About

X When the Thing He Designed Specifically Does Its Job is a phrasal template used in a series of memes that employ various reaction images, most notably Shocked Black Guy, to imagine the reactions of invention creators when their invention does what it was designed to do.

Origin

On February 12th, 2022, Twitter^[1] user @RealYouTubeKids posted an image of Green Goblin, portrayed by Willem Dafoe, captioned, "Willem Afton when the robot that he designed specifically to murder children murders his children." The meme, which referenced the Five Nights at Freddy's video game series, gained over 220 retweets and 2,700 likes in one year (seen below).

Spread

The image did not spawn a format until December 12th, 2022, when @RealYouTubeKids recaptioned it with a joke about J. Robert Oppenheimer, replacing the image with the Shocked Black Guy meme. The tweet^[2] (shown below) gained over 510 retweets and 4,900 likes in one month.

On December 15th, 2022, Twitter^[3] user @traffordanonym reposted the meme, with the repost garnering over 7,800 retweets and 106,600 likes in one month.

In late December 2022 and early January 2023, several versions of the meme went viral on Twitter and iFunny. For example, on December 21st, iFunny^[4] user Agent_Delaware posted a version about The Once-ler that gained over 11,200 smiles in two weeks (shown below, left). On January 3rd, 2023, Twitter^[5] user @terminallyOL posted a version that gained over 7,800 retweets and 67,900 likes in three days (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

Unavailable.

External References