About

"When Your Parents Ask Where All Your Money Went" is a series of reaction images based on a photograph of American actor Zac Efron shrugging with a smile that bears resemblance to the emoticon I Dunno LOL ¯\(°_o)/¯, indicating that the allowance has been already spent in shopping.

Origin

The pictures of Zac Efron were taken for the promotion of the 2007 Disney TV musical film High School Musical 2 in which the actor reprises the male lead role Troy Bolton. The original images can be found on the online catalog of movie stills MovieStillsDB.^[1]

Tweets using the pictures of Efron in combination with the phrase first began appearing in early October 2015, with the earliest known tweet posted by the @ColIegeStudent,^[2] a novelty account build around the Advice Animal character Lazy College Senior, on October 2nd. The tweet combined the images with the phrase "When you're a college student and your parents ask where all your money went." As of January 17th, 2016, the Tweet has received over 15,000 retweets and 17,000 likes.

Precursor

In May 2015, the phrase already appeared in combination with 2 pictures of a child sitting at a bench with a confused look. The earliest tweets by popular Twitter accounts sharing the images can be found for May 14th.^[6][7][8]

Spread

That same day, @CollegeStudent's Tweet was also made by the Twitter accounts @FreddyAmazin,^[3] @meanpIastic,^[4] and @FunnyPicsDepot;^[5] which managed to receive respectively over 16,000, 3,900 and 2,800 retweets as of January 17th; of which respectively @FreddyAmazin and @meanplastic removed the college student part of the original tweet to create the phrase "when your parents ask where all your money went."

The images are frequently combined with items people tend to overspend on, most commonly objects related to video games. On October 9th, Redditor Cryptosporidium_ shared a version on the r/Amiibo sub-Reddit (shown below, top row, left), which managed to gather over 850 points on Reddit^[9] and 84,000 views on Imgur^[10] as of January 17th.^[9] On November 15th, Tumblr user fe-behindthescenes^[11] posted a version featuring the special edition of Fire Emblem: Fates, which managed to gather over 5,400 notes in the following two months (shown below, top row, right). A version featuring Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has also been shared a lot on the internet (shown below, bottom row, left). The earliest notable example dates back to 9gag^[12] on October 13th, which managed to gather over 33,500 points in the following 3 months; but which cannot be confirmed as the original due to different lower-quality versions being shared as well, implying 9GAG's watermark was added at a later time. Another version was posted on 9GAG on December 27th,^[13] featuring Valve's Steam Holiday Sales (shown below, bottom row, right), which managed to gather over 30,000 points in the following three weeks.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References