Choose One Pill

Submission 35,004

Part of a series on Choice Games. [View Related Entries]

About

Choose One Pill is an image macro series featuring pictures of multicolored pills accompanied by descriptions of various super powers they will endow, which are often captioned with instructions for viewers to select only one of the pills. In January 2020, TikTok users began to use this format in a series of videos.

Origin

On October 16th, 2012, an image titled "Which Pill Do You Choose" was highlighted on the internet humor blog electricrelaxation,^[1] featuring eight different colored pills with descriptions of various super powers they provide (shown below).

Spread

On September 16th, 2015, an inforgraphic featuring different pill illustrations labelled with super powers was uploaded to the /r/teenagers^[5] subreddit (shown below, left). On September 19th, a similar pill infographic was uploaded to 9gag, where it received upwards of 9,800 points and 1,800 comments over the next two years (shown below, right).

On March 11th, 2016, an image featuring pills with both super powers and handicaps was uploaded to the internet humor site Memes.com^[6] by user falcongiddy (shown below, left). On January 22nd, 2017, the Doggo de la froggo de la Snek Facebook^[4] page posted a variation featuring photographs of dogs (shown below).

On March 5th, Redditor JannsCo uploaded Choose One image featuring a purple pill with the description "kill every child under the age of 10 who owns an iPhone" to /r/dankmemes^[2] (shown below, left). The following day, Redditor SnoeTheLeopard submitted an image featuring four different pills, with one providing the ability to “Ban 'you've been visited by' posts“ to /r/me_irl^[3] (shown below, right). Within three weeks, the posts gained over 23,400 points (91% upvoted) resepectively

TikTok Videos

On January 25th, 2020, TikTok users began using a sound clip of Antoje's^[7] "3 Koopa Kingz" to videos of themselves choosing between two labeled pills or food. TikToker @nikki42_ uploaded the earliest known iteration which gained over 218,200 likes in four days (shown below, left). The next day, TikToker @mekaic uploaded a video in which he tries to choose between having curly hair or "become tiktok famous" (shown below, center). The video garnered over 1.8 million likes in three days. That same day, TikToker @rylee.aguirre uploaded another example in which she chooses between dying or becoming the "baddest bitch" (shown below, right). The video accumulated over 810,900 likes in three days.