About

Terrible Tiger is an advice animal series featuring an image of a tiger resting its head on a rock and gazing lazily towards the viewer. The captions typically follow a bait-and-switch model to the opposite effect of Successful Black Man; a seemingly innocuous, amiable, or admirable top caption, followed by a dark twist in the bottom caption.

Origin

On August 6th, 2012, Redditor Zachcvh submitted the first known example of the meme (shown below, left), with the caption “I ate that bear” in reference to Confession Bear, in an /r/AdviceAnimals post titled “Confession Tiger”.^[1] Subsequent early variants made the tiger a rival of, or alternative^[2] to, Confession Bear, although often with an added tongue-in-cheek twist.

At first, due to the similarity of the meme to Confession Bear, a large portion of its derivative content was meta and self-referencing in nature (example shown above, right).

Spread

On March 30th, 2014, Imgur user ZoranKnight submitted two compilations (examples shown below) titled "Tiger Meme: Part 1"^[3] and "Terrible Tiger: Part 2"^[4] respectively, reaching the website's front page. The posts coincided with the meme's search interest skyrocketing.

A third compilation, titled "Terrible Tiger: Part 3"^[5] was submitted by ZoranKnight on April 2nd, also reaching the front page of Imgur.

Notable Examples

Search Interest

External References