel Faraday (portrayed by Jeremy Davis) fervently checks a piece of grass in order to set up scientific equipments for an experiment (shown below, left). As early as March 31st, 2009, a parody image macro of the scene with the caption Tell Me Your Secrets, Grass^[1] was uploaded by Flickr user rubbaducky42 (shown below, right). As of March 2015, the image has gained more than 14,000 views.

Spread

Becoming quite a small curiosity online, the first parody was re-posted to several image-sharing blogs such as Meh.ro on December 8th 2009^[2], Meme Classics on February 4th 2010^[3], Funnyjunk on March 9th 2010^[4] and Nasty Hobbit on April 26th 2010^[5]. Various examples of it being used as a reaction image on forums can be found on the web, including Foam Universe^[6] on February 13th 2011.

Further derivatives involving different characters started appearing as early as October 7th 2011 with a Half-Life reference posted to the Garry's Mod website Mod DB^[7] (shown below, left). On Funnyjunk, an October 2012 post of the caption with a 2-pane picture of an ostrich speaking to a zebra's butt garnered more than 70 000 views^[8] (shown below, right). There is also evidence of the meme being used on imageboard 4chan, in the /tg/ (traditional games) board as early as May 2013^[9], in a thread about the Fate/Stay Night game.

Various Examples

External References