Armed Adam

Submission 9,355

Part of a series on Me IRL. [View Related Entries]

About

Armed Adam refers to a wave of images created on the /r/me_irl subreddit at the request of a person who claimed to be dying of terminal cancer. It was later discovered the poster was lying about his illness.

Origin

On November 11th, 2017, /r/me_irl user danorexia^[1] posted in the subreddit saying he was dying of terminal cancer and asked the subreddit to create memes of him holding a toy gun (shown below). His post gained over 6,700 points.

Spread

/r/me_irl obliged the request and began making edits of the image. Some popular edits include one by Joogen64^[2] which made the character appear to be holding a tiny version of himself that gained 3,000 points (shown below, left). A version posted by AddictiveSombrero^[3] turned the image into a GIF, gaining over 3,400 upvotes (shown below, right).

In the comments section of the original post, danorexia admitted that he had created a fake account to gamble on faking cancer to get upvotes.^[4] A thread was posted to /r/OutOftheLoop^[5] on November 12th investigating the incident and gained over 1,700 points.